If you are born poor, It is not your mistake If you die poor, it is your mistake. —Bill Gates
Two of Professor Oladipo Adamolekun’s exceptional traits are his power of recall and his penchant for excellence. The power of recall has propelled him to the pinnacle of the academic profession, beginning with a First Class degree in French at the University of Ibadan to an outstanding DPhil (Oxford’s equivalent of a PhD) in Administration at Oxford University. After an outstanding academic career at the University Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), where he rose to the deanship, he joined the World Bank in Washington, D.C., in the United States for another distinguished career.
I have known Ladi, as he is fondly known among his close associates, since his secondary school days at Oyemekun Grammar School, Akure, and followed him from a distance through Christ School, Ado-Ekiti, and the University of Ibadan. For his doctorate, he went to Oxford University in England. He had completed his doctorate before I embarked on mine at the University of California at Berkeley, USA.
We never went to the same schools but we were contemporaries. However, he was always ahead of me. His father’s early embrace of literacy education gave him a head-start. So, while he was sent to Elementary School, as Primary School was then called, I was apprenticed to a diviner to acquire the secrets of Ifa divination. The gap in our years in school came partly from differences in the early paths to which our parents directed us and partly from my three-year affliction by the yaws (ògòdò) epidemic of the 1940s to early 1950s. Yaws was eventually eradicated in Nigeria by penicillin, after it became widely used in the mid fifties.
Although Ladi and I only knew about each other during these years, it was only at Ife that we met in the early 1970s as lecturers. Even then, we were never close. Our friendship grew only in our retirement years, when he moved to Iju and I to Idanre, via Akure. Since then, we’ve been exchanging visits. We even developed a monthly lunch date with our common friend, Professor Kole Omotoso.
Today, we exchange ideas virtually on a daily basis, via phone calls, email, and WhatsApp to keep us both socially and intellectually engaged. He promptly responds to any and all messages from me, while I struggle to catch up with him!
It is to his power of recall and penchant for excellence that I dedicate this tribute today, July 20, 2022, as he turns 80.
We tend to tie the idea of remembering with the act of recalling the past. We normally do this by digging into the store of data in our memory. But we know that memory can fail, especially as we age. The ancient Sumerians and Egyptians were the first to provide alternative to cognitive recall. They devised a means for externalizing memory, by inventing writing. The Sumerians used reeds to record on clay surface about the same time that the Egyptians were also developing hieroglyphic writing. One of the earliest uses of writing was for list making for commercial and administrative purposes.
With advances in technology and the advent of electronic (digital) writing, we began to store information on disk or a local or distant server (otherwise known as the cloud). Bill Gates, author of the above quote, and the late Steve Jobs were among the earliest developers of electronic writing and the cloud for storing data.
One of the early devices used for storing information for long-term use is the diary in which events and notable developments are recorded, using manual writing. Among my circle of friends, Professor Ladi Adamolekun is the best user of the diary for record keeping, a trait he apparently inherited from his father. In recent years, he has been employing digital writing for the same purpose.
His autobiography, I Remember (2016), employed, among others, data from introspection (memory recall) and diaries, notes, and letters. A keen sense of observation and involvement also aided the recall of specific events. The first set of diaries was kept by his father and by his mother. His father was only minimally literate, while the mother was completely non-literate. But she employed scribes to record in notebooks important information about her children and notes on her trading activities.
The second set of diaries was his own, which he started keeping in 1962 at age 19. To enhance his diary-keeping habits, he moved from yearly to 5-year diaries in 1986. As he finally embarked on writing I Remember (2016) Adamolekun decided to write 52 weekly recollections from January to December 2013. His new monograph, Nigeria and I, being launched today to mark his 80th birthday, may well have used the diary as a source of data.
Diaries and other devices used for storing information are useful not only for remembering the past but also for planning for the future. Diaries are like looking back to see where, why, and how you fell in order to prevent a reoccurrence in the future. It is in this sense that diaries are also about remembering the future, as indicated in the title of the above title.
Even more importantly, Ladi has used the art of remembering to excel in school and in the workplace in order to secure a profitable future for himself. In other words, he has ensured that he would not make the mistake of dying poor.
Ladi’s knack for excellence came from various sources, including domestic discipline, attending the best schools, and working in the best environments. His punctuality and sense of responsibility come from his penchant for excellence. It is no wonder then that he has always been among the few outstanding achievers, wherever he went to school or worked.
It is heartwarming, therefore, that Nigeria recognizes him as an outstanding and productive scholar, by awarding him the Nigerian National Order of Merit. As of February 2022, only 79 Nigerians have been so recognized since the Award was established 43 years ago.
No one should be surprised, therefore, that Ladi is intolerant of failure, tardiness, and avoidable loose edges, although he understands that they happen.
Finally, I thank Yemi Adamolekun for inviting me to contribute to a book of Tributes, which gave rise to this contribution. Here’s to my friend’s toast as I wish him many more years of healthy, peaceful, restful, and productive life.