I am a November child but today is not my birthday and I have not really ever luxuriated in the celebration of birthdays, except for childhood days when Fanta was placed in front of a large bowl of rice and neighbourhood kids surrounded you and posed for photographs. You and your friends wished the camera man, who spent too long in adjusting your positions, dispensed with his duty quickly, for you to descend on the bowl of rice, which was a major attraction for the whole event in the first place, for which you would probably look forward to another.
These days. beautiful cakes have replaced the tray of rice of my days and even more mouthwatering cakes, exemplified in a certain governor whose wife got women in all local governments in the state to present one cake for each LGA to mark his birthday. The social media took the man to the cleaners and no one told them that Madam did the birthday ‘coup’ for which the man faced social media bullets, like I walked into such an event on a landmark birthday I had forgotten. She did not forget and executed the ‘coup’ successfully, with the active participation of the children, to remind me.
I am not totally aloof to birthdays. I do meditate over the state of the personal journey through this clime, at the turn of another year and do thank God, who has preserved me to that stage in the time-bound calendar of living, wherein I have read the obituaries of even younger people. I express gratitude in prayers and unanimous thanksgiving in church when my pocket agrees to follow me there.
But I have elected to celebrate some great men, in my reckoning, whose birthdays fall today. I have always admired Dr. Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, the great Zik of Africa, one of the prime movers of the struggle to liberate Nigeria from the shackles of colonialism. The story of his sojourn in the United States of America, his deployment of the of mighty pen against the sword of colonial rule, relocation to Ghana from where he fired his shots and the coming together of other founding fathers of the nation have become foundational material for the study of the nation’s history of the pre-Independence and post Independent era. Born in Zungeru in 1904, far away from his Onitsha hometown, an early show of the ubiquitous tendencies of his people, which has seen them as the permanent decimal in every nook and cranny of this nation, Zik, as he was fondly called, was a force in Nigerian politics. He returned from the United States in 1934 to become editor of African Morning Post, a newspaper based in Accra, Ghana, from where he returned to set up his own newspaper in Nigeria, the West African Pilot. Zik had his mind on the continent, a reason some of his kinsmen say his focus was too international, even within the Nigerian space, to cater for the local political needs and interests of his people. However, when everyone was forced to head home politically, given the famous carpet crossing in 1953 in Western Nigeria of yesteryears, which made him lose election overnight in a poll in which he was heading home to victory, Zik moved to Eastern Nigeria from the Western Nigeria parliament, where he was a member. He became Premier of Eastern Nigeria in 1954. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka, stands today as an eternal legacy of his achievement in office. It was with a certain feeling of being shadowed by a great figure that I dwelt in Zik’s flats as a fresher at that university, where the great Zik lived next to the block of flats that housed fresh students. We hardly saw him, but we felt the awe of the great Zik of Africa. I understand the place is no longer in use and has sadly fallen into disrepair for unclear reasons, one story has it that litigation between Zik’s family members has stalled usage of the place and yet another has it that Zik had willed the place to the university to the apparent chagrin of some family members who have told the court to wrest it from the university. I do not know the true version and it hardly explains why such a place should be left to rot. I hope something has been done or is being done about it. He later relocated to Onitsha, where he held the traditional rank of Owelle, before he passed away in 1996, ahead of those who mourned him in the wake of his hoax death story in 1989. I remember the great nationalist and thank those who set up the Zik Leadership Awards and urge those now moulding the image of leaders in their state capitals to do an imposing one of Nnamdi Azikiwe. He was a great man. His life should point the way for today’s politicians.
Today is the posthumous birthday of another great Nigerian who also has links with University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Prof. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, writer, poet, social activist, teacher of teachers and many more, would have been 87 today had he lived beyond 2013, when he succumbed to the cold hands of death. Achebe occupied the literary space to do what Zik did in the political arena. He rescued the nation and indeed Africa from the narrow prism of colonial writers, who portrayed Africans in their early writings as buffoons. Achebe was infuriated by Joyce Cary’s novel, Mister Johnson, where the African protagonist was a jester and a buffoon, who was good for nothing. The fury made him go to his inner recesses and pull out his talent as a storyteller, a passion so strong that he jettisoned a scholarship to study Medicine and moved to the arts where no scholarship awaited him. As a 29-year-old, Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart, where he told the African-cum-Igbo story from an original perspective. It became the most widely read book in Africa, one of 10 such books in the world. Achebe rescued African literature from colonialism and I have often said that the man made words dance in a manner that could only have been elicited by a master drummer in his mould. I always refer to anyone who has not read Things Fall Apart as an illiterate of sorts. It may indeed be an exaggerated joke but it should pull anyone who has not done so to come out of that state of illiteracy as defined by yours sincerely. Achebe wrote several other books and acquitted himself creditably as a giant in his chosen profession.
I also wish to pay tributes to my boss and mentor, whose birthday falls today. He shares birthday with great men and he is, certainly, one. Rt. Rev. (Prof.) Dapo Asaju, Bishop Theologian of Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion, and Vice-Chancellor Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo. He detests unnecessary eulogy but it is unfair to behold the transformation that university has undergone under his watch and not ask him to stand and take a bow. He is a living example of hard work, transparency and integrity. He was my vicar and spiritual father and has remained an example of all that is good. Scores of people have gained from his mentorship. That the university has grown in leaps and bounds, even amid cash crunch, would only take those who have straddled his two years in office and the previous years to confirm. He is a man who strives to leave any place better than he met it. That has trailed him everywhere. In Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo, the bishop and sound academic is raising godly intellectuals.
Happy birthday, sir. May your days continue to be better and brighter. May God continue to be your guide and guard.