Bisi Olatilo, a former broadcaster with the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria and the anchor of Bisi Olatilo Show in this interview with ’NONYE BEN-NWANKWO and TUNDE AJAJA, shares his life experiences
You speak the three major Nigerian languages fluently, how were you able to master them?
I grew up in Kano, in Sabon Gari specifically, a place thickly populated by the Igbo. I was born in Kano in 1953. The street where I grew up was called Gold Coast Road; it is called Maitama Road now. Although it’s supposed to be in the North, it could as well have passed for an Eastern settlement because of the composition of those who lived there. So, the first language I spoke was Igbo. I was able to speak Hausa as a second language because I helped my mum in selling things seasonally – ceramic wares. Most of my friends were Igbo. Yoruba language is my mother tongue. Incidentally, I learnt to speak the language when I was forced to go to a secondary school in my father’s town, Igbajo, somewhere in Osun State. Thank God my father insisted that I should go to school in my town because that also helped me to get a little closer to my people and understand the nitty gritty of the language itself. Today, I speak impeccable Yoruba. Before I left Kano, I couldn’t speak anything but Igbo and Hausa.
Since you grew up in the North, how do you feel about the crisis there at the moment?
It is most unfortunate especially for those of us who had the rare privilege of growing up in that very special setting when you never bothered whose children you were. It didn’t matter what language you spoke, we were all seen as one. I was brought up by the Igbo and I say it proudly. It was not because my mum didn’t have all it took to bring me up but children were living as one. What is happening now is so saddening. If anybody had predicted that this would happen, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Would you remember what made your father live in the North in the first place?
I only remember that my father was a very successful tailor and my mother was engaged in buying and selling, specifically selling dresses, wares, fabrics and so on. That’s all I remember, we all grew up there. I am the last of my mother’s three children. We just discovered that the North was the place for us; that’s where we grew up.
You said you are the last of your mother’s children, was it that your father had other wives?
In those days, it was a taboo for you not to have many wives as a man. All those things were status symbol. Yes, he had about three wives and mum was one of them.
Since ‘prince’ is attached to your name, does it mean your father was a traditional ruler?
My grandfather was once a traditional ruler. The traditional ruler that reigned before the current one in my town was my uncle. He was of the same mother with my father. So, if I really want to go back, I’m sure that at one point in time, it will also get to us because it’s a rotational thing. But I don’t have that in mind. A lot of my friends and family members call me Obalola (the king that would reign tomorrow) but I will never aspire to become a king, the same way I will never touch politics.
But you are in politics; so many people believe that you support the Peoples Democratic Party…
How can you say I’m into politics? Have you ever seen me carrying any card?
But most of your shows tend to support the PDP…
No. All I do is to help politicians to achieve their ends. I’m a broadcaster. I’m a media entrepreneur. If any of the parties brings business to me, I will wholeheartedly do it. Maybe most people see me more as a PDP person just because I do stuff for them. I go with whoever gives me work to do. Most people think the Bisi Olatilo Show is all about events.
Is it not?
It is more than that. We conceptualise public enlightenment programmes, develop image building ideas for state governments, parastatals and businessmen, that’s all we do here. When (Isa) Yuguda was still a member of the ANPP, we worked for him. We worked for (Rochas) Okorocha in APGA, we worked for Anambra State Government, which is also an APGA state. Even when the Nassarawa State was still being ruled by CPC, we worked for the state too. We are not aligned with anyone in particular. We also worked for Lagos State Government for seven years; we followed the government everywhere during campaigns, when the state was still ACN. That was the same way we followed President Goodluck Jonathan during his campaign throughout the 36 states before he became President. We are just broadcasters doing our job; we are media entrepreneurs. The party that brings business is our friend; all of them are our friends.
So, primarily, you don’t get into politics because of your job?
Naturally, I just don’t like it. I like to be on the fringe. I prefer to help them with professional expertise and that is our core area of competence.
But have you made foes because of this job?
Interestingly, I am a very lucky person. Everyone of them just finds it exciting to work with me. I don’t see anyone of them raising any eyebrows or feeling not too satisfied. It may be because of this language power, I don’t know. I am apolitical. I cannot do politics but I will help politics and politicians to grow in my own way. This is my professional calling.
Your daughter’s wedding attracted the bigwigs in Nigeria, is it that your profession has now made you to dine with the rich and the famous?
I have nothing but thanks and gratitude to God. They overwhelmed me, I was shocked, I was dazed by the goodwill that I enjoyed. I have not believed it as I speak. I think it just has to do with the way we relate with people, our disposition towards people. I always go the extra mile. We don’t even get paid for most of the jobs we do but there is always a pay day. That is a lesson to some of us who think that everything must be money. A lot of people would have expected me to celebrate my 60th birthday in a bigger way than I did. But because God has blessed us more than our expectations, after our daughter’s wedding, it would be overreaching my goodwill if I made another noise. I rather went to the orphanage. We didn’t even call anybody. It was just my family, children and grandchildren. That was done purposely.
Was it your life ambition to be a broadcaster?
Certainly, all the way, I had no other life ambition even from my secondary school days. Those days, we used to have one small television. I would always listen to the news at 7am, 4pm and 10pm and the words I heard would keep resonating. The voice of Ikenna Ndaguba was always reading the network news then. For football, it was Ishola Folorunso. They were the ones that were reigning then. By the time I was in school, I got fascinated and I started doing things like that. During the school assembly, my principal then, Mr. Olagunju, allowed me and gave me the latitude to gather news around our environment, prepare it and read to the assembly of not less than 1,000 people and they would all listen to me. We also had football matches and I did mock football commentaries at that young age. And so the breakthrough came. After my school, I approached the Broadcasting Corporation Voice, that’s the radio station where I started before I came over to Lagos and the coast became a lot wider.
So it naturally followed that when you had to go for a degree, you had to study Mass Communication?
Certainly, you know the way things work in Nigeria, you must have some degrees, otherwise, if I had my way, I was just enjoying myself, but it’s been a good time.
Weren’t there challenges as much as you were enjoying yourself doing something you loved?
A lot of challenges, but we never gave up. People say that broadcasting and media are all about glamour? Indeed, it is but no money. All the same, if you really work it out properly, like most of us did, you would be able to use that to pitch your way through. It’s been perseverance, dedication and the ability to break new grounds.
At what point did you consider the idea of Bisi Olatilo Show?
Bisi Olatilo Show was a child of circumstance. It started between 1999 and 2000. When I was in Radio Nigeria, I was doing some programmes for DBN which was called Straight Talk. It was a magazine show incorporating news, sports, interviews and so on. So, when I disengaged from Radio Nigeria, I asked myself what I would do. I left when I least expected it. I was like a fish out of water. I was very much in demand as a master of ceremonies, especially for high profile events. A friend of mine suggested I go with a cameraman to events and have a five minutes slot on TV as a social diary. And that was how the concept was conceived and we started it on AIT and NTA. They permitted us to do it without paying a kobo; just to see how it would work but at a point, I started getting memos; they needed money to pay for their own services and their platforms. So, it made sense for them to demand money from us. That was how we started commercialising it.
But wasn’t the first edition a flop?
No. If it was a flop, we could have been discouraged from going ahead with it. It was because they liked it and everybody kept urging us on. So, we were able to gather enough courage to continue.
So, in all these years, you have never thought of calling it quits?
It has never crossed my mind. The question I have been asking myself all the time is when are we going to start our own television station? People have asked this same question on many platforms and they say that our programme is bigger than some television stations. If they give us the go ahead today, we have our mast at the back there and we have the manpower to start. I just hope that very soon, we will get the licence. The excitement is always there. I hope it comes.
There was a time your office was razed…
That was in July 2006. I had gone to cover the defection of Saminu Turaki from ANPP to PDP in Dutse, Jigawa State capital. They called me not to compere but to cover the event. Ahmadu Ali was the chairman of the PDP then. We went, did a very good job, finished and came back to Abuja. I wasn’t feeling sleepy when we got to Abuja, so I decided to go ‘shake it down’ because I like dancing a lot. I came back to my room around 4am, when a phone call came from Lagos and it was one of my editors, Yomi, that called.
Was he the one that broke the news to you?
Yes and he was not diplomatic about it at all. It was very heart-breaking. He said, ‘Oga, the whole place is on fire! The smoke is so terrible!’ Before I knew it, Dede Mabiaku also called. He was even worse than Yomi. In an undiplomatic way, he said, ‘Don’t just put your heart, the whole place don finish o, but just thank God nobody died.’ You can imagine sleeping with that kind of burden overnight. You can imagine going through that kind of trauma till morning. But I had to bear the burden until I got to Lagos. When I stepped in here, I saw my wife, my children, everybody. The luck we had was that nothing happened to anybody. My son who was around brought out all the cars and they were brand new then. My Pastor came around, prayed and prophesied that under two months, we would recover and we were shocked what changes God brought about and they all happened under two months. The whole upstairs (first floor) was in rubbles, ashes and it happened during the rainy season. So, we operated here in this hall for about a whole month before we got ourselves back. But the good thing about it is that there was no week that we didn’t have the Bisi Olatilo Show, even the same week it happened. So, that was a great setback but God changed our adversity to prosperity.
What has sustained your marriage for more than 30 years?
It is going to 33 years now. Once in a while, the devil tries to play the bad one, but God has always been there for us. We started out liking each other, not because of money, I plucked her away from her parents three years before we got married. I eloped with her.
How? Why?
I was a Christian and she came from a Muslim background and we knew her parents wouldn’t support the relationship. Eloping seemed like the only way to do it. Since she wanted it, I decided to elope with her until we decided to get married on December 19, 1981.
Did her parents eventually forgive you?
They did. They had to. Love conquers all. There is nothing that love cannot conquer. The most important thing was that the lady herself was interested. If I had forced her, it might not come that easy. That was what drew me to her and I made up my mind that it had to be her out of all the others.
Oh, there were others?
Certainly, why wouldn’t there be others? She was 24 and I was 28 when I married her. There would always be others at that age. But we thank God, there have been all kinds of temptations which is normal, but we have been able to surmount and overcome them.
At that period you eloped, you didn’t try to encourage her to go back to her house or you still encouraged her to stay with you?
Why would I do that when they didn’t even want to see her? And there were some people in her family who didn’t think I was the right person for her. Her family was richer than mine but she was more interested in letting love prevail. That was what she wanted.
Could you please tell us why you left Radio Nigeria?
Well, I don’t know whether to say I left them or we left each other. The most important thing is that it is a thing that I always would rather not talk about. But I’m sure that all those that I had relationship with then would be happy that we have achieved success in what we are doing.
Soni Irabor must be your very good friend going by the picture of you and him on the wall. Since he does the kind of thing you do, hasn’t there been any form of rivalry? How have you been able to sustain your friendship?
I haven’t seen any such thing in him. But I cannot say that some of my friends are not envious. I come from a background where we love without boundaries. We can almost give our eyes out to help people. But recently, something happened that made me sit back and say to myself that I will have to change my attitude to some people that come like friends whereas they are not. If you have such people as friends, you don’t need enemies. You can imagine somebody who was supposed to be a friend who came back to town having been in the UK for years. When he came back, I was one of the persons in the vanguard of trying to rehabilitate him. Despite people’s compliments about my daughter’s wedding, this man opened his mouth and said to me that my daughter’s wedding was ‘recklessly’ popular. And when I tried to get him to explain what he meant by that, he said it was ‘carelessly’ popular. And the Yoruba people say that what you have inside you before you get drunk is what you would still say when you are drunk. Though people tried to make excuse for him, that maybe he had too many bottles, I just sat back and said there was need to be careful. That was somebody who was supposed to be a friend, so I thought what he said was an enemy statement of the highest order but I am happy that once you know your enemies, you will know how to walk around. Soni hasn’t shown me anything like that. But that’s the last thing I would ever do. You will always find me over-blowing people’s image once they are good. You can fault me on that, once you are good, I can go to any length to talk about you in a very good light.
Have you ever faltered as a master of ceremony while doing your job; have you had a bad day?
Certainly, you will have your good day and bad day, but what we try to do to avoid this is to go by the books propounded by Ikenna Ndaguba, the master compere of all times. Even if he was going on air as a master of ceremony for 30 minutes, he would have had everything well researched that even the owner of the business would have to be listening to him. He said broadcasters must conquer the environment, they must dominate the environment. How will you dominate the environment if you don’t know it? You should know a bit more than everybody and that means you must read hard. You must read up yourself, so any event you are going to anchor, you must know a lot about it and ask questions well in advance so that you don’t falter.
What has been your highest point in your profession?
The highest point that I had was when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and he came to Nigeria with his estranged wife, Winnie Mandela. Ndaguba and I were Masters of Ceremony at that very big event. It was the most well attended that I know of till date. It happened at the National Stadium. If you threw a pin, it would fall on somebody’s head, it was that populated. The stadium had never witnessed such a crowd. That was the height of my career. And incidentally, that was when I was beginning, you can imagine that. I began at that high octave, that’s about early 1990s.
These days, On Air Personalities try to speak through their noses like Americans, or foreigners, what would you make of such?
What you should do, if I were you would be to put off the television or radio. What are they trying to do? What you get from me here is what you will get when I am reading a script, I am not making up anything, and that was how we grew up. Also, someone like Ndaguba was always himself; either you were listening to him on air or anywhere else. So I think it’s a complex thing. There is no reason for them to change their accents.
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