In 2004, I was living in the UK, working in digital marketing and watching two things happen at the same time.

Technology was changing, quite dramatically. But something else was happening too. The demographics were shifting, young people were finding new ways to express themselves, and culturally, something was stirring. The Nigerian diaspora was growing in confidence, and the relationship between Nigerians at home and abroad was beginning to take on a different character.

I had a feeling we were heading towards a cultural disruption. And I suspected Nigeria was going to be right at the centre of it.

At the time, I was building a career. I had started out as a digital marketing executive at a world-leading consultancy before moving client-side to Ericsson Enterprise, a leader in mobile and enterprise ICT. By day, I was a fairly high-powered corporate executive. By night, I was working on what I hoped would become my exit from paid employment.

That was NaijaSounds.

The idea was to introduce the world to Nigerian music through the emerging mobile ringtone market. Afrobeat, Fuji, Juju and a new sound coming out of Nigeria that hadn’t quite settled into a name or identity yet. A sound that the world would eventually come to recognise under the broad banner of Afrobeats.

We called it NaijaSounds, but it was never just about music. It was about a vibration coming from Africa. An expression of identity, confidence and culture that we believed the world was going to have to pay attention to.

And we weren’t content with simply selling ringtones.

We produced custom T-shirts that sold out almost as soon as they became available. We organised club nights in some of London’s top venues, with early performances from Weird MC and guest appearances from JJC and the 419 Squad (a music group, not a fraud operation!).

We were building a community around a feeling. Naija was becoming more than a geographical reference. It was an identity, a cultural signal and, increasingly, a global proposition.

Looking back, perhaps we understood something before we had the language to articulate it fully. The world was changing, and Nigeria was going to have a lot to say about what came next.

From NaijaSounds to Naija Times

By 2007, it seemed only logical that we should have a publication to document and explore what we were witnessing.

NaijaSounds was about the culture. Naija Times would be about the wider story: the people, ideas, events, businesses, conversations and changes shaping Nigeria and its relationship with the world.

Naija Times began as an email newsletter. It was an exciting format for its time, but we quickly discovered that advertisers weren’t particularly keen on spending heavily on newsletters. So, in 2008, we took another leap and launched the first full run of 10,000 copies of the print magazine.

Our first cover featured Dabota Lawson.

How did she get there? Well, we didn’t simply select a cover personality. We ran a competition on our social networking platform, NaijaConnects, asking our community who they thought deserved to be on the cover. Dabota won.

That little detail says quite a lot about what we were trying to create. Even then, we believed media should be a conversation, not simply a broadcast. Our readers and community weren’t just an audience to be sold to. They had a voice in what we did.

Naija Times was also never intended to be one man’s publication or a platform for my personal opinions. From the outset, we wanted an independent editorial platform with multiple contributors and perspectives.

We opened up the editorial space to other voices, including Uche Eze, who had founded BellaNaija and would serve as a guest editor for one of our editions. We wanted to make room for interesting people, fresh perspectives and writers who had something worth saying.

And some of those voices have stayed with me.

I remember the interview with Tiwa Savage around the time she was making her return to Nigeria. It was an opportunity to hear from someone at an interesting point in her journey, before the extraordinary career that followed. She didn’t even make the cover, by the way! Sometimes the stories that stay with you aren’t necessarily the ones that get the biggest headline.

Then there was Mr FineBoy.

His Proudly Naija column was one of our most popular regular features. Readers loved his writing, his observations and his particular way of looking at Nigerian life. He had a voice, and we knew it.

The man behind that byline was Kayode Jegede. I hope he doesn’t mind me revealing his alter ego after all these years! Today, he’s recognised as one of the screenwriters behind Gangs of Lagos.

We wanted Naija Times to be bigger than any one personality. That principle hasn’t changed.

The business of telling stories

There was just one small problem: publishing a magazine is not necessarily the quickest route to financial freedom.

As I often joke, the quickest way to become a millionaire is to publish a magazine. You start off as a billionaire and end up as a millionaire!

But behind the joke was a genuine challenge.

I was stubborn about one particular principle: the magazine had to be free.

I wanted anyone, whether in Nigeria or abroad, to be able to discover, pick up and read Naija Times without a financial barrier. But free didn’t mean we were prepared to compromise on quality. Quite the opposite.

The writing had to be good. The ideas had to be interesting. The production had to be beautiful. Even the paper mattered. If we were going to put something into people’s hands, it had to be worth keeping.

We were ambitious about the product, but the economics of publishing were changing around us. Print advertising was under pressure, media consumption was shifting, and the business models that had traditionally supported magazines were becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

We also had a particular editorial ambition that didn’t always make things easier. We didn’t want to be a me-too publication. We weren’t interested in simply reproducing what everyone else was doing or filling pages for the sake of having something to publish. We wanted to bring something distinctive, something that felt genuinely needed.

We had a clear idea of the publication we wanted to create. Finding a sustainable business model that could support all of those ambitions was a different challenge.

Eventually, we had to stop printing.

But that wasn’t the end of Naija Times.

We lived on in what I have often thought of as the Naija-verse: the interconnected collection of ideas, communities, platforms and expressions that had grown out of our original ambition.

And while the publication went through different seasons, the instinct behind it never really went away.

We were always interested in what was coming next

One thing I remain particularly proud of is that we were looking beyond what was immediately obvious.

We were interested in the signals before they became headlines. In the people and ideas that would eventually shape how we live, work, communicate, consume and express ourselves.

Some of the things that seemed emerging or peripheral at the time are now central to conversations about Nigeria and its place in the world.

We saw the importance of technology in shaping culture. We understood that the Nigerian diaspora was not simply an audience abroad, but an important part of our cultural and economic story. We recognised that Nigerian creativity had a much bigger market than the one immediately around it.

We didn’t get everything right. We certainly didn’t get every business decision right. But we were asking questions that still matter today.

And perhaps that is the most important part of this story: Naija Times was never just about publishing a magazine. It was about paying attention to Nigeria, and helping others pay attention too.

A new chapter, a bigger conversation

Nigeria is a country where the creative energy runs well ahead of the systems meant to carry it. Where a young population with global ambitions navigates an economy that rarely works in its favour. Where the culture travels the world while the country argues with itself about identity, opportunity and direction.

There is no shortage of people telling Nigerians what to think about all that. There is a shortage of people asking.

Because I said so is not a good argument.

So the questions interest me more than the answers. What is actually happening beneath the headline? Who is shaping what comes next, and who benefits from the decisions being made? What are we getting right, what are we getting wrong, and what are we missing altogether?

And the one underneath all of them: what does Nigeria think?

What this is

An independent editorial platform with many contributors, because no single perspective holds the whole picture — not mine, not any writer’s. Commentary, reporting, analysis, interviews, cultural observation. From people who will disagree with each other. That is the point, not a problem to be managed.

What Naija Thinks is how the asking happens. We put a question to the public, people answer, and we publish what comes back. Not as a popularity contest, but as evidence — so public opinion becomes part of the story rather than something the story is written about.

We are not interested in telling people what to think. We are interested in giving them more to think about.

The times have changed. We’re still here.

In 2007 we started Naija Times because we believed Nigeria was entering a period of real cultural and social change, and we wanted to document it. Nearly two decades later, that isn’t a nostalgic ambition. It’s an unfinished one.

We are not recreating the magazine — the back issues are still there if you want them. We are taking the original idea and giving it room to become what the present requires.

To those who remember Naija Times, welcome back. To everyone else, welcome. If you have a story worth telling, a perspective worth arguing or a question worth asking, there is room here.

Nigeria has never been short of stories. What it needs is the curiosity, independence and imagination to tell them properly.

Dayo Elegbe