The quintessential media administrator @ 70

In school, from elementary up to tertiary, the subjects of Mathematics and English have always posed quite an antithetical complexity for students. It is either you are very good in figures and struggle with the Queen’s words, or vice versa. Only a few scholars successfully marry the two with quite some intellectual aplomb.Chief Ajibola Ogunsola […]

In school, from elementary up to tertiary, the subjects of Mathematics and English have always posed quite an antithetical complexity for students. It is either you are very good in figures and struggle with the Queen’s words, or vice versa. Only a few scholars successfully marry the two with quite some intellectual aplomb.
Chief Ajibola Ogunsola is one of the few, even if the marriage was a metamorphosis from a career in Mathematics, so to speak, to a profession that he must inevitably employ the English language as its main tool. Chief Ogunsola so much meticulously accorded the switch a practical vent at THE PUNCH newspapers that when the Nigerian media industry celebrated his 70th birthday ceremony last week, not many people remembered he set off from higher school as a graduate of figures. By April 11, 2011 when he retired as chairman of THEPUNCH group, what fame Ogunsola had gained was as a stickler for accurate use of the English language rather than as a mathematician.
Fate had jerked Ogunsola off his juicy Actuary consultancy and thrown him into an uncertain world of newspaper management. But he had stared fate in the face and made fame of the transformation. Ogunsola had set his sight on Actuarial Science, then an emerging professional niche in Africa. An actuary is a business professional who deals with the financial impact of risk and uncertainty. Actuaries mathematically evaluate the probability of events and quantify the contingent outcomes in order to minimize the impacts of financial losses associated with uncertain undesirable events.
So after Ogunsola graduated in Mathematics, which he considered a non-professional course, in 1967, he considered Actuarial Science the professional and business road to explore. He, therefore, travelled to the United Kingdom to qualify as an actuary and become a Fellow of the UK Certified Institute of Actuary.
He returned to Nigeria to begin a career in insurance at NICON and gradually rose to be Head of its Life Department. He later moved to the Niger Insurance Company where he emerged the Chief Executive Officer in 1984.
The year would prove to be bittersweet for him, and, without him conscious of that fact, be the beginning of his  transformation from a man of figures to that of the English word.
Chief James Olu Aboderin, an accountant and Ogunsola’s maternal step-brother had 11 years earlier founded THE PUNCH newspaper as its chairman and by 1984, the newspaper had stabilised editorially, though it boasted no strong financial muscle. In 1984, Ogunsola was met with both the good news of his ascendancy to the Niger Insurance top seat and the sad news of Olu Aboderin’s death.
It was three years after his immediate elder brother’s death that Ogunsola eventually actively emerged in newspapering, in a manner of speaking, when he became chairman of the THE PUNCH group. This was the tide in Ogunsola’s affair. With no academic, professional or business pedigree in journalism or the media business, it presented quite a tide for him to take at the flood. With the parlous financial state of THE PUNCH then, it promised no fortune.
After rising to be the CEO of Niger Insurance and running an actuarial consultancy at the time THE PUNCH chairmanship beckoned, Ogunsola’s business voyage couldn’t have been more “bound in shallows and in miseries”, as Shakespeare philosophised, than what the grim situation at THE PUNCH portended. It was such a frightening challenge.  
But then, Ogunsola decided to swim with the current. The legacy his brother bequeathed was too symbolically rich to be allowed to perish without a fight. What would that say of the great Aboderin and Ogunsola names, not only in Ibadan where they are rooted, but in Yorubaland generally?
As Ogunsola has stated in many interviews, it was, indeed, a black moment to assume chairmanship of the beleaguered media establishment. Chief Muyiwa Aboderin, the eldest child of their mother, had succeeded Olu as chairman of the troubled PUNCH group. By 1987 when Ogunsola succeeded Chief Muyiwa, the debts had piled up high.
The Ogunsola era at THE PUNCH gained prominence in the industry for the uncompromising stance of the chairman over professional competence and ethics, but only a few  informed insiders at the company when the going was rough would understand the battles he had to overcome before he could place the media house on a sound footing. If Ogunsola thought battling to pay claims when he was boss of Niger Insurance was ardous, it dawned on him that settling the huge debts he inherited at THE PUNCH can be so humiliating. At least, at Niger Insurance, he didn’t have to hide under the table or in the toilet in fleeing from policy holders seeking to be paid their claims.  
Taking time off the National Conference holding in Abuja where is a delegate to chat with journalists last week at the sprawling PUNCH premises in Lagos, Ogunsola reminisced: “In addition to the banks that were being owed, there were plenty of suits, like libel suits. The credits were not incurred in my time. But whenever they (creditors) came, the Chief Accountant would tell them that I was yet to arrive from a foreign trip… That was the only way we could survive. What we did was wrong…”
Lying was, indeed, wrong, but it was a business trick that the chairman employed well to stave off pressure from creditors to enable him put THE PUNCH back on track. And put the media house back on track he achieved, far beyond his dreams. Within a couple of years, Ogunsola, marrying his actuarial training with robust journalism, had reinvented THE PUNCH to be a high-demand national sell and had offset the group’s debts.  
In driving THE PUNCH titles, Ogunsola suffered no editorial fool gladly. At THE PUNCH, the fear of Ogunsola’s axe was the beginning of professional excellence for any journalist, and, indeed, any other staffer of the company who desired to keep his job. The chairman was always organising written tests for the journalists and woe betide any of them that couldn’t spell as simple a word as “tintinnabulation” correctly. Every now and then, staffers deemed not up to it were shown the gate.
He has no apologies for his action. He told journalists last week: “Whatever was done, was done in order to make things better. Without any attempt to cast aspersion on any group of persons, we had problems on grammar. Almost throughout the period of my chairmanship and it is not only Punch.
“The people you are recruiting are from the universities and the universities are no longer teaching English. So grammar was one of the main issues we had to face during my time. And a staffer that is not competent is not worthy to be kept in the system, because he or she will pollute the system. And if the system is polluted, you will find out that it is the staffers who are frustrated. They will be the ones who will become politicians in the company, carrying stories from one person to the other. So we thought that there was no point leaving incompetent staff in the system.
“All that we could do was advertise and take those we need. We expect that the person will improve. We recommended particular magazines, books and courses to help them improve. We brought in university professors to train them. We brought in lawyers to take them on libel, still some of them were committing libel.
“I always say that a journalist knows when he is writing libel. There is nobody who will write something libellous without knowing. To be able to get our desired results, we had to do some of those things.
“Another thing we did was to start conducting periodic English tests. And if you fail more than twice, you will find your way out. We also gave room for improvement but if you don’t improve there is no point keeping you.”