Letter To The First Lady Of Nigeria – Independent Newspaper Nigeria

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 Ekaaro ma, and compliments of the day. I trust you are in excellent health, and that you are well. The last time I saw you, you were planting veggies at the state house garden, seeking to get Nigerians to at least grow something of what they eat. I know that most Nigerians did not apply and follow your footsteps but many of us liked the idea, especially as we are daily confronted with the perplexity and modernity of fake eggs, fake fish, rice grown on the DNA of maggots and flies, cloned meat and potatoes, and of how we are almost helpless at the inexorable invasion of GMO foods like beans, cassava, rive and water melons, in our markets and bukas, exposing us your children to carcino­genic abundances.

Last week on this page I wrote to thank you for using the occasion of your birthday to draw attention to the abandoned National Library. I said in that piece that I had done some leg work, and published that leg worked­ness as a less than one-minute video on Youtube. I had also gone ahead to publish something about the library on Thisday and The Guardian news­papers of Nigeria. I did something ex­tra as well, and that was that I made the story a cover story on my monthly cultural digest, WADONOR…cultur­al voice of Nigeria in October 2023. In that WADONOR publication, I was to note that whilst the two worship cen­tres representing Nigeria’s hypocrisy with being a secular state have been completed and running, a building as significant to national development like the National Library itself has been decrepit for almost twenty years.

I am certain that you are not us­ing the auspicious occasion of your birthday to draw attention to the bad state of the library simply because you may have chanced upon some of these publications, no. Other much older and more esteemed personages like Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, for­mer president of Nigeria had at one time urged Asiwaju to try to look at completing the abandoned library located in the heart of Abuja.

From what I have seen, read and listened to about you in the media, you appear an Amazon: a very strong and passionate person. You love Nigerians and want the best for us. You have sup­ported Asiwaju all of these years as a wife, mother, close confidante and friend. Evidence of that support you have given him lends a lot of credence to that aphorism that all you need to see behind a successful man is a good and dependable woman – which you have proven to be.

Quite the opposite of a lot of poli­ticians today, you also appear to know the importance of reading, study and the role that research plays in nation­al development. I said, ‘quite the op­posite of a lot of politicians today’, and I have not minced those words or used them for the nonce. Your hus­band’s predecessors hardly helped the book and study industry and sector either with their names and means but wanted to use the same critical sector which they had ignored and abandoned to whitewash their fail­ures whilst in power.

Already there are many forces out there lampooning your bold initiative at seeking to resuscitate the aban­doned library. I know you know about these effete efforts but here’s what I have heard: that the library itself can­not be completed from a pet project as yours apparently because gargantuan monies were and have been allocated to the library in the past – monies in billions of naira that appear to have been stolen and misappropriated. I also hear that you have plans to use a private account with which you want to crowdsource for funds with which to complete the library, and all such blah, blah and utter blah.

On one occasion on those blahs, I have had to say that if we are to con­duct a forensic and follow and track the stolen national library monies that have been pilfered in 17 years, the tracks may just lead in the direc­tion of the many disgruntled fellows out there whose source of livelihood appear now to be being checkmated by your bold initiative with the na­tional library. In 17 years when mon­ies for the library were being taken with brazen bravado, most of those fellows throwing tantrums now were not shouting blue murder as they are doing now, no.

All this brings me to point of my letter to you. But first let me say that greatness does not come from doing great things but from doing those needful things that affect a great many of our people for good. Extraor­dinary feats come from doing those ordinary things that eventually etch names in hearts of people. Such is the resuscitation of the abandoned national library to which you have embarked upon.

Therefore, my message to you our first mother and first lady is this: set a timeline of two years for the com­pletion of the library. If the National Conference Centre in Abuja can be resuscitated in two years, so can the li­brary. To get more money to complete the library, I recommend you get Oga to chase those who stole the library monies and get them to refund those monies for use for the completion of the library. And lastly, yes, let the li­brary be named the REMI TINUBU National Library of Nigeria.