Tag: Boroffice

His driver dropped me at the door with his official SUV registration number “Sen 98” of his magnificent residence in the high-brow Asokoro area of Abuja at exactly 9:45 a.m. on New Year’s Eve. I would be meeting him for the second time. The first was at the APC Presidential Convention in Lagos where I had a brief chat with the senator representing Ondo North Senatorial district, Prof. Robert Ajayi Boroffice. The convention meeting was a chance encounter because he had stopped to greet his colleague, Ganiyu Solomon with whom I was having a discussion. I had called him a couple of days after the announcement of Prof. Yemi Osinbajo as Buhari’s running mate for an exclusive interview for a special publication currently in the works.

It took the driver a few more minutes to get someone’s attention from the inside that he had arrived with yours truly. His daughter eventually came and slightly opened the door to verify. Prof. Boroffice subsequently came and ushered me inside. He quickly led me through a short labyrinth into an obscure small room. In the room, it dawned on me why it had taken a little longer for someone to come out and why the senator had asked me, briskly, in the foyer, that he hoped I was a Christian. The senator, with his army of three that included himself; his wife and his young daughter were in the midst of their morning devotion. His wife (also a professor) had apparently put her prayers on hold for her husband to let his visitor in. They all took turns to pray. Sitting beside him, the senator signaled that I pray. My prayers, in Yoruba, my preferred language for communing with the Creator effectively rounded up the family’s morning devotion.

You probably would be disappointed if your idea of having a good and quality time with Senator Boroffice was to gulp choice wines and exotic spirits with such a man of means. He doesn’t drink and could not take you to an exclusive club specially created for his kind because he doesn’t belong to any. Aside his family and his senate duties and reading, the only other frills in the life of the senator are the two Christian fellowship centres he had helped to establish, which takes the remainder of his time. But what you would have missed in the frivolities of drinking would no doubt be made up in deep and robust intellectual discourse with him, enough to get you dazed for days and more compelling to wake you up in the middle of the night to ponder over. His vision seems timeless. Since he had told me that he really didn’t plan to go anywhere that day, my strategy was to let the discourse take us wherever it wanted but would discreetly drop what I wanted him to speak more about in form of a statement rather than a question. This was to enable me to see through the man inside the white apparel. He did not disappoint. I always believe that you tend to know the real person not necessarily by the quality of the interview s/he gives you but from an atmosphere of general conversations that would give you a good view of his worldview and his values, if you’re discerning.

Just the two us in the comfort of his living room (his wife had left almost immediate after the morning devotion), the senator and I conversed, from the mundane things of human existence, the intrigues behind the intrigue of Nigerian politics to the serious issues of our time in the first six of my nine hours of being with him. With Boroffice, you are under no illusion as to where he stands on issues. He is atypical. I found out during our discussion that three things would make his eyes glow with passion and these are science, the Nigerian nation and his Ondo State. It never occurred to me how hopeless we are as a nation until he analyzed the state of science in our national development. With his lucid explanations, I came away that our leaders – and the people themselves – see science and technology as integral to the cultures of other countries and alien to us. Therefore, whatever happens (or didn’t happen) in the scientific ‘stratosphere’ is for them to worry about. One also gets the feeling that our leaders act as if they’re scared of this inevitable developmental tool. After all, you tend to be afraid of what you don’t understand. I couldn’t agree more with him when he declared that “No nation can advance technologically without addressing science and technology because science is the engine room for growth, economic development and technology advancement…And if we’re not prepared to invest in that sector, we’re only going to be consumers of technology and not its creator. And there’s a big difference.”

You cannot fail to recognize how versed this senator is with his ready answers to the myriad of problems confronting the Nigerian nation that you wonder whether researching the nation’s problems was all he ever did. However, his passionate advocacy for the introduction of Genetically Modified (GM) foods into the country’s food supply was discomfiting to me. Although his position on this issue is no doubt driven by his unflinching desire to have science, his first love, to be, and rightly so, in the epicentre of all aspects of our national development but I cannot see why we should be in haste for GM foods when there’re hundreds of thousands hectares of our land yet to be cultivated for organically grown foods. Do we have our own scientists to genetically modify our own seeds? Are the country’s healthcare system and the drug manufacturing concerns sophisticated enough to handle the unintended, health-related consequence of GM foods? How do we make sure that the GM seeds by either Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) were not intentionally injected (I remember the Tuskegee Airmen) with something far more detrimental, if not lethal, to our health and future? Why are we being asked to think GM when the people with the wherewithal in Europe and North America are suspicious of GM foods? These are some of the questions that made me feel uncomfortable with the senator’s position on GM foods.

As a research scientist of international repute, a consummate administrator, a lecturer that spanned many years, a senator, a devout Christian and philanthropist, I can now see why Boroffice’s name was shortlisted as a running mate from the South-west to General Mohammadu Buhari. While one is not oblivious of the intense, high power political intrigues that usually characterizes national political contests, which may have been responsible for his being dropped as Buhari’s running mate, it beats my imagination that Senator Robert Ajayi Boroffice was not the candidate of the then ACN in the 2012 governorship election in Ondo State. On whether he might consider running for governor in the post-Mimiko government, which is being anticipated by the people of the state to be sooner rather than later, Boroffice said he’s happy being in the senate. But he quickly added a rider: “It would be a social contract between me and the people. We would reach an agreement that they would cooperate with me in prescribing the right medicine, which might sometimes be bitter for their liking. I will declare my assets. My wife and children will declare their assets. My close associates will declare their assets…At the end of my tenure, my wife and I and my children and my close associates will again declare our assets so that the people can see what has been stolen and what has not been stolen. The proceedings of the state Executive Council meetings would be published on a weekly basis…” so that “anyone who has something contrary to what is published can come forward to challenge us.”

This is what I called “The Boroffice Doctrine.” How I wish this senator is the next governor of my state after the profligate Mimiko administration.

• Odere is a media practitioner. He can be reached at femiodere@gmail.com