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.

7th Tai Solarin Memorial Lecture is Thursday 27 September 2012 at 11 a.m. Prompt

You are cordially invited to the Seventh Tai Solarin National Memorial Lecture entitled “The Dynamics of Information: Embracing the Present to Cope with the Future” to be delivered by Professor Zakari Mohammed, FNIM, University Librarian, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, on Thursday 27 September 2012 at 11.00 a.m. prompt at the auditorium of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria, PC 19 Adeola Hopewell Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, under the distinguished chairmanship of Senator Chief (Mrs.) Oluremi Tinubu, OON.

Our Special Guest of Honour is Mrs. Sheila Solarin, MFR, OBE while the Master of Ceremony is the veteran broadcaster and actor, Mr. Yemi Shodimu. 

ADMISSION IS FREE FOR ALL ATTENDEES!
  
Please call 0803-365-3110 or 080-22233-413 for more information.

“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!

Professor Munzali Jibril Honours Dr. Tai Solarin Today.

It was a gathering of the young and old, men and women, poor and rich, power brokers and the not-so-powerful that remembered the 16th anniversary of the demise of Dr. Tai Solarin today as Nigeria is celebrating its golden anniversary as an independent nation in less than 24 hours.

Madam Sheila Solarin, Corin Solarin, Mrs. Fola Olumide, Professor Olumide, Senator Olabiyi Durojaye, and Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu were among the dignitaries who attended the 6th Tai Solarin Annual National Memorial Lecture delivered by Professor Muhammad Munzali Jibril, OFR, at the auditorium of the Bankers House, Adeola Hopewell Street, Victoria Island today under the chairmanship of Otunba Hope Harriman, the first president of The Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers of Nigeria.    

Solarins' Marriage Is 59 Years Old Today

O n the 14th day of September 1951, Tai Solarin and Sheila Tuer started a matrimonial journey that lasted 43 years by the time the husband died on 27 July 1994 at the age of 78. Sheila is now 86.


There are a few lessons learnt from this unique union of the teaching titans both before and after their wedding as revealed by Tai himself.


"Sheila and I met during my second year in the university. We went to the dance and cinema together, but I did it with the casualness that had been the trait of my relationship with all other girls I met. We were all students with some time off duty for a spree. I never proposed to any girl that I disappointed in my life.


"Any time we were together, I was surprised by the versatility of Sheila’s mind. She was a competent electrician. She could darn perfectly. She was a first-class cook and any time I commended her cooking, she always said it was nothing as compared to her sister’s. Not once could I talk about a book in those days which she had not read, or a news item she had not picked up on her own before me. In every aspect, she was my better.

"When I went to Manchester where Sheila and I got married, the ceremony took about 3 minutes. I remember carefully checking over the passage that was to be read. My wife was to obey me. I told the registrar that sentence should be deleted. I did not want her to obey me. The family would lose lots of things, having to be led imperiously by a husband of lesser intelligence. The registrar accepted my wish and the portion was deleted.

"Sheila and I have so much in common. We do not hold secrets between ourselves. We remain honest and trustworthy in our relationship with each other. If I take money out of our joint account, Sheila never asks me why or what I use it for. Like me, she does not buy clothes or jewelleries. We have no need for them.

"I can safely assume she shares my stand on religion, though we have never discussed the issue. She allows me all the degree of freedom I ever can need. I don’t need to inform her beforehand of my social crusades or my public statements or roles and yet she’s ever so supportive. I don’t have to discuss the contents of my articles to her before publication, yet she shares the tribulations with me when they do occur.

"She’s a courageous woman, very brilliant too. I respect her. I’ve never shouted at her and I’ve never raised a finger against her in the forty-plus years of our marriage. Ours has been a happy and highly successful marriage and Sheila has been a strong positive influence in my life.

"In our 43 years of married life, we have never had a day of sorrow. Ask me why not. My guess is that we spend each day as our last. We fill each day with plenty of activities in the service of others – that of course is our religion."      

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.”  

Professor Niyi Osundare on Professor Attahiru Jega and Dr. Tai Solarin

The 2011 election is already being rigged even before it ever takes place. 


How much power and control can Professor Attahiru Jega have over these government appointees?


The situation Jega is in reminds me very much of my encounter with our immortal Tai Solarin when he was given the post of Chairman of the People’s Bank. I went to him and said "Uncle Tai what is this I am hearing? Those who gave you this Greek gift are trying to destroy you and those who believe in you. Please don’t let them.” He said “Well, I’ve always been for the people. This is an opportunity to serve them." A man of good faith, he meant well. I asked if he trusted the ones asking him to serve the people; how much of the people’s friends are they really? “We know you as a man of integrity,” I told him. But what happens to a sole man of integrity who finds himself in a moral desert? This question pops back into focus as I consider the Jega appointment. I shudder when I remember that Nigeria’s moral roadside is littered with a crowd of “rubbished” professors.


Nigeria has an uncanny way of rubbishing good men and women. In fact, it’s as if this country is a cesspool and whoever is the leader will look at somebody whose clothe is still clean and do everything to drag that person into the mess. You have to have a lot of courage and integrity to be able to say no. I’m afraid, Jega is being put in a position in which he cannot exercise full power, a situation that he cannot control. How will he control the security agents who collude in the snatching of ballot boxes?


We have seen so many instances. These agents are bribeable and easily corruptible. What about the wizards of the computer room who manipulate poll figures and conduct virtual elections? What about pervasive pressures from the ruling party bent on turning Nigeria into a one-party state?


What pains me is that professors have been used to clean up the mess so many times. I think Jega would be about the fifth professor to serve as boss of the electoral commission. The only professor that has left the place untarnished is Professor Eme Awa and he ran away when he saw that he was being subjected to undue pressure. They harassed him, they intimidated him but he told them “I’m an old man; I want to go to my grave with the clean name that I’m noted for. Take your position.” They took their position. Whom did they give it to? It was another professor: Humphrey Nwosu. You remember what he did with it.


Now we have another professor as INEC chair. Professors are not trained to handle political thugs. Professors are not trained to superintend over corrupted electoral officers. How would Jega be able to do this? How many hands does Jega have? How many fingers are in each hand? How many heads stand on his shoulders? How many eyes does he have? The people who should be his eyes in the country, he does not have control over because they were not appointed by him. He has a gargantuan task ahead of him.


Only one election has succeeded in this country: the one of June 12, 1993. All the other elections were designed to fail. June 12 was designed to fail but it became a spirit as it were. It refused to die; it refused to fail. Because it refused to fail, Babangida and his clique killed it; they killed something about this country. Nigeria has not really recovered from June 12.


What about option A4 that succeeded so well on June 12, 1993? I was here, going from one polling station to another. I saw women with babies on their backs, singing, waving their ballot papers. That was democracy about to unfold. Nigeria was poised for progress. Babangida and his clique killed that dream. As I said before in another forum, if this were a true country, people like Babangida would be in jail for crime against humanity and the Nigerian dream. No crime could have been greater than that. He was responsible for the deaths of so many Nigerians, including those that were killed during the June 12 riot. But now he wants to rule again. Such unspeakable abomination!


Comrade Jega will need a miracle to succeed in this task. And I am no believer in miracles.