Professor Olatunji Dare, journalist, teacher, scholar, public intellectual and mentor to many, turns 80 years old today. This man of letters, who writes to advance the cause of citizens on Main Street, Nigeria, deserves his flowers in the most open manner possible.
Unlike the proverbial teacher, whose rewards are to be received in heaven. Incidentally, Dare is a trained teacher. It is rumoured that he possesses a National Certificate of Education in Mathematics and Physics.
These numerate areas of specialisation may be responsible for his mental acuity and exceeding ability to reduce the esoteric to the level of nursery rhymes, in the manner of Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who could explain the most difficult scientific concepts in everyday English.
When you encounter Dare in the classroom, his confidence and mastery of his craft can be infectious. He has the capacity to bring the most opaque concepts to the understanding of even a dunderhead.
Almost no one gets out of a class taught by him without clarity about the knowledge just shared. My own experience is that I never wanted his classes to end. He was such a consummate man of the chalk!
Tolani Awere, his classmate in the Mass Communication Department of the University of Lagos, pours admiring encomiums on him, saying, “One’s head smells up in joy that one was in the same class with such a genius. A quiet, unassuming, intellect.”
He may not have been a playwright or poet, like master satirist George Bernard Shaw, but his Shavian credentials are in no doubt. Shaw was most recognised as the master of satire, the literary device that exposes the vices, foibles, shortcomings or flaws of its victim.
Satire offers social criticism or what some call journalistic criticism that focuses on social issues, especially the kind of perceived injustice or injury predominant in Nigeria. Shaw is famous for his comedic, but acidic drama.
Dare has demonstrated immense talent in the art of writing newspaper columns to the extent that his readers not only look forward to be enlightened by his writing, but they want to enjoy his wit and prodigious sense of humour.
After encountering the phrase, “To inaugurate a new cohort of intellectuals, driven by forensic facts that are ‘credible and reliable,’” in a submission by former Lagos Governor Babatunde Fashola, Dare concluded that it must have been the “lawyer and jurist, the Senior Advocate,” that was talking. Direct, humorous, witty.
After Akwa Ibom State was created in 1987, Dare deployed his humour to draw the attention of Nigerians to what they had always seen, but never noticed. In, “The Disappearing Calabar Man,” Dare revealed that practically every “Calabar Man,” king or knave, that Nigerians always knew was from Akwa Ibom, and not “Calabar” after all.
“Calabar” had always been the generic nomenclature for any of the ethnic nationalities of the old southeastern state, out of which Cross River State, the home state of the “Calabar Man,” and Akwa Ibom State, were created.
Like Shaw, Dare would sneak his sarcastic message into his writing with an entertaining and riveting punchline. Dare stimulates his communications in a decidedly intellectual manner, like the essential deep calling to the deep.
Perhaps the only other Nigerian newspaper columnist to employ biting satire and robust humour is Alade Odunewu, Allah-De, who plied his trade on the pages of Daily Times, the flagship of Nigerian newspapers in its heyday.
After reading the rejoinder written by me, his student, to an Op-Ed he wrote in the Daily Times newspaper, sometime in 1978, Dare came into the classroom, praising the rejoinder, but without failing to point out what could be improved.
But to my surprise, he promptly appointed me as a member of the Editorial Board of The Unilag Sun, the training journal of the Department of Mass Communication. When I won the 2018 Diamond Award for Media Excellence which he had won many years before, I was more than excited.
The excitement was even more significant because I won the award on the same occasion that he got the esteemed DAME Lifetime Award which was received on his behalf by the late Prof. Lai Oso, my classmate in the UNILAG Mass Communication Department.
The teacher in him can be very strict. When he discovered that I was cutting classes because I thought the course he was teaching was a piece of cake, he promised to ensure that I came for a resit. And he did.
After that encounter, I learnt never to skip classes– and to always show up whenever necessary. I already told this story to Olakunle Abimbola, columnist and member of the Editorial Board of The Nation.
Dare is completely dedicated to the principle of the rule of law, without which any society, under democratic or military rule, will not survive. The predictability of the rule of law sustains society, whereas impunity will compromise the safety and security of citizens.
When Publisher Alex Ibru, led a delegation to apologise to the then military Head of State, General Sani Abacha, to avoid the arbitrary shutdown of The Guardian, Dare deigned to join and promptly resigned.
He argued that a newspaper like The Guardian, couldn’t be seen to be trading off its commitment to the principle of the rule of law that it advocates. He must believe in the aphorism that Caesar’s wife must not only be beyond suspicion, but she has to be seen to be beyond suspicion.
At The Guardian, which has become the flagship of Nigeria’s newspapers, Dare had been a columnist, editorial page editor and Chairman of the Editorial Board. And out of the “editorial belly” of that regime came some of the profound corpus of public intellectualism.
Dare’s journey as a university lecturer started as a Graduate Assistant at the University of Lagos. He went through several American universities as he climbed the rungs of the academic ladder to become a professor, after which Bradley University, in Peoria, in America’s state of Illinois, celebrated him with the honour of Professor of Journalism, Emeritus.
Dare has been a reporter, columnist, newspaper lead writer, interviewer and teacher. He has travelled extensively and won academic and professional laurels in the course of his career as an academic, professional and administrator.
Incidentally, when Americans tell you, “It is raining in Peoria,” where Dare became a professor, they mean that something is commonplace everywhere. You could borrow that phrase to describe the brilliance of Dare who has excelled everywhere he has worked; in the classroom, the newsroom and the boardroom.
Someone has suggested that Dare has a “felt commitment to help shape the standards of sense and sensibility in an era of fervent partisanship and ‘alternative facts,’” especially when journalists become unabashedly partisan and present obvious lies as truth.
Dare’s human rights credentials are indisputable. His utterances say so. He once said –or wrote– that if you cut the body of a journalist with a knife, the body should be dripping the blood of a human rights activist. The journalist must be a liberal, who protects the freedom and wellbeing of citizens.
As Nigeria’s media world today celebrates Prof. Dare, Shavian in every material particular and current doyen of the tribe of Nigerian columnists, one must wish him, “May your pen never run dry.”
