Category: Jide Osuntokun

By Jide Osuntokun

I voted for President Buhari in all his presidential elections since 2003 because I felt he has the sense of urgency and will power needed to tackle the multifarious problems of our country.

How did I come to this conclusion? I was in the University of Maiduguri from 1982 to 1984 as Professor and Dean of Faculty of Arts straight from Washington DC in the United States where I had lived for about three years.

In early 1983 or thereabouts, Chadian forces invaded some parts of Nigeria near Doro/Baga across the rapidly drying Lake Chad and inflicted some casualties and pain on Nigerians on our own soil.

General Muhammadu Buhari was then General Officer Commanding the armoured division in Jos.

He ordered the 23rd Brigade based in Maiduguri to pursue the Chadian army across the border into Chad and to give the Chadian army a bloody nose so to say.

My friend the then Colonel Joshua Dogonyaro was then in command and the orders were carried out to the letter.

The action was condemned by the government of President Shehu Shagari and the army’s action was said to have had no approval of the government.

The government may have been right  to  have suggested that a prior permission from civil authorities should have been sought before crossing an international border with military forces, but so  also was the man on the spot  right who had to respond to armed incursions immediately especially from the chaotic situation in Chad Republic.

When the Shagari regime was overthrown and replaced by the duo of Brigadiers Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon in December 1983, they immediately said their regime was a continuation of the no-nonsense Murtala Muhammad/Olusegun Obasanjo regime.

They acted as such by imposing draconian discipline on the country and attracting respect for us externally. A manifestation of their aggressive response to events was the attempt to kidnap Umaru Dikko, erstwhile corrupt trade minister under Shagari who was calling for Buhari‘s overthrow from his safe abode in London.

When in reaction to the failed Dikko kidnap attempt, the British government seized Nigerian Airways plane, Nigeria retaliated by seizing a plane of British Airways.

One may not agree with the modus operandi of Buhari’s government in the Dikko affair, but as a nationalist, one would somehow be happy that Nigeria had come a long way from being subservient to foreign powers to being an important player in international politics.

These were the reasons that made me prefer Buhari over others when he entered presidential politics. Having studied and worked abroad and suffered from racism and humiliation, I was not ready to see my country kowtow before any western country.

The Muhammed/Obasanjo, Buhari/Idiagbon in varying degrees fitted my picture of a progressive government. So when Buhari offered himself for the post of a democratically elected president, many of my kind looking back decided to bet on him.

In 2015 his choice was made more attractive by the hopeless and pervasive corruption and drift of the Goodluck Jonathan government.

By 2015, Buhari was like a cult figure among the poor in the North but to us academics in the south in particular our support was based on realpolitik because he was the better of the two main contenders.

When he was elected, he made the right kind of statements like he belonged to no one but to everybody. Some members of his party did not quite like to hear that.

But the statement was presidential. He could not be president of only his political supporters but of everybody in the country.

Then he said if we don’t kill corruption, corruption will kill the country. This was spot on the problem. Then he took six months to form his cabinet.

When the list came out it was a disappointment. We did not see those who could help him carry out a root and branch revolution in government.

It was the same tired old political war horses with the exception of a few people who were well known for their knowledge and competence.

Later on, Buhari himself said he did not know most of them. His wife concurred. But he has kept this cabinet virtually unchanged for five years.

This I must say is not the spirit of presidential system of government where the president has the whole country from which to recruit his cabinet unlike in the parliamentary system where the cabinet is made up of party leaders in parliament.

We then had the curious situation in which the Chief of Staff to the president took pre-eminence over the vice president.

This was an anomaly of a situation of a personal staff of the president calling foreign ambassadors, military commanders, ministers, governors and issuing orders and directives as if he were the president.

The president’s final acquiescence with this anomaly was when he said all his ministers who want to see him should see the Chief of Staff for clearance.

His government was further hijacked by ethnic, religious and regional jingoists who now occupy all important ministries, parastatals and security organizations in the country.

We now have the unfortunate global coronavirus pandemic‘s complication of a serious problem of governance. This plague is not only killing thousands of Nigerians, but also killing our fragile economy and eroding the worth and value of our national currency.

This has further undermined our prestige, respect and leadership role in our West African region and on our continent and the world at large.

As if this was not enough, we now have two problems that the president must urgently solve. The president must change the entire security architecture and scaffold.

The war against the Boko Haram he inherited is destroying the country. His military commanders have failed to deal decisively with the Boko haram problem and festering insecurity all over the country.

This is the time the president has to say thank you and good bye to the military leadership in the country. This is the normal practice everywhere and Nigeria should not be an exception.

We cannot be doing things the same way forever and expecting different outcomes. A situation in which hundreds of rank and file in the army are saying they want to leave because they are dissatisfied with their kits and weapons and welfare are alarming and constitutes signs of failure of the higher hierarchy of the armed forces.

Tied to this is the failure of intelligence to ferret information to the security forces so that rebellion and violence can be nipped in the bud.

This is not good enough. It seems to me that the police and other forces lack morale due to poor pay and career advancement.

Now we have a situation where the flagship of this regime the anti-corruption war has been dealt a death blow by fifth columnists and enemies within the government.

In the last five years, the anti-corruption corps led by the EFCC was perceived as having performed creditably. At least this was the public perception and we had no way of thinking otherwise.

The opposition kept making noise that its activities were coloured by political partisanship. This was however to be expected.

It is only those who were in positions to embezzle government funds that were being asked to disgorge what they had illegally eaten.

There were also spectacular successes at home and abroad and stolen money by Abacha were being returned. Never mind the attorney-general instead of calling it the” Abacha loot” was calling it “Abacha assets” until there was an uproar against him.

President Buhari had foreign support in his campaign to recover this loot. He even suffered the humiliation of being introduced to Queen Elizabeth of England as “President of a fantastically corrupt country” until the Archbishop of Canterbury interjected that Buhari was not in power when Nigeria became “fantastically corrupt “and that poor Buhari has a mission to change the situation.

Then with a bang, the whole anti-corruption edifice appears to have collapsed like a house of cards when Ibrahim Magu the anti-corruption Czar was arrested like a common criminal on the streets of Abuja and dragged before a presidential panel to face charges of corruption levelled against him by the attorney-general.

If truth must be said, the attorney-general lacks public high regard arising from his handling of the  Abdulrashid  Maina case. Whoever comes to equity must come with clean hands.

Then we have the unbelievable sleaze going on in the NDDC in which an Acting Managing Director claims she slapped her minister because of sexual harassment.

The management of the NDDC arrogantly said they shared N40 billion to its staff as palliative against Covid-19.  When one of them was being quizzed by a committee of the House of Representatives, he conveniently collapsed to avoid embarrassment.

This is happening in  a ministry set up to rapidly develop the Niger Delta – the goose that lays the golden eggs so to say .

Mr. President, borrow a leaf from President Donald Trump who had no problem getting rid of an unreliable FBI Director, James Comey and a friend and loyalist Attorney General, Senator William S. Sessions.

Do likewise and more. Send back Akpabio to Akwa Ibom and change your entire cabinet and the higher hierarchy of your security organizations.

It is you history will judge and not those you appointed and who have let you down.

Jide Osuntokun

 

 

I first met the then young Dr Ladipo Akinkugbe in 1961, 59 years ago when he came to give a lecture on water-borne diseases to students of Ibadan Grammar School during my Higher School Certificate course.

Our principal, Archdeacon Emmanuel Ladipo Alayande was known to cultivate the friendship of promising and intellectually brilliant young men and Akinkugbe was one of such young men. My Alma Mater, Christ’s School Ado Ekiti did not have HSC in arts subjects then.

Even some of my very brilliant colleagues in the sciences preferred to have different experience than the one we had in Christ’s School by going to such schools as Ibadan Grammar School, Oyo Baptist College, Government College Ibadan, Abeokuta Grammar School etc.

But quite a number got into the University of Ibadan through the concessional entrance examination rather than going through the circuitous route of the Advanced Level examination.

Akinkugbe comes from a patrician family of the Akinkugbe/Ladapo lineage in Ode-Ondo. By the way the only other place prefaced with “Ode” in Nigeria is Ode-Itshekiri or “big Warri”. Without going too much into history, the people of the two places are linguistically related.

Akinkugbe after his primary school in Ondo went to Government College Ibadan which distinguished itself by offering British-type “public school” kind of education. Unlike Barewa College in the northern part of the country, its students’ intake were usually the best selected after rigorous examination process.

My brother Edward Abiodun was a senior to Akinkugbe in Government College. Akinkugbe’s classmates included the Nobel laureate for literature Wole Soyinka (W.S) and the late Professor Muyiwa Awe, another great man who made a first in physics in the University College Ibadan, before a PhD in physics in Cambridge.

I must say if Akinkugbe had not studied medicine, he too would have made a mark in English literature judging from his mastery of the English language.

One just has to listen or read his public lectures and autobiography “Footprints and Footnotes” to see the erudition that is native to the man.

Akinkugbe belonged to the class of medical students at the University of Ibadan who had to leave Nigeria to go to London University College to finish their clinical studies before graduating M.B. B.S. (London).

Those who came after him to Ibadan which by then had one of the best teaching hospitals in the Commonwealth, the UCH, finished their medical education in Ibadan but continued to get degrees of London University until 1964 when the University of Ibadan regrettably severed its ties with the University of London.

I was at the University of Ibadan at that time and many of the students who started earning degrees of Ibadan after 1964 were not very happy with being denied London degrees.

Would we have lost anything if we had maintained academic ties with the University of London? The modern trend in higher education nowadays is that the great universities of the world viz Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, London, University of California at Berkeley etc. are establishing overseas campuses in the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore and China to offer opportunity for students overseas for their brand of quality education.

After graduating, Akinkugbe went to Oxford for advanced clinical studies earning a PhD (Oxon) in the process. Fortified with this and membership of the Royal College of Physicians, Akinkugbe joined the teaching staff of the College of Medicine at the University of Ibadan.

He rapidly rose through the ranks becoming a professor and dean of the faculty in his thirties. His rise to the top was simply meteoric. He was succeeded by my late brother, Kayode Osuntokun, distinguished and world acclaimed neurologist with whom he developed a great friendship.

During the expansion of tertiary institutions in Nigeria during the 1970s, Akinkugbe was asked to build initially a university college in Ilorin like the University of Ibadan Jos campus established in 1971.

He had hardly settled down there and laid out his plans when he was asked by the federal government to become the vice chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, the bastion of northern Nigerian nationalism.

The Obasanjo/Muhammad military government at that time in the late 1970s was driven by some kind of nationalist fervor and thought it could unify the country by making the nation’s elite work in areas far away from their ethnic home land.

For example, Professor Agodi Onwumechili was appointed vice chancellor of the University of Ife, J. C. Ezeilo was appointed vice chancellor of Bayero University, Kano and Umaru Shehu was appointed vice chancellor, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

The experiment in nation-building nearly ended in tragedy for Akinkugbe and Ezeilo who had to be spirited out of Zaria and Kano following students and staff rebellion against them on the grounds of their ethnic and religious differences.

If left alone in Ibadan, Akinkugbe would have adorned the vice chancellorship of the University of Ibadan with erudition, scholarship and refinement. After this adventure in Zaria, he was later called upon to chair as pro-chancellor the governing councils of one or two universities in the country.

He finally became the pro-chancellor of Ondo State University of Medical Sciences, a controversial university established by Governor Segun Mimiko on the eve of the end of his eight-year term as governor.

This university was obviously a sop to the people of Ondo town who were complaining that their native son did nothing for their town in eight years.

After retirement from Ibadan University, Akinkugbe set up the Ibadan Hypertension Centre with his own funds offering first class treatment to many of the people suffering from this silent killer.

The Ibadan Hypertension Centre which Akinkugbe established and ran with his own funds unfortunately closed down in 2018 after he celebrated 60 years of medical practice and as the medical titan reached the age of 85.

It is a pity that the government of Oyo or the federation could not take over the centre and run it as a referral centre or as an adjunct to the University of Ibadan Teaching Hospital.

Probably 50 percent of us Nigerians are hypertensive. This disease is a silent killer, the management of which our governments have paid little attention to.

Akinkugbe on his own pointed the way that we should go. It is a pity that our over-politicized country pays little regard to things that are worthy and deserving of attention and emphasis.

Akinkugbe paid his dues to Nigeria and to humanity. He definitely earned his epaulettes as a distinguished professor of medicine.

A grateful nation accorded him the highest honour of the NNOM. He was involved with credit to the development of higher education in Nigeria.

His advice may not have been listened to all the time by those in power but his contributions are on record and history will be kind to him. Sixty years of medical practice is worth celebrating.

The death of Professor Oladipo Olujimi Akinkugbe CON, CFR, PhD Oxon, M.D London FRCP London, DSC (Honoris causa) is a national loss, an African loss and a global loss.

On a personal note, his death is a loss to us in the Osuntokun family. He was an in in-law because his nephew, Damola Ifaturoti is married to my niece Lola.

He served on the Kayode Osuntokun Trust pro bono and with distinction for a decade.  We all will miss this gangling genius and embodiment of all that is good and wonderful.  Indeed, as the Yoruba’s will say, Erin wo Ajanaku sun bi Oke!

 

Jide Osuntokun

 

Is it not strange that the only continent where people have not demonstrated in large numbers against the recent slaughter of African-Americans is Africa which should have been at the forefront of the global protest? There were inconsequential demonstrations in Lagos, Cairo and Nairobi.

One would have expected bigger demonstrations in Nigeria and South Africa at least. Yet, our ancestors collaborated with white slavers who carried hapless and helpless Africans across the Atlantic in a triangular trade in black cargoes between Europe, Africa and the Americas over a period of 400 years from the 15th to the 19th century.

The number of our people that were landed in the Americas ranged between 25 and 50 million and those who perished or were thrown out of the ships when sick in the stormy voyage from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean may have been in their millions.

For all those years, blacks tilled the ground without any fees thereby providing cheap labour for the capitalist development of the new world. The profit from this trade provided the source of the development of the Americas and Europe itself.

The late Professor Eric Williams  who later became prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago in his famous book “Capitalism and Slavery” demolished the theory of humanitarianism being responsible for the abolition of the trade and argued that it was the rivalry between the ascendant East Indian interest in Britain which provided alternative source of sugar that mobilized parliament to pass the abolition bill of 1803 and not William Wilberforce who may just have jumped on the bandwagon when abolition became a possibility.

In any case the trade continued till the 1880s before it was permanently stopped while slavery in the British Empire continued till 1833 and in America till 1865.

Dr Walter Rodney in his books “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” and his  doctoral dissertation on “The History of the Upper Guinea Coast” compared the level of  development in Europe and Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries and did not find any yawning gap in the level of development between the two continents.

The only difference was that Africa did not have the cannons and other precision weapons that made conflict between Europeans and Africans unequal and the undoing of Africa. Europe exploited this weakness to her benefit until Africa became ripe for European slave trade and eventual conquest.

This short preamble is to demonstrate the fact that the slave trade by Christian Europe and colonialism provided the basis of the black man’s perceived inferiority to the whites who had to justify the slave trade and slavery by arguing that Africans were not really human because if they accepted the humanity of Africans, the slave trade and slavery would have amounted to sin and colonialism which followed was justified by Rudyard Kipling,  the British theorist of  imperialism  in his book “The White Man’s Burden” by saying Africans were “half children and half devils” who needed the white man’s guidance.

In the history of racism, the British and their fellow Saxons like the Dutch and Germans bear greater responsibility even though  all Europeans generally bear a shared responsibility for racism .

All races have the potential for racism. The Chinese for example see all non-Chinese as barbarians. The Japanese look at other Asians as good for conquest.

The French have a cultural arrogance of being superior to other Europeans while the Germans see Russians and Slavic people as untermenschen (sub humans). Italians who are the descendants of the Romans of the great Roman civilization are today perceived as not up to the mark with other Europeans.

The Portuguese and Spaniards who conquered and divided the whole world between them in the 15th century are now looked down upon as lesser breeds to Northern Europeans.

Among us Africans, some look down on others as belonging to a people of a lesser civilization. This and our different tongues are the basis of African tribalism.

The hallmark of any civilized person is to so educate oneself to realize the foolishness in believing in the superiority of one race or ethnic or national group over another.

What can wipe off racism in the world is equality of power. International relations in its raw form is power relations.

In the 1950s when advertising for tenants in Britain, one came across things like “Accommodation available, No Irish, No coloured, no Japs, and No Coolies (Indians) No Chinaman” (a derogatory term for Chinese). By the sixties, it was only coloureds and Irish that were not wanted; now it is only colored that need not come.

In the race of life, the Blacks are now left behind. Who will dare discriminate against Chinese today? The long arm of nuclear armed China is there to protect the Chinese.

Japanese technology and money have elevated Japan to the Group of Seven capitalist economies of the world. Nuclear-armed India is also seeking its place in the sun. The result of the unequal development in the world is the association of blackness with underdevelopment, inferiority and ugliness.

The sorrowful part of the whole scenario is that African leaders don’t seem to be aware of the fact that the powerlessness of Africa has economic and political dimensions. As long as Africa is not respected, Africans will not get the right and fair terms of trade for their commodities.

The so-called world price is what suits the people with power.  As long as Africa remains badly governed and its resources looted by African rulers and taken to foreign banks, Africa will remain poor and underdeveloped.

As long as Africa remains buried in tribal warfare of one against the other, those who have power will continue to supply weapons for Africans’ mutual slaughter.

As long as Africans remain in 52 puny states unable to mobilize its resources for development, Africans will remain unequal and discriminated against by others. As long as blacks in Africa and the diaspora do not support one another and continue to despise one another, they will continue to be humiliated singly and collectively.

There was a link and correlation between African independence in the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act in the USA of 1965. As long as Africa remains a “shithole continent”, Africans in the diaspora will continue to be slaughtered like sheep without a shepherd.

This is why we must break down the yoke of tribalism and micro-nationalism and build regional federations as building blocks towards continental unity in Africa, south of the Sahara. We should stop deluding ourselves about Afro- Arab unity.

The Arabs actually introduced slave trade to Africa before the Europeans and slavery still exist in some of the Arab countries in Africa notably in Mauritania, Libya and the Sudan.

One of the greatest mistakes made in Africa is that black South Africa let the nuclear bombs of apartheid South Africa slip from its hands. A black African country with nuclear power would have changed the equation.

Young people on this continent must not hope for the day when other people in the world will treat them as equals.

This will not happen until the ignorant political leadership currently prevailing in Africa is swept off the stage and replaced with forward-looking Africans who will shut the doors against foreigners and build their countries with their own energy and native intelligence before dealing with others as equal.

It is the weakness of Africa in its own continent that is leading to humiliation of Africans everywhere in the world. Africa must cure itself of the disease of its leaders roaming around the world in China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Japan for handouts when all the minerals the rest of the world needs are in Africa.

We should tell our leaders to sit at home and whoever needs our produce should come to us to negotiate with us as equals. We must stop the merry-go-round annual jamborees in which 52 or so African black presidents line up to be introduced as grinning little black children to Chinese, Japanese, French or whichever imperial powers that had invited them. Enough of all these stupid shenanigans.

Jide Osuntokun

I was a graduate student in Halifax Canada in 1967 during the heydays of black protest against discrimination and all kinds of injustice in the US and shall I say also in Canada. I was therefore a witness to history and went through the mental torture of suddenly being made to realize there was something wrong in being black. I grew up in post-Independence Nigeria where we felt all things were possible if one worked hard to suddenly found oneself in a society where to be black meant to be ugly and unacceptable which  I found  jarring at my humanity. I was in total sympathy with my black colleagues who wanted to do something about the humiliation black peoples suffered in the hands of white peoples. I was very active in the African Students Union of my university quickly rising to the position of President of the association. I remember having chats with blacks in Halifax and asking them why they were not in the university to which they always retorted that they “ain’t got no business  there” which was a pity because there was a sizable population of blacks there mostly from all over Africa and the West Indies. By the time I left the university after my Ph.D. in 1970, its gates were then opened to black Haligonians. People like Rocky Jones, a black power advocate was already admitted to the law school on basis of “affirmative action” Rocky Jones modelled himself after  young black activists like Rap Brown, Stockley Carmichael, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, the writer of the fantastic book titled “Soul on Ice” which became a must read by students in those halcyon days. Some us daring black students used to go to Rocky Jones’ house to be harangued by “brothers” and “sisters” coming in from the United States to solicit our support for the black struggle in the United States. Our engagement was not as overt or as violent as those of black students in Montreal who in 1968 stormed and damaged university computer centre in Sir George Williams University which is now part of Concordia University in Montreal Canada.

The situation of black students and presumably blacks generally changed for the better after the tumultuous 1960s which witnessed the murder of Martin Luther King junior and Robert Kennedy, the former Attorney General of the United States and brother to President Kennedy the slain United States President  and the most sympathetic politician to the black cause in the United States . There is a tendency to give Martin Luther King  and his non-violent marches all the credit for black advancement in the US  without acknowledging the role of the young black leaders who offered a violent option for black advancement for the whites to choose which  one they were prepared to live with . There is no doubt that there has been some movement in the right direction. There have been many black mayors, congressmen and some senators. Blacks have been appointed to the Supreme Court and a few of them have risen to cabinet positions in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. To climax it all, Barack Obama became president from 2008 to 2016.  There has been noticeable improvement in lives of some distinguished and highly qualified people. The question is to what extent has this affected the lives and fortune of black humanity in the USA. The answer is that it has not affected black humanity as a whole.

After Obama’s presidency, his successor has done everything possible to rubbish his legacy. In fact no less a person than the former President Jimmy Carter has observed that  white Americans voted for the racist Donald J. Trump as a reaction to their suddenly realizing their country had been run by a Blackman for eight years . It must also be stated that while president Trump got the majority of the votes in the warped system of their Electoral College, he was beaten by Mrs Hilary Clinton by almost four million votes. If America were truly a democracy, Mrs Clinton should have been the president since 2016.

Since coming to office as president, Trump who began life as a Democrat has moved with wherever the political wind blows to and has finally found home among the racist crowd in white America amongst those who want him to make “America great again” which is a euphemism for making “America white again”. At a time when America needs moral leadership, they have not found one in the White House. In fact, Trump has made racism acceptable in high circles of political and intellectual leadership in America. He does not find anything wrong in Swastika flag-waving Americans beating up other Americans and driving their vehicles into rival demonstrators thereby killing women and men who are asserting their rights to voice out their democratic opinion. He has been tweeting that when “ looting begins shooting starts” in reaction to demonstrators protesting the murder in public glare of an unarmed George Floyd, a black American already handcuffed but who the police snuffed out his life by slamming him on the ground and kneeling on his neck until he died when he could no longer breathe.

The offense of this man was that he allegedly offered a counterfeit $20 bill to purchase something in a grocery shop. This happened in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His death was a signal for the explosion for pent up emotions against the police and those who sent them .This followed in recent times, wanton killing of blacks in the USA. In July 2014, Eric Gardner was choked to death by policemen in New York. In August 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson Missouri; the same happened in Baltimore Maryland when Freddie Gray was also murdered by police. Other blacks like Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and Delrawn Small followed. Recently, Ahmad Arbery was murdered by off-duty policemen of father and son in Georgia while jogging because they thought he was involved in house-breaking .This litany of blacks being wasted goes back to the period of slavery when blacks could be shot as part of shooting practice. Apparently the American police still think they have a license to kill. Most of those dying in the on-going coronavirus pandemic are blacks who have no health insurance or who have lost their jobs. This is the America where the police has become boogeymen to black peoples who are permanently made to live in fear for their lives, yet when America goes into one of its wars of pacification as global policeman, these poor blacks are the first to be conscripted because serving in military and its wars provide blacks avenue for advancement. Of course when they are demobilized, they are picked up or shot by the police for small infraction of the law.

George Floyd was killed for using fake $20 which he may have been given innocently in normal business transactions. Instead of President Trump offering soothing words to the families of those killed by the police, he was boasting and calling on the Pentagon to deploy lethal weapons in the streets of America and also saying he will unleash ferocious and wild dogs on the demonstrators. The saddest part of this story is that he may yet win re-election in November when he runs on the slogan of guaranteeing “Law and Order” coded words for putting the blacks in their place. Thank God the governor of New York State Andrew Cuomo has bravely spoken in favour of the demonstrations while deprecating the violence and looting by people on the lunatic fringe of the demonstrators.

There have been solidarity demonstrations in Toronto, Canada and some cities in Europe in spite of the restraining factor of the coronavirus. How I wish our young people in our country and the rest of Africa showed solidarity with suffering black humanity in the USA. When Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa made his inaugural speech on October 7, 1960 in the United Nations in New York, one of the things he said was that Nigeria would support the rights of all black people wherever they were in the world. We have now unfortunately arrived at an unenviable place in our nation’s political and economic trajectory where our voice is muffled because we have mismanaged all our opportunities and now where our voice should be heard clearly we are cringing before our international creditors who manipulate the levers that pull strings in the Breton Woods institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to which we owe money or hope to borrow from. If African countries cannot protest  against the humiliation suffered by our people and protect  them, should we not be able to hide under the African Union and at least express our sorrow  about the plight of our people who continue to be treated as if black lives do not matter?

Jide Osuntokun

 

In 1972 as a young academic at the then University of Ibadan, Jos campus, I decided to examine the life and times of Chief S.L.A. Akintola, second and last premier of the Western Region of Nigeria.

This was strictly to be an academic exercise which would, as required by the nature of historical scholarship, be based on documentary evidence as well as oral interviews.

I was also reacting against the problem of paucity of written documentation about the African past which students of my time in the 1960s encountered in the University of Ibadan which was then the centre of nationalist school of historiography.

I was determined to play my part in ensuring that the generation of my children, if they decide to find out about their past, will not be hampered by lack of relevant literature.

I am not sure my generation has done all it can do to establish a body of knowledge that would help elucidate the past and foreshadow the future.

I believe we have tried. The Ibadan History Series to which I contributed a book cover many countries and themes from politics, war, economy, the press, Christian evangelization in Southern Nigeria and Islamic revolutions in northern Nigeria and other west African states and their impacts on politics and society in West Africa.

They also cover early European contacts with Nigeria going back to the 15th century and the Mfecane the Zulu dispersal in Southern Africa as well as French expansion in west Africa and the different legacies of European colonialism in West Africa.

When I began looking for official records of the Akintola administration, I was shocked when the secretary to the government of the region or what was left of it when the Mid-West had been hived from it, told me there were no records.

I asked what was the meaning of that? He plainly said they did not have enough space for old records and that as soon as one head of government left office, they simply burnt all the papers to make room for the incoming administration.

Needless to say, I was shocked. He then added the clincher that they did not even have the papers of the newly departed Brigadier Adeyinka Adebayo who had just been promoted to the rank of Major General and moved to Kaduna as Commandant of the Military Academy.

I reminded the gentleman that there was a National Archive in the University of Ibadan not too far away from the secretariat where official documents were by law supposed to be deposited.

As an aside, the National Archive has branches in Enugu and Kaduna. I have doubts if the National Archive has had any budgetary provision for years.

I had for my self-imposed assignment of writing the book on Akintola to go to the University of Ibadan library to rummage through the brittle old newspapers from the 1930s to the 1960s covering the period of the man’s epiphany and assassination in 1966.

I supplemented my newspapers sources with oral interviews in Ibadan, Lagos and Ogbomosho. Almost 50 years later in 2016, Dr (Mrs) Dere Awosika, one of Chief Samuel Festus Okotie-Eboh’s children wanted to mark 50 years of her father’s untimely death in the hands of military assassins by putting on record her father’s contribution to the economic development of Nigeria.

She approached me to help with the project. The time for the assignment was incredibly short. I then suggested we prepare a book of anthology of his public presentation of national budgets spanning almost a decade and a generous introduction of who he was and the Itshekiri people to which he belonged to the usually uninformed Nigerian citizenry.

I sent research assistants to the National Archive in Ibadan for relevant information. We drew a blank! Then we went to the Cabinet Office (office of the Secretary to the federal government).

It was the same result. Then I felt surely, the Ministry of Finance or the Central Bank which Okotie-Eboh created would have copies of his budget speeches. That also was a forlorn hope. I then went on the internet and the University of California at Berkeley had them.

They couldn’t be accessed online but one had to go physically to Berkeley, California. We did not have the luxury of time. I was about to give up when someone suggested we ask Chief Phillip Asiodu, a former permanent secretary known for keeping important records.

To my surprise and joy, Chief Asiodu had them in his private collection. Should I have been surprised? Perhaps no.

Chief Asiodu went through the portals of Oxford University and the university also went through him unlike most people who, as soon as they returned home from studying abroad, went “native” and forgot all they studied and the culture of organized life that produced the excellent institutions from which they benefitted .

A country does not develop without institutional memory. The present is as part of the past as it is part of the future. One generation builds on the shoulder of a preceding generation.

Any country that begins every epoch by laying new foundation and writing its development plans on a tabula rasa will never make it.

Just look at the numbers of conferences, plans, visions Nigeria had been involved in dreaming in the last 60 years, each beginning as if we were reinventing the wheel and yet we have nothing to show for them.

No one is sure whether copies of such vision documents lavishly funded by the national exchequer are deposited anywhere for future reference.

We seem to run our governments blindfolded and always groping in the dark for a way out. It is not just the presidency that needs institutional memory, all our institutions particularly vital ministries like education, finance, defence, foreign affairs, need institutional memories.

As a matter of urgency, every ministry must be asked to have libraries and archives. Do we have records of our gas and oil industries for example? Do we have figures of how much oil and gas have been exploited from our shores and from where? Do we have documents on each individual company involved in exploration and exploitation of our hydrocarbon resources? Do we have records on who and who have been running the affairs of the national oil company and their achievements and failures and what new entrants into office can learn from the past? Do we have figures of export of hard wood timber and consequent deforestation of Nigeria?

In these days of computerization, whatever needs to be stored for future should be done. Certainly, all universities should have records which can be stored electronically.

I remember going to my alma mater, the University of Ibadan, to help a nephew collect academic transcript some years ago. I was directed to an underground office near the zoo. When I reached the place, it was in total darkness.

The place was manned by some elderly women and their boss who was naturally a man! After a lot of fuss, I was led in by a kind woman who knew how to walk in the dark. She unabashedly said I should hold on to her in the dark.

We eventually arrived at a dimly lit space which harboured thousands of files. All the ladies searched manually until I gave up my search. They begged me to mention my experience to their vice chancellor so that they could be given a generator to lighten their darkness so to say.

This was after I told them how much could be generated from their office if only they could computerize the place and run it efficiently.

Anybody who has ever done social science or humanities research in France, Britain and Germany would have an idea how much those countries make in fees charged to allow users to make use of their materials.

The Public Records Office in London or the Les Archives Nationales in Paris and the Archive of the Quai d’osay in Paris (Foreign Office) and their counterparts elsewhere attract professors and research students who in their thousands spend millions in those countries while on research trips.

In other words, apart from the importance of keeping these records, they are also useful to nationals and foreigners who want to carry out research and if needs be, fees on entry can be charged.

Is it not a shame that information on Nigerian affairs are not readily available here in Nigeria but are to be found in British, European and American universities and archives? This reminds me of an incident when I was in Germany.

I was visiting Bavaria, one of the most important states in the German federation and a village was thrown in as something that would interest me.

I was taken to the office of the Burgermeister (mayor) who surprised me by bringing out my biography of Sir Kashim Ibrahim and wondered if I was the author.

Germans like books and venerate intellectuals. Is it therefore strange to anybody how technologically and culturally advanced the Germans are?

Let me appeal to the powers that be, to encourage the keeping of records and fostering institutional memories of wherever we work but most especially, the memory of our states and country for the coming generation so that they don’t grope in the dark like their forbears about what happened in their history.