--MABOGUNJE'S LIBRARY GIFT TO OLABISI ONABANJO UNIVERSITY
by Ayo Olukotun
"Reading is not something our leaders have taken seriously. One building which has taken several years to complete is the National Library. The site was bought when Abuja was created. They started something on it and they are yet to complete it" – Emeritus Professor of Urban Geography, Akin Mabogunje, The Punch, Wednesday, July 1, 2020.
One way of gauging a nation's mindset regarding educational development is not in the fine speeches of politicians, but in the respect or frivolity with which it treats its libraries, particularly its National Library. As Emeritus Professor of Urban Geography, Akin Mabogunje laments in the opening paragraph, Nigeria is yet to complete the National Library Complex started several decades ago, compelling the library to be warehoused in a rented apartment, where rents are often long overdue before they are paid. Three and a half years ago, it required national outcry before an eviction threat over accumulated, unpaid rents, for 3 consecutive years, was dropped. Obviously, the pending status of our apex cultural and educational institution reflects the state of many other public libraries around the country, underfunded, underequipped, often lacking in topical acquisitions and hardly worth the name of the word library. The same kind of decay has overtaken most of our University libraries, many of which stock old books, unkempt and featuring yellowing pages. Given this background, it was refreshing therefore, to have Mabogunje donate his entire library, built over a 30-year period, to Olabisi Onabanjo University.
At a moving ceremony held on Tuesday, 30th of June, Mabogunje who turns 89 in October this year, went down memory lane to recall his days as the pioneer Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council of OOU, a post he held for 9 years. The professor felt that the donation was one way he could give back to the University, which he helped to establish. Present at the ceremony was Oluseun Mabogunje, an engineer and the professor's eldest son; Professor Ganiyu Olatunde, Vice-chancellor of the University; Professors Ayodeji Agboola and Ebun Oduwole, Deputy Vice-chancellors; Dr Adebambo Oduwole, the University Librarian; Niyi Oduwole, Deputy Registrar (Corporate Affairs), as well as this columnist. Olatunde, who could hardly hide his excitement assured Mabogunje that the University Library, located auspiciously at a new site on the main campus would do its level best to ensure that the most profitable use is made of the additional volume of books, journal articles and specialized papers bequeathed to the institution. There is no gainsaying the fact that the Mabogunje Library, located both in Ibadan and Ijebu-ode, will go a long way to beefing up the intellectual storehouse of OOU, considering that Mabogunje is one of our best scholars, globally acclaimed and the winner, a few years ago, of a star award in Geography, considered to be the equivalent of a Nobel Prize.
One of the valuable lessons to draw from such an event is its capacity to stimulate similarly edifying examples. There must be many Nigerian academics, at home and abroad, who are capable of making similar gestures to Nigerian university libraries, in order to boost their stock and profile. Indeed, some professors in the Diaspora, such as distinguished Humanities scholar, Toyin Falola, have made similar donations to universities across the country, but there could be many more, considering, especially, the resource gap that exists between our Ivory towers and centers of learning in more developed countries. There is also a negative cautionary tale when the harvests of the academic labour of many years are not properly harnessed. The story was told of a world-class Nigerian professor who unfortunately passed on while on sabbatical leave in a university outside Nigeria. Naturally, his family was thrown into disrepair and shoe-string financial status to the extent that the children, seeing no use for their late father's magnificent library, decided to hawk the books, piecemeal, to roadside booksellers and itinerant book vendors on the streets of one our cities. Obviously, their illustrious father must have turned in his grave to see what had become of the academic warehouse which he labored for almost a lifetime to set-up and furnish.
Needless to say that both leaders and followers in Nigeria are caught in the bind of a vacuous reading culture in which books attract very little value and attention. Consequently, those who do not arrange to have their books taken to where they are likely to be appreciated, will have themselves to blame if some of the pages of the books end up as material for wrapping akara, moin-moin and groundnuts by food vendors. The point here is that all kinds of embarrassing things can happen to the best store of books and reading material after the owner may have passed on. The point can be buttressed by undertaking a casual inspection of such edifices and thriving resource centers as our national archives and other resources centres located in our universities. In these instances, our organizational challenges as a nation which includes failure to properly organize learning resources is compounded by a poor reading culture, as well as creeping philistinism, teetering on the brink of book-burning. It is apposite, therefore, and a kind of delectable homecoming that the work of a scholar of Mabogunje's status, can be made available in its lush variety, to current and future students of a university which he himself has laboured to build. To be sure, it is not only in the areas of books and educational materials that the privileged or the affluent can bequeath lasting legacies to our educational institutions. For many years, we have talked endlessly about the revival of our comatose ivory towers, but the prospects of this happening in the foreseeable future are dim, going by current trends. As this columnist has often emphasized, it is not enough to lament the distressful circumstance, it is perhaps more important to do the little we can to alter the situation. The vagaries of life, especially on the African continent are such that many stupendously rich Nigerians have passed on, leaving their enormous wealth to be shared by international bankers and anonymous wheeler-dealers. Would it not have been inspiring if part of the funds gestating in European vaults were to be turned into endowments that would help to grow and stabilize our tottering centres of learning? If the government has failed to adequately fund our universities, what stops Nigerian billionaires from creating avenues and leeways to fill some of the gaps?
The recent outpourings of charitable donations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that there is a lot of civic energy and goodwill out there, waiting to be tapped in the interest of national progress. This point is made, not to excuse the dereliction of an incompetent state, but rather, to pinpoint, as Mabogunje has done, areas where civic and social capital can make a difference. Hence, the recent donation of a well-furnished library to one of our universities should serve to stimulate several other such endowments, as well as stir the conscience of privileged Nigerians to make the best use of their fortunes in order to build a better educational future. In this connection, it is pertinent to recall that many of the world's great universities derive tremendous resources and goodwill from such endowments, donations and charities.
- Prof. Ayo Olukotun is the Oba (Dr.) Sikiru Adetona Chair of Governance, Department of Political Science, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye.
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