Professors Niyi Osundare, left, and Tunji Dare.jpg

(Olatunji Dare as Splendid Exemplum)

Niyi Osundare

Soon after Chief Olusegun Obasanjo won the presidential election of 1999 and started compiling a list of possible cabinet members and principal chieftains of the most important government parastatals, the rumour began to spread that Olatunji Dare was already in for a fat one. Some curious speculators said he was already penned down for a cabinet post, possibly as Minister of Information; some swore he was one of those being considered for plum ambassadorial postings; others speculated that a special temple was being built for him in Aso Rock where he would be the supreme deity in charge of all presidential discourse and high priest of presidential speech writers. Those behind these rumours were only wrong in the detail of their speculations, not in the principle behind them; for, in the end, Olatunji Dare was nominated for the post of Managing Director and Chief Executive of Daily Times, then the largest newspaper conglomerate in Nigeria and one of the hugest in Africa.

Now, let us wind back the tape a little bit and capture some of the spirit of that period. It was surely a time of giddy euphoria, of general good will, and generosity towards matters relating to government. After so many years of devastating military rule, including nine years of perfidious, nation-wrecking by General Ibrahim Babangida, and five by General Sani Abacha, the most hellishly murderous dictator in Nigeria’s history so far, a new chapter was opening in the annals of the country. Civil rule was back again. There was an air of freedom and cautious optimism; a certain feeling of relief that the brutes were back in the barracks. And Chief Obasanjo, the new President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, came in with an appreciable measure of public approval, even good will, from compatriots who remembered his scathing and relentless criticism of Babangida’s military dictatorship (especially its homicidal IMF-instigated economic policies), and his close-to-death experience in General Abacha’s gulag. The new President therefore enjoyed, at that initial stage, a degree of sympathy and public support that was bound to redound on whoever chose or accepted to work with him.

So, accepting an appointment from this new man was considered patriotic, even enviable, by many observers already aware of Olatunji Dare’s sterling qualities as a journalist and his impeachable standing as a person. Besides, in the view of many observers, there was some logic to this offer: Dare was known for many years as Obasanjo’s speech writer and intellectual sparring partner and advisor. So this new position was something close to a payback or reward which the giver was eager to dispense and which the prospective recipient could not afford to refuse.

I read about this new appointment in the newspapers. Three or four friends also called me from Nigeria, congratulating me on my friend’s good fortune. But my response to those friends was ‘let’s wait and see’. A strong, instinctive hunch curtailed my enthusiasm and played havoc with my eagerness to hail and holler. For the Dare I know is not the kind of hound who jumps at this kind of meat; not the fortune-seeker who milks personal contacts and professional relationships for appointment to public office and access to political largesse. No. Despite the Babangidan doctrine that every Nigerian has a price (you only have to name it!) and the general Nigerian subscription to the come-and-chop policy of public service, I was sure there were still a few constant stars in our beleaguered firmament whose invigorating glow has not been dulled or occluded by the fog of rank opportunism. Even a couple of days later when word reached me that the other new overseas-based appointees had already hit the plane and landed in Nigeria to joyous celebration by expectant friends and families, I was sure that the Dare I knew would not snap up what in the typical Nigerian situation amounted to a political bait.

One long week passed and Dare’s name never showed up on the manifest of any of the planes bound for Nigeria; there was no news of a festive airport welcome or generous congratulation parties by family members and professional colleagues with ingratiating gifts and remember-me-later smiles. The newspapers ran dry on a former speech-writer suddenly come to great fortune through the ascension of his former beneficiary now turned benefactor with unlimited benefits. Who would not seek or strive to be close to the occupier of one of the most powerful (read imperial) presidencies in Africa, nay, the world? How many Nigerians could afford to miss this golden opportunity to reap where they had so tirelessly sown? One week later, I was on the phone to Olatunji Dare. “Onigegeewura (the One-with-the-Golden-Pen: for that is my oriki for him), what are you still doing here in the USA? Haven’t you heard about the red carpet waiting for you at Abuja airport and your new designation in our new dispensation? Don’t tell me you’re still dirtying your princely fingers with those flaky pieces of chalk, and working your eyes red over mountains of student scripts. Abi you no wan chop?”. A master satirist himself, Dare knew both the cause and complexion of my sarcasm, and he replied in kind. “I’m still here”, he said, “I have no intention to change jobs”. The thunder of our laughter could be heard from Peoria to Abuja.

And so Dare turned down (or just refused to take up) an appointment as Managing Director and Chief Executive of the Times empire. He did so not out of disrespect for President Obasanjo who nominated him to the post; for although he was gravely disappointed at many aspects of the Obasanjo presidency especially in its second term, he still talks nostalgically about the statesmanship and vision of the man in his pre-Presidential Otta Farm days, and the great leader he would have become had he not allowed the so-called ‘Nigerian Factor’ to diminish him into just another Nigerian ruler. Besides, Olatunji Dare is a man who lays much store by fidelity to friendship and loyalty in all dealings. When I hear him criticize the former President, he does so with the sensitivity and concern of one who regrets the failings of a friend and wishes he had been able to do better.

But how could Dare have turned down an offer which thousands if not millions of his colleagues would have given an arm and a leg to grab? How could he have thrown so recklessly away a golden opportunity to tap to the tinniest drop the spring of personal and political contact he had nurtured over the years which would now guarantee him limitless and unfettered access to Aso Rock, Nigeria’s seat of profitable power? How could he have pulled off this act of supreme virtue in a country not generously blessed with a crop of conscientious intellectuals? For, it is common knowledge that virtually every Nigerian professor is a classroom teacher by day and political job-seeker by night (In some desperate cases, the search for political preferment is a 24-hour job and lifetime engagement). Nigeria has more than its usual quota of palace professors and learned lobby  jerks pounding government office pavements and genuflecting to powerful office holders young enough to be their own children or intellectually low enough to be their pupils. Like Professor in my play The State Visit, that weather-worn, pathetically obsequious penguin who bows at the drop of every command from the dictator’s mouth, no amount of insult is enough to assuage their desperation, no level of degradation, is enough to prick their suborned ego.

We remember with sobering reality the derisive comments of one of the military governors during the dark days of the Babangida dictatorship, who chastised Nigerian academics and their insatiable appetite for political office. He said something to this effect “Many of these university teachers have double faces. They write long words in the newspapers; they shout big words on radio and television, abusing government and abusing us. But they chase us everywhere. They crowd the waiting room in our offices and the corridors of the Governor’s mansion. They try to bribe my ADC, my personal assistant, even my gardener – just anyone they think can facilitate access to the Governor. They send their traditional rulers. I say this, and I’m not exaggerating: in my first week in office as Governor I had a trunk full of unsolicited cv’s and application letters from university teachers. Yes, in just one week, and I just kept asking myself, are things this bad in the universities? Why are these professors so desperate to abandon the job for which they were trained? What is driving them away?”.

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Coming from a military governor in Babangida’s SAP-afflicted regime, the last two questions must sound at best rhetorical and at worst cynically disingenuous. For it was the military to whose political aberration the governor owed his gubernatorial power and privilege, that ruined the Nigerian economy and brought the university system to its knees through a relentless process of disempowerment and impoverishment. It was they who made sure that the university teacher’s take-home pay could no longer take them home (to plagiarize a witty ASUU slogan).

Be that as it may, that governor’s observation needs to prod us into further reflection regarding the intellectual’s apprehension of and role in a dysfunctional polity such as we have in Nigeria. For, instead of joining hands to find a solution to the problems in the educational system and the political dysfunctionality that has spawned these at the national level, many Nigerian intellectuals have always opted for the easier solution (which, in actual fact, ends up compounding the problem) by jumping the tottering ship of the educational system and hopping into the no less turbulent but infinitely more materially rewarding mega-ship of the public/political service. The drama of this transition is deliberate, calculated, and insidiously orchestrated.

First, brush up your rhetorical skills. Create cheesy populism on campus and make a loud noise. Make that noise even louder by insisting on being noticed beyond the campus walls. Ingratiate yourself with one or two television and radio stations where you can be seen and heard every week. Get hold of one or two newspapers and flatter the editors into either allotting you a column or granting you regular space in the op-ed pages. Now, with all these forums at your disposal, shout at the top of your voice, and at the top of your pen. Since this is your wonderful chance to play the omniscient guru, make the utmost of that opportunity: comment on everything under the sun and beyond the skies. Win a reputation as the ‘media guru’ and keep defending the title. Establish a profile as the defender of the people’s rights and advocate for their welfare. Borrow one or two catch phrases from Karl Marx though those who read between your lines would find no difficulty in locating your premise right in the median space between Adam Smith and Niccolo Machiavelli. In times of national crises, straddle the horse of public opinion and dance gingerly on the fence. Perfect the art of speaking from both ends of the mouth. When push comes to shove and the need arises, bless the government and bash the people, and make sure everyone in government gets a photocopy of your already published ‘byline’ or column. Blow hot, blow cold. But make sure you are never out of sync with the temperature in the government house. Pretend. Pretend. Pretend again. When your efforts are beginning to garner the calculated rewards, and invitations start pouring in to government cocktails and state banquets, make sure you circulate in the right circles. Grab the attention of the Governor, or the Secretary to his government, or his head of service, or his chief of staff. Spice your conversation with any or all of these potentates with frequent reference to “my column”, “my article”, “my tv/radio slot”, etc. Let the Governor know how terrifically good he is and how terribly bad his critics are, and how irredeemably ungrateful the citizens are. Don’t miss his birthday, or that of his wife. If you too are married, you may send off your wife occasionally to take care of the First Lady’s sartorial and tonsorial needs, help with house cleaning, and lend her muscle to the pounding of the yam for the Sunday supper.  When all that is over and you are back on the university campus, start packing your things and tweaking your nose at your suffer-head colleagues; for your government appointment is invariably on the way.. . . .

I say again: Nigeria has more than its fair share of palace pundits and intellectual prostitutes; those professional jobbers who are always willing to sell intellectual integrity for something messier than a mess of pottage. These are the ones who impede our progress by corrupting public discourse, obfuscating the public mind, and devaluing intellectual currency. There is no gainsaying the fact that one of the reasons those in government look so pathetically down on the so-called university people is the prostration and self-abasement resulting from the acts of office-seekers whose groveling for political preferment has turned the Ivory Tower into a wilderness of crawling lizards. This is also why the university cannot absolve itself from blame for the perennial underdevelopment of the country.

Come to look at it: no change for good or ill has ever taken place in Nigeria without the input of the Nigerian intellectual. Some of the government-house intellectuals were always in and out with the military rulers, even the most virulent of them, that have literally turned Nigeria into a failed state. Those draconian decrees with which the military bound us hand and foot were drafted and perfected by the lawyers among the intellectual class. The ones that enabled the subterfuge that nearly made military rule a permanent reality in Nigeria (by planning to make Abacha a life president, for instance) were crafted by learned men. In many instances, Nigeria has witnessed the stunning irony of a learned man who made his name as a Human Rights lawyer joining government later and championing the promulgation of decrees which turned the fight for basic human rights into a treasonable offence.

We have seen a tumultuously heralded professor of constitutional law who not only supported and defended the annulment of a free and fair election (such as the one Nigeria had on June 12), but also went ahead to participate in the making a constitution designed to bury that election. These learned aiders and abettors of tyranny scour the archives of human knowledge for instances which justify their paymasters’ designs. They put a Machiavellian spin on the most unimaginable evil and strain no nerve when they labour to convince an incredulous world that there is indeed no hunger in a famine-infested land; only otherwise well fed citizens on a course of God-endorsed, nationally declared fasting. When their bubble of lies bursts and their current masters are swept out of office, they return to the university campus to wait for next gang of political masters.

In many ways, the nature of that return and its spectacular aftermath provide useful insight into the thinking of many members of the Nigerian intelligentsia. For some members of the university community, the ‘returning dons’ (A Nib in the Pond, p. 44) are nothing short of objects of envy and admiration; people who have been there in the corridors of power, seen it all, and circulated in the circle of the high and mighty, and made good for themselves; people whose company will now have to be cultivated and desired by those dying for the right contacts and connections that would open the door to their own good fortune in government; people to whom to give your pumped-up cv for onward delivery in the higher quarters.

To be sure, the triumphal returnees are not prepared to leave anyone in doubt about their new status. The power-glow on their faces, the silky smoothness of their skin, the glittering polish in their accent, the sinuous surge in their stride, the spectacular swagger in their comportment all point to the lofty niche of people who have sat and supped with those who matter; those who have seen life beyond the height of a crumbling Ivory Tower. Add to these a new mansion in the choicest part of town, and the new gleaming SUV which adorns its driveway. (Good bye to poverty. Good bye to those rickety, rat-infested campus houses!).

Name-Dropping becomes the rule of the new discourse: General X, Alhaji Y, Chief Z, Madam F etc, And, of course, the lucky returnee makes sure s/he puts their recent elevation in constant focus by starting or ending every sentence with “When I was in government”. Occasionally, he even subconsciously slips into the royal ‘we’. The returnee becomes a constant feature in the campus seminar/lecture circuit where his colleagues are eager to learn how he made it so high and so big, and how they too can find their way in.

However, the celebration of the returnee is anything but universal; envy of his/her new status is hardly ever a campus-wide contagion; for there are some campus gatherings and functions they must avoid, some people whose company they have to flee. The story is still told of the not-so triumphal return of one of the Special Advisers to the corrupt, incompetent Shagari government of the Second Republic, who scurried back to the Ivory Tower after the overthrow of that inept regime for a much-needed refuge in his former roost. About a month after his return, he was a featured speaker at a well attended symposium by one of the student organizations on campus. Question time, and student after student asked him what a brilliant and avowedly principled scholar like him was doing in a government so debauched, so visionless; what role did he play in it?; how did his great learning affect the course of events?; how did he manage to feel so blissfully at home in the company of the ‘callous and calculating kleptocrats’ he had always denounced in his lectures and public pronouncements?; did he realize the damage he had done to the image of the intellectual class? One of the students went touchingly ad hominem when he said something to this effect:

Sir, your presence in this university was one of the main reasons I preferred it to other choices; your discipline influenced the academic course I decided to follow. Ever before I sat in your class, I had nursed the hope of growing up and being like you. I sang your name so much that my colleagues started calling me by it. I never missed any of your newspaper articles; I even kept a file for their cuttings. Then you went and dined with those thieves and robbers. Are you still the no-nonsense scholar we used to know, sir? Now you left me confused. I have lost a mentor. . . .  More chilling barbs followed. More excoriations took control of the air. The chairman of the occasion, achingly embarrassed for the distinguished speaker, tried to hush and pacify, but the thunderous shout of ‘Allow! Allow!’ frustrated his orders as more and more students took turns to vent their anger and disappointment. The returning don tried to smile it all off, but he had a hard time parting his lips. A cold sweat broke out on his brow. He looked in the direction of the chairman with the kind of mortal resignation a punch-drunk boxer regards the referee in a moment of hopeless surrender. He packed up his files and left the hall to the jabbing catcalls and boos of his erstwhile acolytes.

Returning dons of this kind, many of them ideological apostates, litter the Nigerian intellectual scene. Professors of philosophy who take their ‘philosophising’ to the courtyard of barely literate, bibliophobic military despots, then commit their perverted expertise to the perpetuation of their paymasters’ life-destroying ‘Heritage’ foundations; political science professors who jettison the ‘science’ and peddle the politics to the highest bidders in government quarters; palace pundits and State House griots who expend their talent on putting the most glittering spin on the darkest narratives from ruling circles. Which Nigerian over the age of 40 could have forgotten that bearded historian and famous don under whose watch lexical humbugs such as ‘Bandwagon Effect’, ‘Incumbency Factor’, ‘Grassroots Appeal’ were manufactured by the ever-busy Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) to aid the ruling party’s shameless rigging of the 1983 elections in Nigeria? Which Nigerian could have forgotten the political and socioeconomic chaos that was the consequence of this despicable deceit?

Perhaps the situation is the way it is in Nigeria because of the curious relationship between the Republic of Knowledge and the Republic of Politics; that is, between the state of the State and the state of Academe. Ideally what should exist between these two is what I would like to call a state of creative tension, of problematic mutuality and imperfect symbiosis. The Republic of Knowledge serves as the breeding ground of ideas and ideals, the Republic of Politics as the crucible of action and implementation. The former generates the theory; the latter pushes it into praxis. But constantly, theory is refined by the actual working of praxis; while praxis is deepened by theory. Of course, these are no two invariably antagonistic poles: a crucial instance of some kind of conjuncture occurs when a denizen of the Republic of Knowledge brings his learning to bear on the Republic of Politics. Again ideally, the academic in power or in a position of power is expected to illuminate his action with the precepts garnered in so many years of learning, with demonstrably positive outcomes on both policy and policy action. In other words, he is expected to ensure that his learning makes a difference.

But why have Nigerian intellectuals/academics found it so difficult to make this kind of difference? Why do they end up sinking deeper into the same morass they rail so loudly against while within the campus walls? The answer to these questions will require another essay, but let us just say here that the situation is as it is because the wall separating the two Republics has become dangerously thin in some places and completely broken down in others. The mutual seepage resulting from this breach has polluted the stream of thinking and    action on both sides. The Nigerian government especially under the military brought Academe to its knees. Perceiving it as nothing more than a nest of ‘undue radicals’, it did everything in its power to break its ranks and silence its voice. To ensure its control of every important action on campus, it engineered the appointment of compliant vice chancellors and loaded the governing council with its own men and women. To guarantee the absence of a united front for academics, it proscribed their union at will. With all these manacles in place, it went ahead to impose starvation wages on university workers and made conditions of service so severe that only masochists still found joy in the Ivory Tower. The era of the iconic ‘Poor Professor’ had dawned. Having thus set the campus forest on fire, the military watched as desperate denizens scrambled to flee the conflagration. Some of these socio-economic exiles became sure game in the hands of the military government, the new Professor Bamgbapo’s (as in Wole Soyinka”s Opera Wonyosi) who grovel pathetically before those in power and spread out their diploma for them to walk on.

With its antiquated libraries, empty labs, dilapidated classrooms, paltry pay slips, the university campus became progressively inhospitable for living and hostile to learning. Many academics found a solution in two kinds of exile: some fled into political appointments, others across the seas.

But thankfully, our account above does not tell the whole story. For there are thousands of other Nigerian intellectuals who never abandoned their commitment to a life of the mind; there were those whose conscience was too strong to be swayed by the juicy temptation of political appointments. Many of them stayed on to fight the rot in the Ivory Tower; others shifted base to the academy of the newsroom. Olatunji Dare is the most prominent member of the latter group and unarguably one of its most accomplished and most influential.

For the past three decades, Dare has not only succeeded in establishing himself as one of Nigeria’s most engaging thinkers and writers; he has also shown the country how it is done by raising both the accent and tenor of journalistic practice. In the true tradition of journalism as truth-seeker, information-disseminator, and shaper of public opinion, he has championed a school of journalism that places the highest premium on integrity and informed engagement. Believing that journalism is not just ‘history in a hurry’ as is often touted in common parlance, Dare conceives it as history in motion and remembrance in action. A writer with a stupendous sense of history and faculty of memory, he believes that the principal role of the writer and intellectual is to make sure that we do not forget. For him history is too important to ignore; for those who forget the past may not only suffer the calamity of repeating its mistakes; they may, in fact, not be lucky enough to be around to do so as they might have perished from the affliction of amnesia. In Dare, therefore, we see the thinker, intellectual, writer, journalist, towncrier, griot, and prophet all rolled into one conscientious and profoundly edifying nexus.

For Dare journalism is not just a job; it is a vocation; not just a career but a calling. Journalism is a cause. The journalist is not just the proverbial  witness to and reporter of events; he is also part of the unfolding of those events, and his reporting and presentation of them is a measure of his personal integrity and professional proficiency. And, what’s more, these two qualities, consciously or unconsciously, influence the story and constitute an inalienable part of its permanent essence. Contrary to those textbook theories about the neutrality of the reporter and the divine independence of the story, real-life experience shows us that a part of the teller is invariably secreted in the telling: whether that proverbial glass is half full or half empty depends upon the subjective eye of the observer. Most times what we see is a function of who or what we are.

In no part of journalism is the maxim of the-writer-as –shaper-of-public-opinion truer than in opinion writing. And this is Olatunji Dare’s turf, his roost, and refuge – and in a manner of speaking – his crucible. In a classic case of professional commitment and passionate engagement, Dare is committed to the truth of the story and engaged with the ramifying implications of that truth. With a micro-biologist’s microscope and the surgeon’s scalpel, he fishes out the tiniest bit of a news story and subjects it to an informed and spirited dissection that magnifies it for the audience and reveals all its hidden hints. Dare leaves the reader in no doubt as to his single-minded wish to inform, to educate, to inspire, to call for change. He reminds me so forcibly of the wisdom of Jean-Paul Sartre, the great radical thinker and existentialist philosopher, who declared some four decades ago that ‘The function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about’ (1967, 14). Here then goes the Writer as Righter (Sartre, 1967; Osundare, 2002), a premise that was very much behind Achebe’s thinking in 1965 when he saw the novelist as teacher; and Soyinka when he declared that the writer must be the sensitive point and  voice of conscience in society, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o who perceives every writer as a writer in politics.

Dare’s column is the meeting-point of many interests: up-to-date account of the news of the day; a masterfully executed analysis of it; a magisterial coda oftentimes with unforgettable moral gravitas. These are some of the main factors in the creation of an authoritative voice; and if any journalist has that kind of voice in Nigeria today, that journalist is Olatunji Dare.

That authoritative moral voice is realized through a cogency of ideas and felicitousness of expression; that frequently humorous, piquantly satirical style, that constant elevation of journalism to the pedestal of a truly noble profession – these have been the hallmarks and guiding principles of Dare’s journalistic practice since his days as an Op-Ed columnist for Daily times, then Nigeria’s dominant and most influential newspaper and one of the most widely read publication of its kind in Africa. It surprised no one, therefore, when soon after its birth in 1983, The Guardian which quickly matured into the flagship of Nigeria’s print journalism, had Dare as a member of its star-studded pioneer team. This was a team the like of which had never been seen in Nigeria’s newsroom: seasoned journalists, productive academics, former career diplomats, technocrats, and other veterans in public affairs. Together, they gave The Guardian a liberal, well informed social vision, professional integrity, and a journalistic (house) style distinguished by clarity of thought, painstaking investigative practice, and elegance of language. In this robustly conducive atmosphere, Dare unfurled his feathers and soared high in public reckoning. His column, ‘Matters Arising’, made The Guardian a compulsory read every Tuesday because of its depth of analysis, fearless argumentation, and impeccable expression.

As a versatile and vigorous writer, Dare often ranges from the sober to the sublime, from the clinically narrative to the picturesquely descriptive, from the fabulous to the fantastical. Here is just one instance of the ace journalist at his most mischievously funny:

[Humphrey Nwosu, a professor of political science, had a reputation for brilliance and volubility. He used his hands and sometimes his feet liberally to drive home his message. Reporters soon learnt not to sit too close to him at press conferences for fear that his right arm or left arm which he often stretched out with his accustomed vigour without warning might land on someone’s eyes, nose, mouth or ear. Or as he swayed to the left and then to the right in his chair in a manner reminiscent of Ray Charles at the keyboard, he might unintentionally administer.

*This two-part tribute was first published by The Nation