Case of Ibadan mail and the need for community newspapers in nigeria

[Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth]

 Ibadan Mail  and the need for community newspapers   in   Nigeria by Augustine  Togonu- Bickersteth  september 9 2022

Our newspapers tend  to focus  more  on where the  wealth  is or where power resides.for money or wealth it is lagos and for, power obviously it is Abuja  and so you would wonder why anyone would want to publish a paper or magazine devoted exclusuvely to  Ibadan  city. So it happened with the journalist and publisher Taslim Abiola Layonu maybe for emotional reasons, he is from Ede but his great grand mother was the  Iyalode of Ibadan Land

   I    Edited  the Ibadan Mail magazine in the city of Ibadan. it's now defunct/ Then, the residents  of   Ibadan, indigenes and non indigenes  alike   kept asking why   we decided to have a publication devoted exclusively to   ibadan  city.. First we explained then,20 years ago that  Ibadan   had the population to support not only a  magazine but a newspaper. Then the central council of   Ibadan indigenes revealed there were 1.3  million houses in   Ibadan and they reckoned that if each house had 10 people  not flat,then there was  a conservative  estimate of 13 million people then in ibadan. So it should be agreed that the population existed to support publications like  Ibadan Mail.

   The second reason we gave is that papers like los angeles times, washington post, new york times all started as community newspapers. News is about people  and people is about news. Iibadan has people!  But somehow the  paper died. Perhaps because most publishers, like most entrepreneurs  are good at production but poor at operations, marketing, finance, customer service and business development.

        I     sympathize  with  A catholic   priest in Ekiti  reported in the Thisday of September  9  2022 as stating that there is an excessive attention on  Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and  Peter Obi  almost to the total exclusion of the other candidates or all other positions  Being contested for. 

  I would not blame   Nigerians for   this” excessive attention” rather I put the blame on the absence of  enough  newspapers and other periodicals that focus on other levels of government aside the federal government   like  IBADAN MAIL.its not only affecting  our  politics and democracy negatively but also development ,for instance  the buhari government  planned 109 integrated farms  and several other projects at local government levels  .there is no way a national newspaper would monitor effectively 109 senatorial districts with regards to government projects. But some papers have to monitor them.that why we lost billions of Naira to primary health care centers cut across all the local governments in nigeria, this is why there are 56,000 abandoned buildings  belonging to government the length and breath of nigeria,

       Unfortunately     Most Nigerian newspapers   strive to assume a national  spread if only to maximize profit,.we should not forget that for the most part    Nigerian newspapers  are not charities for most or all of them profit matters.

 There is not much in nigeria in terms of   newspapers at the level of the neighborhood the, street ,, community ,,local government   constituency,r,senatorial district. State. And regional levels.  Cut across this we also need ethnic,Arabic  and pidgin  english newspaper and periodicals  same with radio,   TV and the NEW Media/ which might suggest thre are a lot of jobs to be created