Tolu Ogunlesi

thumb Tolu Ogunlesi (born 3 March 1982) is a Nigerian journalist, poet, photographer, fiction writer, and blogger. Ogunlesi was appointed to the role of special assistant on digital/new media by President Muhammadu Buhari on 18 February 2016. Quotes I can speak specifically about Nigeria. With Nigeria, it’s not so much censorship and state operation. Especially as a democracy, Nigeria has always had a fairly open space for journalists to work. But there are bigger issues, of capacity and talent, and training and skills development. Skills development funding is a key issue. People are not born journalists – you may be born with such skills that help you become a better journalist, but you have to learn. Good journalism especially needs funding. Most journalists are badly paid, so they have to depend on what we call 'brown envelopes' – there are a lot of handouts from companies, which are essentially just bribes to journalists. That’s a big issue. If journalists are as important as we say they are to any society, then we cannot afford to have them as some of the least paid members of that society. If you take into account the differences in literacy and access to technology, and the speed of the Internet, it’s inevitable that you are going to have differences in production and consumption patterns. I don’t think there’s any newspaper in Nigeria that does 100,000 copies a day – for a population of 170 million. Much smaller countries – Germany for example, which has a population of less than half of Nigeria’s, or in the UK – weekend editions will sell a million, two million copies. We don’t have anything like that. One reason for that is the economics of it; people can’t afford to buy newspapers. And another reason is literacy; newspapers would only be able to reach a small chunk of the population. So patterns of production and consumption are not the same as in the West. Radio is very big. These days, social media is also becoming quite big, especially from a production point of view because for people who want to go into the media, social media allows an easy opportunity to become a blogger, a journalist. You can put stuff out on your blog, put stuff out on YouTube. Because we’ve got a huge population, you can also then tap into that huge population and get a lot of attention. There’s no doubt that media production and consumption patterns are unique to Nigeria and many African countries because of those factors. I think one key thing is that you have to understand your audience. The most successful media businesses are the ones that best understand their audience and adapt whatever they are doing to their audience. You find that happening again and again in Africa – whether it’s mobile money with M-Pesa in Kenya, which has become a model for the rest of the world, or whether it’s Nollywood, the film industry in Nigeria, if you look at what they have in common, they are essentially very local solutions. The technology is of course based on Western technology but these people have almost instinctively adapted Western technology to local needs. Nollywood is a good example – small budget, a quick turnaround, it’s a very fast paced, volume-based industry. I think there are lessons in that, also for the media. I think confidence is the most important thing, for governments, for the media themselves, and for the consumers of information on the African continent. They also need to pay more attention to local sources. There is an obsession with Western media – if Western media doesn’t say it, we don’t believe it. If Western media says it, then it must be true. We need to fundamentally change that kind of thinking. When this happened, people in Nigeria were saying, “I don’t think that any European head of state would give their first interview to CNN or Fox News or anyone on the other side of the world…”. The media needs to build confidence in itself as a voice. Governments need to build confidence in the media and give them opportunities that Western governments would give their own media. There also needs to be a lot more sophistication in government communications. You can do a lot for local media by finding credible sources locally. To be honest, I have not done a very good job of juggling both! I have not done any fiction or poetry in many months. Journalism now takes up most, if not all, of my time. Of course there are things that influence both. Sometimes a journalist needs the kind of skills that a novelist would have for things like color and background, which make a story come alive. Sometimes a novelist needs to think like a journalist, for the what, where, when, how. So these skills feed into each other but for me it’s quite difficult to find a balance. I do mostly journalism these days and I am trying to find a way to spend more time being an artist and combining that with being a journalist. I’m not sure I set out to write thinking or obsessing about one grand theme or the other… it’d be somewhat absurd for me to sit down and say, hey, let me now spend the next ten minutes writing about Love, and after that, I’ll do a short story on Cruelty Readers – after the fact of my writing – will point out thematic threads that they have spotted in the body of my work, and I think that is for them to do, and not for me the writer. All my life, books have always played a part I must thank my parents who surrounded me with books from the very beginning… thus helping me to start on this adventure with the printed word When you spend all your time breathing in bookshelf-wood and ageing newsprint and navigating around inked paper, maybe it’s inevitable that one ends up a writer I feel like my life has left the service lane and joined the highway I still have it in me to write cringeworthy stuf passion for writing does not in itself guarantee success I think that talent is not within our spheres of control seek to build the best house you can upon the foundation that nature/circumstance/gene has built for you The role of any writer first and foremost is to write. Not talk about writing, not live on past glory, not teach writing, not create new schools of writing, not analyse writing, but WRITE. The bulk of our attention and energies should aim at becoming the best writers we could ever be, maturing in our craft, communicating as seamlessly as possible with our readership, and perhaps influencing our world that way The role of any writer is to write – The Tolulope Ogunlesi Interview 26 May 2007 There is something about the sciences that I think drives many of its practitioners into art As far as I’m concerned the challenge now is to take on the Indians and produce far more exciting writers and writing than them. They are not more talented than we are I think! From the outside I sometimes envy those domiciled within the Ivory Tower – the single-minded devotion to research and production of new knowledge, the conference circuits, the networking – but on second thoughts I think that I prefer the ‘freedom’ outside what I’d call the ‘footnoted’ fence I appreciate the power of the internet in promoting literature Tolu Ogunlesi: The Sentinel Interview 28 August 2026 Much of what ends up in the media spaces, sadly, is driven by sensationalism, a desperation for attention by all means, that is sadly not limited to bloggers alone—what used to be called traditional media are just as guilty and complicit [How] Nigeria Works - Intro Ed. 16 June 2023 People are not born journalists – you may be born with such skills that help you become a better journalist, but you have to learn. If journalists are as important as we say they are to any society, then we cannot afford to have them as some of the least paid members of that society. The most successful media businesses are the ones that best understand their audience and adapt whatever they are doing to their audience. There is an obsession with Western media – if Western media doesn’t say it, we don’t believe it. If Western media says it, then it must be true. We need to fundamentally change that kind of thinking. Governments need to build confidence in the media and give them opportunities that Western governments would give their own media Sometimes a journalist needs the kind of skills that a novelist would have for things like color and background, which make a story come alive. Confidence key for Africa's media: Journalist Tolu Ogunlesi 26 May 2015 I have tweeted about 40,000 times in the last 3 years. Roughly 13,000 tweets per year, approximately 36 tweets per day. That’s a lot! 40,000 answers for when God asks me: “What did you do with your time on earth?” [Interview] ‘I joined Twitter because it wasn’t Facebook’ 11 March 2013 External links Category:1982 births Category:Living people Category:Journalists from Nigeria Category:Authors from Nigeria Category:Poets from Nigeria Category:Bloggers from Nigeria Category:Short story writers from Nigeria