Academy Press at 50

It is the lot of the journalist/writer to retell history in installments from the prism of his own lenses. Even as naysayers refuse to acknowledge some of the good things happening in Nigeria, we are now and again confronted with evidence of giant strides attained through the sheer never-say-die commitment of Nigerians and Euro-American friends […]

It is the lot of the journalist/writer to retell history in installments from the prism of his own lenses. Even as naysayers refuse to acknowledge some of the good things happening in Nigeria, we are now and again confronted with evidence of giant strides attained through the sheer never-say-die commitment of Nigerians and Euro-American friends of Nigeria who team up with their local counterparts to forge a lasting legacy. I was witness to one of such last week.
In the printing wilderness of Nigeria, Academy Press is the undisputed lion. Having weathered the storm for 50 years and still counting, the printing giant has contributed immensely to the country’s development in the areas of service provision, skills transfer, employment generation, multilateral trade and collaboration and industrialisation.
There is a sense in which it can be said that Academy Press is to the printing industry what the Daily Times of old was to the Nigerian newspaper industry and the New Nigerian to newspapers north of the Niger – a training ground. Many of the top executives of other standard presses cut their professional teeth in Academy Press.
Several decades ago when DRUM magazine was the only nationally circulated magazine in Nigeria (it was later joined by Spear magazine from the Daily Times stable and four sister magazines namely African Film, Sadness and Joy, Trust and Boom) there was only one printing press that could meet the exacting standards set by the magazines’ founders: Academy Press.
There aren’t many commercial printers the world over that provides the wide range of services that Nigeria’s printing giant has to provide. In Nigeria you have to be as self-sufficient as possible with facilities that routinely handle a wide range of products – Magazines, Journals, Reports,
Seminar Papers, Calendars, Annual Reports, Labels, Insertions, Posters, Handbills, Invoices, Waybills, Deposit/Withdrawal Forms, Account Opening Forms, Receipts, Point of Sales forms, Diaries Educational Books, Religious Books, Biographies and Novels, Confidential prints and other Publications.
The ruggedness of the press in confronting the daunting challenges of doing business in Nigeria was a result of the vision of the founding fathers who had made up their mind from the onset that they were in the grind for the long haul. Fate brought together people from three continents – Dick Gamble from the United States, Ian Pritchard and David Yellop from the UK, and Alade Idris Animashaun, Babs Fafunwa and others from Nigeria. Gamble was the founding chairman and financier but it was Animashaun who was to propel the company to industrial proportions and also take it to the stock market.
The founders of the press were in their thirties when they set out on the entrepreneurial adventure. They deployed their clean money, energy and life to the project, making it their life’s work. That is a good lesson for the younger generation today. Good people can come together to make a difference in any field of human endeavour.
The Buhari administration’s BUY NIGERIA campaign is bound to have a positive effect on Nigerian companies if government agencies key into the government’s vision and patronise Nigerian printers instead of taking their printing requirements abroad thereby depleting our scarce foreign exchange as scandalously happened during the previous administration.
Whichever way one looks at it, the fact that a multinational company in the printing industry has been able to successfully navigate its way for 50 years in the testy business waters of Nigeria, is a testimony to the fact that Nigeria is still a good place to do business, even with all the age-long glitches.
One point the federal authorities and the central bank will have to grapple with to ensure that companies like Academy Press continue to play their role in the national economy is the availability of foreign exchange to pay for raw materials and technical inputs required by the hi-tech industry so that jobs will be retained in Nigeria and not exported as had been the case in the past.
As we use Academy Press as contact point for all companies celebrating 50 years in Nigeria, perhaps we should remember the timeless quote of the inimitable Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in his song, “Buy Africa”. How can Africa prosper if we don’t patronise our own?

Donald, the Trump
Where are American clinical psychologists and psychiatrists? Why are they not speaking up as a spoilt child trapped in an adult body continues to foul their political space with rantings of hate and unmitigated idiocy?
The answer must lie in one of the secrets of America’s greatness – an infinite capacity to tolerate the intolerable, shop for disaster in an era of economic resurgence and self-destruct in order to self-repair afterwards. Yes, that is the only way one can rationalise the ascendancy of Donald Trump, grandson of a brothel owner, son of a racist property magnate who discriminated against people of colour through his segregated housing programme – in the ongoing political chess-game in America. Remember, Trump’s father was sued by the US Justice Department for refusing to rent his apartments to black people!
Trump’s claim to political fame is that he verbalises the unspoken racism of many white Americans. He hates Muslims and equates Islam with terrorism.
He cannot understand why the slave trade had to end and Blacks in America given the vote. He thinks Mexicans and Latinos are ought to be kept in their place. He is on record as promising to build a wall to fence off Mexicans if his POTUS dream materialises. He is an irreverent, rude, uncouth, intolerant, war-mongering demagogue.
Last week, he warned the press that he would curtail their freedom and sue newspapers out of existence if he became president. This is America’s own home-grown Hitler minus the full-stop mustachio.
Trump’s tantrums remind me of the hate campaign mounted by the PDP in the run-up to the 2015 presidential elections in Nigeria. People respond positively to programmes, now campaign of calumny. There are more good people in America than the KKK-types. As history is my witness, this cerebral malaria called Donald Trump will soon choke by its own malodorous vomit.