Some time in 2009 a friend of mine who read Political Science in University of Nigeria, Nsukka, was visiting me after eight years.
I had through the email described my current residence on campus, so he drove the relatively long trip from Abuja. As I came out to answer the door, we hugged in the excitement of the re-union but it was not words of greeting that he first said. What he asked me was first, almost in frenzy, was, “So, Dr Ogban lives around here?” I was a bit taken aback and ignoring his characteristic Nigerian slip-up of attaching academic titles to someone’s first name used alone, I tried to find out why where the man lives should so bother him. In a child-like elation he motioned to a place in the neighbourhood where he had driven past and seen two unserviceable Volkswagen mini buses under a large tree shade.“In our days those buses were something of a trade mark for the man,” he continued. “I don’t know why and as students you couldn't possibly summon the courage to ask. But those buses were almost as old as they are now when he was driving them.”I had heard the story of Dr Ogban Ogban-Iyam, the American MIT-trained political theorist and activist, and his old Volkswagen kombi buses before. I had heard people discussing them among themselves. Some said they were the hallmark of humility. Others said they constituted the highest level of unconventional economics for a man who wanted a strategy to shield him from anything that could lead to desperation that might draw down a compromise in his enslavement to principles. Yet others would wager that he needed such large vehicles so he could always pick up his few possessions and members of his household down to his native Cross River State, if it came to that, without being beholden to a loan-giver.
I had through the email described my current residence on campus, so he drove the relatively long trip from Abuja. As I came out to answer the door, we hugged in the excitement of the re-union but it was not words of greeting that he first said. What he asked me was first, almost in frenzy, was, “So, Dr Ogban lives around here?” I was a bit taken aback and ignoring his characteristic Nigerian slip-up of attaching academic titles to someone’s first name used alone, I tried to find out why where the man lives should so bother him. In a child-like elation he motioned to a place in the neighbourhood where he had driven past and seen two unserviceable Volkswagen mini buses under a large tree shade.“In our days those buses were something of a trade mark for the man,” he continued. “I don’t know why and as students you couldn't possibly summon the courage to ask. But those buses were almost as old as they are now when he was driving them.”I had heard the story of Dr Ogban Ogban-Iyam, the American MIT-trained political theorist and activist, and his old Volkswagen kombi buses before. I had heard people discussing them among themselves. Some said they were the hallmark of humility. Others said they constituted the highest level of unconventional economics for a man who wanted a strategy to shield him from anything that could lead to desperation that might draw down a compromise in his enslavement to principles. Yet others would wager that he needed such large vehicles so he could always pick up his few possessions and members of his household down to his native Cross River State, if it came to that, without being beholden to a loan-giver.
For a long time Dr Ogban-Iyam was the labour nightmare of a non-performing or unfair administration in University of Nigeria. As he gained in experience and reputation such also, to a large extent, became the case at the national level. In the mid-1990s when the junta dissolvednormal administrative structure on University of Nigeria and imposed a Sole Administrator on the university Ogban-Iyam was on the frontline of the fray as the Zonal Co-ordinator of the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities, ASUU, for universities in the Nsukka Zone that included all such institutions from Benue State to all the states of the southeast. Previously he had cut his teeth in labour leadership as the Chairman of UNN branch of ASUU. This is why his retirement in the last quarter of 2010 is one of the most discussed topics in this Nigerian premier autonomous university. His idea of friendship is rare. It does not matter what else you manage to do, once you cut corners or are slipshod in your tasks you are Ogban-Iyam’s sworn enemy. And it does not matter where you come from or your social status, you are his friend once you show by your conduct that you stick to the rules and are on the side of the oppressed. It says something of the confidence the academic community has in him that he became a member of the University Council when he was a mere lecturer 1 He never looked back. In part because it was clear to him that he was in the university system for two reasons: the usual functions of an academic and the activistic one of trying to force a positive change.
There is this story about when in the National Youth Service camp he was dating the heartthrob he ended up marrying. When prospects of marriage seemed very likely, he told the young lady, “I hope you won’t mind marrying someone who will be sharing his time between school and prison throughout his active life?” Shocked, the lady wanted to know what the latter locus has got to do with the life of one of the best behaved men she ever saw. Her debonair suitor added the climax to the grim picture, “Please also factor in the prospect of being shot by a repressive government so that you wind up raising the children without me. I will never abandon the struggle to improve the Nigerian education system, even if it means paying with my very life.” They married alright and even though the worst of the scenarios never came true but official harassments were well and truly part of Ogban-Iyam’s life, not least in the days of the post-Second-Republic successive juntas. During General Abacha’s regime ASUU was protesting the dictator's excesses when leaders of the local branch of which Ogban-Iyam was one of the best known were rounded up. When his wife came to the Enugu State Police Command headquarters to see him, she broke down at a point. Between sobs she said, “I remember that you said this … But no regrets ... I can understand.”
One would be excused to guess that Ogban Ogban-Iyam picked up his attitude to authority overseas but he denies such, crediting two sources instead: his nature and his socialisation in Nigeria. After primary and secondary education in the old Ogoja Province inwhat are now Okuku, Ogoja, and Afikpo districts of Cross River and Ebonyi States, he had scholarships for university trainings in Nsukka and the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was in the heydays of such hard-left hot heads of whom the Institute’s Professor of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, was at the head of the pack. But when I suggested this Ogban countered that what he could see by way of pre-career influence at activism was from his both parents. He said both were sticklers for justice in their own traditional settings. “On one occasion my mother had had to give her own spare cloth to a woman from a neighbouring community who lost hers in a brawl in our market place. The old man (meaning his father) ran into trouble on occasions for standing up to fairness. ” The only contribution of the MIT to it was that it gave him some of the best university education anyone could have and that fortuitously he came upon the works of the Senegalese Afrocentric polymath, Cheikh Anta Diop. “If I have to do it all over again, I will go exactly the way of Cheikh Anta Diop,” he told me.
Ogban-Iyam’s insistence on principle cuts both ways in terms of bringing in friends and detractors. It is common to hear people describe his attitude as “extreme”. A senior lecturer in the Faculty who asked not to be named cited two examples that touch on the personal welfare of our activist intellectual. One was on the rank on which the man retired from the University’s service. The other was on his last outing on the Faculty’s Deanship politics. “Everyone knows that Ogban is a first-class scholar,” he began, “but look at him leaving the University with the rank of a mere senior lecturer. Why? Because he wouldn’t bend his socalled principle just a little”. The commentator said that the activist submitted papers for assessment to the rank of professor years back but would not care to improve his public relations. “Anyone else would have tried to find out what was happening to those papers but not so Ogban,” he said. Another example was Ogban-Iyams’s campaign against his former student, Professor Emma Ezeani, who was running for Dean of Faculty of the Social Sciences practically just weeks before the activist was due to retire. Dr Ogban-Iyam supported another candidate. Professor Ezeani went on to win, anyway, but narrowly. Ogban-Iyam told me that he had no regrets on either of these or any other stand he had taken during his career. With regard to his official rank, he said, “I don’t hate the designation of professor on my epaulette but it is not the kind of thing you get by all means. In that context too you have to be careful not to compromise the integrity of the system.”
Ogban-Iyam’s insistence on principle cuts both ways in terms of bringing in friends and detractors. It is common to hear people describe his attitude as “extreme”. A senior lecturer in the Faculty who asked not to be named cited two examples that touch on the personal welfare of our activist intellectual. One was on the rank on which the man retired from the University’s service. The other was on his last outing on the Faculty’s Deanship politics. “Everyone knows that Ogban is a first-class scholar,” he began, “but look at him leaving the University with the rank of a mere senior lecturer. Why? Because he wouldn’t bend his socalled principle just a little”. The commentator said that the activist submitted papers for assessment to the rank of professor years back but would not care to improve his public relations. “Anyone else would have tried to find out what was happening to those papers but not so Ogban,” he said. Another example was Ogban-Iyams’s campaign against his former student, Professor Emma Ezeani, who was running for Dean of Faculty of the Social Sciences practically just weeks before the activist was due to retire. Dr Ogban-Iyam supported another candidate. Professor Ezeani went on to win, anyway, but narrowly. Ogban-Iyam told me that he had no regrets on either of these or any other stand he had taken during his career. With regard to his official rank, he said, “I don’t hate the designation of professor on my epaulette but it is not the kind of thing you get by all means. In that context too you have to be careful not to compromise the integrity of the system.”
I pulled his legs on the kombi bus matter. “Oh, well, it is all a question of prioritisation of what you want out of life, “he said, beginning to move away. “For some people it is to get the poshest cars possible; for others it is some other things.” Then he stopped a little distance from where the chitchat began, and facing where I stood, he said, “At the point in 1980s when they were pointing at my jalopies I had paid two fifty-something thousand naira to get a laptop that I considered to be more relevant to my productivity. Most people on this campus had not heard about laptop, let alone seen one then.” One time Chairman of ASUU in UNN, Alex Nzei, added another dimension to the kombi story. “Does anyone still remember that it was Ogban as Chairman that bought the first ever car for ASUU-UNN? This is the Peugeot 505 station wagon that we are still using. He bought it brand new then. At that time only ASUU-UNN, ASUU-UNIBEN and the ABU branch had cars.” He went on, “The only thing about Ogban Ogban-Iyam is that I have never seen anyone more selfless than him. He literally forgets himself while fighting for other people or public good.” There is no doubt that University of Nigeria, Nsukka, will miss Dr Ogban Ogban-Iyam’s mesmerising oratory. This is even more so for Nigeria’s academic labour, and labour in general. Both should find a way to continue tapping from his wealth of knowledge and experience, even in retirement. Luckily he is merely retired but, by any stretch of imagination, not tired. Looking at his physical fitness you will think, with all justification, that he is someone somewhere in the second half of his thirties.
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