Femi Olugbile

Things seemed to come to him easy, but in reality his physical effort was only sequel to a meticulous effort of thought, and an unwavering self-belief. From Aro he went on to start the Psychiatry Unit at the University College in Ibadan. In time he became its first Professor. By his sheer effort of will, he ensured that Mental Health would never be consigned to the backwaters, but would always have a central prominence in the Ibadan scheme of things.

In the fullness of time, he became Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan.
Culture flowered in the days of the Lambos in the Vice Chancellor’s lodge. People, not just lecturers, were expected to dress well and act with a certain decorum. The Lambos’ sitting room was a lively gathering place for the friends of their sons who wandered in to eat Mrs Lambo’s food, or partake of the genteel conversation that ebbed and flowed. As Layi Erinosho, Professor of Sociology, and one of that privileged class would recount, Professor Lambo would always smile at you, then ask you seriously what you wanted to do with your life. And try to guide you.

He was a natural, self-appointed guide who had a habit of immediately taking people under his wing, especially those he perceived to have talent and possibility. Some of these people were his professional colleagues who were only a few years younger than he. They became known as ‘the Lambo boys’.

When he left Ibadan for an appointment with the World Health Organisation as Assistant – later Deputy – Director General, the rituals and solidarity of the Lambo boys solidified, rather than attenuate. He took the responsibility of guiding his ‘boys’ and opening doors for them in his stride, as a natural part of his duty. In return he expected them to do him the honour of always walking in his train. When he came home on his occasional visits from Switzerland, he expected ‘the boys’ to be at the airport in Ikeja to receive him. From there perhaps they would stop somewhere to have lunch, or drive in a convoy from Lagos to Ibadan, he standing out in their midst or in their fore like royalty. ‘Boys’ like Jide Osuntokun and Bode Akindele were all the while rising in the ranks of their own profession – whether it was Psychiatry or Neurology, and becoming internationally acclaimed experts. But they remained his ‘boys’, and were happy to be so called.

The mentoring attitude never departed from him, even after Geneva, even in retirement. Other ‘boys’ – doctors who had nothing to do with mental health at all but had interests in different specializations, including the then-nascent discipline of Managed Care – like Ebun Sonaiya and Kunle Hassan would cluster around his home in Maryland to speak to him, to learn from him, often to profit from his vast wealth of international and local contacts. He was the patron of this and the Chairman of that. But what really mattered was that he was the mentor of all.

You would remember the sessions of one-on-one conversation you had with him in his library, in his last few years. His eyes always had a penetrating glint, even while his body ailed. He always dressed up, even when he was only going to sit in the library and pore over his volumes. At one time you toyed with the idea of asking to do his biography, and getting the measure of his psychology. Perhaps he would not like to read it. Or perhaps it would amuse him to be finally disclosed and freed of the saintly image? Worms were sure to come crawling out of all the corners of the can. There were all those rumours about how he had a way with the ladies, but would not have one hair out of place, or his pocket square one centimetre off from its accustomed position by the time he went home to the love of his life – Diane.

Towards the end, he worried always about Nigeria. He was appalled at the goings-on in Politics. It was not right, to him, that the past appeared to be better than the present. As a measure of his despair, he began to advocate that everybody who aspired to political leadership should have his head examined by a psychiatrist. In your conversations, and in public discourse, he went back to the subject with unflagging regularity.

And yet he, more than anybody else, knew the pitfalls of that position, surely. Who would order the ‘test’? What would be done with the information? Come to think of it, who was a ‘normal’ person? What about the psychiatrists themselves – some of the eminent colleagues he had attended conferences with in his career had been Nazis and the holders of other offensive political and racial doctrines, despite the fact of being mental health specialists. And more harm had been done to humanity – surely – by ‘sane’ people than by ‘mad’ people – what about that?

Your last vision of him was when you went to see him on his sick bed in a quiet little clinic in Ikeja GRA. He was floating in and out of wakefulness, but he was still the polite, urbane and cultured Thomas Adeoye Lambo who was mentor to everybody. He wanted to know when your next book would be published. Unspoken between you was the certainty that he would not be around to be chairman of the book launch, as he had been the last one.
A few days after this, he was dead.

The world had lost a great soul. Nigeria had lost a great Intelligence. Several generations of Nigerian health professionals had lost their mentor.

Today is not a landmark anniversary, or any anniversary at all, and for a fleeting moment as you write this piece, you are wondering why you are thinking about Adeoye Lambo. Perhaps it is an unconscious feeling you have not done enough in his memory. Perhaps it is the endless shenanigans of Nigerian politicians, wallowing in infamy, or the specter of an apparently unstable President Donald Trump in the USA bragging to the world about the size of the nuclear button on his desk. All the scenarios arouse in the thinking mind the old worry about how to protect human kind from politicians, the same worry that afflicted the mind of ADEYEMO Lambo to his dying day.

On Friday the thirteenth of March, 2009, at an auditorium in LASUTH, you had celebrated the fifth anniversary of his death by gathering mental health specialists and a cross-section of the general public to listen to a lecture by a professor of Psychiatry from the Ibadan department founded by Lambo on the state of mental health in Nigeria. For two hours, they had sat still to absorb unhappy information about the terrible state of mental health services in the nation. You could only imagine that if Lambo had been present in the hall, the news would have depressed him greatly, and he might have wondered if his great effort in bringing the giants of World Psychiatry to Abeokuta over half a century ago had been all for nothing.

The foreign visitors, and their local hosts – Lambo and Asuni, must have thought in those few days of the conference so many years ago that Nigeria was a land of promise, and a beacon of hope for Africa.

Would they still think the same today?

May the soul of Thomas Adeoye Lambo rest in perfect peace. Amen.

…Dr. Femi Olugbile, a psychiatrist, an award winning novelist and former Permanent Secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Health