By Olatunji Dare

 

The piece below first appeared on this page on October 22, 2013. It is being republished, slightly revised and updated.

Philanthropy runs deep in the Saraki family.

Its patriarch, Himself the Oloye, Dr Abubakar Olusola Saraki, was a legendary giver.  You always knew when he was in his country home in Ilorin GRA, to take a break from his endless trips abroad in search of new deals, to nourish and consolidate old business, or to undergo medical treatment.

Large crowds would gather on the precincts of the expansive villa – old men, old women, young men, young women, pregnant women, women carrying their babies on their backs, children, people in all sorts and conditions of distress, some of them from the crack of dawn – waiting for the man they reverentially called Oloye to emerge from the innards, hold court, and hand out gifts as was his habit.

They would go home with all manner of gifts – cash, food parcels, painkillers, soap, and fabrics.  The next day the crowds would gather again, and the next, until Oloye left town to attend to his sprawling business interests across the globe.

This philanthropy was the root of Saraki’s phenomenal success as vote harvester and political king-maker in Kwara State.  If you agreed to his terms, he endorsed you for whatever office you were seeking, even if you did not belong in the same political party. And at election time, he delivered far more votes than you needed for victory.

The formula failed him only once, when he tried to make his daughter Senator Gbemisola Saraki state governor, just as his son Bukola was completing his second term on the job and had positioned himself to succeed the sister, aforementioned, in the Senate.

To be fair to Bukola Saraki, he had stated for the record that it would be “immoral” for his sister to succeed him as governor.  Still, it would be hard to praise him for high-mindedness.  For, if it was immoral for his sister to succeed him as state governor, what made it moral for him to succeed her as Senator representing Kwara Central

In the end, it was not morality that settled the matter, but biology and sociology.  Oloye Saraki’s deeply conservative base, Ilorin Emirate, was simply not ready for a woman governor, even if that woman was his daughter.  Her candidature never got off the ground.  The philanthropy did not flag.  But this time, the votes were just not there for the harvesting.

His failing health deteriorated, and he died without enthroning another king, and without knowing for sure whether what happened to his daughter’s governorship bid was merely a setback or the end of his hegemonic hold on Ilorin politics.

It may well be, as some detractors have been saying in light of the collapse of the family’s Société General Bank and with regard to some other financial transactions under investigation, that much of what was fuelling Oloye Saraki’s philanthropy was OPM – Other People’s Money.

Even if this is indeed the case, we must still give him high praise. For, how many of the tens of thousands of Nigerians living the good life on OPM ever think of giving back anything, much less giving back on such a large and sustained scale as the Oloye?

Senator Bukola Saraki has been carrying on in the tradition of his father, handing out gifts to the less-privileged, especially during Muslim festivals.  But in his hands, what used to be an orderly occasion, festive even, has turned not merely riotous but positively lethal.

Not once, not twice, but three times have such occasions degenerated into primal stampedes in which dozens were trampled to death or suffered grave injuries.

Last week, 20 persons were reported to have died in the stampede for a piece of the Sallah gifts the Senator was handing out at his residence in Ilorin. At least as many persons were injured or fainted.

This macabre spectacle was a reprise of a similar occurrence on May 27, 2011.  By one estimate no fewer than 10 persons died in Ilorin in the stampede for rice and other items Dr Saraki was distributing at Mandate House, his campaign headquarters.

In November 2010, at least 11 persons had lost their lives in similar circumstances.  The State Government had swung quickly into damage-control mode and put the number of fatalities at four. But that is still four persons too many, for an occasion designed to provide succour to those in distress.

Ours is not yet a litigious society, the type in which a man who crashed the car he had stolen from a parking lot sought damages from for his extensive injuries from the car’s owner on the ground that if the owner had kept the car in a good working condition, the accident would not have occurred and the petitioner – the car thief – would still have the use of his legs.

Or the type in which the driver of a recreational vehicle that crashed sought compensation from its manufacturers on the ground that nowhere was a warning displayed that you could not leave the steering wheel to make coffee in the kitchenette at the rear while the vehicle was in motion.

In such a setting, Senator Saraki would now be drowning in an avalanche of wrongful-death lawsuits brought by relations of the casualties demanding hefty damages on the perfectly reasonable ground that he knew or should have known from experience that a stampede was likely to occur for the gifts he was dispensing, but had failed to take measures to forestall it; in short, that the deaths and injuries had resulted from his negligence.

• Postscript: The dark side of Ile Arugbo

Seven years have passed since the foregoing was published.  Saraki has lost the family’s hegemonic grip on Kwara politics, and his transactions while he was in office and in power are being scrutinized.

That is the context in which the Kwara State Government sent in the bulldozers last week to clear the space lying across from the residence of the late Dr Olusola Saraki along Iloffa Road, in the Government Reservation Area, Ilorin, saying that the site was long ago earmarked for a car park and staff clinic for the State Secretariat complex, but had been appropriated by the Saraki family.

Dr Bukola Saraki, for the family, says it is part and parcel of the family’s estate, duly acquired, and vested in a corporate body that goes by the name of Asa Investments. To clinch the point, they revealed their evocative name for the place:  Ile Arugbo, a Home for Old People

That name conjures up a residential facility where the elderly poor received caring, life-sustaining attention.  Its demolition has consequently been portrayed by some as an act of preternatural wickedness directed at the elderly poor by a soulless government vengefully pursuing a vanquished political opponent.

Ile Arugbo was not by any stretch a home.  Nor did it cater only to the elderly. It was a vacant lot across from the family house that the  government says had been aside for public purposes when the younger Saraki was probably still in his teens.

But on becoming state governor several decades later, Saraki had, without formally acquiring it, proceeded -thoughtfully, it should be remarked– to erect a shed on it to protect the habitués from the elements, and a storage for the materials they were going to receive.

His claim to the property, the authorities maintain, rests on no firmer ground than that.  But that is a matter for the courts.

Whatever the status of its disputed site, there is no denying that a great deal of philanthropy did take place at the so-called Ile Arugbo.

But there was also a dark side to the business.

Many who went there seeking relief were trampled to death in the stampede for the stuff on offer – 97 persons in three years, according to the best authorities, more than twice as many souls as I had reported in this space seven years ago.  I say nothing of those who suffered horrific injuries.

In that respect, Ile Arugbo will also go down as a crime scene – a scene of wrongful deaths, the circumstances of which the authorities never made even a pretence of investigating.

 

Back in the 1980s, military president Ibrahim Babangida’s palace intellectuals proclaimed with accustomed arrogance that Nigeria’s evolving history was going to divide neatly into two epochs: the Before Babangida Era, when it was all darkness, with nary a shaft of illumination, and the After Babangida Era, which was going to be all sweetness and light, the dividing line being 1985, the year General Babangida seized power.

Others, habituated to marking time off in decades, as if historic events paid the slightest respect to our penchant for organising our experience according to a decimal calendar, looked beyond Babangida’s time to the year 2000, the intersection of one millennium and another, one decade and another and one year and another.

This triple conflation vested the year with special significance. It had the great merit of being far off enough to give planners and policy makers some breathing space to meet long-proclaimed but unmet outcomes, and to set new targets that would fire the public longing for better conditions of living.

Who can be against “water for all,” not just for the few, by the year 2000? Or “electricity for all?” Or food for all? Or education for all? Or housing for all? Or transportation for all? Or health for all? Or “money for all,” assuming money would not have not become an anachronism under those circumstances?

No sooner had the last decade of the 20th Century dawned than they began to rewrite the future. The year 2000 was no longer going to be an anno mirabilis without parallel. It was going to be just another year: an upheaval here, a remarkable advance there, but altogether nondescript.

Water and electricity and housing and food and shelter and all the good things that were supposed to have become would now have to wait until 2010. But paradise had only postponed, and remember, people, that everything comes to those who wait. So, patience.

Next to outright forgiveness, time is a debtor’s best succour. But only for a while. The deadline for payment may seem like eternity. But it marches on inexorably until, voila, the creditor is at the gate. So, 2010 arrived, and the outcomes laid out without the slightest diffidence a decade earlier were no nearer fulfillment. It some cases, what the intervening period witnessed was a regression, not an advance.

But hope springs eternal. And as has been said down the ages, what is heaven for if our reach does not exceed our grasp?

The target years, it is necessary to concede, were set with no machinery in place to achieve the expected outcomes. It was as if the important thing was to decree the year, and everything else would follow.
A different strategy was therefore devised for 2020, the new magic year when water, food, shelter and all the other good things of life would be available. Rather than leave matters to chance, A National Conference enlisting some of the most enlightened Nigerians was charged with articulating a more encompassing Vision for Nigeria.

The Visioners, as the appointed delegates called themselves, met in Abuja for several weeks, all facilities provided, including a well-staffed Secretariat to coordinate the visioning and the follow up.
They did not disappoint.

They came up with Vision 2020, later named Vision 2020/20, the key goal of which was to transform Nigeria, already the largest re-based economy in Africa, into one of the 20 largest economies in the world by the target date.

Whether any of the countries in that elite league would allow itself to regress to the point that Nigeria would come from the 50th place, if that, to displace it was another matter. Nor was Nigeria the only country seeking to move up in the league. But the Vision was at least much clearer and more focused than “water and food and housing for all” in 2020.

That year has finally arrived. But the goals of Vision 2020 are not a whit closer to fulfillment than they were in 2000 or 2010. And it may well be that Nigeria will have to do all the running it can just to keep its place in the global economic order.

Turning away from Nigeria for a moment for some self-interrogation, I suspect that a great many among us have, over the decades, fallen far short of our goals and our potential. I certainly have. I never pass up an opportunity to put off until tomorrow a task I should perform today. Like the British writer Jerome K. Jerome, I love work so much that I always save some for the next day.

Dozens of books lie unread on the shelves, or read only in part. The memoir is yet to take a coherent shape. Losing weight has been easier, just as Mark Twain said of giving up smoking: I have done it a thousand times. Moments of clarity and focus dissipate, yielding to languor. A stubborn illness probably had something to do with that, plus advancing age. But that is not the whole story.

It is therefore a salutary thing to look in the mirror when excoriating Nigeria for all the dilatoriness, the discontinuities, and the missed opportunities that has marked its post-colonial history.

But Nigeria is a different proposition altogether. It represents our place in the world. It is home to the largest aggregation of black people anywhere. More than any other country, it qualifies to be regarded as their spiritual home, the place they should turn to in affirming their humanity in a world that denies and denigrates it, a voice for their collective aspirations and hopes, a guarantor of their place in the scheme of things, a refuge in times of trouble; in short, a beacon.

Sadly, Nigeria is none of these things. It is almost as if it has given up even trying.

Muddling through might have worked in an era that did not have to reckon with the profound challenges of climate change, growing population in the face of dwindling resources, artificial intelligence, deep-fakes, galloping unemployment, cyber wars, ethno-religious conflict, and so on. Today, that path is simply unsustainable.

In the midst of these challenges, they are talking animatedly about the next General Election due in 2023. They are doing so when the Buhari Administration has indicated no major policy departure from a preceding term that hardly lived up to the Change that the ruling All Progressives Congress had led Nigerians to expect—an administration in which only a few of the key policy makers and political officials inspire trust and confidence, judged by their expertise or integrity.
Politics in its rawest form is the only thing on their minds. From which zone will the next president “emerge”? And who will be his or her running mate? Who will hold what office in which party, and so on and so forth? These are the issues that are likely to consume the rest of Buhari’s term.
Meanwhile, they are not talking about restructuring. Yet, without it, Nigeria will continue to go back and forth in an ever-shrinking circle. It will carry on like a stalled caterpillar, its antennae probing furiously in every direction, its body inert.
Restructuring goes beyond tinkering with a Constitution made for an era that time and tide and circumstance have overtaken. Nor can it be vested in a National Assembly that would be loath to dilute, much less abolish, the obscene package of remunerations its members bequeathed to themselves.

If Buhari is minded to build a lasting legacy, this is the time to mobilize the entire country and the National Assembly where his party holds a controlling majority, to take the necessary steps to give Nigeria a new, truly federal Constitution rooted in unity, not uniformity, and above all, in justice.

Seize the day, Mr President.

Olatunji Dare

 

In the mid-80’s, there was a young man, one of a crop of enterprising reporters at Rutam House, university and polytechnics graduates who competed fiercely from day to day for coveted bylines to Page One stories in The Guardian.  He covered the education beat.  His principal source was the Minister of Education, Professor Jibril Aminu, not a great friend of the media and no admirer of the progressive-radical journalism the paper espoused.

The young man ranked among the most productive and most engaging of the lot, soft-spoken, exuding a quiet confidence and unfailingly respectful. I doubt whether his colleagues or supervisors ever remarked it, but he had in common with military president Ibrahim Babangida a pronounced diastema that always made it seem as if a smile was playing around his mouth.

He never flaunted his professional relationship with, and access to, Aminu, one of the influential members of Babangida’s cabinet.  He was just as discreet about his access to other powerful political officials that redounded from his covering the Minister of Education.

Once a week, usually, on a day when the Editorial Board had no scheduled meeting, I used to invite The Guardian’s field correspondents to my office to debrief them for my own orientation as chair of the Editorial Board, and for my personal education. I would ask them about the major developments of the previous week, current issues the authorities were grappling with, and how those issues were likely to shape future policy.

Goddy Nnadi was always on top of his brief. He knew who was who at headquarters and at various departments and agencies as well the forces and tensions at work. I came away from each session with a better understanding of the education landscape.

It was during one of those debriefings that he spoke of how the Minister had told him that he found my columns intriguing and would like to meet the personality behind them. I demurred on the threshold and at every subsequent reiteration of the request.  One day the request took on an urgent tone.  If I would not meet with the Minister, I should not be surprised if the Minister turned up in my residence.

Having not the slightest inkling of how to play host to a Minister I settled for the approaching 1998 Salah as an unexceptionable occasion as any, to visit him at his residence in Ikoyi, Lagos, with Nnadi as my escort.   That way, I could partake in the feasting on the Sallah lamb into the bargain.  He received me very warmly. Perhaps to maintain the spirit of the occasion, he did not bring up my column which had often been critical of his official conduct.

That task was taken up enthusiastically by another guest, Chief Ita Ekanem-Ita, registrar of the University of Ibadan.  He was still chafing from a piece, “The vanishing Calabar man,” I had written in 1987, following the creation of Akwa Ibom from the old Cross River State.  It turned out, I had written, that virtually every person one was used to regarding as a “Calabar man” was actually from Akwa Ibom, and that you would have to conduct a diligent search to find the real thing.

Aminu and Nnadi bonded and developed the kind of mutual empathy not unusual among news sources and reporters in Nigeria, a relationship that often creates a dilemma for the news firm.  Media sociologists have observed that after a while, the reporter covering a beat develops sympathies for the organisation.  Its point of view and its problems come to shape the reporter’s perspectives. The reporter loses the “objectivity,” that is supposed to undergird news work.

It is then time, it would seem, to deploy the reporter to another beat.

The trouble is that it will take the new person quite a while to report with the savvy and the surefootedness that his or her predecessor had developed over years of patient cultivation. For the news firm, the outcome of such move is a loss, with hardly any mitigation in the short term.

The rapport between Aminu and Nnadi was not of the dysfunctional kind, however.  On Aminu’s part, it was driven largely by altruism, the goal being to help Nnadi prepare for a better future.

He used his good offices to arrange a special scholarship for Nnadi, who held an HND from Anambra State Polytechnic, to study for a BS in mass communication, and thereafter an MS, at Indiana State University, in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the United States.  To ensure that his successor would not scuttle the arrangement, Aminu ensured that Nnadi’s tuition and fees and stipends were paid in full before Nnadi commenced his studies at Indiana State.

Nor was that all.  Later, on a visit to the United States as Minister of Petroleum Resources, Aminu would turn up at the Indiana State campus asking to see Goddy Nnadi.

The last time I talked with Aminu when he was serving as Nigeria’s Ambassador to the United States, I asked him about Nnadi.  “He is somewhere in Abuja making money,” he said.

Nnadi, it turns out, had indeed been making money, but not in the way Aminu meant or thought.

Last week, The Abuja Federal Court ordered the final forfeiture to the Federal Government some N2 billion, in Nigerian and foreign currencies in a bank account the EFCC said it had traced to Nnadi, plus a swank hotel in Owerri, the Imo State capital, and four pieces of real estate in Abuja, proceeds of the corrupt enrichment and abuse of office Nnadi allegedly committed while serving as general manager for corporate services at the Petroleum Equalization Fund.

As I reflected on the matter, one question kept tugging at my mind:  What will Aminu say?  Did that question ever cross Nnadi’s mind?

The piece below was submitted for my December 17 column.  Its publication was mutilated, however, due to production errors.  The original copy is hereby restored, for the record.

Tejumola Olaniyan (1959 – 2019)

Sometime in 1985, I received in the mail a letter from Tejumola Olaniyan.  The name sounded vaguely familiar, and I had no idea of his identity.  It seemed just like any other fan mail commending me for some column I had written for The Guardian, or, very rarely, excoriating me for one column or another

The outrage-manufacturing and multiplying machine called the Internet was still restricted to military usage, and its offshoot, the much-misnamed social media were distant dreams.  Writing even a short “Letter to the Editor” was a serious, deliberative act.  You thought through what you wanted to say and phrased it to the best of your ability, unlike now when composition is instant and outrage or vulgar abuse takes the place of reasoning.

I would discover that my correspondent was then finishing his MA at the University of Ife, later Obafemi Awolowo University, or was set to take up a junior faculty position. What I found even more reassuring, he said he was well acquainted with my younger Emmanuel, sadly deceased, although he did not state where or in what circumstances they had met.

Any anxieties I might have harboured up to that point dissolved.  My correspondent, I perceived, was clearly a well-bred young man, an omoluabi worth treating with.  He would not call you Uncle and then go on to give you a sandbagging.

I can still visualize his letter covering the front and one-half of the back of lined, white foolscap paper, in script that would have won a handwriting contest. He talked admiringly of my work, but dwelt on one in particular, a piece on the retirement of former Chief Justice Ayo Irikefe.  The “satirical thread” was “too thin,” he said.

My Guardian colleague then, the playwright and literary scholar, Femi Osofisan, had made the same point by way of admonition, concerned that I might inadvertently get myself misunderstood or targeted unfairly for vengeful reprisal.

“Bold exaggeration,” Olaniyan counselled in the letter, “is the heart of satire.”

I wrote back to thank him, promised that I would look him up if work or pleasure took me to  Ife, and urging him to feel free  to stop by at Rutam House whenever he was in Lagos and had some time on his hands.

He left Nigeria not long thereafter, and unfortunately, I never got to meet him.

If I have not always delivered on the satire I had set out to write – and the “Buhari Double” episode proves conclusively that I have not — it is not for lack of instruction from a solicitous tutor whose scholarship cuts across an astonishingly wide range of issues in the arts and humanities and popular culture.

Tejumola Olaniyan, The Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and Wole Soyinka Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, died on November 30, aged 60.

May his example continue to inspire us.

Olatunji Dare

 

To its critics, probably the overwhelming majority of Nigerians, the whole thing is an unmitigated swindle entrenched in the scheme of governance by the National Assembly to indulge the sybaritic proclivities of its members.

They see it as springing from the mindset that regards being a lawmaker as a hardship that must be assuaged by an obscene reward system rooted in rampant and flagrant disregard of the nation’s economic reality and the pervading poverty.

To give a notorious illustration: The N30,000 that the labor unions are demanding as minimum monthly wage is just one-half of what senators receive every month as “wardrobe allowance.” And that is by no means the most preposterous aspect of the reward system the lawmakers have designed specially for themselves.

To members of the National Assembly, however, the “constituency project” is a noble scheme that provides funding for beneficent interventions that stamp the federal presence on their constituencies and give those who dwell there a sense of belonging to a whole that values and treats each part equally.

Speaking for them, Senator (Princess) Stella Oduah (PDP, Anambra North) whose scandal-scarred tenure as Minister of Aviation in the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan is still engaging the attention of the anti-corruption agencies and is still held up as an example of how not to conduct oneself in ministerial office, says the projects constitute “one of the unique features” of Nigeria’s democratic journey so far.”

So unique that she has introduced a Bill that would henceforth earmark at least 20 percent of the federal budget, or N2.1 trillion at current estimates, to the scheme, to ensure that “good governance” is delivered to the majority of Nigerians who constitute, according to her, some 70 percent of the national population.

The last figure, pardon the digression, has remained probably the most durable statistic about Nigeria. Despite the rural-urban migration that began in the decades before independence, exploded during the oil-boom years and continued at a relentless pace thereafter, the ratio of Nigeria’s rural dwellers vis-a-vis urban dwellers has stood officially at a stubborn 70: 30.

Senator Oduah’s advocacy for greater funding of the controversial constituency projects is coming barely two weeks after the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) delivered a scathing report on the scheme at a National Summit (another one, again?) on Diminishing (sic) Corruption in the Public Sector.

The report, based on field work conducted by the Commission’s Constituency Project Tracking Group, between June and August 2019 covered 424 projects from 2015-2018 across 12 states and Abuja Federal Capital Territory.

It speaks of how federal lawmakers collude with executing agencies to pocket millions of Naira under the scheme. It details how contracts awarded by the same agency, are duplicated using the same description, same narrative, and valued at the same amount. It remarked how vast sums expended on nebulous interventions described as “capacity building and empowerment projects, some involving cash transfers, all of them difficult to verify.

It noted that embedding constituency projects in Border Communities Development Agencies and in Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency makes those bodies especially prone to the corrupt practices detailed in the report.

The Monitoring Group says it located some footloose money in the amount N3.9 million in the 2019 budget, funds not earmarked for any project or sector. It reported recovering diverted assets such as equipment for schools, hospitals, farms, water and energy projects, and from over-valuation of projects, abandoned projects, or projects shoddily executed.

All in all, the report is a veritable catalogue of malfeasance.

The report is not all gloom, however. It confirmed that 255 of some 373 projects inspected were “healthy” and 108 were “on-going,” which could mean that a site had been cleared or that the foundation was being laid, or that funds had run out. Only five project were reported actually abandoned, and eight lawmakers were recommended for prosecution, apparently one who converted his constituency project fund into building a hotel in his own name.

Nor is it entirely the case that lawmakers regard the funds as free money, to be spent as they please on themselves and their pet fancies. Hardly a does a fortnight pass without some lawmaker staging a carnival to present “dividends of democracy” such as sewing machines, bicycles, pepper grinders, portable electric generators, school stationery, and other items. But they present these as “personal donations” and often stamp them with their names and pictures, lest the recipients forget where the stuff came from.

But it is more than enough to confirm the worst fears of Nigerians who have been conditioned by experience to expect only the most scandalous conduct from their leaders and representatives.

Senator Oduah says her Bill before the National Assembly is designed to provide an “institutional framework” for the implementation of constituency projects as in other places where they operate, Kenya being her example. It must be accounted a scandal that the scheme has operated here for nearly 20 years without any institutional framework.

Still, better to fix it now than never.

Tejumola Olaniyan (1959 – 2019)

 

Sometime in 1985, I received in the mail a letter from Tejumola Olaniyan. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and I had no idea of his identity. It seemed just like any other fan mail commending me for some column I had written for The Guardian, or, very rarely, excoriating me for one column or another.

The outrage-manufacturing and multiplying machine called the Internet was still restricted to military usage, and its offshoot, the much-misnamed social media were distant dreams. Writing even a short “Letter to the Editor” was a serious, deliberative act. You thought through what you wanted to say and phrased it to the best of your ability, unlike now when composition is instant and outrage or vulgar abuse take the place of reasoning.

I would discover that my correspondent was then finishing his MA at the University of Ife, later Obafemi Awolowo University, or was set to take up a junior faculty position. What I found even more reassuring, he said he was well acquainted with my younger Emmanuel, sadly deceased, although he did not state where or in what circumstances they had met.

Any anxieties I might have harboured up to that point dissolved. My correspondent, I perceived, was clearly a well-bred young man, an omoluabi worth treating with. He would not call you Uncle and then go on to give you a sandbagging.

I can still visualize his letter covering the front and one-half of the back of lined, white foolscap paper, in script that would have won a handwriting contest. He talked admiringly of my work, but dwelt on one in particular, a piece on the retirement of former Chief Justice Ayo Irikefe. The “satirical thread” was “too thin,” he said.

My Guardian colleague then, the playwright and literary scholar, Femi Osofisan, had made the same point by way of admonition, concerned that I might inadvertently get myself misunderstood or targeted unfairly for vengeful reprisal.

“Bold exaggeration,” Olaniyan counselled in the letter, “is the heart of satire.”

I wrote back to thank him, promised that I would look him up if work or pleasure took me to Ife, and urging him to feel free to stop by at Rutam House whenever he was in Lagos and had some time on his hands.

He left Nigeria not long thereafter, and unfortunately, I never got to meet him.

If I have not always delivered on the satire I had set out to write – and the “Buhari Double” episode proves conclusively that I have not — it is not for lack of instruction from a solicitous tutor whose scholarship cuts across an astonishingly wide range of issues in the arts and humanities and popular culture.

Tejumola Olaniyan, The Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and Wole Soyinka Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, died on November 30, aged 60.

May his example continue to inspire us.