Life Demands That You Sow Into People’s Lives Because Their Lifting May Be Tied To You Being A Positive Influence  

Dr Akin Olaniyan is the lead consultant at The Chatter House, a digital media strategy consultancy. He is also the convener of the Centre for Social Media Research in incubation. He is an experienced Journalist, Communications specialist, and digital branding consultant. A former Head of Corporate Communications at Zenith Bank, Dr Olaniyan spoke to The Podium Magazine Publisher, Oloye Ademola Akinbola, on a wide range of interesting issues. Here are excerpts …

Congratulations on your 60th birthday. How does it feel to be 60?

Hmm! Honestly, it is mixed feelings. I don’t know about others, but I feel grateful to God for keeping me alive, for the landmark and the ‘achievements’. So, in a sense, there is a lot around me to be grateful for, but at the same time, you take a step back and you then suddenly see that there is so much more to do. It’s like they say in the Holy Book, ‘there is more land to conquer. I have been encouraged by people who called and sent messages citing the impact that our connections made on them, but then, I am thinking in my head – could that impact have been bigger? Could I have reached and impacted more people? So, I am deeply grateful to God and feel satisfied, given the ‘modest background’ where I came from. I feel I still have a mission – to touch more people and make more impact.

That’s awesome. It is a positive feeling, no doubt. Tell us a bit about your birth, family background, and childhood

I come from a very modest background, from a family of seven. I am the last of those seven children, and my early childhood involved helping my mother to hawk Kerosene and a Ghanaian staple, called Dokunu, on the streets of Ogbomoso. As you might imagine, for a typical Ogbomoso family, life started in Ghana, where I was born; we returned to Nigeria when I was a toddler. I never grew up to know my father, but my mother (God bless her soul) was as strong as she could be. She taught me strong values that have preserved me all these years. So, growing up, it was my mother, and then my eldest brother, the late Professor Alex Gboyega, who had the most influence in the life of the boy now turned man; the man people now know as Akin Olaniyan.

Growing up was a big lesson in how families are closely-knit together and, in typical Nigerian fashion, of sacrifices made by parents, siblings, and others to make sure children have the basic things like a roof over their heads and education.   I attended Ebenezer Baptist Primary School in Ogbomoso, and later had a remedial Primary Six in Otapete Primary School, Ilesa, from where I went to Ilesa Grammar School. That was from 1978 to 1983. I spent one year at The Polytechnic, Ibadan, for what was supposed to be a two-year A-Level programme because I gained admission into the University to study English in 1984. 

Which words best describe Akin Olaniyan

Akin Olaniyan is loyal (probably to a fault), courageous, principled, and calm in the face of pressure.

What has life taught you at 60?

This is profound. On the eve of my birthday, I sat in my study to reflect on what to say. It was a few minutes to midnight, and after a while, I settled on three of the more important lessons life has taught me in 60 years.

First, life is a process, and what that means is that most things in life are planned. For instance, success and failure are both results of deliberate acts – either of good or bad habits repeated daily. So, every experience in the journey of life works for a purpose and to avoid any step in the process of life is counter-productive, which is what we are seeing with the young folks everywhere today.

Second, life has taught me that you must never remove God from the life equation; otherwise, people like me would never have achieved anything. The same young boy who hawked on the streets of Ogbomoso has also walked the streets of the best cities in the world. I mean, it can only be God that could write a script like that. Am I going to talk about opportunities that came that I know bore the handwritings of God, or the promotions that came despite all odds? For some of us, if our background alone were the criterion, we never should have amounted to anything at all.

Third, the best messages I received around my birthday were from people who recounted how my access to them, maybe they heard me teach in church, or just took counsel, helped them to leap. I never had time to think about those things until I began to see them coming in. So, I have learnt that life demands that you sow into other people and just give what you can because there will always be people whose lifting is tied to you being a positive influence.

That is right. Are you happy to share your highs and lows with us?

Oh sure. Probably the lowest moment would have to be the years after national service when I struggled to find a job in a newspaper organisation. It was difficult not just because you had to survive as a young man in Lagos, but much more so because I knew from secondary school that I wanted to be a journalist. I chose newspapers because I am a bit introverted, so struggling to get into a newspaper was a challenge, and that was because I had a clear dream and idea of what I wanted after national service, and yet, it appeared to be unattainable.

Having been given a chance to start with a freelancing role at the Sunday Times, and later the defunct Sketch, I realised that probably the reason for the delay was that that space would lead to unending favours. One other low moment was being denied a study visa to the United Kingdom, even though my family had five-year multiple-entry visas to the same country. I had waited rather too long to do the master’s programme, and so a lot was depending on this. I had paid the £12,000 tuition and more than £8,000 for accommodation, then the visa refusal happened. I remember collecting the passport, returning to the office, and then opening it after I sat down, only to discover it was a refusal. I mean, I was sweating under the central air conditioning in the Zenith Bank Head Office. That is how big a blow it was at the time, for it meant there was a real risk of losing the payments made.

Anyway, as I mentioned, overcoming the challenge of entering journalism taught me valuable lessons on these things. So, I stood with some friends holding my hands in the place of prayer, and within weeks, I got the visa and was able to join the MA Social Media course for 2013 and finished with a Distinction. The bucket of the most notable moment has to be completing my PhD in 2022, and that is because it had been on my to-do list since the year 2000 when I first wrote my vision plan. So, succeeding in achieving that even when Covid-19 threatened to derail the programme was a high moment.

Congratulations on those two lofty milestones. You are a successful career professional. Tell us your story. How did it happen?

I remember those early days at the Sketch when I would attend events and go back to write stories that colleagues in other newspapers would ordinarily ignore. When the opportunity to cross to the Punch newspaper came in 1996, it was my immediate supervisor, the Sketch City Editor in Lagos, in the person of Bisi Onanuga, who introduced me to the Editor of Sunday Punch, Mr. Remi Ibitola. I believe the commitment to getting things done was instrumental to his decision to recommend me to Punch.

Crossing to Punch would have fazed others, but I already had the wisdom and commitment to hard work. Imagine crossing from a small business desk in Sketch to a bigger one with the likes of Dele Ojo and the late John Uwe there, and you get the idea of the environment then. However, when I arrived there, again, the commitment to hard work made the difference, such that when I was later sent to Abuja as a business correspondent, my journalism career just took off.

In those days, Abuja used to be a quiet town, and I had the habit of going from Asokoro to Area 3 early Saturday mornings to draft proposals for fellowships. It was unusual, and people used to wonder what anyone was doing in the office at a time when others were resting. Guess what? Those commitments got me my first training in 1998 in the UK. Attending the ‘Writing Business News’ training funded by the Reuters Foundation was another breakthrough because it simply turned me into a business reporter on another level.

Those four weeks in London, being taught by experienced Reuters journalists, did for me what Journalism school and the newsroom had not done. Then, of course, that also opened my eyes to training and using foreign funding where they were available. The six-month University fellowship hosted at Oxford University in 2000, and the five-month Reagan-Facell Fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy in 2004/2005 in Washington, DC, both came from that eye-opening experience of the ‘Writing Business News’ training.

So, I have benefited from God carrying me, hard work, and a commitment to lifelong learning. Those same principles helped me when I went to work in the Corporate Communication Department of Zenith Bank. I could have spent money to take holidays and selfies instead of saving up for my Master’s, or buy status cars instead of investing in my PhD, but that is who I am. I remember being locked down alone in a 2-bedroom apartment in Johannesburg, but I had to keep writing my thesis regardless. Moving from my workstation to the living room, to the bedroom, and even to the kitchen, just trying to find the most comfortable place so I could be inspired to keep writing.

What a sacrifice. In the light of this, what does success mean to you, and what are your success principles?

Certainly not in the things acquired, but as I have mentioned earlier, I had a sweet remembrance of this on the eve of my birthday, and the messages from some of the people who said I had inspired them reinforced the belief. So, success is to inspire people around you positively so that they take away from you life-changing lessons. For me, that starts from the home – my wife, children, and anyone who lives with us; to people in the churches where my wife and I have served, and people I have encountered in the course of my career.

You had a successful media and PR practice. Kindly share your experience with us.

I would have loved to remain in journalism, but at a point, I became worried about the influence advertisers were having on editorial decisions. I sought to move to the BBC at a time but was not successful. So, when the opportunity came to go to Zenith Bank, I took it, hoping it would at least save me from the moral dilemma that I was having. However, the move to Zenith in 2006 and the 13 years spent in corporate communication made me a better communications professional.

I mean, there I was, one moment a reporter-editor; then the next moment, a corporate comms person. Understanding the newsroom has its advantages if you cross to Comms, but you have to quickly make a mental shift to be successful. I remember in my early days in the bank, during strategy sessions, I would be reminded that I had to stop thinking like a reporter-editor. So, that mental shift, from thinking like a journalist to one in strategic comms, must happen fast, and I was able to deal with it on time. Then maybe for me, having been in the newsroom had another impact, and that was to help me understand the pains of journalists, and the challenges of their organisations. Therefore, I had to work with them in ways that helped them to achieve results.

Which would you describe as your most challenging career experience?

I would say the only time I went on a two-week suspension was at the Punch newspaper. I consider myself to be extremely well-organised and thought the suspension or the issues that caused it were avoidable. I was in Abuja as a business correspondent in the Abacha years. That was when the late head of state was planning to transform from a military to a civilian president. All the political parties had adopted him, and it looked as if it was inevitable that he would become a civilian president. So, one of those days in Abuja, one of the officers at the American Embassy, I believe he was the Commercial Officer or something like that, visited the Ministry of Commerce and was said to have made a statement to the effect that were Abacha to contest and win, the US would not accept that result.

It was a big story, of course, but I was not there, and no one seemed to have the man on record. Regardless, the then Bureau Chief, Yinka Oduwole, and I agreed it was risky to miss the story, given the belief that other newspapers were going to use it. Reluctantly, I wrote the story, sent it, and expectedly, it was Punch’s lead for the next day. Most newspapers gave it that treatment, of course, and that was when the drama started. The American Embassy clarified the statement by their officer and suggested that he had been quoted out of context.

Punch, true to its style, demanded for the audio recording of the interview reporters had with the man. I could not produce it, and I was suspended. I felt bad because my instinct was to ignore that story since I was not physically present when the statement was made.

What inspires and motivates you?

I am motivated by the need to surpass myself at what I do, which is why I have committed to lifelong learning. The more I study the Bible, new developments in my field, the more I am motivated. This is necessary for me because I like to share knowledge as well, and I must have context at all times.

Looking back, do you have regrets? Are there things you wish you had done, or things you wish you had not done?

Yes, maybe the most obvious has to be not marrying earlier. My wife and I were married in 1999, and when the children started growing, I realised that it would have been sweeter to have married maybe like four or five years earlier. It’s sweet to live to see great-grandchildren, you know? So, that’s one thing I wish I did.

What is your assessment of media practice in Nigeria? In which areas would you love to see improvements?

This is an interesting one, and I recently wrote an article to highlight some issues around the whole question of whether merely performing acts of journalism makes one a journalist. The standards are lower all around, including in the legacy media. I know this could be due to relatively lesser quality in the level of people joining the profession; the digital disruption forcing journalists to compete with the speed on social media and thereby committing avoidable errors; the relatively lower entry barrier to entering the industry to start performing acts of journalism. We are now seeing renewed levels of partisanship, subjectivity, and ethnic nationalism, which first manifested in the run-up to the 2023 election, and are likely to be with us till the 2027 election, and probably beyond.

I think all the issues can be dealt with, but the most important is to ensure that journalists are better trained and well remunerated. For instance, I am shocked that certain courses like Digital Media and Multimedia journalism are still unavailable at the undergraduate level. I would like to see media organisations invest more in training journalists to help them adjust to the ever-changing media environment. Also, I would like to see better quality control across the board – be it in newspapers, radio, or on television.

What should PR and Brand Managers do to become more relevant and impactful?

I would speak from my personal experience to say that the wise thing to do is to be sure you are ahead of the changing PR environment, especially with new technologies affecting the branding and online presence of organisations and people. So, let me give an example. By the time I was ready to go for my Master’s degree, I reasoned that it was unwise to invest in just any Journalism course because I was witnessing real changes driven by technology. I was privileged to have been among the pioneer set of the MA Social Media programme at the University of Westminster, London.

While there, I found out about the Digital Marketing Institute, Dublin, and figured that their certification would help me. So, again, I invested money and spent my leave in December 2014 attending that training in Dublin. I obtained a Certificate in Digital Marketing. That leave was meant for me to attend graduation in Westminster, but I chose to spend it in Dublin. What’s the point? The point is, I have a better understanding of managing PR and Brand Management because of those investments in training that I would not have had without them.

If you were the head of the PR and Public Engagement machinery of the Tinubu administration, what would you do better or differently?

I think by far the biggest issue they have is the obvious lack of a coherent communication policy, and that affects whatever structure they have. You would see that in the instability and sometimes contradictory communication from different aides. The communication policy ought to be the first thing to be sorted out, and the policy should be reflected in a structured organogram that clearly defines who does what. Without a doubt, that is something I would advise. I was privileged to have been in South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I saw what a difference a communication policy could make in managing the government’s engagement with the people.

What are your current and future professional engagement plans? What is your organisation focused on?

I am the lead consultant at The Chatter House, a digital media strategy consultancy. We deliver personalised, innovative branding and digital transformation strategies that enhance personal and business visibility, reputation, and influence. I am also the convener of the Centre for Social Media Research in incubation. Hopefully, the centre will be launched before the end of this year.