The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Professor Ayankanmi Ayandele: A Tribute

    I was visiting one of the universities in the Atlanta Metro area in summer of 2014 when I heard through a newsletter from the Nigerian academy of letters that Professor Ayankanmi Ayandele passed on sometimes in June, 2014. Needless to say I was shocked and somehow bewildered as to how such a great man can pass on unsung by the academia in particular and the polity in general.

    Professor Ayandele was born in Ogbomosho some 79 years ago. From his name, it can be deduced that he descended from a family of drummers. Drummers in Yorubaland historically were quite knowledgeable about the society and somehow knew not only the history of kingdoms but also the cognomen of most people. His ancestors must have influenced him in the way he developed his mental ability for retention of the details of development in his environment. He was educated in one of the Baptist schools in Oyo State before going to the then Nigerian College of Arts and Science in Ibadan which was a kind of preparatory intermediate school for entrance into Ibadan, the only university in colonial Nigeria. It was from here that he entered the University of Ibadan and majored in History. From the University of Ibadan he went to the University of London as a postgraduate student and earned the PhD in History in1964 and immediately returned to the University of Ibadan and went through the various stages of a normal academic career. And by 1972 he was not only a professor but the founding principal of the Jos campus of the University of Ibadan. This was a campus that was set up in response to the demand of the people of the then Benue-Plateau state who wanted their own university distinct from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria whose staff and student population was largely dominated by the majority group of the Hausa-Fulani in northern Nigeria. The existence of the University of Ibadan Jos campus was therefore largely resented by the powers that be in northern Nigeria but through the efforts of the then governor, commissioner of police, J.D Gomwalk who was a science graduate of the University of Ibadan before joining the police and the support of the then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon who was from the Plateau, the college took off in 1971. Professor Ayandele provided the dynamic leadership for this college which was located in abandoned warehouses belonging to some tin-mining companies; Professor Ayandele worked tirelessly to make the college a reality and lived a spartan life somewhere among the Naraguta people on Bauchi road in the outskirts of Jos metropolis.

    I joined this college in 1972 and I headed the History unit and my other colleague now Professor Joseph Inikori now of Rochester University was assistant lecturer pending the completion of his PhD in Ibadan. Most of us who worked with Professor Ayandele were Lecturer grade II and Assistant lecturers in departments such as English, History, various Sciences, Geography, Islamic and Arabic studies. He, as a Professor towered above every one of us. I had the privilege of representing the college in the senate at the main campus at Ibadan.

    The country then was peaceful and Professor Ayandele sometimes drove all the way from Jos to Ibadan and back if the weather was not good for flying; I also did the same. On a personal note, I lost two children through premature birth which brought untold suffering to my wife and myself because of poor medical services in Jos. But inspite of these personal losses, as a young family, my late wife and myself had a great time, planting roses, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes and other sub-tropical fruits that only the Jos area can grow. We lived in modest shoddily built bungalows along Bauchi road built by contractors who came from the then Mid-West state apparently on recommendation from the then Colonel Ogbemudia who was a bosom friend of Governor J.D. Gomwalk of Benue-Plateau state. I remember being visited by thieves who came to rob us of the few belongings we had in our fragile homes. We found listening ears to our complaints in Professor Ayandele who made us believe that we were rendering patriotic service. We had good relationship with our students some of whom became friends because we were just a few years older than them; some of these students included Professor Sonny Tyoden who became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Jos some years later. Another student that I remember is John Nwodo who later became a minister under Shagari and later under Abdul-salami Abubakar.

    Professor Ayandele left Jos in 1975 when the Ibadan Jos campus was upgraded to a federal university and professor Unuaguluchi became its first Vice-Chancellor. I had left the University for University of Lagos in 1974 because of the need for proper medical attention for my wife. Professor Ayandele’s sterling performance did not go unnoticed by the federal government which rewarded him with appointment as the foundation Vice Chancellor of the newly established University of Calabar and remained so up till 1982. He was the one who built the university from scratch and to the level of a comprehensive university with all the major disciplines of Medicine, Engineering, Law, the Sciences, Education, Social science and Liberal Arts. He took the job of building the university as a personal challenge. He breathed and lived the university every moment of the time he spent on the job. He visited Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States several times to see to the recruitment of staff and building a library worthy of a university. I had the opportunity to serve him between 1978 and 1982 when I was respectively director of the national universities commission’s offices in Ottawa Canada and Washington DC, United States respectively and also when he came to Howard University between 1981 and 1982 on sabbatical leave. He was so engrossed with the building of the University of Calabar that he brooked no opposition from the local people whom he arrogantly dismissed as “an atomistic society perpetually at war with itself”. This earned him a lot of opposition from the then Cross-river state whose people were known for the mutual antagonism between the Ibibios and Anangs, the Efik and Efuts and others which Professor Ayandele apparently could not understand but he meant well and left an enduring legacy in the solid foundation which he laid for the University of Calabar. When he left the University of Calabar, he served as regional director in UNESCO office in Dakar, Senegal as a form of self exile and from there he returned home to Ibadan where he lived almost isolated from others in his private home, only coming out to give lectures if and when invited by various learned societies.

    • To be continued.

  • The African condition – 2

    Mercifully, Lesotho is a more civilised place of slightly over a million people, perhaps too civilised, because there are about 10 political parties there creating a sense of instability. Politics seems to be the only profitable business in Lesotho, therefore creating a feeling of hopelessness in the citizenry. I was in this country in the late 1980s as part of Commonwealth electoral monitoring group. I was amazed at the level of drunkenness, unemployment, sexual licence and prevalence of AIDS infection and consequent high mortality. Zambia, Malawi and particularly Zimbabwe are studies in political and economic regression. The story of Zimbabwe is one of the saddest on the continent. Here is a country whose people fought gallantly for their freedom and liberation from white settler regime. The regime of Ian Smith who had boasted “not in a thousand years” will there be majority rule in the then South Rhodesia was happily pushed aside by the fighting cadres of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) under the leaderships of Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo respectively. Hardly had victory been won when the two parties took on each other in a death grip with Robert Mugabe winning. This was the licence he needed to stay in power from the time of independence in the 1980s till now at the ripe age of 90. More galling is the fact that he has perpetuated himself in power and he is busy grooming his wife, who is half his age, as his successor and future president of the country. While engaged in this travesty of rule, he has watched the country’s economy collapse into Stone Age primitivity of people merely surviving and not living.

    When one moves to the Horn of Africa, the picture is the same. In Ethiopia the previous revolutionaries now in government have become reactionaries killing protesting students after rigged election. Somalia has disappeared, at least politically from the map and the country is a free for all for Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab and other terrorists high on khat and marijuana. Somalia has the distinction of being the first state to disappear as a political entity in the world. Eritrea that seceded from Ethiopia is locked in mortal struggle against its bigger neighbour over a tract of forbidden frontier. The Sudan is now divided into North and South along racial lines, and if Darfur in the South West of the country succeeds in its war of secession, it may add another division to a complex map. Yet the work of governance is left in abeyance while the Janjaweed and the Sudanese government with support from oil consuming India and China slaughters its own people. The chaos has spread into Chad, where Idris Derby, the typical African ruler refuses to give up power.

    West Africa is not better. Central Africa is even worse. The central Africa Republic and Congo Brazzaville have alternated between one brutal leader and the other. The Ivory Coast, the economic jewel of French speaking West Africa is coming out of the division arising from struggle for political power between Laurant Gbagbo and Al-Hassan Watara, between a Christian and a Muslim manifesting a malady afflicting the whole of West Africa. Guinea is afflicted by ethnic struggle between the Fulah and the Mandinka because of the problem of political succession. Nigeria the crown jewel of the continent is struggling against the tide of political instability because of problem of political succession.

    Yet Africa announced a few years ago, NEPAD- New Partnership for African Development. There has been neither partnership nor development. The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) that was supposed to ensure leaders abide by constitutional rules has been ignored.

    North Africa to complete the picture is not different. Morocco, with its Sharifian dynasty is modernising royal tyranny and Tunisia that first raised the flag of Arab Spring has just elected an 88 year old president. There has been no peace in Libya since Africa colluded with the West to murder Muamar Ghadafi, its late mercurial sit-tight leader. Now the country is partly occupied by ISIS with loyalty to Al-Baghdadi its murdering caliph somewhere in Mosul. Egypt tried some form of Islamic democracy under the Muslim Brotherhood President Muhammad Morsi before General Muhammad Al-sisi threw him out and the country has therefore murdered sleep. FIS (Front Islamique du Salut) is waiting for Algeria under its eternal leader Abdul-aziz Bouteflika to collapse.

    Nigeria has the biggest economy on the continent and has 25% of Africa’s population. Its 170 million people are poorly served by a conniving and corrupt regime at all levels. Its problems are compounded not only by the fissiparous tendencies of religious schism but deep seated ethnic animosity of one group against the other thus making national consensus near impossible. Leaders of Nigeria are oblivious of the fact that other Africans look up to them. Therefore if the country fails it will drag the entire continent down with her.

    It is really sad that just a few years ago, Africa was seen as the frontier of opportunity and economic growth. Like a mirage this hope of a happy African decade has disappeared. What this illusion has proved is that prosperity cannot be built on export of raw materials and minerals alone. Africans must add value to their God-given endowments. Secondly, Africans must be eternally vigilant about their self-serving and self-aggrandising leaders if the fruit of liberty and development is to come to them and to the generations of Africans yet to be born. There is also a need for massive civic education in Africa to prepare the citizens for their civic responsibilities and rights. Not only that, the place of the black man in the world needs to be emphasised. We are not living in a cocoon isolated from the rest of the world. We therefore have to march in tandem with the rest of civilised world observing the norms of civilised behaviour.

  • The African condition

    Several years ago, the late Professor Ali Mazrui the famous Kenyan Professor of History and Political Science gave the annual Reith lectures on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and later published the lectures as a book with the title the African Condition. In it he raised several issues about development, among which were the questions of leadership, mobilization of resources, followership, modernization of infrastructure and international meddlesomeness to mention a few. Since that time nothing has changed and yet there has been 50 years intervening period between then and now. Perhaps the biggest of our problems is that of the ‘big man’ syndrome rather than structures in African politics. What really is the problem of Africa? There is a sense of ennui or of tiredness by the international community about what to do to and for Africa. Almost every development paradigm has been tried without success. We have tried the one party centralised socialist state, we have also tried the interventionist corporations model. These two have failed woefully and we are now privatising and selling the national heirloom to private people sometimes under shady conditions.

    We tried the free enterprise capitalist system, at least in places like Kenya, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Ivory Coast. The result was the same. Short of going back to village democracy and monarchical tyranny we have tried everything. It reminds me of reading Kenneth Post’s seminal book, The Price of Liberty a biography of Alhaji Adegoke Adelabu in which he shows African politics as some kind of retrogression to the pre-colonial times of warlordism. Political parties nowadays have no ideology or manifestoes, and where they have them it is merely for decoration because as soon as government is formed nobody ever makes reference to any party platform.

    Governance is arbitrary, ad hoc episodic with little rhyme or reason. A governor in the case of Nigeria wakes up, talks about “empowering” his people, he flies to China to buy hundreds of motorcycles which he distributes to young people for “transport business”. There is no thought about whether the infrastructure can cope with thousands of motorcyclists driving recklessly without any regard for Highway Code. There is no thought of what this does to agricultural development or the environment. Young people are organised as party thugs to molest those who share different political views with votaries of whatever is the prevailing political orthodoxies of the present.

    Yambo Ouologuem, an academic from Burkina Faso several years ago wrote a book entitled Bound to Violence in which he theorises that the situation in Africa was predestined to violence unless our leaders wake up in time. He has largely been proved right. Of the 54 states in Africa including the violence prone new state of South Sudan, which one can one point to as on a stable path of growth? If the truth must be told there are very few such states. With the exception of South Africa with its highly developed First World infrastructure and economy, virtually all states from the Democratic Republic of the Congo down to the Cape of Good Hope are distressed. Perhaps one can add, Botswana and Namibia to South Africa. Even South Africa under African rule sometimes manifests the almost universal trait of misrule, corruption and ethnic jingoism characteristic of less materially endowed African states north of the Limpopo.

    The DRC has been wracked and wrecked by civil war for almost two decades. Yet this is one of the potentially richest states in the world. There is hardly any solid mineral that is not found in the DRC. The adjoining small states of Rwanda and Burundi vegetated in states of unrestricted genocide for decades until recently when Rwanda operates under Paul Kagame, a rather unstable autocracy whose sorrowful end is predictable. Yet the Hutus and the Tutsis speak the same language. Admitted that in terms of physiognomy one may be able to distinguish one from the other, but should this be the cause for mindless murder?. Uganda is not much better. Their President Museveni has refused to vacate power after almost 40 years. His argument is like that of Charles de Gaulle of  France who said aprés moi: la deluge. Yet the work of government is never done. No one is indispensable. Governments come governments go, the people and the country remain. Uganda in spite of Museveni and perhaps because of him has been in a state of siege for almost as many years as Museveni has been in power. The country is ravaged by the so-called Lord’s Resistance army led by one murderer called Joseph Koni.

    in spite of occasional tribal slaughtering between the dominant Kikuyu and the more sophisticated and educated Luo has not manifested the symptoms of a disappearing state. Tanzania has transited from one democratic ruler to the other, but even there all the moralizing of Julius Nyerere has been replaced by rampant corruption and free for all capitalism. Mozambique after the destruction inflicted by Dlakhama’s RENAMO is beginning to settle down. South Africa somehow provides a safety net for Mozambique. Workers from the wretched country are allowed into South Africa, even though most times, they are met with hostility and police brutality. Botswana and Namibia are for now isolated success stories. Even the two little kingdoms of Lesotho and Swaziland present different problems. Swaziland is a study in all that is bad in monarchical tyranny. Their young king in his 30s already has as many as 30 queens. He marries queens every year from among virgin girls who are made to gyrate before him in the stadium, while he looks on the one with sturdy boobs and shapely legs fit for royal sexual orgies. Yet this is a country with almost half the population afflicted with HIV virus and full blown AIDS. The king’s wish is the command of the country. With per capita income of about US$300 a year, the young monarch spends his country’s resources on cars and planes and tolerates no opposition.

  • The fall and fall of the Naira

    In 1973 when the Yakubu Gowon post-civil war government introduced the Naira, it was at par with the West African currency board pound  sterling that we were then using along with The Gambia and Sierra Leone. Ghana as an independent country under  Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah had withdrawn from the West African common currency in 1957. This was one of the regrettable but understandable decisions of Nkrumah to assert his country’s independence and new status but which from privilege of hindsight set West African economic integration years back. The pound sterling we were using until 1973 when we changed to the Naira was at par with the British pound. The result was that there was no reason in the world for Nigerians to have foreign accounts as a hedge against the fluctuating local currency. But how things have changed . The increase in national revenue following stupendous growth of the oil industry after the civil war  in 1970 guaranteed the strength of the Naira. Even though there was corruption in the Yakubu Gowon admnistration, it did not reach the current prevailing  epidemic, endemic and industrial level of today.

    For years after the introduction of the Naira, it remained stable  to the extent that the mad drive to have foreign money by Nigerians was not there. I remember when I was Director of the National Universities Commission’s  office respectively in Ottawa, Canada and later in Washington DC in the United States from 1978 to 1982, I refused to take my salaries in dollars because there was no advantage or benefit from availing myself of that opportunity. I was merely living on my foreign service allowance. The point I am making is that the Naira remained strong and respectable and convertible. I remember that while recruiting Americans and Canadians for our then new universities in Jos, Port Harcourt, Calabar, Benin, Sokoto, Bayero Kano, Ilorin, Yola and Bauchi, we used to just multiply the Naira salaries paid to Nigerian professors by two to get the American equivalent. In other words, one Naira converted to two American dollars. A professor in Nigerian universities then earned N16,000 per annum which was respectable US$32,000.

    The national currency of a country is a symbol of a country’s power and pride. When as in post-First World War Germany, the Reichmarks became worthless as a result of Germany’s humiliating Versailles diktat, it led directly to the rise of Adolf Hitler and his determined campaign of righting the wrong of Versailles. We are in this country reaching a point where the national currency is becoming an embarrassment and a symbol of our current weakness in the face of internal and external challenges to our sovereignty.

    I remember the  late 1980s when after ruining the country, the Shagari regime was overthrown because of its  spendthrift nature and uncontrolled corruption,  the Naira began its downward spiral. When Babangida took over government from the duo of the no-nonsense Idiagbon and Buhari, the International  Monetary Fund moved in with its one-remedy-fits-all policy of structural adjustment programme which the Buhari regime had refused. It was during the Babangida regime that the exposed nature of Nigeria’s economy became apparent. Babangida  was forced first to float the Naira which was then changing at four Naira to a dollar when he took over government. I remember the personal financial loss I suffered when in 1991, I left Nigeria to assume duty as ambassador in Germany, my savings suffered a depreciation of almost 100 percent. The Naira by 1991 was changing at 10 to a dollar and by the time the Structural Adjustment programme imposed on the country had run its full course, the economy of the country had been destroyed and with it the middle class had been wiped out. Those who had money before were then reduced to penury and there began the fashion of owning foreign accounts against the future. If the situation were stable this would have been totally unnecessary because in most cases these accounts earn little or no interest at all. From this period  onwards, the Naira continued to reflect the inherent weakness not just of the Nigerian economy, but of the Nigerian state itself.

    The use of the American dollar as a reserve currency in the world is a symbol of American hegemony in the world, a hegemony  that has made the last century the American century. The Chinese Yuan may in course of time and all things being equal rise to the same prominence in the world’s economic medium of exchange. There was a time in the 1970s when the naira was acceptable all over West Africa and also in the bazaars of Sheperd Bush in London! Gone are those days when Nigeria, victorious from a civil war and loaded with wealth was not only helping Africa’s fighting forces of colonialism in Southern Africa, but was also dispensing monetary largesse in the West Indies. We can only remember those halcyon years with nostalgia.

    The precipitous fall of the naira is always during the time of crisis at home when those who feel they may lose out in the struggle for power resort to carrying their loot abroad and therefore were ready to change their unearned income to foreign currency at any available rate. This phenomenon is not unique to Nigeria; it is simply a manifestation of under development. This is why black or parallel markets of currency exchange are only found in underdeveloped economies.

    We have now more or less reached a point of no return in the destruction of the national currency when it crossed the 200 to a dollar mark. It is not just because the price of oil has fallen, serious as this is, it is because of total mismanagement of the economy by the so-called expert from the World Bank whose contribution in a time of plenty was publishing what states and local government earned as if this was neuro science! This so-called World Bank expert continued telling her employers in Abuja what sacrifice she was making without telling them the benefits that were accruing to her. Now, the chicken has come home to roost and it is dead silence from the guru of World Bank who has now ensured that we  are again prostrate for another Bretton Woods institutions treatment. This World Bank Trojan horse has delivered.

    If we survive the current economic and political problems, we will again be dictated to by outsiders masquerading as dogooders on the way  out of the woods and we may by then be so economically weak that we we would have no choice than to bite the bullet. It is then that social Armageddon may be visited on this country and saints and sinners may be swept away in the blind fury of people’s uncontrolled anger. We may yet avoid this if we defend the naira through disciplined management of our foreign trade. We are importing too many things we do not need. Why are we importing all these wines one sees in every corner of our our country? Why are we the second largest consumer of champagne in the world outside France? Why do we allow our plutocrats to indulge themselves in buying planes and we are boasting that it is a sign of how big our economy is? This shows complete disconnect between us and our rulers. We can half our import bill, encourage local production of rice and substitute wheat with other cereals and generally assist  efforts of imports substitution and local industrialization. The result of this will be reduction of our need for foreign exchange and even at current earnings, we would have surplus and be able to defend the naira at a respectable exchange rate. If and when we transit to a much more disciplined regime with no tolerance for rampant corruption,  we should have a currency that reflects our aspiration as a medium power in the world  and  one that is dominant in our continent.

  • B/Haram and Nigeria’s neighbors; failure of foreign policy?

    Scholars of international relations have always considered peace on the borders of any  country crucial in understanding that country’s relations with the outside world. In this sense, it is almost a truism that the most secure border is the undefended border. Good examples of secure borders are the USA/Canadian and Shengen borders in Europe. The sign of insecurity is when borders are heavily fortified. The removal of borders between or among a group of countries is a manifestation of peace and economic equilibrium. When there is unequal economic development, removal of borders will lead to push-pull  movement in which people will move in large numbers to developed and economically buoyant neighboring countries in search of economic sustenance.

    The greatest development in the politics of the world since 1945 is the attempt at European economic integration as a possible prelude to full political union. This happened  in a Europe where between 1870 and 1945, the two countries in the heart of that continent namely France and Germany fought three wars, the last two plunging the world into military cataclysm that led to the death of close to 50 million souls not counting those who died as a result of disease and collateral damage. This is why the advent of the European Economic Community (EEC) and  its metamorphosis into the European Union has not only been studied critically all over the world, it has also provided an example to follow in other regions of the world  particularly in the Americas. South East Asia, Central Asia the Pacific Rim and Africa. The ECOWAS experiment did not just come from the moon, it was well rooted in historical antecedence.

    Coming nearer home, we have been seized with the question of relations among neighbors in Africa. We cannot build any economic edifice among neighboring countries unless we first establish if there is some kind of entente cordiale between two countries and among others involved in economic integration. For Nigeria, the most important country in West Africa, charity must begin on our borders. I think it was Professor Ibrahim Agboola Gambari who first used an inelegant phraseology to describe this idea as co-prosperity area. It is inelegant in the sense that it  brings back the feeling of a powerful country overrunning its neighbors as was done by Japan during the events leading to the Second World War. I have been involved with others in studying our relations with our neighbors for some decades and I have written quite extensively on this. I remember writing on Nigeria-Equatorial Guinea relations and Nigeria-Cameroun  relations  in the 1970s as purely academic exercise without necessarily thinking of policy implications. But somehow, I have had to advice government based on what initially looked like pure academic exercise. This has been a case of relevance of research in solving problems. I remember suggesting to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs  the idea of posting its most senior and knowledgeable diplomats to the capitals of our neighbors rather than to distant places like WashingtonMoscow, New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Brussels and Beijing, important as these places may be. The home front which peace on our borders implies is more important than the glamour of world capital cities. Their economic importance can be handled by well-trained commercial and economic experts in these missions. Of course ambassadors Hamzat Ahmadu and Akporode Clark were once posted to Yaunde and Niamey but these were not strictly based on the kind of policy shift I had in mind.

    Relations with all our neighbors namely, Benin, Niger, Tchad, Cameroun, Equatorial Guinea, and São Tomé and Principe are important and as we have now found out with the Boko Haram insurgency, a matter of life or death for our country. If our policy towards Tchad for example had been based on sound knowledge and operated by an influential envoy in Ndjamena, we would have had reports on the gathering storm because it is clear that Boko Haram had initially its  rear base of operation in Tchad. This is not surprising to me. Borno shares a common border and history with its neighbors across the frontier in the Wadai and Kanem districts of Tchad.

    In the long history of Kanem-Borno dating back around 800 A.D, that is the 9th century when Sayf bin dhi Yazan founded the Sayfawa dynasty, the area has witnessed political eruptions necessitating transfer of its capitals from Njimi in the 12century to N’gazargamu in the 15th century. Borno also witnessed  the invasion of the kingdom by the Fulani jihadists necessitating dynastic change from the Sayfawa to the Kanemis in 1810 to preserve the independence of the kingdom before it was again invaded by an Arab conquistador named Rabih Fadlallah who occupied the place between 1894 and 1897 before the British and the French drove him out and shared his territory into what was then called British and French Borno. Tchad itself had  never from colonial times till now been stable and had never been under civil admnistration under French colonial  rule it was simply referred to as Territoire militaire du Tchad.  It has continued to be governed by soldiers with consequent instability necessitating Nigeria’s military intervention in the country inthe 1980s. In the absence of jobs, Chadians have always been ready to offer their services legally or illegally as fighters rather than starve  at home in their inhospitable environment.

    In  other words, what is happening now is history repeating itself. The joint military operation has now become necessary because Nigeria has failed to protect its own territory through lack of military preparedness and diplomatic manoeuvering that should have anticipated events if we had secured our borders.

    I was in Maiduguri in 1983 when Chadians invaded Borno. Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, GOC Third Division of the Nigerian Army – yes the same Buhari – rushed the 23rd Armored Brigade commanded by Joshua Dogonyaro to Baga and Doro on Lake Chad and drove the Chadian rebels out of Nigeria. This is why a person like Buhari must find the present situation galling and almost humiliating. It is too late to wish that we can solve our problems ourselves and the setting up of an AU force of 7500 soldiers may be totally unnecessary if the present operations involving the Cameroun, Niger, Tchad and ourselves can be coordinated well under the rubric of the Lake Chad Commission.

    We must learn a bitter lesson from this Boko Haram insurgency which started from local grievances but has now snowballed into an international crisis drawing in Cameroun, Niger and principally Tchad and Libya as a distant source of weapons since the collapse of the Col. Khadaffi’s regime in which we foolishly supported the invasion of an African country by NATO.  Perhaps I need to say that Libya is not strange to Borno because there is a large section of Maiduguri called FEZZARI originally settled by people from The Fezzan in southern Libya.

    The lesson in all this is the appreciation of the nexus between foreign and domestic politics and the need for military preparedness even in time of peace, knowing that eternal vigilance is the price for liberty. Poor governance at home has its reverberation abroad. One hopes the Chadian army now fighting the Boko Haram would not be tempted in getting involved in the politics of territorial expansion and exerting political pressure on an apparent militarily exposed Nigeria. The news we have is that Chadians are already involved apparently in clandestine administration of conquered  Nigerian territories.

  • Witness to elections in Nigeria

    The first election I witnessed as a small boy in  this country was in 1956. I was in form one in Christ School in Ado-Ekiti . Ordinarily I should not have been interested but for the fact that Chief Joseph Oduola Osuntokun, my brother was running for the House of Assembly in Ibadan . He had been a member of the House since  1951 and in 1955 he was appointed Minister of Works in the old Western Region which stretched from Lagos to present Delta and parts of Bayelsa states. To be a minister of such a huge region that was almost autonomous of the centre in those days was not a  small job. I also had special interest in the election because after the death of our father, Chief Osuntokun as Dawodu stepped into the shoes of our father and that included paying my school fees. I was not quite conscious of the Election in 1951 which sent him to the Western House in the first instance. What he later told me as an enquiring academic was that it was not based on universal adult suffrage but  on divisional electoral colleges throughout the region. The political parties were organizationally inchoate. What our people did was to choose three or four graduates or professional people all over the regions. This is why the first crop of politicians were top class educated people in full employment while politics was  seen as vocations.  A reading of the Hansard of the period either in the regions or at the centre will confirm the quality of their minds. My brother became Minister of Finance in 1956 at the age of 32. Subsequent elections in 1959 to the federal parliament and in 1960 to the Western House were fought on highly debated and well articulated manifestos. The elections were well fought and well run and conducted. We usually sat by the radio throughout the night as election results trickled in. Western regional elections were usually keenly fought between the Action Group, the ruling party and the NCNC, the party in opposition. Even the much more keenly fought 1959 federal election provided a lot of drama with Chief Obafemi Awolowo taking on the forces of the NPC (jamiyar mutanen arewa) or Northern People’s Congress and those of its coalition partner the NCNC.  These two parties were led respectively by the aristocratic Sir Ahmadu Bello, scion of the Usman dan Fodiye dynasty in Sokoto and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe,  a cosmopolitan Igbo republican.

    Elections to a reasonable extent were conducted with finesse and solid planning. Awolowo’s party represented the best face of serious planning and perhaps because of this and the rather more prosperous condition of his region, the other two leaders treated him with suspicion. In spite of official British partisanship, elections even on the eve of independence still continued to be a civilized operation.

    It was not until the Action Group crisis of 1961-1962 that things changed for the worst simply because the coalition government at the centre used the opportunity to fish in troubled waters. Instead of responding to minority demands all over the country for creation of states, the Western Region was singled out for the purpose of weakening it when the Mid-West region was created out of it in 1963. The much louder demands in the North for a Middle-Belt state and Calabar/Ogoja/Rivers state were ignored. Through meddling in the affairs of the West, the Action Group party was manoeuvred out of power. This was the prelude to the Western election of 1965 which was flagrantly rigged by the Akintola’s government. The federal elections of a year earlier had suffered the same fate. The Western election of 1965 was therefore seen as a do or die affair by the two rival alliances of UPGA (United People’s Grand Alliance) and the NNA (Nigerian National Alliance) formed respectively around the NCNC and the NPC with the old two factions of the now destroyed Action Group lining behind their major partners. Attempt to resolve the national question centring on the division of spoils of office by the election failed. Following campaigns of incendiary nature in Tiv-land in the North and farmers revolt in the West, young army officers who had been watching the events and whose members were being increasingly used to put down rebellion decided to intervene and change the government. The coup d’état of 1966 did not quite succeed but it decapitated the leadership of the NNA leaving the leadership of the other party unscathed. The much internationally respected Prime Minister Sir Abubakar was brutally killed. Worst still, the top hierarchy of the officer corps from the West and the North was eliminated. Reaction swiftly followed six months later. These events eventually led to a fratricidal civil war the aftermath of which is still with us till today.

    After years of military rule we transited to democratic rule and surprisingly enough, it was like we did not learn any lesson from our history. The parties of the First Republic came back with different names with their leadership intact and unchanged except for the northern leadership which had had to make an adjustment following the loss of Sir Ahmadu Bello and Sir Abubakar

    This Second Republic collapsed under the weight of corruption of the ruling party the NPN. The military rode back on the wave of public disenchantment and brought draconian decrees to teach the ruling class one or two things about the need for discipline. Muhammadu Buhari was the popular face of the new junta which was supported by the vast majority of Nigeria’s suffering masses. The regime promptly said it was a continuation of the Obasanjo/Muhammad popular regime of the 1970s. If there had been a referendum the regime would have won by landslide. This writer dislikes non-democratic forms of government but my observation is a record of history. The government made things difficult for all politicians without discrimination. It even made Nigerians proud when it tried to bring home in a crate from London, the boastful and garrulous Umaru Dikko who publicly challenged the government.  The regime deliberately stepped on many toes without looking inwards for fifth columnists among its hierarchy. When the free sealing and free dealing Badamasi Babangida  struck in 1985, it was good bye to discipline and Nigerians went back to their pastime  of cutting corners and general and generalized irresponsibility  which the new regime allowed to fester in order to remain in power for as long as possible. The regime began a costly transition regime that was programmed to fail. It however tried to create two political parties, one a little to the right and another a little to the left! But when these two parties took on character and life of their own and produced a winner in Moshood Abiola in the best election in independent Nigeria, Babangida moved to truncate the process. We finally ended with the thieving regime of Sani Abacha who confused outright looting of the national treasury with governance. The damage this man did to Nigeria remains to be assessed.

    Since 1999 we as a country have soldiered on as best as we can holding elections that were adjudged fraudulent and lacking in integrity  not only by the international community but by Umaru Yar’Adua one of the beneficiaries.

    We are now on the eve of an election that may decide the future of Nigeria. In spite of the negative campaigns, I believe we can hold a reasonably credible election if we can trust INEC and allow it to conduct a free and fair election. If the election is openly fair and transparent, everyone will abide by the result. I am not pessimistic at all about what will happen after the results are in on February 15. There is so much to lose that I believe politicians who are leading us to the edge of a precipice will make a round about turn at the last moment

  • Medical education and frustrated young graduates

    Some years ago during the Obasanjo administration, he was told that there were no positions in hospitals particularly teaching hospitals for medical graduates to do the compulsory one year requirement as house men without which their training will not be complete. If their training is not complete, they will not be able to practice medicine and they will not be able to serve in the NYSC. The president gave an executive order expanding the training positions in teaching hospitals.

    Around this time also a delegation of The Historical Society of Nigeria intimated the president that History had been muscled out of primary and secondary schools curricula and that no country can develop without a point of reference in the past. Furthermore it was pointed out to him that some of the anti-social behaviour noticeable in our youth and adults is a manifestation of the disconnect between the leadership and the follower-ship and between the present and the past. He was told that without solid grounding and connection with the past the present will be disjointed and the future will be uncertain.

    The president was persuaded and he issued an executive order restoring the teaching of history to the appropriate levels in the educational ladder. Unfortunately the presidential executive order was obeyed in the breach! The ministry of education simply put one huddle or the other in its way of implementation.

    The issue that is very critical right now is that of young people completing five or six-year medical programme in a university and having no where to finish their education as house officers. I would never have known about the existence of this problem but for the fact that my colleagues have children graduating and frantically searching for non-existent places in hospitals. I have had to join friends in this frantic search sometimes successfully but failing abjectly some other times. When my daughter finished her medical programme abroad, she did not have her dad around to run around looking for friendly CMDs.

    This is a problem that needed not to have arisen in the first place if we plan seriously in this country. The Nigerian Medical and Dental Council must share in the blame. Whenever it gave approval for establishment of medical schools, it ought to impose quotas on each approved medical school. All medical schools ab initio should be required to indicate where graduates would spend the stipulated one year of housemanship after graduating. The hospitals need not all be teaching hospitals. All specialist hospitals and some good private and general hospitals should be encouraged and funded to take in house officers. There may be need for caution in all and sundry starting medical schools. If we are not careful mushrooming private universities may catch the virus of starting medical schools for profit.

    Now that we know we have this problem the president of our country should issue an executive order immediately and not tomorrow asking the various hospitals afore mentioned to get cracking and solve the problem. Definitely there will be need for special appropriation to be made through the National Assembly and Senate. This problem must be permanently rested and terminated.

    As a professor who knows the challenges facing young people, I cannot fold my hands simply because it is not really my problem. It is everybody’s problem. There will come  a time in this country when old people like me will be challenged by young people for messing up the country if we can not plan well for the future. As leaders, we have become very insensitive to problems of the youth. There seems to be a total disconnect between the people and the leadership. The same disconnect manifests in the way we run the NYSC. Suddenly young people are being fleeced by asking them to pay N5,000 to access the NYSC website to register or get their states of posting ! Yet these young people are giving free service for their country. The same insensitivity led to young people stampeding after paying N1,000 to a private company recruiting immigration officers. Some died in the process including pregnant women. The illegality of the whole thing became clear when the Controller- General of Immigration Department said he knew nothing about the so-called recruitment. A job for the public service commission was firmed out to a powerfully connected company leading to the death of young Nigerians. Up till today no one was held accountable and punished.

    Young people are posted and put in harms way in states where it is generally known there is no security. A few years ago, parents were called to receive the corpses of their children brutally murdered in Plateau and Bauchi states during break-down of law and order. One of the governors of the states had the temerity to say the murder of youth corps members was an act of God. Lord have mercy! If God were man, He would have struck down this erring governor with thunder!

    James Baldwin wrote a book in the 1960s entitled the FIRE NEXT TIME to demonstrate pent-up anger among the youth particularly the black youth if their problems were not addressed. His prophesy came true when young Blacks during the Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency started rioting and burning down American cities. Johnson responded by passing a comprehensive Civil Rights Act and embarked on building what he called the Great Society. To his eternal glory, he laid the foundation of what has now been described as an American Century. We should not wait until we have the equivalent of an Arab Spring or a revolt by our youth before embarking on youth-friendly policies at all levels of governments in Nigeria. If we do not do something positive to help the young people of Nigeria, we may all be swept off in the violence and blind fury that are bound to accompany youth frustration, disenchantment, discouragement and disappointment with the status quo.

  • Time to focus on economy

    The falling price of crude petroleum presents  Nigeria a golden opportunity  for our leaders to put on their thinking caps to come up with reasonable solution to what has become a recurring decimal in the economic life of our country. Even though the price of crude petroleum is not likely to remain low for too long because of several reasons chief of which is the fact that the fracking gas oil which has reduced considerably American oil imports will become uneconomic to produce if the price of crude falls bellow 40 dollars. Secondly the oil majors that are critical to the global economy and its stability will not be allowed to go down with losses totaling trillions of dollars belonging to the investing public that is invariably western capitalists. In other words, it is in the enlightened interest of the West to settle for oil price at between 70 and 80 dollars a barrel.

    In the meantime Nigeria  and such other oil producing countries  like Venezuela  constitute the Achilles heels of the previously formidable cartel of OPEC which unlike Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States can call the bluff of the west and engage in price war to drive the fracking gas and oil industry of Canada and the U.S. out of the market. With trillions of dollars in foreign reserves, Saudi Arabia and the the Gulf States can afford to overproduce at any cost or not to produce at all in order to make a point. Nigeria, Iran Venezuela and Indonesia cannot afford that strategy.

    This is really a pity in the case of Nigeria. Iran and Indonesia are at least semi-industrialized but what do we in Nigeria have to show for all these over 50 years of oil production? We have been talking about diversification  until we are blue in the face  amounting to motion without movement. It seems we may continue like this unless we are forced or compelled to do something. Some years ago an Israeli ambassador told me when he travelled from Ibadan to Kwara State he dreamed about Israel having the abundance of land he saw on his trip and that the ruinous wars his country was engaged in would not have been necessary and that with that land Israel would have been able to feed the rest of West Africa. Imagine then what the  land available all over Nigeria in the hands of a technologically competent country could do for us in our country.

    I am not excited by  the claims of our mobile telephone-distributing minister of agriculture and his claim of agricultural revolution when the whole country is awash with imported rice and other farm products of other countries! But there is no doubt that we must go back to the land. This was the resource that sustained us before hydrocarbon resources. We must support agricultural investment through farm subsidies instead of oil subsidies that are making people rich without working! This will have to be done in such a way that there will be a stampede to become young farmers. The way it is done is  through guaranteed prices for agricultural produce. We have done it here in Nigeria  before through the regime of the abandoned marketing boards which guaranteed prices for farmers even when there was a fall in agricultural produce globally. This was how Nigeria encouraged production of cocoa, Palm produce and groundnuts before the curse of oil on Nigeria which led to our people living a life of indolence and living off commissions as compradore agents of foreign multinational companies.

    Since 1999 when the PDP came into power, we have been told about the plan of power sufficiency. The current president told us that by the end of last year those of us with generators will be begging people to take them off us because by then power will not only be available but would also be cheap . This promise has been fulfilled in the breach! We are daily told of how many thousands of megawatts of electricity we need and how government is going to meet this demand only to be followed the second day on how the power situation has collapsed to 2000 megawatts or less, sometimes worse than where we were in 1999 and after billions of dollars have been spent by the same PDP government that wants to be re-elected. If we are serious about development we should ask serious questions about the urgent need for power for industrialization and reasonably comfortable life free of the environmentally damaging diesel generators that have become permanent feature of our lives whose fumes kill instantly or intstallmentally. Power is key to our survival as a civilized country and the party that can solve this problem should be embraced by Nigeria. We do not need to depend on gas at all so that we are not blackmailed and threatened as we are daily  threatened that unless we abdicate power to people for oil and gas producing states we would have no country. There is enough coal and water to give us power forever in this country. Even without oil we can access resources in the international financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF to support our electric power infrastucture. Industrialization and agriculture will get us to where we want to be. We started well on this route when we had several textile mills all over Nigeria supplied by Nigerian cotton growers but we let all this go to  waste  when we got drunk on oil wealth. Any student of western industrialization knows it was from light textile industries that countries progressed to heavy industries. You can not jump a developmental stage! In all this we have to emphasize power. Indonesia a country with serious spatial difficulty  scattered over 2500 islands is joining China as an industrial hub of the world because of her ability to supply its people power which has made small scale industries and enterprises thrive. There is no magic in all this. We just have to work hard. No amount of prayers in churches and mosques will help develop our country. Our future is in our hands. And we should not expect miracles. God is not a magician! If we do the right things in this country, there will be jobs for everybody to do and it will not matter who is in or out of government or the ethnic group from which the president or governors come.

    What we have had in the hands of the World Bank Trojan horse of Okonjo-Iweala in the last 10 or so years is management of prosperity which is not the same thing as economic policy. Paying off our indebtedness to the Paris Club and London club countries and the Bretton Woods institutions does not require neuro surgery because management of an economy in a time of plenty is easy even Joseph did this in pharaonic Egypt. What is  the big deal publishing state allocations and investing a mere $1 billion in Sovereign Trust Fund  while drawing down billions of dollars in foreign exchange to pay for all kinds of wines and champagne of which we are the largest consumer outside France all in the name of free trade when we do not benefit from dividends of comparative advantage on which free trade is based? What is left of our foreign earnings is then stolen to put it mildly  under the regime of market economy and subsidies for oil imports.  This is an embarrassment of importing oil by an oil exporting country. Why has it taken us more than 15 years to fix the four oil refineries in the country?

    The point I am making is that we should have managed our economy better and allow in things that we need rather than pandering to the dictates of the World Bank regime of free trade when we have nothing to contribute to global trade except raw and crude produce.

    Finally, we have an opportunity to tell our people that the meaning of self government includes taxation. Nigerians for a long time have not been paying taxes. This  is the time to tell our people the home truth. A situation where only salary earners are the only ones paying taxes is simply untenable and unhealthy. Every adult must be made to pay taxes no matter how small. This  is the only way people will have a sense of ownership of their government.

  • Obasanjo’s book and judicial censorship

    Let me say right away that former President Obasanjo is not my favorite politician. I also probably do not count as one of his closest friends even though I had defended him when it was crucial such as when Abacha sentenced him to death and I was ambassador of Nigeria to Germany. I  mobilized the European Union by personally going to Hamburg to brief former chancellor Helmut Schmidt  of the situation of his friend and the latter got in touch with his successor Helmut Kholl who was then on state visit to South Africa asking him to return home because Germany at that material time headed the  E.U rotational presidency. I believe I am one of those who probably saved Obasanjo’s life. Obasanjo in his self-righteousness does not believe he owes any mortal being a debt of gratitude for any favour. It is not in his character! After his release he publicly said in Toronto Canada that all Nigerians, with the exception of the dead and those in detention supported Abacha. I was in the audience and I was pained to no end.

    My late brother Kayode was his physician and he was the last patient he saw before his demise. Obasanjo was under house arrest ordered by Abacha and my brother flew from Geneva to Lagos to see him and also in solidarity with him in his hours of travail. The soldiers will not let him see his patient and one of the soldiers threatened to shoot him. My brother dramatically brought out his stethoscope and asked the soldier to bring out his hand because he wanted to check his blood pressure. Since most human beings including soldiers are afraid of dying, the soldier involved complied and he was subsequently tested and pronounced hypertensive. My brother told him he was almost a dead man but that if he would buy amlodipine tablets and combine it with cholesterol reducing tablets of simvastatin he would get his hypertension under control. The poor soldier went and called his captain who was also tested and given the same prescription. At this point the captain told the physician he could come in at any time he wanted. This was how Prof Kayode Osuntokun got to his quarry! On Obasanjo’s own testimony, he told me he noticed Kayode did not look well. My brother died when Obasanjo was in jail in Yola. I visited him when Abdulsalaami  Abubakar pardoned and released him. He told me he heard I was in detention too. I confirmed in the affirmative. I had reviewed a view BEYOND FREEDOM written by some world leaders dedicated to Obasanjo’s freedom in The Tribune and granted an interview to a young man named Akande who turned out to be a spook of the Abacha regime in which I was critical of the regime. When this was combined with my spirited effort to save Obasanjo while I was ambassador, my cup seemed to be full and this led to my being in military detention on Child Street in Apapa, Lagos for months. I will be one of the first to testify that Obasanjo’s freedom was an act of divine mercy through the instrumentality of man. When Obasanjo had just left prison I could not recognize him. He was reduced to half his normal size. He was totally emaciated and only a close look revealed the man who was in the shrunken body. If he became hardened after his experience, he was justified. Obasanjo told me he was going to visit Professor Bopo Osuntokun, Kayode’s widow. He never did and never until today asked for her and her children!

    I write this for public records and to confirm Obasanjo s reputation of seeing himself above human and perhaps what he regards as sentimental gratitude and acknowledgement of other people’s contribution to his life.  I shared my anger with a family friend close to Kayode and myself who is also close to Obasanjo and from the North. What he said is that most great men use people and move on. Of course I did not agree with him.

    Having said this, I agree that Obasanjo remains a great Nigerian leader which is not the same as a great Nigerian. Certainly, of those who have held office as head of state of Nigeria, he remains head and shoulders above all of them with the possible exception of Muhammad Buhari. I also admire him because he keeps records. He may misuse or misinterpret his records, but he keeps records and has his eyes on history. All the lazy people who criticize him should shut up or write their own accounts!

    Most of Obasanjo’s writings are autobiographical and they are written from his personal perspective. This is why historians would not take an autobiographical account without cross checking it with other accounts before arriving at objectivity. It is almost impossible for one to write about himself in a negative way, so all those who are expecting Obasanjo’s to be totally objective, miss the point and even when our great Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, writes about his experiences in life, we can only take it as his own account and not the gospel truth.

    No court of law should impose censorship on the reading public. This is a fundamental and perhaps, almost inalienable right that no judicial officer paid by the public should peremptorily take away from us especially when such a right is guaranteed by our constitution. There are also provisions for whoever is wounded by the exercise of free speech to go to court and seek redress. No politically influenced and induced injunction is acceptable and I am surprised that our legal activists have not gone to court to enforce our rights which are no doubt justiciable. Since the book is going to be released abroad the futility of the Nigerian court becomes apparent.

    I disagree with the rather intemperate language of Professor Wole Soyinka in criticizing Obasanjo for allegedly mentioning him in the new book My Watch. I mean what entitles Wole Soyinka to take apart many people in the country with license why nobody can criticize him? He should be ready to take as much as he gives! If all Obasanjo allegedly said was that he did not respect his political  judgement and that he only respects his taste of wines and his ability to shoot partridges, how can such jovial comments lead to the savage criticisms of  Obasanjo by Wole Soyinka? I like our Nobel laureate but in this particular case he should have respected Obasanjo if not for himself but as a former Head of State of Nigeria. Because of the way Soyinka dressed down Obasanjo, others not deserving have been insulting the former Head of state. This is a case of being knocked down by an elephant and rats now start running over one. No one should get me wrong. We can criticize without being offensive. This is the point I am making.

    Obasanjo or his publishers should challenge the ban on the book and let’s see if anybody has the right to prevent us from reading what a former Head of state that is still being maintained by the public exchequer has written about his service to the nation. This is an issue of public interest.

  • Kayode Osuntokun remembered

    This year marks the 20th year since Professor Kayode Osuntokun passed on . If he had been alive, January 6, the day of epiphany would have been his 80th birthday. How time flies! I still remember those  horrible days when I was with him in the Addenbrooke Hospital in Cambridge not really knowing how serious his case was until his friend Sir Keith Peters, Regius Professor of Physics (medicine) told me Jide, you know Kayode will not be returning home to Nigeria. I immediately knew what he meant. My brother that meant so much to me was dying before my eyes and there was nothing I could do  about it. It was horrible. Everyone in the family had always taken our medical problems to him  and he always found solutions to them. Our rural folks at home in Okemesi always waited for his visits to lay before him their medical conditions and in his inimitable way, he would treat them and sometimes used psychology for good effect by jokingly telling them not to talk to any of their wives after swallowing whatever medicaments he gave them. We would laugh over his pranks! Our people at home did not know of course that they were consulting one of the best neuro-scientists in the world. He had garnered all the certificates available in his field from MD, PhD to Dsc and the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians and prizes across the globe. If he had lived, I believe he would have been a strong contender for the Nobel prize especially because of his research on Alzeimer disease. He was such a global figure in medicine that his earlier research on cyanide poisoning associated with consumption of garri (cassava) had led to disease  emanating from it being named the Osuntokun’s syndrome.

    We as a family were very proud of his unparalleled achievement and none of us expected he would die so young at 60 with so much accomplishment that even one could not have done in a century. It was like he was in a hurry  to finish his earthly work. His birth was itself a miracle. My mother was about to die with him in her womb when my father rushed to Prophet Joseph Babalola who through prayers facilitated his delivery. When a few years later my mother had a set of twins and because of the hardship of raising three babies at a time, she  donated Kayode to Babalola and his Christ Apostolic Church. Kayode  as a precocious child finished reading the Holy Bible from Genesis to Revelation-before he was six years old.  The child indeed  was the father of the man! He showed his hands very early in life. He waltzed through secondary school by clearing all his subjects at O Level at Distinction grade, a feat that can only be equalled not excelled. He did the same at medical school in Ibadan. He had in record time finished his training as a neurologist under eminent British professors in Cardiff and Newcastle in the UK. He became a professor of medicine in his 30s and the rest they say is history. It was not all work and no play; he was a good footballer and was once Western Nigeria’s Lawn Tennis champion. On his death bed, he once asked me about what would happen to all the work he had done. He was meticulous even to the point of where he would like to be buried. He had told his wife he should be buried at right side of his father’s grave. I have not met somebody as organized as he was. Sometime in 1992 when I was ambassador of Nigeria in Germany, he gave me a letter written to him in 1953 by someone asking him to send him a pair of shoes known then as ronke. The letter in terrible English  was first a mystery to me until I saw my name  as the writer. I showed this letter to my children who simply dismissed it as probably something written by  an illiterate cousin from Okemesi. I finally told them that their illiterate father at 11 wrote the letter! My brother had kept that letter  for almost 50 years!

    He was so selfless to the extent that he bequeathed half of his estate to the University of  Ibadan to support professorship in  medicine and ophthalmology in honour of himself and his equally cerebrally endowed wife who is a retired professor of ophthalmology at the University of Ibadan. He was the first African to serve as an examiner in the British Royal College of Physicians examination and the first African to be appointed visiting professor to the Royal Hammersmith Hospital in London.

    The most important thing was that he was a father, husband and brother. He was of course honored by his country as an Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR) and was the second person to receive the National Order of Merit (NNOM) after the great Professor Adeoye Lambo, a great friend of his who stood by him when he was evacuated from Lagos in 1995 by medical ambulance. Recently he was adjudged as one of the most distinguished Nigerians of the last century.

    A great man never dies just as a great idea never dies. He lives on  in his published scientific papers of over 300. His library was shared between Ekiti State University and the College of Medicine University of Ibadan. His estate and a friend who doesn’t want himself named and this grateful brother have endowed a medical prize at Ekiti University College of Medicine. He lives on of course in his children and grand children. Two of his children became doctors in his life time. Two were lawyers and one a distinguished and accomplished chartered accountant.  One grand child is already finishing medical school in the United States and another is on scholarship in Yale to mention some of the grand children who are already following grandfather’s footsteps. If Kayode can see how well his family had done since he left mortality for immortality, he would no doubt be proud of them and realize that when ashes cover a burning fire, it does not mean the fire is completely extinguished and when the bunch of plantain is chopped off, it will sprout again!  Let this be our testimony of Kayode Osuntokun’s promenade on this side of heaven. He was a man in a million.