Two weeks ago, they buried the remains of the University of Ibadan historian, Dr Gabriel Akindele Akinola, in Ugbole, in the Ekiti country, the hometown of the legendary Daniel Ojo, who through sheer mental prowess and uncommon doggedness, rose through the grinding poverty in which he was reared, made his way to Cambridge, earned a doctorate in physics, and became, reputedly, the first African professor of geophysics.
Akinola would have been embarrassed, scandalised even, to be mentioned in the same breath as Ojo Ugbole, for he was the quintessence of modesty and self-effacement. But he was a first rate scholar in his own right, and a gentleman to boot.
It is necessary to dwell on those twin attributes, because there are scholars, even great scholars, who cannot be called gentlemen. There are also gentlemen who labour in the academy and other knowledge-production centres who cannot be called scholars. Akinola belonged in the select breed of outstanding scholars who are also fine gentlemen.
It was my good fortune to encounter him in 1971, in a section of the General African Studies course he was teaching at the University of Lagos. The class met in a large, windowless room, at the basement of the Main Library. It usually overflowed with students, scores of whom would have arrived some two hours earlier to start class at 8 o’clock in the morning.
The entire setting was a fire marshal’s nightmare. The hall had only one exit. Once in a while, I would entertain the scary thought: What if a fire broke out? The University did not even have a fire service back then.
Akinola stepped into the lecture room that morning, a box containing pieces of chalk and a duster in one hand (ah, those analog days!), a sheaf of papers in the other, walked with quiet dignity to the front of the room and took his position at the lectern, and introduced himself.
There were no airs about him. On the contrary, it was as if he had set out deliberately to carry no airs about him. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt tucked into a pair of knee-length khaki shorts, and could easily have been mistaken for an older student.
His crisp, precise and cultivated elocution immediately endeared him to me. His mastery of the material and the verve with which he imparted it showed that the man at the lectern was no accidental teacher but a scholar. When the lecture was over, I could hardly wait for the next one. And so it was for the six weeks or so that he taught the African History section of General African Studies.
He transferred to the University of Ibadan shortly thereafter. I never forgot the man, and I never forgot the material that transported us the class to exotic places like Kush and Nubia and Meroe and Axum. These places would come vividly to mind some two decades later when I was on assignment in Ethiopia.
Sometime during the mid-80’s a submission signed “G. A. Akinola” arrived at my desk at The Guardian, where I was Editorial Page Editor. I recognised the name instantly, and literally devoured the piece. The elegant phrasing, the scholarly exposition that had endeared its author to me back at the University of Lagos perfused the article. It was impeccable through and through, an editor’s delight. I scheduled it for immediate publication.
Then I followed up with a letter to Akinola introducing myself as his grateful admirer and former student at Akoka, and asked if he would be kind enough to favour The Guardian with his occasional interventions in the national policy dialogue.
That was when I discovered the Gentleman in the Scholar.
His response overwhelmed me. You would think I was the former teacher, and he the grateful student and admirer. Such humility; such solicitude for my progress and well-being, and so many words of encouragement and support at every turn, laced with wisdom and uttered with deep feeling.
Every so often, he would send me articles for publication. The last one I recall receiving from him at The Guardian before I left Rutam House, following the paper’s banning by the Abacha regime, was in 1994, and it was titled “Lest we regret.” Full of historical insight, it was a brilliantly prophetic piece about Nigeria’s future under Abacha.
Subsequently, he forwarded his contributions to me for publication in The NATION. Over the years, his submissions never lost his graceful exposition and compelling logic. Every word was in place. You could not take out a phrase or paragraph without ruining the architecture.
Not once did Akinola ask for the modest honorarium we pay for each article. The desire to share his knowledge and advance the public good was what animated him. These are the marks of a true public intellectual.
When Akinola discovered that his friend and confidant, the celebrated poet Niyi Osundare, is also a close friend of mine, his solicitude turned into doting affection. Whenever I was visiting from the United States, he kept track of my movements. In this age of kidnappers, please do not take your personal safety for granted, he would counsel, especially whenever I was going to my hometown Kabba, in Kogi State.
He made contact invariably by telephone. He never cottoned on to the Internet and all that.
In a moving tribute, the historian, Emeritus Professor Akinjide Osuntokun remarked that if Akinola’s published scholarship was not voluminous, it was largely because Akinola did not subscribe to the “publish or perish” code of the university system, which often privileges sheer plenitude over quality. Akinola set his own targets and strived to attain them to the best of his great ability.
Dr Akinola paid me what I regard as the ultimate compliment when, in 2014, he journeyed from Ibadan with Professor Osundare to Lagos to attend events marking my 70th birthday. He looked rather frail. I would gather later that he had been ill, but had insisted on making the trip.
He died three weeks ago, aged 82.
Farewell, sir, and thank you, sir, for your great personal example and your public spirit. You have left us, but that example endures, and guides us still.
The State and Dr Saraki
Senate President Bukola Saraki has no sterner critic than this column, right from when he was Governor of Kwara State.
It has remarked his overweening sense of entitlement, his predilection for cutting corners, his disdain for rules and process, and his serial disregard of the precept of noblesse oblige.
Saraki’s proxies have in return threatened the column with defamation lawsuits and dismissed it as a front for the APC leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.
I thought I should state all this upfront.
As I was finishing this column on Sunday night – six hours behind Lagos time — to meet a Monday morning deadline, the usually sedate online newspaper Premium Times flashed this headline: “IGP Idris gets Buhari’s nod to arrest Saraki over murders.”
This has got to be one of the most dramatic newspaper headlines in recent memory. And it raises a troubling: question: With whom does the power to authorise prosecutions lie, based on the evidence available: The President, or the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice?
At this writing, the details are sketchy. The whole thing centres on the recent robberies in Offa, in Kwara State, during which nine policemen and 26 other persons were killed. Some of the suspects reportedly claimed in confessional statements that the arms found on them were handed to them by, or purchased with help from, Saraki.
Saraki seems to have anticipated this development when he announced sensationally two weeks ago on the Senate floor that IGP Idris was set to frame him on a murder charge, mobilised the Senate to denounce the alleged scheme, led a Senate team to brief President Buhari and urge him to step in.
Recall that the Senate had engaged in a running battle to get IGP Idris to come testify on issues related to law enforcement, notably the recent arrest and detention of the dissolute Senator Dino Melaye (nPDP/APC Kogi West).
Recall also, that following the IGP’s refusal to honour the invitation, the Saraki-led Senate declared him “an enemy of democracy” and a person “unfit to hold any public office within Nigeria and outside.”
Saraki’s followers must have been stunned by the latest development, especially coming when elements of the nPDP, of which he is the arrowhead, are set to defect to the rump of the PDP ahead of the 2019 General Elections so as to wrest power from the APC and stop Buhari from clinging to power.
Saraki’s sworn opponents, on the other hand, as well as those envious of his political profile, may well be gloating, saying that he had it coming and that it serves him right.
That would be wrong, and egregiously prejudicial.
Only the courts can pronounce one way or the other on the issue, and they must be allowed to do their work without any interference. Any prosecution arising from this matter must be transparent and expeditious. And the end must be what all judicial processes worthy of that designation seek in the final analysis: Justice.
