Not many people at an early age are privileged with the prescience of the directions their lives would take. The bulk of humanity flounder through life and at the end, the successes they encounter are not really the outcomes of well-designed lives but rather accidental bestowals of benevolent Providence. We cannot locate Professor Tunji Olaopa in this category. From childhood, the signs were visible. Like Napoleon Bonaparte, he was born to conquer the world, but not with guns and bullets but with profound knowledge. Thus, even at an early age when many of his contemporaries’ development was stiffled with filial doting, Olaopa had charted his path by embarking on a quest for knowledge.
Olaopa’s memoir, The Unending Quest for Reform is located at the interstices of his life journey, intellectual maturation and public service. Its preoccupation is not consigned to life in the swanky offices of government and international institutions. Consequently, our initial encounter with Olaopa is in rural Okeho and Aawe in Oyo State where he had precociously begun his quest for knowledge with his reading of Sketch Newspaper that was always bought by his father. Olaopa tells us that he is enamoured of books, a love that he has sustained through life. It was this precocious reading that formed his views of the world. And because he had started reading at this early age, it was not difficult for him to discover his interests and strengths in life and how best to parlay them. In his reckoning, these interests and the strengths could be better served not through the study of medicine as required by his family but through philosophy or political science. Apart from medicine, his family was also in support of his studying law. They were apprehensive that the study of philosophy or political science was divorced from the reality of life. There was the overarching question of how these seemingly abstract intellectual quests would provide food for him. But at the end of this filial struggle as regards the best career for him, Olaopa won. He chose political science which he thought aligned with his intellectual interests. He went to the University of Ibadan to pursue this interest.
Olaopa says that his ” entire life has always been defined and shaped by books. “They have been the only basis of my growth that has remained constant, apart from God and family. Books of all kinds have been the fundamental lubricants responsible for the becoming of who I think I am today, and what I think I will be tomorrow. Books were my initial avenues to untold worlds: an escape route from the restricting confines of my humble background to the worlds I could only dream of as a kid.” He was weaned on the intellectual traditions of Plato, Wole Soyinka, Obafemi Awolowo, Thomas Paine, Thomas More, Niccolò Machiavelli , Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Max Weber, Napoleon Bonaparte, and D.O. Fagunwa . In the secondary school his obsession with books culminated in his being identified with the sobriquet “isms” which suggests that ” like Nnamdi Azikiwe, I was motivated by the urgent need to enter into all literary worlds.”
Also, his professional life was inspired by the ennobling legacies in public service of Professor Ojetunji Aboyade, Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji and Allison Ayida and Prof. Akinlawon Mabogunje.
Olaopa’s life was so providentially designed that whatever he lost, was always uncannily compensated for . This was instantiated in different ways. Obviously due to his involvement in student union activism at the University of Ibadan, he failed to realise his dream of attaining higher academic goals. This seeming failure propelled him to pursue his master’s degree and even a doctorate. The sage Obafemi Awolowo died the day Olaopa was to start work with him as a private secretary. But the abortion of this dream which would have confined him to probably Ibadan if it had materialised enabled him to get a job at MAMSER that eventually etched him in the public imagination. His premature retirement from the public service rather paved the way for his making a career in academia and becoming a professor.
It was at MAMSER where Olaopa was expressing his opinions in the newspapers that he was ferreted out by former Military President Ibrahim Babangida who was impressed with his writings. Babangida brought Olaopa to the presidency which became the watershed of his public service. From beginning as a speech writer in the presidency, Olaopa worked in different departments and climaxed his public service as a permanent secretary.
Olaopa’s journey in the public service was hallmarked by a desire for reforms. He was actuated by the desire to transform the civil service into a hub for national development. It was this desire that birthed his pursuing his doctorate. He was not interested in pursuing a doctorate that would gather dust and cobwebs on the shelf of a university after spending many years of research to get it. Rather, he wanted a doctorate that would serve as an answer to the question of why the Nigerian civil service was not a contributing factor to the optimisation of the country’s potential.
Even after experiencing first-hand the intrigues and treacheries of the civil service and being prematurely retired, Olaopa has not been deterred from seeking how to reform it. He has thus seized every opportunity to express his ideas on the best way to reform it. These ideas are found in his plethora of academic articles, newspaper opinions and books. In fact, to further give expression to his quest for the reform of the public service, Olaopa set up the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP) after retirement. Through lectures and seminars, Olaopa has used this institution to point the direction for the public service. As an intellectual, Olaopa does not hesitate to reveal his ancestral spiritual roots that have influenced his life. We are reminded of the inter-play of what Ali Mazrui in his documentary The Africans: A Triple Heritage refers to as Islam, Christianity and traditional African religion in the lives of the people of formerly colonised people. But in Olaopa’s life, the Christian faith eventually became the most dominant. It is thus not surprising that Olaopa equates the public service with service in Christianity. If Olaopa could not be a priest in the church, he could feel satisfied that he was in service as a public servant. As he tells us: ” The public service, from its origin at several points in history ( from the Jewish Levitical order to the ancient Pharaonic society) was conceived as a selfless priestly or scribal service to either God ( in the case of the Hebrews) or to a demi-god ( in the case of the ancient Egyptians).This automatically speaks to an inherent sense of the public service as a calling ( in a similar way that the Levitical Order was called and constituted.)”
At the beginning of their marriage, Olaopa’s wife was apprehensive that his love for books might not provide food and meet other family’s needs. As he tells us, “My wife would later worry about my fixation with books and introspection. This is all the more because of societal expectations – the one that motivated my grandmother’s philosophy of excellence as physical toiling and demands more from a man more than just pushing his eyes into books. For the Yoruba, an alakowe (book person) is almost a dunce – someone that is disconnected from the reality of life and its many struggles. “But Olaopa’s wife and the members of his family who thought that he had made wrong career choices, would no doubt be impressed with how his life has turned out having attained the zenith of public service as a permanent secretary and that of academic career as a professor. These were preceded by his quest for reforms and intellectual pursuits taking him to the Commonwealth, the World Bank, the United Nations and other global and professional institutions.
Olaopa tells us that the demand to write his memoir came from his children. Having accomplished this mission, it is clear how much loss to Nigeria and all of humanity it would have been if it was not written. Still, there is the haunting danger that humanity would lose a study of the inspiring life of Olaopa if he does not provide a fuller version of his memoir. In this regard, it is not only his children who want to learn how he has conquered the challenges of private and public lives. The readers who have been enchanted by this first volume of his The Unending Quest for Reform that details the ” difficulty of the reform business” that is ” matched by the difficulty of the reform context in Nigeria” await the second volume that would explore his fuller life as a private citizen, a reformer and a public intellectual.
Paul Onomuakpokpo, PhD
Former Editor, The Guardian Newspaper &
Publisher, New Times Online,
Lagos
