Attaining half-a-century is a noteworthy achievement, especially in a country like ours where average life expectancy is below this landmark for both male and female. It gets more important when such life has been lived in pursuit of excellence and helping others to achieve their full potentials.
Babatunde Aloysius Ahonsi’s life is a lesson in humility and excellence. Turning 50 on February 27 is, however, a noteworthy event even when he refused to have any elaborate celebration, which is very typical of him, as many of us who have interacted and worked with him at different levels know. But Nigerians have a duty to examine his life closely and see the lessons we can glean from it. It is doubtful if a critical analysis of our developmental efforts as a country in the areas of maternal and child health, HIV and AIDS, and gender empowerment in the last two decades would not reveal his imprint in all. Whether as a lecturer at the Universities of Ilorin, Calabar, and Lagos, or as a senior programme officer in the West Africa office of the Ford Foundation, or currently as Country Director for Population Council in Nigeria, his life has been geared towards rescuing children from a myriad of diseases, ensuring pregnant and nursing women live life to the fullest, and lifting women from the shackles which our tradition and religion have bound them with.
He has also made stellar contributions to scholarship as his copious papers on health, development, and gender issues are everywhere for all to read. Even when he left the university environment formally in 1997, he has remained attached to the system in churning out papers regularly and actually planning to return to academics fully later in his life. BAA, as colleagues and friends affectionately call him, graduated with a first class honours in Sociology from the University of Lagos and a doctorate in Population Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science which he undertook as a Commonwealth Scholar between 1988 and 1992.
BAA is a winner of over 20 awards for academic excellence and professional distinction since 1985, and he has been a Visiting Young Fellow at the Population Institute for Research and Training at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA (1993), a Laureate at the 1st Gender Institute by CODESRIA, Dakar, Senegal (1994), and a World Bank-Robert McNamara Fellow (1995-6). He has also been actively involved in technical assistance to several Nigerian NGOs working on gender equity and sexual and reproductive health, and to major not for-profit companies on CSR issues. Highlights of his professional career in the last 17 years include helping to catalyse the school-based provision of comprehensive sexuality education for young people in Nigeria, the empowerment of persons living with HIV and AIDS in national responses to the epidemic, and the inter-linking of reproductive health education for poor youth and women with economic empowerment approaches. His newspaper articles have not been as regular as when he used to write a weekly newspaper column but appearing rather sparingly possibly due to the nature of his current assignment.
Our paths crossed in 2003 even though his name has featured repeatedly in conversations with some friends before then. What struck me that time and till now is his simplicity in dressing and approach to issues with a knack for breaking down complex stuff to easily understandable parts. Until recently when I asked him his mother tongue, it was difficult placing him particularly within the prism of that usually confusing phrase, “state of origin” as most of our discussions are held in Yoruba which he speaks very fluently having grown up in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital. “Ogbeni, ki lo n happen?” he would intone in his baritone voice anytime we speak. More often than not, he plays the roles of a teacher, counsellor, sociologist, and educator whenever we speak. His cosmopolitan outlook has, however, not stopped him from supporting his homestead. BAA sits on the board of Otuo Microfinance Bank in Edo State.
His undying love for Nigeria remains unparalleled and he would always intone, “Let’s keep hope alive, Nigeria is our country,” even when situation appears to be going contrary. Despite numerous opportunities to live outside the country, he has consistently refused to do so saying “Nigeria si ma da,” loosely translated: Nigeria will still get better. Whenever I asked him why he remained so eternally optimistic about Nigeria, he always answered that our abundant potentials in human and natural resources properly harnessed will surely do wonders and that he sees his life-long occupation as giving hope to Nigerians. He does not relate with anybody on the basis of ethnicity but solely on the fact that such person is a human being and that’s why his friends cut across the entire country and outside.
He is also devoted to his family even when his career has forced him to live a peripatetic life recognising it as the hub for a successful and productive life. Babatunde – he loves that name greatly – is married to Francisca Ahlijah and they have two sons, Arenma and Osaemi. A devout Catholic who is not loud but whose life is an epitome of Christian virtues; he is an active participant in his community whether in the neighbourhood where he lives, the churches he worships both in Lagos and Abuja, and the schools his sons attend. He readily offers his skills and intellect in all these places. And for those of us his younger friends, he is the elder brother we don’t have offering us shade from the vicissitudes of life whenever we need it.
I wish I could speak Otuo, a variant of the Bini language spoken in parts of Owan East LGA of Edo State, and wish him a Happy Birthday using the language. But this tribute suffices, and it comes with a prayerful wish that surely the best part of his life is still ahead.
Fatade is a journalist in Lagos.
