It's 22 Years Today That Our Own Dr. Tai Solarin Left His Great Legacy for Nigeria

The good deeds of patriotism, honesty, hard work, freedom of conscience, religious tolerance, matrimonial ideal, educational excellence and moral probity that our great icon, Dr. Tai Solarin, was famous and popular for still live on today in the minds of us his followers and admirers.

Tai Solarin Organisation, Tai Solarin University of Education, Tai Solarin College of Education, Tai Solarin Memorial Schools, Mayflower School, Mayflower Private School, Mayflower Junior School, T(ai) & S(heila) Hospital, Tai Solarin Memorial Library and Tai Solarin Way are some of the monuments extant today that make his memory lingers in our mind.

Twenty-two years after the transition of the social critic and human rights crusader par excellence, Tai Solarin lives on.

Tai Solarin’s Legacy Lives On 20 Years After His Exit

As Tai Solarin Organisation (TSO) is remembering the 20 years of Dr. Tai Solarin’s transition today, we are excited to acknowledge that your immortal greatness is still fresh in our minds as an erudite scholar, author, columnist, social critic, moralist, humanist, human rights activist, disciplinarian, patriot, teacher and farmer. We, your admirers, shall continue to cherish your philanthropy and educational legacy for a long time to come. Your greatness is inspiring and enduring. Keep on living in our consciousness, Oga Tasere (The Slim Teacher).

How Many Books of Tai Solarin Have You Read?

I read books that challenge and inspire:

books that make one feel that life is worth living.

TAI SOLARIN, 1992

 TSO Coordinator Sulaiman Dave Bola-Babs and Yemi Shodimu of O Le Ku fame admire two of Tai Solarin's books on display at a Tai Solarin Memorial Lecture, Victoria Island, Lagos

“But why should I read Tai Solarin’s books at all?” you may ask. Here is Tai Solarin’s response, from the horse’s mouth: “My guess is that most people want to read about people who started poor and ended in affluence or greatness. This is because most of the people everywhere are poor. Or to put it in another way, most of the people everywhere are common men.

“The average reader would like to read about the life of the common man who ended uncommon. The common man who sweated and strained, body all aching and racked with pain, but who eventually made it by extracting himself with his own exertion from the crowd of the common men to the pinnacle, with so few up there and all of them uncommon. In our society in Nigeria, this is the class to which I belong. I started from down under and eventually rose not to affluence but to greatness.”

Writing a foreword to Education for Greatness 1: Selected Speeches of Dr. Tai Solarin, Nigeria’s former Minister of Education, Professor Babs Fafunwa, observed that “Tai’s fertile mind, like his writings, ranged over a broad variety of topics: nation-building, self-reliance, technology, science, culture, economic well-being, food production and human rights, just to mention a few. But all of Tai Solarin’s topics, both in speeches and articles in the national newspapers, dovetail into education.”

If you want to have education for personal and national greatness, your starting point may be an acquaintance with the 265 pages book Education for Greatness 1 with 48 colour pictures of Tai Solarin, Sheila Solarin, Corin Solarin, Tunde Solarin, Mayflower Junior School pupils, Mayflower School students, ex-Mays and Tai Solarin’s friends and associates, inter alia, plus variegated ideas and principles of education advocated for more than four decades in his own pristine words.

If you are in hurry to drink from the fountain of wisdom of the social crusader par excellence, your best bet is the 126 pages book or ebook titled Tai Solarin in a Nutshell: Immortal Quotes of Tai Solarin with a foreword by the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Benin, Professor Grace Alele-Williams.  According to her, “the book is an attempt to bring together in one book the philosophy of the man Tai Solarin. In particular, it describes what the man stood for. The book attempts to view the wide range of Tai Solarin's writings about the failures and, in some ways, what greatness Nigeria could attain as a nation.

“Tai Solarin was an educationist, a social critic and a reformer. He believed ardently in the power of education to transform Nigeria into an egalitarian society, a state in which Nigerians would enjoy the basic necessities and civil rights. These he saw as a right of every Nigerian to food, shelter, water, transportation, adequate health care facilities and education from birth to the tertiary level. He not only used every opportunity available to him to teach, lecture and discuss, he also often berated the authorities for the type of education available in the country, the missionary schools and the private proprietors. Tai not only criticised the government, he also practised what he taught by establishing his school.

“In all, Tai Solarin in a Nutshell: Immortal Quotes of Tai Solarin is not a book to be read in a hurry. Each nugget calls for deliberate thinking in order to re-examine policies, practices, governance, indiscipline, indulgence, malice and inadequacies in the nation. This book is, therefore, capable of galvanizing its readers to re-examine Tai Solarin's life and works in order to examine not only our schools and colleges today but also governance and the role the educated can play in transforming our country for good.”

Those are glimpses into just two of the 36-plus books on Dr. Tai Solarin and Mayflower School. If you are interested in benefiting from the 11 books authored by the social critic and 25-plus publications by other scholars on him and his philosophy of life, simply call 0803-365-3110 right now to avail yourself of the books and ebooks on him and his existential ideology cum national and international ethos.

Even the former military president of Nigeria could not resist the persuasive power and logic inherent in the sterling thoughts of irrepressible change agent as admitted in his 2012 interview with the Leadership newspaper, “I was an avid reader of late Dr. Tai Solarin when I was in secondary school. There was his column, ‘Thinking With You’. I grew up to know that even the whites teaching us at that time loved to read him, because there was a lot of sense in what he said.”

My personal sentiment about Dr. Tai Solarin was my discovering the genius in him in 1984 after reading his A Message for Young Nigerians good nine years before the former Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice of Nigeria, Dr. Olu Onagoruwa, detected same in 1993 when he averred, “Dr. Tai Solarin and I share the same ideals and ideology of equity and social justice, with an unalterable belief in the rule of law and preservation of the dignity of man. Like all great men of unusual vision, Tai Solarin approximates to Mahatma Gandhi, Karl Marx, John Dewey, etc. in selflessness and self-denial. However, I feel confounded that his logical mind finds no place for religion and the Creator who created his genius.”

If you want to start enjoying the genius of Tai Solarin in the next few hours, simply call 0909-177-3366 right now to avail yourself of the two books above or the following ebooks on your laptop or desktop:

Education for Greatness 1: Selected Speeches of Dr. Tai Solarin
Tai Solarin in a Nutshell: Immortal Quotes of Tai Solarin

No Witches, No Angels: My Credo

Our Grammar School Must Go
Sheila: A Lady of Courage.

How many books of Tai Solarin have you read?

Today's Memorial Lecture was a Great Success

Precisely 18 years and 2 months ago, Dr. Tai Solarin parted with us after a hugely eventful life of 78 years, with his footprints on the sands of time as the first Nigerian with two higher institutions of learning named after him posthumously - Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijebu-Ode and Tai Solarin College of Education, Omu-Ijebu.

“The World Owes You Nothing,” Says Mrs. Sheila Solarin At 88

TSO COORDINATOR & MRS. SHEILA SOLARIN

As the highly respected widow of Dr. Tai Solarin clocked the enviable age of 88 yesterday, admirers of her late husband’s most popular article “May Your Road Be Rough!” will also enjoy Madam’s version of it republished here with the above title. It’s a sort of career guidance for the 21st century youth and the young at heart.

 “Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.

The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

MARK TWAIN

I would like to suggest that the only thing that is certain in this millennium is uncertainty. The world is changing rapidly and we will have to change with it, whether we are ready or not. It will surely be better to prepare for this uncertain future.

You should grasp at every shred of education and work experience that you can get. If you have a week or two of vacation, or a compulsory stay-at-home for a strike, look around for what work needs doing in your area and start doing it voluntarily. Don’t look only for what you will be paid for. If there are potholes in your street, look for broken blocks or an abandoned heap of laterite.  Get others of your kind together, beg for a shovel and a derelict bucket or head-pan and fill some of those potholes thoroughly. Get used engine oil from a local mechanic to pour on top of your filling. This will protect it from the rain to some extent. You will feel so good, you will have got physical exercise and you will have shown what is possible without money. Who knows, you may one day be a PWD engineer, or a local government chairman, and you will remember what you learnt. Above all, you will have learnt to be a leader, not a follower.

Volunteer to work in a local hospital – read stories to children, hold the hands of someone afraid or in pain. Look round and see what you can do to help. I am not suggesting that you are going to spend your life in a poverty-stricken volunteer, but you will learn a lot from any kind of work experience.

As I said above, get every shred of education you can. I would like to emphasize mathematics, science and English. These are your core subjects in secondary school. You can read up subjects such as history, geography, economics and literature at anytime, but you must get the basic rudiments in mathematics, English and science. Your science should be as practical as possible, so try to encourage your teachers to give you practicals. Volunteer to help set up, clean up and put away equipment. Your teachers are probably overwhelmed by the number of students and lack of equipment. Try to suggest politely ways in which students can help. You and the teachers are not in opposing teams. You are on the same side, facing the same goal post.

When you reach the end of Junior Secondary class 3, you have to be thinking of your choice of subjects. Try to make sure that your results are good enough to offer at least biology and chemistry, and physics if you can. The world we are in – the millennium we have just moved into – needs science and technology. Don’t opt for physical education or religious knowledge because you can get marks. You may get through Senior Secondary class 3 and university and end up with a useless qualification. Music and art should be taught and should be enjoyed, but remember that very few people make a good living from either of these. The same goes for football. Sure, an international footballer may get, for a few years, a salary beyond its widest dreams but count how many such footballers there are. Get a degree in, say, biochemistry and play football thereafter. When your football career is over, you will go back to your biochemistry for the rest of your life – perhaps another twenty or thirty years after the period you spent on football.

Aim at becoming computer literate by whatever means. One of those compulsory breaks from university may give you a couple of months for a short computer course. Befriend somebody who has a computer. Offer to clean his car, do up his garden, scrub his cement yard or wash his clothes in exchange for half an hour on his computer. Read the theory by all means but try to get your hand on somebody’s keyboard. Bill Gates never went to computer school. His mother got hold of a computer from somewhere and he learnt as a teenager what he needed to know to become one of the world’s richest young men – a computer wizard.

Consider what you can do to be self-employed. If you want a job these days, you had better make one. What about making work and wealth from waste? There are a few people in Lagos combing the rubbish heaps for reusable materials but they are not well organised and do not own the processing equipment themselves to turn the rubbish into something useful.

You can sell waste paper, scrap metal, glass and cloth. Get yourself a collecting cart, two bicycle wheels, a rectangular metal bottom with the sides heightened with iron mesh. Go around your collecting area on the same day every week, so that your visit will be expected.  If you can afford to divide the inside of your cart into three sections, then you could collect paper in one, glass in one and metal in the other section. After your round, you have to press the paper into bales.

Reusable tins and bottles can be sold off to those who reuse them for selling palm oil, vegetable oil, etc. Other metals need sorting into types – aluminium and iron will be separated. Factories producing aluminium pots and pans accept aluminium for recycling and pay for it. Plastic can be recycled also to coat hangers and similar small items. Cloth can be cut up and turned into rugs or reprocessed for re-spinning and weaving.

Clearly, one quality you have to put aside is pride. What will my mates say when they see me collecting rubbish? Perhaps, ultimately you will have a small business producing coat hangers and your mates will still be dressing up to carry their application letter from door to door looking for a job ten years after they graduate.

If you are going into business, be ready to start small, producing something people want. ‘Eleganza’ knew what he was doing when he started producing coolers for carrying food for parties. Which household does not own one, or does not hope to get one? Slippers we need; carpets we can live without.

If you can manage to have two businesses going – especially if one is seasonal – you will have a better chance of surviving. If you drill a small borehole and produce bottled water, you could run it in the dry season and farm during the rains.  In China, on a commune we visited, the farm was a fruit farm but they also produce children’s cloth (which Nigeria imports from them) when there was not much work on the farm. Nigerian farmers are largely idle throughout the season.  

In the U.S.A. and United Kingdom, there are special department stores where all kinds of handcraft from the Third World are sold. You will find embroidery and crochet work from Zimbabwe, carvings from Ghana, textiles from India, small items of furniture from Thailand – from Nigeria, nothing. Yet this country has a wealth of handsome cloth, pottery, wood carving and metal work we do not seem able to show the world. All of these could be produced in the dry season as a second leg on which to stand when times are hard. You might also make a business out of going round the country collecting craft items for export.

If you are lucky enough to get a job at any point in your career, make sure you do more than you are asked to do. Tai worked an average of 15 to 16 hours per day all the time I knew him. Even before he came back from Europe, he had worked on a farm in Sweden and hit the headlines as the man who could pick twice as many potatoes in a day as any other farm worker. When he was in the Air-force in Canada, he collected from the dustbins the socks that his mates were too lazy to wash. He washed them and sold them back to those who had thrown them away.

When I was a student, I sold cloth in the Saturday market, cleaned the apartment for one bachelor and mended socks for another. I worked as a waitress in a hotel in the long vacation; one summer I worked on a farm. On fine days we were outside working on the fruit farm. On raining days we were inside packing sweets made from fruit juice, or making wooden crates to pack the fruits for market. There was no day when a lazy worker could put his head down on the table.

Tai also worked as a mortuary attendant. And he was already a graduate at that time, but he had learnt to take any job available. If you get a job, work harder than you are expected to do, and be ready to put in longer hours if need be – whether you will get extra pay or not – you will be training yourself to work and building a reputation that will always be useful.

So these are a few suggestions to think over.  The world does not owe you a living. You have to make a place for yourself. Good luck!

Corin Solarin on Nigeria, Education and Religion

Dr. Tai Solarin's first child and daughter, Corin Solarin, who came back to Nigeria permanently last year after spending 42 years in America expressed her views to "The Nation" newspaper last week Sunday, while remembering the death of his illustrious father 16 years ago.

According to Corin, Nigeria has not really achieved the democracy his father lived and died for. “We have a long way to go. We are still backward. We are no longer the country rated the best in Africa, for we lack many things and we are no longer the giant of Africa.

“We don’t have electricity and all our ability to develop cannot work without power supply. Education is affected, for the quality of our graduates is dropping. No job for people and crime rate is high, among other problems,” she observed.

Unknown to many distant observers of the Solarins, the nuclear family is a kaleidoscope of faiths. While the late Tai was a confirmed atheist, his now 86-year-old wife, Sheila, is an agnostic. Tunde is a deist while Corin says “I am a Christian. I go to church in America. I believe in God and in Jesus Christ’s teachings, but not so with my parents.”

“They have their own lives to live and I have mine to live too. I cannot preach Christ to them, for they have their own beliefs. The church I attend is in America. My parents who did not believe God are godlier than many of those who go to church every day. My parents’ behaviour cannot be faulted. They were nice and good to people. They do a great deal than those who go to church every day.”  

Superior And Inferior Educational Systems?

"For a republican country to build special schools whatsoever negates the idea of republicanism, sentencing the nation’s students to terms of superior and inferior educational mints. It is a cheat to want to unite a country by keeping in one school hand-picked students by whatever method of selection.


Build not only 72 but a thousand unity schools, ten thousand unity schools, a million unity schools with better teachers, better equipment, better teaching facilities, leaving the others as colourless state schools, and you have destroyed the core of federalism in the nation.

Republicanism stands for egalitarianism. Anything that prevents a member of a republic from benefiting from what any other republican member benefits from is corruption.

The greatest hindrance to realizing a true republic is the injection of anomalies like unity schools, model schools, command schools, air force schools for girls into the nation’s educational system. They should all go."

TAI SOLARIN IN A NUTSHELL: IMMORTAL QUOTES OF TAI SOLARIN

Private Schools To Rescue.

"It is lamentable that Nigeria of today, instead of getting its children given education free, universal and compulsory, is further re-establishing private schools and thus taking us back decades from what should be actually happening in Nigeria."

TAI SOLARIN IN A NUTSHELL: IMMORTAL QUOTES OF TAI SOLARIN