The Publisher of Abeokuta-based general interest tabloid, Public Faces Magazine, Ms Bola Solate was a guest on Parrot Xtra Hour On Radio recently. She spoke about how very tasking it is to publish a magazine in Nigeria…Excerpts here presented by OLAITAN IGE
Bola, you’ve been publishing for over 10 years, how has it been for you? How did you start?
I started from doing some thing that is out of the ordinary- because where, I am from, we don’t have a publisher not to talk of a female publisher. It’s not like today where we have few female publishers. I was working in a property firm in Lagos then -so I know that for me to go out to sell landed properties, I can also come back to my home town to look for how I can gather information and start publishing. So I started from there. I didn’t know it was this exerting, I didn’t know it was this tiring and time consuming, if I had known, maybe I would not have dabbled into it. That’s why sometimes it’s not good to know so much about what you want to do but just have passion for it. On the long run I started having challenges but because I love what I’m doing and have passion for it, I continued doing it and here we are.
You were talking about challenges, can you be more specific?
A whole lot oo! I would just do a highlight – just like we do in journalism. I’ve been almost taken to ‘Panti Police Station’ because of what I do, I’ve been duped and people started abusing me that I spent money meant for publishing – you see, I gave the money to someone to help me publish and the person didn’t publish and I ended up not seeing the guy again, even till today. I’ve gone through a whole lot.
A housewife once ran after me on a bike because I was distributing magazine. So the woman ran after me and started calling me a husband snatcher and that I should leave her husband. I just explained to her that I’m a publisher.
What can the government do to support this kind of business that you do- publishing?
There’s a way they can do it. Government has news and advert placements on national newspapers, they can also help community newspapers by giving them some of the big things they give those national newspapers. They can decide to give 4-5 newspapers in the state adverts. It can go a long way in paying the staffs, paying house rent and getting gadgets instead of looking for individuals to place adverts. He who pays the piper dictates the tune. When we look for individuals to place adverts in our papers, we sometimes tilt our news to favor those individuals. So, the government can help us, we’re always ready to support them, even without them giving us anything. We’ve been publishing their news without them paying us, we just want them to encourage community publishing and empower us locally.
Do you have any advice for other publishers?
They call something Personal Branding. If you look at publishers critically, they don’t have time for themselves, they’re always buried in the newsroom. There are several opportunities out there that we don’t recognize because we’re always busy. I’ll advice that we leave our comfort zones, we should go out and also celebrate ourselves. I want to thank Parrot Xtra for bringing me here because he’s set to celebrate practitioners. So we should always go out to celebrate ourselves everyday.
From what we’ve read about you, you’re not married. What’s happening?
It’ll happen at the right time. If you could remember I mentioned that this work is stressful, and since I’ve been doing it, it’s not every guy that can marry my kind of person. I left the house early to be here, if my dad didn’t allow me, I wouldn’t be here. So I have to marry a man that will support the work I’m doing, and respecting each other is also key.
