So, what have they done to the space now?

They revoked the C of O, gave one person who made them Man of the Year award, a portion of the land for Galleria. Before then, they had been doing something, they put the Musa Yar’Adua centre there, all because of some stupid boys who are thinking that a national parastatal is their father’s property, it does not belong to the people. As chairman of an arm of UNESCO, I wrote a proposal which was accepted for the establishment of regional craft units, metallurgical centre. When I left they did magomago and they were embargoed financially by UNESCO. They thought among themselves and said ‘‘let’s bring that man who created all these things to help us out of this.” So, they brought me in as a consultant. The embargo was lifted.

That takes me to this very important project that you are doing, two volumes of coffee table books on Nigerian festivals.

Tell me, where are these festivals? They are in the rural areas. That is why you have this book. When you have something like those festivals and you support them properly, considering the multiplicity of those festivals, that means that money will go round. You could take most of those elements from the village and bring them to bear on the villages. That is domestic tourism; that is what is in there. Not just that, the type of festivals that we have, take the festivals that we have in Cross River, you bring people from Cross River and you bring them there. From there, you develop outlets for television. That was what I put in the Niger-Delta plan – that we have competitions among the states.

In 1988, we set up the traditional Wrestling Association of Nigeria, TWAN. After I left, that was the end of the association. That is what we should be having on television. We can have regional and states competitions, and then people coming from the West African Coast to compete and before you know it, it would become something big. So, do you need the emirates to invest in the national theatre?

You think it’s deeper than that?

It’s greed, just avarice.

But this is a set of people who don’t have the kind of knowledge that you have?

They are lazy people. They can’t exercise their God-given brains. And they are there with eyes that do not see and they cannot dream dreams. The only thing they use that for is to go on television and talk about the American, Martin Luther-King Jr. This is our own dream, this should be our own dream not Luther King’s dream. They have a whole faculty but they don’t dream.

The second volume of this book tries to make sense of who we are?

Not only that, the book talks about the fact that we are mistreating ourselves for nothing. The title is Between God and Man. Between and god and man, what do you have? You have lesser gods, kings, the intermediaries are all there. It means therefore that when you want to reach the intermediaries you use festivals. You have the intermidiaries, who are inter-related. And so for example you have gaya, which is an example of communal living in parts of northern Nigeria, those are the festivals. You have the ojude oba that is the new one that is coming up. Self-help is great. Tradition and some of the things we are doing are reconciled. We made efforts to reconcile the differences we have – archeological findings and others. If this man comes from a certain place, the evidence must show that he comes from there.

Wasn’t this done before? In what way does your own work make it any different?

Distortion! You base your arguments on the fact that you derive Benin art from Ife. The evidence doesn’t show. There is nothing like Benin art in Ife. But there is something documentary that Ife was somewhere else not where it is now.

How long did it take to finish these two volumes?

They are the things I have gathered since I was young. There were the things stored in my head from when I was eight years old. Part of it, for example is my journey to the place that is historically the boundary between Ife and Yorubaland. I didn’t know about the importance of carvings until I got to Lagos and saw some of the things I used to play with at the palace at Ila in the museum in Lagos. I now told the people there that ‘this is elempe’ and I sang adamude.