The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission ( FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, on Saturday paid tribute to a former President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Dr Wale Okediran, as he turned 70.
Olaopa delivered the tribute titled “Writing the Public Service into the Nigerian Consciousness” at the “70th Birthday Event/Celebration of Dr. Wale Okediran and a Reading/Writers Dialogue” held at the Mamman Vatsa Village, Abuja, by the Abuja chapter of ANA.
Okediran , a medical doctor-turned writer has equally made a foray into politics where he was at a time a member of the House of Representatives.
In his congratulatory message, Olaopa noted the role of the writer in national development. He specifically drew attention to how Okediran has used his medical, literary and political trajectories to improve the lot of Nigerians in particular and humanity in general.
As Olaopa put it, Okediran “has come a long way and has blazed many trails so consistently that at a beautiful age of seventy, he has achieved a sublime legacy that embodies existential fulfilment.”
Consequently, to Olaopa, Okediran in his estimation “is Nigeria’s answer to C. P. Snow’s two-culture thesis. According to that thesis, there is a significant and unbridgeable divide between the humanities and the natural sciences in ways that ensure seeming lack of communication between the two. The literary intellectuals and the natural scientists pride themselves on their inability to understand each other, and this, Snow argues, leads to an inhibited intellectual progress. In Wale Okediran, we have a fluid and exemplary personification that firmly undermines that thesis. Dr Okediran fluidly incorporates the love for science and the humanities.”
According to Olaopa, Okediran is the very embodiment of the “renaissance man—the multi-talented man imbued with a secular sensibility that draws on the human condition to articulate an Afropolitan sensibility of humaneness, compassion, strength, open-mindedness, passion and empathy.
It was almost inevitable that Dr Okediran’s love for medicine and literature would be deployed in the service of the humanity in Nigeria and on the continent. Medicine is not just physiological and psychological, at least not in Africa. Medicine ministers to the brutalized bodies of Africans. As a medical doctor therefore, Dr Okediran has the unenviable space to confront the many psychotic manifestations of governance failure in Nigeria.”
Praising further Okediran’s legacy, Olaopa said that his “literary interests and skills provide the opportunity to tell the postcolonial Nigerian stories as he encountered them over the course of his own personal existential and professional trajectories. And this explains Dr Okediran’s path into politics; what better way to effect significant changes than being in the corridor of power?
“One could only wonder how long a man of such literary sensibility would last within the murky space of Nigerian politics. Fortunately, public service is not restricted to being a member of the House of Representatives. Dr Okediran’s public service space encompasses the local, the national and the regional—from the National Old Student Association of Olivet Baptist High School to the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA). Dr Wale Okediran’s literary sensibility enables him to build a community of service. The Ebedi International Writers Residency at Iseyin is a unique and defining sense of the metaphor for Okediran’s enlarged sensibility that draws in people and creates possibilities.”
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