By Tunji Olaopa
On Saturday, 13th of January, 2024, exactly one month after the new leadership of the Federal Civil Service Commission that I now have the fortune of leading was inaugurated by His Excellency President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, my monarch, HRH Oba Cornelius Abiola Taiwo, FCCA, FCA, the Alaawe of Aawe in Council, organized what turned out to be a grand reception at his palace at Aawe in my honour. The occasion and my statement of appreciation afforded me yet another opportunity to reflect on what I have called the Aawe Mystique.
Indeed, with the benefit of the wisdom and clarity of hindsight, I can now categorically say that the story of my unraveling from the hapless starry-eyed and starry-minded boy running errands for my grandmother on the streets and crannies of Aáwé to the office of permanent secretary in Abuja reflecting on institutional gaps and governance reforms is the story of Aáwé writ large on my intellectual and professional trajectories. And that narrative speaks a lot about the confluence of culture and religion, or what it takes for a village to raise a child. And in this case, this tiny town did not only embody a coherent mixture of cultural and religious values, it also embodies what I have been calling the Aáwé mystique.
All stories of upbringing or maturation must commence through the input of parents who either took parenting diligently or not. My own narrative contains the diligence of godly and committed parents who understood their sacred responsibility, and the significance of socialization in the effort to raise good children and exemplary citizens. Right early in life, my father would drum into me the lesson that the brilliance he was seeing in me has a place in Aáwé with its lineage of geniuses and achievers, from Dr J. A. Adegbite to Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade. Indeed, I first could comprehend what a genius means through the fact that my father constantly associated the word with Prof. Aboyade. And then, at Aáwé High School, we had the privilege of encountering all the best and the brightest—Dr. J. A. Adegbite, Rev. Dr. S. T. Ola Akande, and Profs. Ojetunji Aboyade, Akande (one-time Rector of The Polytechnic, Ibadan)—to inspire us. And I was inspired so thoroughly that my ambition was to become any one of these indigenous heroes, including the much younger Prof. Adesola Ogunniyi, a leading African neuroscientist.
This is what I have been calling the Aáwé mystique—the confluence of educational, enlightenment and communal investments that raises the significance of a small town in terms of the historical figures it is able not only to commit to its own further growth through its children, but also to the growth and development of Nigeria. Aáwé’s strength lies in the generational and communal investment that birthed great names that are the testaments to its resilience and progress. The smallness of Aáwé is displaced by its greatest achievement—the aggregation of its diverse indigenous pool into a developmental capital that propels continuous advancement in social, cultural, economic and political terms. Aáwé’s indigenous pool is made up of the expatriates abroad who invested in educational advancement and those, equally educated, who didn’t leave Aáwé town but are committed to its advancement. Those at home and abroad are equally sensitised to the urgency of community development which has been facilitated over time through the framework of social groups.
Indeed, it is from this collective desire to scatter the seeds of Aáwé over many waters that gave birth to the notorious Aáwé eponym, “Àwọn ọmo ajẹ òkú adìẹ” (They who turn dead fowls into delicacies). The narrative is that Aáwé indigenes topped the list of house-helps that arrived in Lagos in drove in the early 20th century in search of betterment in the early years before and after Nigeria’s independence. The culture of not wasting anything must have been responsible for a poor Aawe girl-househelp (in Lagos) insistence that a fowl mistakenly killed by some of the whites’ drivers was not too unhygienic to eat. And then, the legend began to grow about Aáwé people and dead fowl! And yet, behind that legend is a deeper one—coming to Lagos was simply a trajectory that led to the growth of the town itself, as it was for some other towns all around Nigeria.
Egbe Omo Ibile Aáwé group (founded in 1912) and the Aáwé Development Corporation (ADC) established in 1982 were the results of a collective signal to the development aspiration and readiness of the people. Apart from the relevance of social groups as the avatars of social struggle in any society, they particularly represent Aáwé’s peculiar diffusion of its social capital to the entire community. Progress in any society is a function of the elite-masses rapport that serves as the foundation of a developmental framework within which the elites deploy their socio-cultural and political advantages to the general uplifting of the collective. My father, and so many I have grown to know over the years, was religiously committed to attending the meetings of these associations through their chapters all across Nigeria and beyond. And hence, it was not surprising that the idea of social capital and subsidiarity that underlies this collective commitment to Aáwé affairs was the basis of Aboyade and Mabogunje’s the optimum community (OPTICOM) development dynamics meant to further mobilize grassroots support for indigenous development.
And so, when I initially commenced my doctoral programme at the University of Ibadan, the theoretical framework for the thesis was already laid out for me. I saw the intrinsic connection between Robert Putnam’s social capital theory, the subsidiarity principle, and the Aáwé OPTICOM experiment. Beyond this, my university experience and encounter with Plato’s Republic were already growing in my mind the significance of education in Aáwé’s collective development. And that insight would play a fundamental role in the connection between learning, education and institutional reform that constitute a fundamental plank in my reform philosophy.
However, the greatest dimension of the Aáwé mystique, as a perceptive reader must have deciphered, is the lineage of preeminent figures that my intellectual and professional growth benefitted from in measures I probably would not ever be able to quantify. From one juncture of my development to others, I have had the benefits of encountering the molding influence of one Aáwé figure or the other, from the significant spiritual homiletics of Rev. Dr S. T. Ola Akande at the Orita Mefa Baptist Church, Ibadan in his days, to the professional lessons I got from Prof. Aboyade to the career enhancing connection made possible by Prof. Mabogunje. I however have no reservation in raising Aboyade to the level of canonization in my pantheon of role models. An example suffices among many. At some point during June 12 political unrest in 1993, I had made the decision to exit the Federal civil service and move to the United Nations. Of course, Aboyade was one of my referees, and indeed he had written a reference letter on my behalf meant for the attention of Mr Fre Hewitt, the permanent representative of the UNDP to Nigeria who had signaled his willingness to offer me a place in the public affairs division in Lagos. However, Aboyade refused to sign and forward the letter.
So, he got me into a discussion one day, and said quite categorically to me: “you are not going to any UN.” It was not a discussion I wanted to have with him. But he was adamant. He insisted that I needed to stay, research the system of the civil service bureaucracy and become an expert-insider since I had become so critical of that same system. He counseled that in career growth as a bureaucrat-scholar, I should never be worried by the politics of promotions, positioning and the treachery that comes with it . That as long as I steer clear of bureaucratic power play that almost defines the civil service (and indeed its stagnation as I came to understand) I can then be sure to reach the point of self-fulfillment. Thereafter, he invoked some prayers and blessings on me, and then concluded by saying that he might appear to me at that moment as a dream-killer, but that he hoped I would be lifted so high sufficiently for me to realize in later years that he meant well for me and my professional endeavor and future. Indeed, he was the one who instigated my curiosity about the institutional challenges confronted by the civil service from the numerous conversations we had in the attempts to interrogate the Nigerian policy and development dynamics. All this drew my attention to the significance of development and implementation researches. And thankfully, Mass Mobilization for Self-Reliance and Economic Recovery (MAMSER) was already in existence and it served as a cornerstone for my initial research focus into change management and the significance of education as a strategy for grassroots mobilization.
I cannot now begin to unravel the thinking process and the doubt that assailed me after my conversation with Aboyade. But the long and short of the story is that I accepted to stay, and the rest, as they say, has now become a history that rebounds at every point of my maturation to a deeper gratitude to God, to providence and to the Aáwé mystique and the role it played in God’s purpose for my life. Indeed, there is no way I could even begin to apply a rational framework to how I moved from Aáwé High School, imbibed all the lessons and insights, and connected the dots of the sociocultural privileges and investments I benefitted from beyond the God factor and the inspiration I got from being an Aawe boy.
And yet, I carry along with me everywhere I went the bursting pride that I am an Aáwé indigene, and a deep sense of gratitude that I am able to speak and write about the Aáwé mystique while also handing the baton of the responsibilities that comes with it to all the fortunate others who will be coming behind. In sum, I am simply a small but significant part of the larger Aáwé story.
Prof. Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
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