Every promise is a debt in abeyance.
And no word conveys, underscores and underlines promise like the emphatic yes. By saying yes, you are making a solemn oath, a declaration, an affirmation, a promise, you are saying, to borrow a naija expression; no shaking. That was what the ever youthful, 39 year-old Azuh Arinze did on June 19, 2011 when he gathered a huge crowd of fellow journalists, actors and actresses, social butterflies, business moguls and celebrities of different stripes in the cavernous hold of the Niteshift Coliseum to witness the unveiling of his new baby, YES INTERNATIONAL!, a 32 page magazine presented in the time tested tabloid tradition harking back to the US – based National Enquirer which first berthed in Nigeria as Muyiwa Adetiba’s Prime People, then Vintage People and before exploding into the sleazo-sphere with Akapa’s “Akapa Top Magazine” and hitting its lowest ebb with the salacious Razor.
But it was the trio of Femi Akintunde-Johnson (FAJ), Mayor Akinpelu (Mayor) and Kunle Bakare (KB) in concert with Dele Momodu (Bob Dee) who tamed the tabloid beast, domesticated it, gave it a veneer of respectability and seriousness, even intellectualism and made it a weekly staple with Fame Weekly. Seye Kehinde’s City People would step in and change the game further after the breakup of the trio and disintergration of Fame. Kunle Bakare and Mayor Akinpelu would, however, return with their own publications; National Encomium and Global Excellence.
It was a new dawn for a different kind of journalism in Nigeria. There had been, hitherto to the coming of Fame Weekly; no publications devoted to the lighter fare; human interest, society, celebrity, scandals and such like. What we had were the normal daily newspapers with their weekend titles which covered these sort of stories, but you had to wait till Saturday and Sunday or Friday in the case of Lagos Weekend and what you got were just two or at most four pages as in FAJ and Molokwu’s Encyclopaedia Gossipica in Saturday Punch.
As the Nigerian entertainment space opened up and bonafide celebrities began to emerge, the need for publications to address that class and their adoring fans became imperative. The traditional papers with their emphasis on serious news were not structured to report this segment and so evolved the Nigerian tabloid tradition. While Adetiba’s Prime People is generally seen as starting the trend, we must look to papers like The Punch with their Saturday entertainment pages, the Lagos Weekend with its emphasis on the salacious, especially divorce (not living in Lagos, I knew that divorce cases were heard at Igbosere) and Vanguard with its array of light-hearted columnists, from Doyin Omololu of Lipstick to Gloria Ogunbadejo and most especially Tony Okonedo who was among the very first to report the shenanigans of those in high society; their parties, their fashion, their homes and their wheels. Other magazines sprang up to cater to the softer issues and we will recall the Moji Danisa edited Climax, Newswatch’s Quality magazine which introduced us to May Ellen Ezekiel who would in time become the irrepressible MEE and publisher of Classique as well as Ibe Kachikwu’s Hints,but all these had a peculiarly feminine bias just as Richard Mofe Damijo’s seminal men’s magazine, Mister did. Those magazines are worthy precursors of Today’s Woman, Genevieve, Mode Men, FAB, etc.
The point to take away from here is that the evolution of the tabloid tradition had its roots in the serious titles; then went through a phase that courted respectability in both content and packaging before the trio of FAJ, KB and Mayor hit upon the right formula which was high society, entertainment and gossip. And the package was simple: A3 size, all colour cover with a multitude of captions, newsprint inner pages that dish the dirt and voila, a new journalistic tradition was born in Nigeria.
But there is always a problem with seemingly easy formulas. People think that it can be done with ease. But nothing can be farther from the truth as seen from the high mortality rate of soft sell papers and human interest magazines. A celebrity mug cannot all papers sell and the salacious delivered without panache, the sort introduced by Fame but elevated by the likes of Kunle Bakare will end up no better than beer parlour gossip. This is why the entry of YES INTERNATIONAL! will have us pause to contemplate the genre, to ask whether this teeming soft sell market is still ready for another title, what with News of the People, High Society, Top Celebrities, Bravo, Enquirer and the rest struggling for market share. Is our people’s thirst for low brow news so much that the titles we have in the market cannot slake it?
Azuh Arinze’s YES INTERNATIONAL! makes quite a lot of promises; first to be “more than just a soft sell” and then to be “the first choice of readers and advertisers” and finally “to make the day of our readers with quality stories, interviews, gist(s), pictures, tips, quotes, ideas and coverage of events”. The vision and the mission may well be the same for others in the genre even if not explicitly slated, but a contemplation of YES INTERNATIONAL! after six editions give us a fairly good idea of how well it has striven to fulfill the promise encapsulated in its payoff line “to be more than just a soft sell”. What that promise establishes is that YES INTRENATIONAL! is a soft sell magazine which already puts it in an easily identifiable category, but its brand promise is to elevate the discourse beyond the normal. The question to ask now is; how well has it done these six editions down the line? To begin to answer the question we must consider the layout and content of the magazine. I recall a conversation I had a few years back with Seye Kehinde, publisher of City People when he pointed out that he doesn’t hobnob with celebrities because he doesn’t consider himself one and he wants to report about them without sentiments. Azuh Arinze does not seem to share this sentiment. YES INTERNATIONAL! is the Nigerian soft sell magazine with the highest number of celebrity columnists. As at launch date, 15 celebrities spread across the spectrum had agreed to write for YES INTERNATIONAL! And by the sixth edition, Apostle Anselm Madubuko, Saint Obi, Chidi Mokeme, Femi Sowoolu, Basorge Tariah Junior, Chris Nwaokobia, had all written for the paper.
Azuh Arinze has an explanation for this; “The major reason I decided on that is to allow them to tell some of their stories their own way and in their own words. An example is when top actor, Saint Obi’s mother lost her memory. He wrote it his own way. One good thing about that is that it also excuses you from the accusation of misquoting them; wrong choice of words in conveying some things said by them and so on. Again, we wanted to do what no other medium is doing. It is equally our USP, if you like”. Taking a look at the stories that have run in YES INTERNATIONAL! in the first six editions, one notices a few interesting trends; the first is that the ever smiling Azuh Arinze does not lack access to celebrities and there are reasons for this. From his early years at FAME to his time as editor of Encomium, he has reported both entertainment and society, thus exposing him to personalities from actors to musicians to business moguls. He is also a charismatic and loyal friend. Azuh must leverage on this access and the good will he has built up over the years to set his paper apart from the rest. This is a potential he has to build upon.
Secondly, if YES INTERNATIONAL! is committed to being “more than a soft sell”, then Azuh as publisher must shy away from captions such as: “Exposed: All the men who dated and dumped Genevieve” as well as “All the marriages Mercy Johnson Destroyed + Why she may never find a husband”. These smack of sensationalism and are a bit too personal. The caption in the launch edition for the Anselm Madubuko story may have worked best as “I love Prostitutes”. It is punchier and more captivating without detracting from the story and would have been more eye catching than the Genevieve caption.
There is a celebratory accent to stories in YES INTERNATIONAL! which is encouraging, from the story of the Ejiro brothers and Nollywood to the one on the Primetime trio and then RMD and Opa Williams’ 50th. YES INTERNATIONAL! must do well to balance the salacious with the salutary because most soft sell magazines have made the mistake of believing that their raison d’etre is to make sure that “the rich also cry”. There have also been some stand out stories, from “Cecilia Ibru Returns, Hides in Abuja, to Helen Sosu’s expose -Charly Boy is Evil” and the two-edition report on Charles Ahize’s shenanigans. While the content has also been beefed up with a few additions from “Outside our Shores” to “Doctor in the House”, there is the need to add colour pages and establish a page that will report Corporate News. This will help attract a key sector which is critical to advertising revenue. In all, Azuh Arinze’s decision to, as he puts it, “say YES! to my own dream” is off to a good start and one can only hope that the name he has chosen, because according to him, “I wanted a positive name that people could pronounce easily and effortlessly. A name that once you come in contact with it, you can never, never forget again,” will bring him luck and fulfill the promise of its early begins marked auspiciously by the award conferred on YES INTERNATIONAL! at the Media Nite Out Awards as “The Most Promising Soft Sell Journal of the Year”.
Finally, one must point out the debt Azuh Arinze owes to Fame Weekly where he cut his journalistic teeth and by extension his publisher and boss of 17 years, Kunle Bakae. Business leaders are often judged by their ability to mentor others and the trio of KB, FAJ and Mayor must be proud of themselves because like the IMB of old which sired the highest number of second generation bank MDs, Fame Weekly was the breeding ground for almost all the editors and indeed publishers of soft sell magazines in Nigeria right now. Azuh Arinze must also begin to think of his legacy now that he is a publisher. And if the above is a pointer to what is to come, one can safely surmise that the future of the soft sell genre is indeed bright.
Toni Kan wrote this piece in 2011 soon after YES INTERNATIONAL! made its debut