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Okaopa: How Akin Mabogunje Mentored Me, Others
Okaopa: How Akin Mabogunje Mentored Me, Others
The Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission ( FCSC) , Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has disclosed how the late renowned geographer Prof. Akin Mabogunje, mentored him, others and the nation at large .
Olaopa made the disclosure in a tribute during the 2nd Public Lecture & Launch of the PALM Foundation in honour of Prof. Akin Mabogunje in Lagos on Saturday.
Stressing that the impact of the life of Mabogunje was both at individual and national levels, Olaopa relived what he identified as his “unbroken mentor-mentee learning engagement walk with him for over three decades” and that “Papa offered himself as sounding board, think tank and teacher for all seasons, all through my career years as a federal officer.He would patiently listen to hear you out. Having observed the gaps or limitation in one’s knowledge, ideas and insights, like the modern-day Socrates, he would methodically stretch the necessity of closing the gap, first through a lengthy seminal conversation, ending up by recommending and offering available materials and authorities.”
Olaopa who described Mabogunje as a national icon, global scholar and unarguably, an intellectual hero said that his contributions to the country would continue to inspire the way committed patriots see life of service.
” Indeed, his contributions to our conceptual, intellectual and development policy architecture remains indelible, and will be hard to erase from our memory”, he said.
Olaopa said that “Prof. Mabogunje personified disciplinary geography, especially as a spatial perspective, an intellectual compass and praxis for self-regeneration and for nation-building. He gave geography and its limitless nuances uncommon prominence and influence in the Nigerian policy space for decades; not just as his calling and lifelong frontier shifting mission; and, in so doing, he succeeded in binding the theoretical to the practical, in a most situated and contextualised application of its cartographic essence to the Nigerian space.”
He added that “Mabogunje showed himself an eternal patriot in his service to his country through the 1962 task of demarcating the enumeration areas in the preparation for the national census , and the numerous supportive surveys; from his membership of the Udoji reform commission of 1972 and contributions to institutional reforms; to DFRRI, to the conceptualisation and technical support to the implementation of the Nigeria’s community bank model; the planning of the Federal Capital Territory, the technical iterations of mortgage banking, university governance, poverty reduction, housing reform and his intellectual mentorship at the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP).”
Thus, for Olaopa, contrary to the Yoruba adage that people are deified after death, Mabogunje was revered while alive as a colossus. “And now in death, he has become a monument”, he added.
Noting the eternal influence of Mabogunje’s ideas on governance after his death, Olaopa said: “With the clinical patience with which he documented in A Measure of Grace, his autobiography, his development thoughts and foresights for the emerging greater Nigeria, I can tell that his thoughts and ideas are still flowing free in the development space, not just amongst core specialists, but also policy workers and development practitioners. These eternal corpus and contributions are therefore available for perspicacious governments to tap into in time and space. This is what constitutes immortality for this colossal genius and patriot”.
The Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission ( FCSC) , Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has disclosed how the late renowned geographer Prof. Akin Mabogunje, mentored him, others and the nation at large
