City People publisher Seye Kehinde has revealed that he had close shaves with military officers during the regime of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (retd) and the late Gen. Sani Abacha.
“I wasn’t arrested. I just decided that I wasn’t going to make it easy for them to arrest me,” Mr Kehinde told QEDNG in a recent interview in Lagos.
“I had so many close shaves with them but for some reason they couldn’t get me. They went on NTA and declared us wanted. They told people to give them information as per our whereabouts. After looking for us for about two years they concluded that we were printing at American Embassy. But everything we did was just around Ogba axis.”
Kehinde left ThisWeek published by Nduka Obaigbena to join African Concord on the invitation of Senator Babafemi Ojudu.
He said the troubles of African Concord began with a cover story which was critical of Babangida.
Despite requests from the publisher of African Concord, Moshood Abiola, for the weekly magazine’s editors to apologise to his friend Babangida, the journalists instead resigned and later started TheNews.
TheNews faced opposition from Abacha’s government and was eventually proscribed. Kehinde later edited Tempo magazine.
“Sometimes I look back and say ‘What point were we trying to prove?’” Kehinde said. “It was very risky. They (soldiers) came for us and went to where we printed. There were so many encounters with them but for some reason they didn’t know who I was or what I looked like. Once or twice, I walked past them and they didn’t know I was the one. But it was very tough.”
Kehinde said he takes journalism as “leisure” and not work, adding that his passion for the profession keeps him active.
According to him, he got the vision to start a soft-sell magazine in his days as an undergraduate at the University of Ife now Obafemi Awolowo University.
After his time at Tempo magazine, Kehinde started City People in 1996. He said his biggest challenge running the 26-year-old company has been funding.
“A lot of people thought I was crazy. How can you do 16 pages black and white when other papers were printing coloured. But the truth of the matter was that I didn’t have the money to do coloured. So I felt that on the strength of our stories, we should be able to sell,” he said.
