By Mike Sula
Back home Tell is banned by the military regime. “The government doesn’t want Tell to exist because it is exposing them too much,” says Ajanaku. “Since this magazine started they have been seizing copies. We have lost millions of naira on seizure, but we always find a way of getting it out. If they seize our color copies, we will go to another place and print black-and-white. The way we come out is an act of God.”
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As a high school student, Ajanaku admired journalists but didn’t think he had it in him to become one. “I thought a journalist had to be someone who was perfect, someone who was extremely brilliant,” he says. “But I only regarded myself as an average student.” After graduation he worked for a few years as a civil servant, eventually attracting the attention of a manager from a newspaper group in his home state of Oyo, who offered him a job as a court reporter for a local paper called Sketch. “I think he saw me and liked me and believed that I should be able to function well,” Ajanaku says. “But when he told me I said, ‘I don’t have a degree. I don’t think I can do it.’”
In 1991 five editors struck out on their own and started Tell, using the slogan “Others watch the news. We tell it.” When Babangida annulled the 1993 elections, which were swept by businessman Moshood Abiola, Newswatch’s coverage was tepid compared to Tell’s unflinching condemnation of the government and insistence that the elections be upheld. “People saw Tell as being in line with their democratic aspirations,” says Ajanaku. “Unlike Newswatch, society did not see them as being part of the government. So anything they wrote people believed.” Tell became the most widely read newsmagazine in Nigeria.
Ajanaku doesn’t object to being called an activist as well as a journalist. “As a newsman I cannot make direct comment,” he says. “So I have to make people say what is in my mind. Common sense dictates that one has to see things the way they are supposed to be seen.”
Old World Market on Broadway, an Uptown grocery with a large African clientele, is Ajanaku’s largest distribution point. Manager Maria Hurtado, who stocks several other Nigerian publications, including Newswatch, says Tell is her best seller (second best is a soccer magazine). “We receive like 20 calls a day from people seeing if we have it,” she says. “As soon as they read that one they come for the next one. Sometimes there is a delay, and they’re like crazy–‘When is it gonna be here? When is it gonna be here?’”
