DEAR Governor Douye Diri, I don’t know how much respect you have for Professor EJ Alagoa, but if I were sitting in your place, I would be thinking of hosting a grand book event in his honour. Get me right. I am not talking about a book you have to write. I am not talking of setting up a committee to put together a few chapters to mark his next birthday. I am talking about making a public presentation of a book written by Professor Alagoa.
This book I speak about took so much power out of the old professor, so much so that he lies exhausted in his country home, as we speak. It took him all of thirteen years to gather materials for this book. The project became so huge for him that he had to recruit the services of one of his best students whose research exploits have since earned him the well deserved honour of becoming Professor John Enemugwem.
Alagoa was so involved with the project that he sent his trusted student on errand to the archives of the British library and museum in London to obtain every piece of information about their subject. I know the labour that goes into writing a book, Your Excellency. I'm writing one at the moment. For Professor Alagoa to have undertaken that assignment for all of thirteen years, you will agree with me that it was the work of a lifetime. He was simply bent on bringing to the attention of the public the labour of this particular hero past whose exploits were virtually becoming a vain fantasy.
Now, Your Excellency, guess who the subject of this famous book is. You guessed right. Ernest Sisei Ikoli is the subject of the story. Who am I to tell you about Ernest Ikoli? I can’t pretend to know more than what the two professors have put together between book covers. But as someone who has read the book, and as a good student of literature in my own right, I can assure you that this book could do with all the attention it can get. I can afford to tell you that you can make political capital out of this book. Your reputation as a statesman to be reckoned with in the near future depends on what you make of this event.
Thankfully, you took one cardinal step in the expected direction when you hosted the Nigerian Guild of Editors at a recent dinner after a two-day parley in Yenagoa. I have every reason to commend you for announcing an annual lecture series in honour of Nigeria's first known journalist, Ernest Sisei Ikoli. Let me quickly point out a few reasons as to why you deserve kudos for this. It is public knowledge, afterall, that the integrated media complex named after Ernest Ikoli is one of the primary achievements of your first tenure.
Now, I tend to think that Ernest Ikoli dropped out of the public memory because he died on October 1, 1960, the very day Nigeria gained independence from Britain. In point of fact, when the royal delegation from Buckingham Palace arrived at Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos, the remains of Ernest Ikoli were still warm. When Princess Anne of Kent and her crew were watching the British flag descend for the green-white-green colours of the Nigerian flag to flutter aloft, the spirit of Ernest Ikoli was floating alongside it.
That is because Ernest Ikoli's lifetime crusade was for Nigeria to gain independence from Britain. Legend has it that he started the first recorded youth movement in cosmopolitan Lagos that led to the formation of political parties as we know them today in Nigeria. He was at the forefront of the agitation for Nigeria's sovereignty as a nation. He worked alongside fellow nationalists in the mould of Herbert Macaulay and Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo who, in fact, saw Ernest as his mentor. All three gentlemen respected Ernest Ikoli for the power of his pen, his forthright intelligence, and his patriotic spirit.
The last time I checked the Nigerian currency, I saw the faces of Herbert Macaulay and Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo. I'm yet to see the face of Ernest Ikoli on a denomination of the naira, not even a coin. As you probably know, I called on former President Muhammadu Buhari to find space for the face of Ernest Ikoli when he announced alterations on the face of the naira in times past. I was to know later that the President was speaking only in terms of changing the colours of the currency, not its value. Since then, we have been spending the old currency notes alongside the new ones without a frown.
Even so, the voice of Ernest Ikoli still resounds from the archives of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The colonisers of erstwhile times still remember the encounter between Queen Elizabeth and Ernest Sisei Ikoli reporting from the pages of West African Pilot, the first and only news medium of the day from the sub-region, which he edited. The voice of Ernest Ikoli still rebounds in a BBC interview conducted in 1959, virtually on the eve of Nigeria's independence, his expectations for the new nation as hopeful as his voice was vibrant.
Just when the dream came to pass, on the very day that Nigeria won her independence, Ernest Ikoli died. He was not there to witness the historic ceremony. He was not there to clink glasses with the Queen's envoy, and toast to the health and prosperity of the new nation. The jubilation over Nigeria's independence understandably overwhelmed the tragedy of one man's death, even though that man was in the lead of the struggle. Many years after independence, it is time to celebrate the life of that man. His story has been told in full by our own emeritus professor of history. The least we can hope for is that government would invest in the memory of their own son, this son of Bayelsa who made Bayelsa proud long before Bayelsa was born.
Your Excellency, I can afford to tell you something else. I have been holding my temper in check since I got to know that someone wants you to approve one hundred million naira to enable the committee organise a formal presentation of the first book on Ernest Ikoli. No wonder the Governor is hesitant about this book launch, said I to myself. I know that this is a national event, rightfully so, and the committee is planning a grand outing. But it seems to me that someone is out to reap where they did not sow. The first question that came to my mind was this. If the Bayelsa State government releases one hundred million naira to organise a book launch, how much will it release to support the aged professor and his acolyte who wrote the book?
Question two. Why should the Bayelsa State government release one hundred million naira to host a book launch when it is yet to pay an outstanding judgment debt far less than one hundred million naira to a civil servant who has been starving for almost fifteen years without his salary? I am a reasonable man, Your Excellency. I could do with a reasonable answer.
By: Pope Pen