In these days when the seasons are becoming less clearly defined, when snow falls in Sahara and you can venture outdoors casually dressed in midwinter as you would on a hot summer day, the coming of spring is still as eagerly awaited as of old.
Heralded by March, spring is the season of new life, of rebirth and renewal; the return of long days, when the drab uniformity of winter wardrobe yields to a riot of rich colours on the streets; when flowers come into full bloom and fill the air with their fragrance; when, to borrow from Victor Hugo, “it seems that everything laughs.”
March also marks the birthdays of many notable Nigerians, starting off with Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s on March 6, which the lady of the house proudly shares with the sage. Fittingly, Awo’s 108th posthumous birthday lecture was given by the respected historian and author, Professor Banji Akintoye, a member of the Sage’s Brains Trust and a leading member of the opposition in the Second Republic’s Senate. Compared with that legislative assembly, faults and all, what currently passes for a Senate is a sad regression.
Akintoye spoke on a subject that was always at the core of Chief Awolowo’s thoughts: the imperative of true federalism in Nigeria multinational state, and the centrality of knowledge in human affairs. He challenged Nigerian youths to emulate Awolowo who had carved a path to greatness by the time he was 40 years old
The challenge was not misplaced, considering that in Awolowo’s home state of Ogun, the school-age population reportedly knew much more about Obafemi Martins the international soccer star than they knew about Obafemi Awolowo. To shut History out of the school curriculum in Nigeria as they have done is to condemn the younger generation to a future innocent of the ennobling achievements of the past as well as its chastening lessons.
Awolowo was a polymath: economist, lawyer, journalist, philosopher, parliamentary debater, and brilliant organiser. He was also a writer of the first rank, though not generally recognised as such. Consider his Path to Nigeria’s Freedom his allocutus when he was about to be jailed on a dubious charge of treasonable felony. Consider before that his 1944 letter to a wealthy fellow Ijebu asking for an unsecured loan in the staggering amount of £1, 400 to enable him go to study law in the United Kingdom, and this summation in his autobiography AWO on the joys of lawyering.
“To engage , without bitterness or animosity, in the fiercest contention; to cultivate the habit of always examining both sides of a problem, and to present the side you espouse with forensic forcefulness and assuredness; to identify yourself with your client and to enter into his feelings as if you were the plaintiff or the defendant or the prisoner at the Bar; to propound and urge points of law which are sometimes difficult, sometimes not all too tenable, or sometimes so fine and abstruse that it is not at all easy to distinguish one point from another; to be utterly fearless and unsparing in combat; to acquire an independence of outlook in all things and to enjoy immunity in all you say and do as long as it is legitimate and within the bounds of professional etiquette; to take part in fostering the cause of justice and equity in their total impartiality before the very bulwark of the citizens’ liberty and individual freedom – all these and more are the inherent and distinctive attributes of a noble profession which I love and will forever cherish.”
That is a whale of a sentence, but also a beauty. Only a gifted writer could have pulled it off.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s 80th symbolic birthday came up on March 5, just one day before the Awo anniversary, symbolic because, like many in his generation, he has no record of his birth. Because of this gap in his personal history, he celebrated his 65th birthday twice
The anniversary marked the grand unveiling of his controversial Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, about which I had written scathingly when he embarked on it. It was gracious of him — unusually gracious, some would say — to thank Chief Olusegun Osoba, former Governor of Ogun State, for allocating the choice real estate on which the majestic edifice stands.
One day, as Obasanjo was waxing lyrical in his Otta Farm House about how the prize Awolowo had sought in vain had literally fallen into his laps, he who was reared in poverty, I interjected in a fit of impetuosity that, nevertheless, he was condemned forever to live in Awo’s shadow.
His face tightened, his eyes bulged, and his frame swelled. I surveyed the room for the nearest exit. His aides told me later that he must have a high regard for me. If any other guest had said the same thing to Obasanjo’s hearing and in his home, they said, that person would have left bearing a mark of his rage.
That was long before his second coming as a two term-president. Like all great men, he made great mistakes. But given his cumulative record of achievement and his standing in his own right as a statesman of global renown, I must now take back my taunt that he was forever condemned to live in Awo’s shadow. To his credit, he never held it against me.
Dr Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, journalist, playwright and public intellectual, was killed in a bizarre accident on March 7, two days shy of his 57th birthday. He was unassuming, personable, and full of promise. Incidentally, the accident that claimed his life occurred as he was returning to his Abuja base from the unveiling of Obasanjo’s Presidential Library.
I gather from those “on ground” that Obasanjo has issued no statement on the passing of Onukaba, his estranged protégé, biographer and collaborator.
Please, Mr President, say that this is not true.
Our much acclaimed poet and future Nobelist, Professor Niyi Osundare, turned 70 on March 12. His joy on attaining this milestone was somehow muted by the deaths in quick succession of the erudite and retiring literary scholar of the first rank, Professor Ben Obumselu, and the great Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate in Literature, Derek Walcott, both of whom he knew quite well.
His eloquent tributes to their memory say as much about him as it says of his departed friends.
Subomi Balogun, corporate lawyer, pioneer merchant banker, founder and chairman of First City Monument Bank and philanthropist, turned 83 on March 12. The celebration was modest, compared to that of the 80th as well as the 60th, which I had the pleasure of attending in his Ijebu-Ode country home in 1994 at his personal invitation.
He is still driven by the passion for excellence and Christian doctrine that made him what he is.
Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, a pivotal figure in the political landscape and prime architect of the grand coalition that swept the All Progressives Congress into power, turns 65 tomorrow. To take a good measure of his political stature and influence, look no farther than the disarray and the insolvency in which the PDP has been mired since its crushing defeat in the 2016 general election.
For the 16 years it held power, the PDP advertised itself as Africa’s biggest political party. It had ample access to resources for all manner of grandiose projects, including a N16 billion, 12-storey national headquarters, for which its well-heeled supporters and governors in PDP-controlled states plonked down more than N6 billion at the launch.
Today, the project stands abandoned, a monument to excess and misplaced priorities. Within months of losing power, the PDP could not even pay the salaries of the skeleton staff hanging out in its secretariat, for want of a better alternative.
Then consider that at the time the PDP was threatening to hold power for 60 years in the first instance, Tinubu and his associates in the Action Congress, and later in the Action Congress of Nigeria, constituted the only barrier to the PDP’s total takeover of Nigeria. Stolen election after stolen election shrank his political base in the Southwest and Edo. Abuja tightened the screws.
It was in this hostile climate that Tinubu set out to reclaim, ward by ward, constituency by constituency and state by state his base on which the PDP had foisted its visionless rule by electoral fraud on a scale almost beyond belief.
They called him “the last man standing” for good reason.
