Adieu to a leading light of Afenifere and an ardent federalist
Since his death three weeks ago, there has been no let-up in mourning Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, elder statesman, devoted churchman, distinguished public servant and public intellectual, cultural nationalist, astute legal practitioner, entrepreneur and conciliator, nor in the tributes that have been paid to his illustrious memory.
The grieving and the tide of farewells will reach a culmination this week as his remains are interred in Isara, in Ogun State, in the Yoruba country.
Ajayi’s death signals the imminent closing of an era in the politics of Yoruba land, and by extension the Nigerian polity. A pillar of the progressive tradition of Yoruba politics, he was one of the leading lights of Afenifere, the socio-cultural formation through which the Action Group in the 1950s, led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, reached the grassroots with its ideology of freedom for all and life more abundant.
The brilliant execution of the Action Group’s manifesto made Western Nigeria a pace-setter for the country, and propelled it to the threshold of modernity. Afenifere was the custodian of the ethos, the core values of the progressivism of that era. And even when the gains of the period were halted and in some cases reversed by political upheavals in the West after Awolowo left for the Centre, by a meddlesome and over-reaching Federal Government, by the Action Group’s sworn adversaries, and by military’s incursion into politics, Afenifere continued to show the way through firm adherence to fundamental principles.
On the national stage, Ajayi was an ardent federalist. He argued that only a return to the kind constitutional arrangement under which Nigeria was governed before independence could Nigeria and the federating states attain their fullest potential.
In bringing the principles of welfarism and good governance to bear on the politics of the Yoruba nation and Nigeria, no one was in the past four past decades perhaps more assiduous than Ajayi.
He did so in five well-regarded books, the first of which he wrote at age 80, when most men would already be in full or semi-retirement. Before he turned 90, he wrote four more books. That is a measure of his commitment to scholarship, and of the courage of his conviction.
Nothing in Ajayi’s early life presaged his later eminence. He trained at the famous Wesley College, Ibadan, and seemed set for life as an elementary school teacher. He rose to headmaster, a decent achievement, and could have coasted along in school administration or exploited his political connections for a sinecure.
But Ajayi had set far higher goals for himself. Leaving teaching, he went to study law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and was called to the English Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1962. He joined the UAC, where he rose to the post of Assistant Group Legal Adviser before setting up Olaniwun Ajayi LP, now reputed to be one of the best law firms Africa.
Previously, he had served variously as Commissioner for Education and Commissioner for Health in the former Western State, under the administration of Brigadier (as he then was) Oluwole Rotimi.
Urbane, graceful and engaging, Ajayi personified through and through the concept of omoluabi, the apotheosis of good breeding: dependable, principled, always granting unto others whatever he sought for himself, measured of speech. Though affluent, he lived modestly and unobtrusively. Not for him the gaudy showiness and vulgar excesses of many of his well-endowed contemporaries
In the turmoil that convulsed Nigeria following the annulment of the 1983 presidential election, Ajayi stood immovably with NADECO, the progressive alliance which insisted that government must be based on the consent of the people, undeterred by the barbarities the Abacha regime unleashed on its opponents, real or perceived.
To the very end, Ajayi worked tirelessly to bring together his notoriously fractious Yoruba kinsfolk. In this, he was actuated not by parochialism, still less by chauvinism, but by his conviction that there could be no national unity unless there was unity within Nigeria’s constituent states.
He would have been exceedingly gladdened that governors of the Yoruba-speaking states resolved last week to set political differences aside and work together for the progress and development of their polity.
In a country where the next major scandal is just one news cycle away it is truly remarkable that a public life spanning some six decades has stood untainted by scandal. That is the essence of the life and times of Olaniwun Ajayi, who has justly been hailed as a moral beacon.
May his legacy endure.
Source: The Nation