Onabanjo’s 30th anniversary

832

 

Chief Olabisi Onabanjo was a unique person. He was clever, urbane, intellectual, courageous, probing, mischievous and a great lover of Nigeria and her people. He made friends from all parts of Nigeria with admirable ease. He revelled in controversy and conceded your right to hold your own views even while he violently disagreed with them.

As a boss, I found him most intriguing. In 1979, after the elections, but well before he was sworn in, he suddenly showed up in my house one Sunday afternoon, unannounced. He spent time with my family. My conclusion later was that he wanted to know the members of his team as much as possible – their families and how they lived. He was a detailed man and a perfect judge of persons.

Chief Onabanjo was a team player. Even when he disagreed with the majority, he was ever ready to defend any collective decision. On one occasion, he was away overseas when the State Executive Council presided over by his deputy took some decisions with which he did not agree. Chief Onabanjo did not upturn the decisions. On the contrary, he sought to convince a re-convened Executive Council of the wrongness of the earlier decisions by superior argument but he upheld the decision taken in his absence.

Chief Onabanjo was a most accommodating politician. In the days of the Unity Party of Nigeria/National Party of Nigeria politics in the West in particular, there was so much tension even in interpersonal relationships of blood relations who belonged to different political parties. Chief Onabanjo was an exception. All his friends in the NPN were very much at home in the Government Lodge in Abeokuta where they could eat, joke and sleep as good friends. His courtesy was available to them even when he was out of town. He was a perfect host. Yet, his friends knew that he was utterly uncompromising in his loyalty to Awo and the UPN. Though he was playful, humane and compassionate, Aiyekooto was a furious fighter.

Aiyekooto had a prodigious sense of humour. Before lending me a book once, he wrote on it, “This book was stolen from Bisi Onabanjo!” No matter how tense a situation was, he always saw the humorous side and by the time he made his contribution, he often managed to get even the severest combatants to laugh.

Chief Onabanjo had many pranks and savoured good jokes. Once, at the Ilushin Rubber Estates during a state tour, he assembled the State Executive Council for a meeting, at which he surprisingly announced a cabinet reshuffle which saw me moved from the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, in which I was having a ball, to an unglamorous new Ministry of Forestry. I was distraught and shattered though I was trying hard not to show it. There was something about the Ministry of Health which I found so agreeable. The governor knew he was stabbing me!

After mischievously dropping his bombshell, he waited for it to sink and then asked for comments. When none was forthcoming, he specifically asked for mine. I was furious inside of me but muttered something like, “Except for the fact that I could see that we were surrounded by a forest of rubber trees, I do not know what this forestry was all about!” For the next five minutes, he threw off his cap and laughed with such relish. “You will soon know”, he managed to say after his hearty laugh. He told a friend of mine later that I was becoming too comfortable in the Ministry of Health and he had sent me to Forestry, an economic ministry, to know the monied class of Ogun State and have a well-rounded experience.

Three months after the reshuffle, he repeated the same hilarious laughter when, in answer to the question on how I was doing in the new Ministry of Forestry, I told him that my freezer could not contain the bush meat coming my way! Yet, he was no jester. He had a sharp, serious and well-focused mind. He had the curious combination of being serious but jocular, simple but tasty, playful, but focused. He had a deep, incisive, keen, yet mischievous mind. When he saw that the ministry was not taking all my energy, he added water resources so the Water Corporation reported to me.

One other remarkable thing about Chief Onabanjo, which I mentioned earlier, was his loyalty to his friends which was severe and total. He would rather injure himself than injure a friend. He could literally break his back to help a friend. He could never betray a friend and be at ease as some are wont to do. In the same vein, while he was slow in making enemies, he fought his enemies furiously. He was a friend you could always count on and an enemy to be feared.

Onabanjo was a man of conviction. He was not a politician who sought only the allure of politics but was too lily-livered to face any difficult situation. Such politicians fled whenever trouble came or went underground. Not Chief Onabanjo. He was a man for all seasons, deft and as bold as a bull. When most of his counterparts were jailed for treasonable felony in 1962-1963, he was known to have been the generalissimo of the “Operation wetie”, the popular resistance to the government of Chief Ladoke Akintola in the Western Region. He was the stuff of which guerilla fighters are made. To him, injustice was anathema. He would go into a house in one dress and come out in another. He wore disguises all over and slept in odd places to avoid the arrest of the security forces who were after him.

Bisi onabanjo

Onabanjo’s sense of proportion and propriety was amazing. When he met his successor, Col. Oladipo Diya (as he then was), in the tense days after the overthrow of the civilian regime, he asked for a Secretary to be able to do a handing over note. For over one week thereafter, he toiled over and did a comprehensive handover note! He didn’t have to do any handover notes to a people who forcibly and treasonably overthrew an elected government but he was a stickler for responsibility. Diya was to pay him back very badly as he proceeded to uproot everything Onabanjo stood for or achieved in Ogun State.

Onabanjo knew when to make a call or visit a friend he had not seen for a while, or extend a gesture of kindness to the needy, or when and whom to consult on an issue. On January 1st each year, as was the tradition of the time, he slaughtered cows and personally supervised the distribution of portions of the meat to different party leaders, traditional rulers, key citizens all over Ogun State, including political opponents and top government functionaries. He never lost his grip with reality. He was never spoilt by office. He did not forget his friends. Even some of those who later betrayed him owed their breakthrough in life to him.

To be concluded

Prince Adefulu, MFR, was Ogun State Commissioner for Health Social Welfare; Forestry & Water Resources; Local Government ( Home Affairs) 1979-1980

Kindly support the growth of journalism in Nigeria

Reactions to stories published can be sent to us at [email protected]


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *