Category: Jide Osuntokun

I want to join the chorus of people congratulating Professor Wole Soyinka as he turns 80. I am not a literary critic, my knowledge of English Literature does not go beyond higher school which when today I discuss authors like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Charles Lamb, Jane Austen, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Frank Yerby, Gustave Dore, Dryden, Charles Dickens and others, my students are always amazed about how much English literature I know. These were the serious authors that I went through in high school.

There were less serious authors that I read when I was just getting into secondary school. I read books by Ryder Haggard and such other writers who without our knowing it ran Africans down before the conquering British lion and European imperialism. I was in the university when the African authors’ series by Heinemann publishers began to surface. I was also lucky to have been taught in high school by some of the writers in the African series like Nkem Nwankwo, Julie Udezwe (Okonkwo) and Dan AbasiEkong when I was in the sixth form in Ibadan Grammar School. I have read all the books of Chinua Achebe, the master story teller.

I must say I wish I could be spared reading the gory, murderous stories of pre-colonial Igbo society which Europeans and other western readers have found very exciting apparently because it confirms their idea of Africans as noble savages. I enjoy reading the latter books about the politics of emergent independent Nigeria and the shenanigans of politicians and the eventual collapse of the first republic. I read the last book by Chinua Achebe which brought a lot of criticism to him but I believe in a free world, everybody has the right to speak his or her mind.

The only thing I object to is when a writer condemns a whole race or group through the deeds or activities of their leaders but that is the license that an author has and if one does not agree with him or her, one can also write his or her own books. I have a good library of Soyinka’s books but I cannot say I have read all of them but I definitely have read Ake, The Man Died, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, The Trials of Brother Jero, and of course, several critical essays on politics by Wole Soyinka. There is no doubt in my mind that Wole Soyinka is a great gift to humanity.

His mastery of the English Language makes him a veritable wordsmith. It is not my wish to comment on his greatness which I leave to others more competent than me. But I will never forget the adulation for him and adoration of his drama, The King’s Horseman when it was staged at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC sometimes in 1979 or 1980. As a member of the audience I enjoyed the encomiums heaped on a fellow Nigerian. I am more interested in his humanity and the few stories I know about him. I admire him for his courage, for his adventurous spirit and for his ability of speaking truth to power and damning the consequences.

His takeover of a radio station at gunpoint while it was presenting a speech of the premier of western Nigeria and replacing it with his own diatribes against that regime is a mark of dare devil adventure by a young man acting out his art of drama in reality. He was lucky to have escaped severe punishment and very few people could have done that then or do it now.

The fact that he escaped punishment is also a credit to the tolerant environment and independent judiciary which we had in western Nigeria in the 1960s. I am sure the late Justice Kayode Esho who freed Wole Soyinka knew he was guilty. This spirit of adventure also saw Wole Soyinka trying to mediate between his friend, Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and the Nigerian authorities at the beginning of hostilities between Nigeria and Biafra in 1967.

On returning to Nigeria from Biafra, he was immediately arrested and put in prison by the government of General Gowon where he languished throughout the years of the Biafra war and during which time he wrote his famous book, The Man Died. The most celebrated quotation from that book is that, the man dies who keeps quiet in the face of tyranny and man’s inhumanity to man calling all of us to speak out when we feel our compatriots are being wronged. Unfortunately, most Nigerians always protect their own skins and many even participate in order to join in looting the national treasury. In other parts of the world, Wole Soyinka could have gotten into serious trouble over his fraternisation with Ojukwu in war time. Those on the Biafran side who tried to reach out to the Nigerian enemy like Colonel Victor Banjo, Colonel Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Samuel Agbam were rounded up by Ojukwu and shot for treason.

I suppose this is why Wole Soyinka and General Gowon are today friends. Wole Soyinka’s long-time friend, the late Professor Ulli Beierand Wole Soyinka once visited Bonn during the Abacha tyranny to lobby the German government, I was ambassador in Germany then and I went to visit them in the Maritim Hotel just as I had visited my friend, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi also when he came to Germany. I was walking a political tight rope and I knew the consequences could be dire for me but at the same time these were my academic colleagues and ideological friends. At the same time a Nigerian delegation led by the late Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu was with me in Germany.

A member of the delegation, an ethnic cohort of mine, to put it in diplomatese, asked me if I knew where Soyinka and Ulli Beier were staying because as he put it, he wanted to beat the hell out of Wole Soyinka if he saw him. I told this thug that I did not know where they were staying even though both parties were staying in the same hotel without knowing it. I called Ulli Beier to find out when he and Wole would be leaving the hotel and to my great relief, they left very early before my bulky Nigerian friend could pounce on them.

A night before this incident, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and his wife, Bianca had had dinner with me. There was a gala performance for the delegation by resident Nigerian community in Germany. After this show, Ojukwu in his remarks surprised me when he said publicly that when we celebrate culture in Nigeria, Yoruba culture was way ahead of others and was the only culture worth celebrating. He talked about Yoruba talking drums, Yoruba art and cuisine and then zeroed in Wole Soyinka’s great works and their great friendship without knowing a member of his team was planning to give Wole Soyinka an upper cut the following morning. I also remember going all the way to Bayreuth in Bavaria, Germany to rendezvous with Professor Soyinka while on a visit to Ulli Beier’sYoruba Haus in the university. Like all artistes, Professor Soyinka could be temperamental, withdrawn, standoffish, introverted but always genuine in his feelings. He is a great connoisseur of wines and food and he seems to have a passion for western cuisine which may be responsible for how he has kept his trim body all this time.

Professor Wole Soyinka’s life has been studied over and over by critics, friends and enemies and it is my considered opinion that the man Wole Soyinka will remain the greatest Nigerian that ever lived. This is not to say the brainiest because if we are talking about the brainiest Nigerian that ever lived, Oluwakayode Osuntokun my brother stands shoulder high amongst others.

Whatever happens to man is for his own good, says the Bible. Man is the creation of God and we are wonderfully made in His own image. Our purpose in life is to praise God and give him pleasure. If things are hard how can we give God pleasure? Yet in all things He says we should give Him thanks. If we are diligent in serving him, we will eat the fruit of the land. We cannot do anything outside God’s plan for our lives.

Man is so totally insignificant in the cosmos made up of the sun, planets, moons, and stars both known and unknown. We sometimes think too much of ourselves and we forget that we can plough and sow and plant seeds but that it is God that waters our efforts. We sometimes get carried away by our earthly achievements and victories but we forget that life itself is transient, and short and that the life hereafter is what is eternal. We plan for tomorrow, for next year even for next decade forgetting that the Supreme Being to whom we owe our lives can at any time say our time is up. Some people are very optimistic about life and that is a good attribute to have but in our African environment, pessimism seems to be more rational way of perception. As religious people particularly as Christians, we know all will be well because in spite of all our problems as a people and as a nation we have an advocate with the Father, our Lord Jesus Christ who by the assumption of our sins and paying for them with his own life has become our final propitiation of our sins before Almighty God.

I personally have so many reasons to thank God for all His blessings most of which I do not deserve. If God were to treat us men the way we treat others, no one would be left alive yet God gives us a long rope to pull. It is futile for us to assume that we are working of our salvation on our own. It is through His grace and through the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ that salvation is available to the righteous and even to the unrighteous if he repents. Life itself is a mystery. Sometimes one asks why are we here? Why do we go through all the troubles after being born, sitting, crawling and walking, going to school, getting educated, getting a job, getting married and repeating the cycle of giving birth, marrying off our daughters and taking wives for our sons, getting old and infirm and then die. I suppose this is why General Charles De Gaulle said, “Old age is like a plague and it is bound to affect everybody”.

This is perhaps why the epicureans or the sceptics in ancient Greece believed that man should create a private life for himself in which public interest had a small or even negative part and that a public career could even mean an actual misfortune. In other words, because of the futility of trying to change one’s society an individualistic life of “women, wine and song” would be preferable. But to live a riotous life because of the uncertainties of life and because death is a certainty for all mankind would negate the purpose of God for our lives. God has given all of us talents and there is no one that was born without a talent. It is left for us to find out what special gift God has deposited in us in order to try and exploit it for the good of mankind. And when God creates man, he always makes them in duplicates. If one man does not exercise his God-given talent, another would be called to replace him.

To come to a pedestrian level, it is not all of us in Nigeria or the rest of the world who can benefit from higher education or who in fact needs it to get on in life especially in the materialistic environment of Nigeria where one does not need higher education or education at all to get on. I recently told a friend of mine that if his grandchildren are good in football, he should ensure that they are not discouraged because after all, our native born football coach is being promised N10 million every month as a salary which is higher than the legitimate salary of our president.

Nobody earns this kind of salary except managing directors of multinational oil companies. In the late sixties, the Beatles, a musical group of young people of my age then had a hit record with the title of Money can’t buy me love. This may be true of English society but not necessarily true globally. I know for sure that money cannot buy happiness. May I take this opportunity of these rambling thoughts to appeal to all our leaders to commit themselves to a higher calling of doing something for our country and leaving the country better than how they met it?

They should commit themselves to being lives’ changers rather than perpetuating evil and poverty in our land for after all, what gain would anybody have if he gains this whole world and loses eternity? All the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam clearly say that whatever we sow, we shall reap and that if after our lives our maker were to ask us, you saw me hungry you did not feed me, you saw me thirsty and you did not give me water to drink. And we shall ask, when did this happen? Then He would say as long as you saw your fellow human beings hungry and thirsty and you did not assuage their thirst and hunger, you did same to me and He God will visit us with retribution.

Traditional African religions also subscribe to this credo. We Nigerians whenever we travel to the West, to America and Europe in particular, we are always smug and self-congratulatory about how religious we are compared to the western world that has lost its religious bearing. What we perhaps do not understand is that Christian ethics of being your brother’s keeper have been internalised in the western society unlike in our society where we go to churches and mosques and then treat our fellow human beings as trash. Our politicians and leaders are generally uncaring for the masses; rather they exploit the masses and do not plan for their future. Their reason of being in public life is their personal financial aggrandisement at the expense of the masses and generality of the people.

Let me also reiterate the fact that we are here today but gone tomorrow. Where are our leaders of the first republic? Where are the rich people of yesteryears? They have gone to their makers and many of them are not remembered for anything today except those who by their deeds live in the hearts of those of us who are still alive. This same question will be asked of us in future, it will not matter who you are- the president, governor, professor or pastor. How would our epitaph be written?

It will not matter how much money you made or stole, what will matter is how you changed the society. I pray that I and others who find ourselves in leadership positions would think not about how to rip off the society but what we can contribute to the society in the immortal words of J.F. Kennedy, “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” and in doing this, we will be laying up treasures in heaven where moth or other kinds of pest will not be able to destroy it. This is my appeal to all Nigerians particularly our leaders and those who for now find themselves controlling the reins of government. This is the only way our republic will endure not only after the elections of next year but till the end of life on this planet earth. A do or die politics of winning at all costs may sound attractive now but in years to come the futility of not building our national edifice on a rock will become apparent. Therefore a carefully designed architecture and an edifice built on proper engineering and moral ethics is what will endure.

Agba o si ni ilu, ilu baje, bale le ku, ile da horo. Imado iba se bi elede a balu je, eru iba joba eeyan o bakukan.” These are two Yoruba proverbs that capture my feeling about the Ekiti forthcoming election. If there are no elders in Ekiti to speak the truth, our state will become a deserted state without a future. If we allow brutes to take over our government, then we cannot expect progress.If a slave becomes king, no free born person would remain.

The Yoruba people are a culturally wise people and this is why we have gotten this far in our life’s journey. But at the right time in this journey, we have had to fall back on the wisdom of our ancestors as encapsulated in our proverbs and witticisms. As an academic, I have always had the problem on relating to the Nigerian political environment. In fact I always say that my western education has not prepared me well for the hustle and bustle of the Nigerian political environment.

I have always had problems adjusting to understanding the nature of our politics. Yet I have practically lived my adolescent life in an intense political environment. How on earth, in the year of our Lord 2014 can anybody compare Kayode Fayemi, our incumbent governor with Ayodele Fayose, our former governor who we are trying very hard to forget that he ever ruled our state?

How could a state whose citizens are tempered by education and the struggle against a harsh environment of the hilly topography of the Ekiti State find it acceptable to have a man who ran the state aground and down through bribery and corruption and who imposed himself on the generality of the people of the state including traditional rulers by brute force and coercion including roughing up people violently if necessary? How can he be running to rule the same state whose legislators impeached and removed him from office?

This bad dream and nightmare has again come to haunt our people even while we are awake and it seems some people are even giving it a consideration when in fact it should have been rejected outright. On the other hand, we have a good commodity to sell in Fayemi.

This is a man true to his conscience who for the past three and a half years has been tested and proven to be a round peg in a round hole and a governor who instead of shaming us has proved to be an object of pride to all Ekiti people at home and abroad. He is a sober man compared to a man acting like a drunken sailor while in office.

Supporters of Fayose describe him as onijagidi jagan, a roughneck who should never have been governor in the first place. If we are a sensible people, and I think we are, we should not be faced with this choice but the choice is clear. There is no meeting point between darkness and light, between peace and war, between serenity and confusion, between murder and life, between development and underdevelopment, between progress and backwardness and between education and illiteracy.

Fayemi is a vessel unto honour. He is not perfect, even our Lord Jesus Christ said no one is perfect. He has set his hands on the plough of Ekiti state’sprogress unless we pull him back, it is forward ever and backward never. As an elder, I cannot keep quiet and allow people to be misled, Fayose has no plan for Ekiti.

If he does, he will not be talking about bringing up two new universities when the only one we have is not well funded because the state is not well endowed materially and I speak from experience.

His people are going round telling lies in order to hoodwink our people but they will not succeed. One of them without shame told me that telling lies is what they call “political bomb” and that they are ready to use it against Fayemi. I challenge all Ekiti people in diaspora to send word home about this election. We will not allow uncircumcised people from outside to take our patrimony from us.

Those who are planning to use extra electoral strategy to rule Ekiti state will not succeed because we will not allow them. I will not be a slave to anybody no matter how highly placed he or she may be and my children and my grandchildren and all Ekiti youth now and in future will not be slaves to outsiders.

Our people should be allowed to make a choice and I believe they will make the right choice. Let the word go out that we Ekiti people are inheritors of an intrepid tradition of resistance and if need be, we will resist again, any imposition from outside. Threats have been issued about this election to be a do or die affair.

Huge amount of money will be brought to Ekiti during this time to buy the voters. My advice to my people is to take the money and vote according to your conscience. The development in Ekiti in the last three and a half years provide opportunity for comparison and this is why this election is a referendum on good governance which has been the experience of Ekiti people during the Fayemi administration. We have the opportunity to build on this excellent performance and to lay the solid foundation of an industrialised state enjoying the application of the knowledge of our people for economic development.

Peace is a desideratum for development. We have enjoyed this peace for over three years and we do not want to go back to Egypt. No country today can be developed without external support. The same scenario goes for our state. If we do not have a government headed appropriately by a far seeing person, we will not be able to attract economic development assistance because only the deep can speak to the deep. A governor who is known in and outside his state, who speaks the language of the world, a renaissance man and who is sought after by the haves and have-nots, by billionaires and plebeians for inspiration will be able to attract attention to our state for the economic upliftment of our people.

Education means a lot to our people because since independence it has provided means of upward social mobility. We need somebody who knows and appreciates the meaning of sound education.

You cannot give what you do not have. We grant Fayose kudos for lifting himself by his bootstrap but he should appreciate what God has done for him and not push his luck too far. He must not allow himself to be used by any external force for their own purpose. If Fayose loves Ekiti people, he himself will accept the fact there is a difference between knowledge and mere understanding, between wisdom and ignorance, between studentship and scholarship.

Ekiti is too important for experimentation, we do not need a repeat of a failed poultry experiment that gobbled up N2 billion which could have built us a bright new Ekiti University Teaching Hospital. Fayose as a patriot must tell Ekiti people the truth that he cannot beat Fayemi in a fair contestation of ideas.

If we do not monitor this election and allow evil to triumph over good, people will laugh last at us that we have so many PhDs but no sense and that we cannot even make a wise choice. We have to stand up and be counted. This is the time to speak out.

At a time like this, silence is not golden. We need to seize the moment and march forward in development under the governorship of Fayemi but if we allow our state to be robbed of progressive rulership, may God forbid, but if we do, let the last man leaving the state shut the door and switch off the light.

The emergence of Ayo Fayose as the candidate of the PDP for this month’s gubernatorial election in Ekiti has given our people two candidates of sharp contrast. The current governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi is totally different from Ayo Fayose. I personally do not think there is a third candidate in this race. The candidate of the so-called Labour Party is part of the PDP and the Ekiti people are intelligent enough to know this. Even though the LP candidate in order to attract attention to himself keeps mentioning that some supporters from the APC are on his side. He is totally wrong and this Trojan horse of the PDP/LP will not deceive anybody. Ekiti people have a clear choice between Kayode Fayemi who is running on the APC platform and Ayo Fayose who is in the PDP/LP alliance. There is no third candidate and the choice before our people is clear.

Since the advent of democratic politicsin1999, we have not had the political stability and economic development that we have had in the last three and half years under Fayemi. Any visit to Ekiti will make this clear even to doubting Thomases; there is hardly any town or village in Ekiti that is not connected to all season roads and the major towns especially the capital are being transformed under the Fayemi administration. Anybody who has not been to Ado-Ekiti in the past three years will not recognise the place because of the criss-crossing of the town by dual carriage ways. Ado-Ekiti has been turned into a construction centre with a city mall, a new general hospital, an expanded teaching hospital, a civic centre among buildings either being completed or under construction. We also have nearing completion, our own equivalent of Aburi gardens in the new government house overlooking the town. It takes a man of class, aesthetics, beauty and history to recognise the need for a physical symbol or monument of a state existence and future aspiration. This is what the new government house represents. It is not a house for Fayemi but for Ekiti people as a whole. When the white men came to Ekiti or any part of Nigeria, they always built houses of the Resident or District Officer on a green hill overlooking the town.They knew what they were doing and it is a pity that unlike Ghana and many other African countries, Nigeria doesn’t have the physical symbols of statehood. Ado-Ekiti is not the most beautiful capital in the country but can be made beautiful through careful planning. The topography may appear as an obstacle or a hindrance to its development but a visit to Stuttgart in Germany of the same kind of topography as Ado-Ekiti will show what is possible under Governor Fayemi.

Education is key to human development and Fayemi has this. There is no doubt that education has redounded on his approach to governance, he approaches governance in Cartesian and logical way and not doing anything on the spur of the moment. Whatever decisions he takes are based on the best practice anywhere in the world. The difference between a renaissance man like Fayemi and any other running for the post of governor is clear. I do not want to engage in itemising the areas in which this governor has impacted the lives of our people. If as a scholar I only celebrate Fayemi as a scholar, it will be expected of me after all only the deep can appreciate the deep; but Fayemi is more than a scholar, he is an activist governor who in spite of his detached scholastic approach is nevertheless a man of action who allows his action to be determined by his long term vision of where he is taking Ekiti. The Ekiti of his dream is a highly developed society based on application of science and technology to our primary produce as well as a society rooted in its culture and green environment. Ekiti of his vision is a state deriving economic sustenance from service industries such as tourism, the light manufacturing and adding value to our agricultural produce.

Three and half years is too short in the life of any state for all ideas to become practical reality but the difference betweena man of action rooted in ideas and somebody who does things on the spur of the moment is clear. This is my perception of Ayo Fayose. When Fayose was governor, he did a few things to ingratiate himself into the hearts of the hoipolloi he also left a few buildings in the town. He converted what was a first class hotel built by Governor Adebayo into the governor’s office and replaced it with series of bungalows named Fountain Hotel. He dualised the road from Ado-Ekiti to Ikere but the job was so poorly done that the first rainy season washed the road away and the road is now being redone in a much careful and professional fashion by Fayemi. The Ado-Ekiti-Ifaki dual carriage way that the regimes of Fayose and Oni abandoned has now been completed by Fayemi. This is a rather expensive road that perhaps from hindsight should not have been dualised without the written consent of the federal government which should pay for it. Billions of naira have been sunk into this road while people in Abuja have been dilly-dallying whether to pay for it or not. The approach to governance of Fayose was populist to the extreme; he freely distributed money and ate in the streets with roughnecks and ordinary street wise young people sometimes to the embarrassment of the elite in the society. His mode of governance also bordered on rough tactics of cowing down opposition including traditional rulers. These were things that were alien to our people but they had to suffer in silence because he was supported by Abuja and encouraged to continue his strong-arm tactics but thankfully, these last three and a half have shown Ekiti people what is possible under a democratic government. It has now been established that there can be peace and tranquillity in the state and everybody can go to sleep with their two eyes closed. Ekiti is not a rich state but it has intelligent people and this intelligent people can be cultivated for the progress of the state if the state is well led. The governor is the leader of the state and the state will be judged by the character and persona of the governor. If we have a roughneck as governor our reputation would go down with him, we cannot afford to go back to what we left behind. “Iwaju ni opa ebiti n re si”; our destiny is forward ever, backward never. If we must continue to make progress, the choice before us is clear and we have a commodity we can sell anywhere, Fayemi will sell anywhere in this country. And if God wills, after he must have finished a second term in Ekiti, his record and reputation will catapult him into a higher position in this country. What is necessary therefore is for us as a people to collectively decide that the election will be peaceful, and that there will be no fight or thuggery and that when the election is over, we will all unite as a family to develop our state.

No outsider can love us more than ourselves so any threat from outside to cause trouble in our state should be collectively resisted. I know there are people outside our state who will want to turn our state into a battle ground. My sincere hope is that the powers that be will not allow themselves to be used to destabilise the most peaceful state in the country. Outsiders who may be planning evil should also learn something from the political history of Nigeria that if you put fire on the house of your neighbour, you may not be able to control it. This was what happened in post-independence Nigeria when the federal government ganged up against the dominant political party in the West and tried to destroy it but the result was that the entire democratic regime unravelled. I hope our people and leaders know the history of Nigeria and they will not allow history to repeat itself because when it does, it will either be a farce or a tragedy. Fayose and Fayemi are my junior brothers and in their own ways I have respect for both of them but if one wants to make a choice that will affect one’s future and those of one’s children and grandchildren, one should make a wise choice. Ekiti people are wise and will make a wise choice on who governs them when all the facts, attributes, comportment, learning, intellectual capability, exposure, calmness under pressure, track record, commitment, breeding, parental, background, psychological stability are put together the choice will be clear and Fayemi is that choice. I say this not to curry any favour, there is nothing I am looking for in life any more that would make me lie. I have achieved more than I expected, I have reached the summit of academic profession, and I have represented my country in places such as Canada, the USA and Germany and I continue to be relevant. And I have advised since 1999 all presidents of Nigeria especially on our country’s foreign policy. If I cannot speak the truth at my age, then I should be damned forever. If Fayose were better person than Fayemi I would have said so and I believe if Fayose is asked who is better of the two of them, he will say it’s Fayemi. Lest I forget there is the inconvenient issue of murder and fraud cases Fayose has to answer. Ekiti deserves a governor with clean hands!

Professor Ade-Ajayi turned 85 last week. A book with the title of J.F Ade-Ajayi, His Life and Works was presented last week with pomp and pageantry at the new University of Ibadan Conference Centre to celebrate an iconic figure in the history of African academia. Professor Ajayi was born in Ikole, Ekiti State to a doting father and an enterprising mother. His father was a local post man and a counsellor in the palace of the Elekole. Even with his limited exposure to western education, his father knew that the key to a bright future for his young son was education. He therefore billeted the young Jacob in the house of a local teacher so that he could have a head-start among his colleagues. Later, he was sent to Ado-Ekiti where he also lived with a teacher and friend of his father while he was going to the Ekiti Central School that later metamorphosed into the famous Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti. It was from Ado-Ekiti that at the age of 11 in 1940, Ajayi left for Lagos, the frontier of opportunity at that time and enrolled in Igbobi College for his secondary education. Igbobi College brought the young man into contact with other Nigerians. While in school, he never took the second position he also never played any games and rose to become as was expected school library prefect and from that time onwards, he and the world of books could not be separated. He was not only a bibliophile and a bookworm, he was also determined to go as far as his brain would take him. On leaving Igbobi College, he was too young to go to Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, the only university in West Africa affiliated with Durham University in England. He also did not have rich parents who could have sent him abroad. He contented himself with taking examination to the Yaba Higher College to read English, Latin and History. The establishment of the Yaba Higher College was something of a sop to nationalists who were agitating for a tertiary institution in Nigeria. They did not get what they wanted; rather, what they got was some kind of what today will be called a polytechnic where people in the fields of Medicine, Engineering, Pharmacy, Surveying and General Education were taught. As providence will have it, University of Ibadan opened its gate in 1948 and Ade-Ajayi crossed over and was one of its first students. Three years later, he graduated with a general degree in English, Latin and History. He later went to Leicester University where he took a first class honours degree in History and he later went to the University of London for a PhD in History. He returned to Nigeria in 1958 and his rise to a chair of History was meteoric. Within five years of returning home, he had not only become a professor but one whose views were very much sought after at home but particularly abroad. With Professor Onwuka Dike, he blazed the trail of the study of African History and African Historiography generally. Before this time, Euro-American historians dismissed the idea of African history and asserted that Africa had no history and that if it had any, it must be the activities of the Europeans in Africa. One even famously said, Africa was a dark continent and darkness was not a subject of history. Ajayi and others both in Africa and some in Europe and America embarked on the diligent search and study of the African past. The absence of written documentation, they asserted did not mean the absence of history and that in any case, it is not the entire African continent that lacked written civilisation as can be evidenced by written materials on North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Sudan belt of Africa, the eastern coast of Africa and the southern part of Africa where European and Arab accounts of the places provided substantial material for the study of the African past. Even where there were no documents, Ajayi and others led the world in the understanding of the usefulness of remembered accounts as contained in oriki, cognomen, oral poetry, kinglist, festival re-enactments of the past etc. Memorised history by griots and other professional historians in the courts of rulers who must remember their histories or lose their lives also provide materials for understanding the African past. Ajayi and others were able to unearth these golden materials for the purpose of elucidating the past of Africa and even foreshadowing the future. He and others taught Africa and the world, the fact that availability of written documents should not be equated with objectivity in history and that African history and other histories of other parts of the world should be studied from a multi-disciplinary approach from which even the sciences of archaeology, anthropology, botany, zoology, linguistics and the use of radio carbon-dating could be enlisted in unravelling the past of Africa.

After Dike became the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan and after he left in 1966 because of engulfing political problems in Nigeria, Ajayi became the torch-bearer of what later evolved into the Ibadan School of History. This school succeeded in establishing the fact and reality of African history and that it was a serious academic discipline worthy of pursuit. The impact of this school was in helping Africans and their leaders have confidence in themselves in the face of European denigration and psychological undermining. This led to the description of the Ibadan School as “a nationalist school of history” designed to challenge western orthodoxy that tended to see non-Europeans as inferior who had no history at all and that if they had any history at all, such history was not important. Ajayi’s place in the academic firmament is secure. He was sought after and given generous grants to teach in American universities such as Stanford, Wisconsin, and North Western to mention a few as well as in British universities such as Birmingham, the School of African and Oriental studies of the University of London and even in Moscow. His reputation was so formidable that the Rockefeller Foundation generously endowed the University of Ibadan as Centre for African Studies. Ajayi’s scholarship carried him to the membership of the board of governors of the United Nations’ university in Tokyo of which he later became chairman. Ajayi does not just believe in the esoteric nature of scholarship, he applied his scholarship to give historical backing to the idea of the Lagos Plan of Action in 1970 arguing that African frontiers and boundaries were new phenomena associated with the ephemeral colonial phase of African development and that in the African past, African territories were open with no frontiers and that they meshed imperceptibly into one another. He was also one of those who set up the Association of African Universities (AAU) and he was active in the Association of Commonwealth Universities while he was Vice Chancellor of University of Lagos.

Apart from helping to build the faculty of arts at the University of Ibadan and to help develop graduate studies in Ibadan, Ajayi was the one who built the University of Lagos from the ashes of ethnic rivalry to the pinnacle of a first class African university. When he got to the University of Lagos, it is fair to say, the university had little academic reputation but by time he left, the university was firmly set on what it has become today. Most of the physical landmarks existing in the University of Lagos today were built by Ajayi when he was Vice Chancellor.

Ajayi’s life has touched the lives of several people in Nigeria and in the outside world. A grateful nation has honoured him with the Officer of the Federal Republic (OFR) and he is also a winner of the academic laurel of the national merit (NNOM). Ajayi is an author of several books and has written widely on several topics, he has mentored several students and he is a professor of professors because many of his former students have occupied and are occupying important academic positions in Nigeria and outside Nigeria today. Apart from being a seasoned academic, Ajayi is a thoroughly civilised man and a gentleman. When he has occasion to disagree with somebody, he does it effortlessly and without offense and with empathy for the other party. He is a quiet worker not given to the loud noise of many of his compatriots and in his evening years, he has devoted himself to the study of the Bible and the word of God. In all his endeavours, he is complimented by a virtuous and lively wife, Christine Ajayi who had made the home environment so convivial for the flowering of the academic tree into which the academic mustard seed had grown. Ajayi’s life is also enriched by his four daughters and a son who are well grounded in their various academic and professional callings.

From Wednesday May 7, to Friday May 9, Nigeria hosted some kind of the world economic forum, a kind of Africa Davos in Abuja. Unfortunately, at a time Nigeria should be in glorious light, the kidnapping of 274 girls by Boko Haram and the global concern overshadowed the significance and importance of the World Economic Forum in Abuja. We, of course, have ourselves to blame for this tragedy. The Boko Haram phenomenon started almost five years ago from an isolated event in Maiduguri involving the killing of the Boko Haram leader, Mallam Yusuf while in police custody. The movement itself seemed to have been exploited by politicians during the regime of the ANPP government of Bunu Sheriff. It seems as soon as the party was in power, it saw no need for the services of Boko Haram sect and tried to get rid of their troublesome presence by force. Unfortunately, the thing has spiralled out of everybody’s control. There has been series of killings and kidnappings by the Boko Haram group and it seems as if they are getting bolder and bolder every day. The world ignored them until this episode of kidnapping of young school girls. Abubakar Shekau the leader of Boko Haram has now publicly said he will sell them to slavery and this has again been exploited to our discomfiture by the international media.

The concern of the international community is understandable but unfortunately, this concern is sometimes laced with hypocrisy. How does one explain the use of the kidnapping to ridicule and denigrate our country as a land where there is no effective government or where the military is inept and where according to CNN, there are 700,000 slaves? The international media suddenly came up with a spurious study that there are 30 million slaves in the world and 700,000 of this are in Nigeria. As if this is not enough, the CNN has been describing the practice of early marriage among our Muslim compatriots as forced marriage and equating it with slavery. This kind of cultural arrogance should not be allowed to go unchallenged. There may be cultural practices in Nigeria and in other parts of the world that are not the same with western practices but it will be irresponsible to describe such marriages as forced marriage. Having lived in the United States and in the western world in general, you cannot but feel that some of the slanting of the information in the global media is designed to depress our brothers in the black Diaspora so as to make people feel that the pernicious practice of slavery has always existed in Africa and our brothers in the black Diaspora should be grateful to the white man in spite of the 400 years of slavery and unpaid labour. Anybody who does not believe race is a factor in international relations can now learn from Nigerian experience. Furthermore, it has taken the international community almost a month to react to this tragedy and even their reaction is so patronising and humiliating that we can hardly be expected to celebrate it. Of course if our government has been highly efficient, this may never have happened.

Perhaps we are wrong to have called the whole world to Abuja and unreasonably closed down the government for three days at a time when all hands should have been on deck to free these unfortunate children. Our government feels what is important is its image and politics and the dramatic crying and wailing of the president’s wife has also not helped because this is not a personal issue of the president as Mr Jonathan but a tragedy for Nigeria. Unless we can dramatically rescue these poor children, the damage to Nigeria’s image may be irredeemable. What worries most Nigerians is that in spite of the declaration of emergency in the north-east, Boko Haram is still able to drive in convoys to inflict havoc on unsuspecting children and individuals. A state of emergency and imposition of curfew seem to be observed in the breach in the north-eastern part of Nigeria. The conclusion any intelligent person will come to is that the security forces are complicit in the dastardly attacks that are going on. Now we have had to descend from our Olympian height of protecting our national sovereignty to the abyss of begging Americans and the Britons to come and help us rescue our own children. One can understand international assistance in situations like air crashes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes but in a man-made situation such as kidnapping, national governments are naturally expected to be able to handle such events. It appears to me that we have failed miserably in this regard. We have allowed politics to come before security and good governance. At one point, we were in self-denial about the crisis facing our country. Now everybody is aware of the ineptness of our government and its inability to protect us. This is sad particularly at a time when we should be basking at being the biggest economy in Africa. We have lost an opportunity to positively project the image of our country. Whatever has to be done to redeem this terrible situation must be done and done quickly we cannot afford to allow the situation to drag on indefinitely. The issue of Boko Haram therefore calls for a frontal attack with a policy of a combination of carrots and cane and a large measure of development assistance to states in the north-east of Nigeria as well as a plan to help alleviate youth unemployment in the region. It is the idle hands that is the devil’s workshop, we have to take the sting out of the pain of joblessness and unemployment among the youth nationally but particularly in the northern part of our country. I am not suggesting government creating sinecure jobs but through encouraging private and public investments and public works particularly investment in agriculture, we can create jobs. The Chad Basin Development Authority was in the past the vanguard of wheat production in Nigeria. We need to revive this and the north-east is also suitable for cattle ranching and for vegetable production particularly tomatoes, onions and so on to which we can add value and export to other parts of the world to create wealth for the local people. There is so much that can be done if we are a serious people and our current security situation compels us to think out of the box and approach our problems rationally. The damage to our image can only be repaired if we are able to put an end to this national tragedy and emerge out of the situation with our heads held high as was the case after the Biafra civil war. A policy of rehabilitation, reconciliation and reconstruction will be most appropriate in the present circumstances.

• Borno political elite’s war of attrition