(Olatunji Dare as Splendid Exemplum)
Name-Dropping becomes the rule of the new discourse: General X, Alhaji Y, Chief Z, Madam F etc, And, of course, the lucky returnee makes sure s/he puts their recent elevation in constant focus by starting or ending every sentence with “When I was in government”. Occasionally, he even subconsciously slips into the royal ‘we’. The returnee becomes a constant feature in the campus seminar/lecture circuit where his colleagues are eager to learn how he made it so high and so big, and how they too can find their way in.
However, the celebration of the returnee is anything but universal; envy of his/her new status is hardly ever a campus-wide contagion; for there are some campus gatherings and functions they must avoid, some people whose company they have to flee. The story is still told of the not-so triumphal return of one of the Special Advisers to the corrupt, incompetent Shagari government of the Second Republic, who scurried back to the Ivory Tower after the overthrow of that inept regime for a much-needed refuge in his former roost. About a month after his return, he was a featured speaker at a well attended symposium by one of the student organizations on campus. Question time, and student after student asked him what a brilliant and avowedly principled scholar like him was doing in a government so debauched, so visionless; what role did he play in it?; how did his great learning affect the course of events?; how did he manage to feel so blissfully at home in the company of the ‘callous and calculating kleptocrats’ he had always denounced in his lectures and public pronouncements?; did he realize the damage he had done to the image of the intellectual class? One of the students went touchingly ad hominem when he said something to this effect:
Sir, your presence in this university was one of the main reasons I preferred it to other choices; your discipline influenced the academic course I decided to follow. Ever before I sat in your class, I had nursed the hope of growing up and being like you. I sang your name so much that my colleagues started calling me by it. I never missed any of your newspaper articles; I even kept a file for their cuttings. Then you went and dined with those thieves and robbers. Are you still the no-nonsense scholar we used to know, sir? Now you left me confused. I have lost a mentor. . . . More chilling barbs followed. More excoriations took control of the air. The chairman of the occasion, achingly embarrassed for the distinguished speaker, tried to hush and pacify, but the thunderous shout of ‘Allow! Allow!’ frustrated his orders as more and more students took turns to vent their anger and disappointment. The returning don tried to smile it all off, but he had a hard time parting his lips. A cold sweat broke out on his brow. He looked in the direction of the chairman with the kind of mortal resignation a punch-drunk boxer regards the referee in a moment of hopeless surrender. He packed up his files and left the hall to the jabbing catcalls and boos of his erstwhile acolytes.
Returning dons of this kind, many of them ideological apostates, litter the Nigerian intellectual scene. Professors of philosophy who take their ‘philosophising’ to the courtyard of barely literate, bibliophobic military despots, then commit their perverted expertise to the perpetuation of their paymasters’ life-destroying ‘Heritage’ foundations; political science professors who jettison the ‘science’ and peddle the politics to the highest bidders in government quarters; palace pundits and State House griots who expend their talent on putting the most glittering spin on the darkest narratives from ruling circles. Which Nigerian over the age of 40 could have forgotten that bearded historian and famous don under whose watch lexical humbugs such as ‘Bandwagon Effect’, ‘Incumbency Factor’, ‘Grassroots Appeal’ were manufactured by the ever-busy Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) to aid the ruling party’s shameless rigging of the 1983 elections in Nigeria? Which Nigerian could have forgotten the political and socioeconomic chaos that was the consequence of this despicable deceit?
Perhaps the situation is the way it is in Nigeria because of the curious relationship between the Republic of Knowledge and the Republic of Politics; that is, between the state of the State and the state of Academe. Ideally what should exist between these two is what I would like to call a state of creative tension, of problematic mutuality and imperfect symbiosis. The Republic of Knowledge serves as the breeding ground of ideas and ideals, the Republic of Politics as the crucible of action and implementation. The former generates the theory; the latter pushes it into praxis. But constantly, theory is refined by the actual working of praxis; while praxis is deepened by theory. Of course, these are no two invariably antagonistic poles: a crucial instance of some kind of conjuncture occurs when a denizen of the Republic of Knowledge brings his learning to bear on the Republic of Politics. Again ideally, the academic in power or in a position of power is expected to illuminate his action with the precepts garnered in so many years of learning, with demonstrably positive outcomes on both policy and policy action. In other words, he is expected to ensure that his learning makes a difference.
But why have Nigerian intellectuals/academics found it so difficult to make this kind of difference? Why do they end up sinking deeper into the same morass they rail so loudly against while within the campus walls? The answer to these questions will require another essay, but let us just say here that the situation is as it is because the wall separating the two Republics has become dangerously thin in some places and completely broken down in others. The mutual seepage resulting from this breach has polluted the stream of thinking and action on both sides. The Nigerian government especially under the military brought Academe to its knees. Perceiving it as nothing more than a nest of ‘undue radicals’, it did everything in its power to break its ranks and silence its voice. To ensure its control of every important action on campus, it engineered the appointment of compliant vice chancellors and loaded the governing council with its own men and women. To guarantee the absence of a united front for academics, it proscribed their union at will. With all these manacles in place, it went ahead to impose starvation wages on university workers and made conditions of service so severe that only masochists still found joy in the Ivory Tower. The era of the iconic ‘Poor Professor’ had dawned. Having thus set the campus forest on fire, the military watched as desperate denizens scrambled to flee the conflagration. Some of these socio-economic exiles became sure game in the hands of the military government, the new Professor Bamgbapo’s (as in Wole Soyinka”s Opera Wonyosi) who grovel pathetically before those in power and spread out their diploma for them to walk on.
With its antiquated libraries, empty labs, dilapidated classrooms, paltry pay slips, the university campus became progressively inhospitable for living and hostile to learning. Many academics found a solution in two kinds of exile: some fled into political appointments, others across the seas.
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From the Classroom to the Newsroom/Newsstand
But thankfully, our account above does not tell the whole story. For there are thousands of other Nigerian intellectuals who never abandoned their commitment to a life of the mind; there were those whose conscience was too strong to be swayed by the juicy temptation of political appointments. Many of them stayed on to fight the rot in the Ivory Tower; others shifted base to the academy of the newsroom. Olatunji Dare is the most prominent member of the latter group and unarguably one of its most accomplished and most influential.
For the past three decades, Dare has not only succeeded in establishing himself as one of Nigeria’s most engaging thinkers and writers; he has also shown the country how it is done by raising both the accent and tenor of journalistic practice. In the true tradition of journalism as truth-seeker, information-disseminator, and shaper of public opinion, he has championed a school of journalism that places the highest premium on integrity and informed engagement. Believing that journalism is not just ‘history in a hurry’ as is often touted in common parlance, Dare conceives it as history in motion and remembrance in action. A writer with a stupendous sense of history and faculty of memory, he believes that the principal role of the writer and intellectual is to make sure that we do not forget. For him history is too important to ignore; for those who forget the past may not only suffer the calamity of repeating its mistakes; they may, in fact, not be lucky enough to be around to do so as they might have perished from the affliction of amnesia. In Dare, therefore, we see the thinker, intellectual, writer, journalist, towncrier, griot, and prophet all rolled into one conscientious and profoundly edifying nexus.
For Dare journalism is not just a job; it is a vocation; not just a career but a calling. Journalism is a cause. The journalist is not just the proverbial witness to and reporter of events; he is also part of the unfolding of those events, and his reporting and presentation of them is a measure of his personal integrity and professional proficiency. And, what’s more, these two qualities, consciously or unconsciously, influence the story and constitute an inalienable part of its permanent essence. Contrary to those textbook theories about the neutrality of the reporter and the divine independence of the story, real-life experience shows us that a part of the teller is invariably secreted in the telling: whether that proverbial glass is half full or half empty depends upon the subjective eye of the observer. Most times what we see is a function of who or what we are.
In no part of journalism is the maxim of the-writer-as –shaper-of-public-opinion truer than in opinion writing. And this is Olatunji Dare’s turf, his roost, and refuge – and in a manner of speaking – his crucible. In a classic case of professional commitment and passionate engagement, Dare is committed to the truth of the story and engaged with the ramifying implications of that truth. With a micro-biologist’s microscope and the surgeon’s scalpel, he fishes out the tiniest bit of a news story and subjects it to an informed and spirited dissection that magnifies it for the audience and reveals all its hidden hints. Dare leaves the reader in no doubt as to his single-minded wish to inform, to educate, to inspire, to call for change. He reminds me so forcibly of the wisdom of Jean-Paul Sartre, the great radical thinker and existentialist philosopher, who declared some four decades ago that ‘The function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about’ (1967, 14). Here then goes the Writer as Righter (Sartre, 1967; Osundare, 2002), a premise that was very much behind Achebe’s thinking in 1965 when he saw the novelist as teacher; and Soyinka when he declared that the writer must be the sensitive point and voice of conscience in society, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o who perceives every writer as a writer in politics.
Dare’s column is the meeting-point of many interests: up-to-date account of the news of the day; a masterfully executed analysis of it; a magisterial coda oftentimes with unforgettable moral gravitas. These are some of the main factors in the creation of an authoritative voice; and if any journalist has that kind of voice in Nigeria today, that journalist is Olatunji Dare.
That authoritative moral voice is realized through a cogency of ideas and felicitousness of expression; that frequently humorous, piquantly satirical style, that constant elevation of journalism to the pedestal of a truly noble profession – these have been the hallmarks and guiding principles of Dare’s journalistic practice since his days as an Op-Ed columnist for Daily times, then Nigeria’s dominant and most influential newspaper and one of the most widely read publication of its kind in Africa. It surprised no one, therefore, when soon after its birth in 1983, The Guardian which quickly matured into the flagship of Nigeria’s print journalism, had Dare as a member of its star-studded pioneer team. This was a team the like of which had never been seen in Nigeria’s newsroom: seasoned journalists, productive academics, former career diplomats, technocrats, and other veterans in public affairs. Together, they gave The Guardian a liberal, well informed social vision, professional integrity, and a journalistic (house) style distinguished by clarity of thought, painstaking investigative practice, and elegance of language. In this robustly conducive atmosphere, Dare unfurled his feathers and soared high in public reckoning. His column, ‘Matters Arising’, made The Guardian a compulsory read every Tuesday because of its depth of analysis, fearless argumentation, and impeccable expression.
As a versatile and vigorous writer, Dare often ranges from the sober to the sublime, from the clinically narrative to the picturesquely descriptive, from the fabulous to the fantastical. Here is just one instance of the ace journalist at his most mischievously funny:
[Humphrey Nwosu, a professor of political science, had a reputation for brilliance and volubility. He used his hands and sometimes his feet liberally to drive home his message. Reporters soon learnt not to sit too close to him at press conferences for fear that his right arm or left arm which he often stretched out with his accustomed vigour without warning might land on someone’s eyes, nose, mouth or ear. Or as he swayed to the left and then to the right in his chair in a manner reminiscent of Ray Charles at the keyboard, he might unintentionally administer
