SPECIALE: Chief Dotun Sanusi, A Star Out of Ilaji

“After Oja’ba, close to the late Oba Adetunji’s palace at Popoyemoja is a compound called Ile-Ilaji, Idi-Arere. That Ile Ilaji is where my mother hailed from. It so happened that on the 17th October 1968, I was born in that very Ile-Ilaji, and it was after she’d birthed me that she took me to the hospital so that the birth could be registered. While my father is from Olugbade compound, Oja’ba, I grew up in Ile-Ilaji.
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Ibadan, at the time, was a peaceful, serene, community. Back then, there was a saying that ‘Ibadan people have so many windows but only one door’. That means that in Ibadan, there is a communal sense of belonging. Every Ibadan person is, someway somehow, connected to another man. If you look closely enough, you’ll find the link. We all come from the same source.
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I knew early enough that when there is a conflict between two Ibadan people, it is better for an outsider not to meddle in the conflict because no matter how fierce the conflict may be, when the parties would resolve it, the outsider will not be there; and if care is not taken then the outsider will find themselves trapped in the centre of a resolved conflict. That was the kind of Ibadan I grew up in.
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Our sense of community is very strong in Ibadan and I believe, too, that from the days of our ancestors, every member of the Ibadan society was embraced. No one was left out. Everyone mattered and you can see this in our chieftaincy system. In the rise to the throne, there is the military line of ascension which is the Balogun line and the civilian line. So, from the earliest of times, the unity of Ibadan was forged in the manner that our ancestors carried on things, not leaving any strata of society behind.
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Growing up was fun. My primary school was Wesley Primary School at Elekuro. The school was founded by the Methodist church, the same institution that founded Wesley College which happened to be a teacher training college at the time. Back in those days, it was the educated ones in our community who ran the Methodist schools and they did so with whatever resources the church provided for them.
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The school may have been founded by the Methodist church but it truly felt like it belonged to the people, there was a strong sense of communal belonging within and around the Elekuro axis. The implication of this was that there was no discrimination whatsoever in who attended the Methodist school. As a Muslim, you were welcome to join the school so long as you were willing to learn. That willingness to learn was all that mattered.
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At the time, I would walk to school. I had friends and we moved around together in our cliques, just having fun. There was nothing like ritual killings at the time, so as a parent, you had nothing to worry about if your little child left home for school. Doors and windows of houses were never closed because you’d rarely ever hear of any robbery incident. That’s why when you see the structures of houses from that era, there were never fences; why will you need a fence?
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I lived an adventurous life as a kid. My friends and I would trek from Aperin-Elekuro to Akanran just so that we could swim in the Akanran river. That trip to the river was long but it was always fun. Once we began trekking, we would see people selling corn by the road, and we’d eat that as we go along. Sometimes, we could see a farm of yams and we’d go in. The farmers would welcome us into their farms and encourage us to roast some if we were hungry. They did not know us from Adam.
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The peak of our adventure was getting to Akanran river and jumping into the water for a swim. Just like us, tens of other kids would come from far and near to swim in the river. The water would be full of kids swimming, splashing water over themselves, having fun. It didn’t matter if anyone in the water had a skin disease, it didn’t matter whether the water was dirty, we just wanted to play in the water – that’s it!
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These fun-seeking escapades got me into trouble every now and then, especially with my father. There were times I’d leave home in the morning and return very late in the night. Sometimes, I may not return until the next day, or even the third day. Whenever I got home, he’d flog me for not informing anyone where I had been. Let me remind you that this was an era when there were no cell phones and not everyone owned a NITEL telephones. That meant there was no way to let my father know where I was per time.
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Still, all that flogging never stopped me from joining the boys on the next adventure. Usually, I’d weigh the fun that waited for me out there versus the pain of the punishment if something went wrong; somehow the fun mattered more to me.
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When I grew older, I began to follow some of the older boys into the bushy areas to hunt for bush meat. They showed us how to hunt and skin the animal. They also taught us how to roast them. That was pretty much how my primary school life rolled by. I look back on those years now, I realize that even as a boy, I’d always stood firmly by my convictions even when they got me into trouble.
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For my secondary school education, I attended Ibadan Christ Apostolic Grammar School. Though the school was not one of the big names, there really wasn’t any difference between a school like Ibadan Boys High School and Ibadan Christ Apostolic Grammar School. It still had the standard that a good school should have. We had Indian teachers in my time, we were exposed to sports like basketball, volleyball etc., so there was nothing to set us back in our educational journey. Today, the reality is different.
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At that time, in Ibadan Christ Apostolic Grammar School, the competition among the students to top the class was fierce; and as fate would have it, I was one of the brilliant ones. At this point, I’d begun to get more intentional about my life. When I chose my friends this time, I picked the best students in my class. Having the smartest students in my circle, was how I laid foundation for growth in life.
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I didn’t have the privilege of having parents who’d sit with me to check if I had done an assignment. My parents were busy with their businesses, and so as far as school was concerned, I was on my own. In fact, the only time any of my parents ever followed me to school was my first day at the primary school; it was my mother who followed me, and the reason was because I had to be registered. I couldn’t do that by myself.
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Knowing the kind of home I came from, I knew early enough that the responsibility of doing well in school rested squarely on my shoulders. I was able to get my tasks done and score good grades because whatever I did not understand, someone in my circle knew it and they’d teach me. In the same way, if I understood a task and someone in my circle didn’t, I’d teach them too. This helped us a great deal.
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As we rounded off our sojourn at Ibadan Christ Apostolic, my friends and I began to talk about what we wanted to become. They mentioned professions like doctor, lawyer, mechanical engineers, etc. but I never saw my path in any of these nice courses everyone else mentioned. As young as I was then, I had recognized a pattern in my life; that in moments of making big decisions regarding my life, joining the bandwagon never worked for me. From those early years, I knew that my path was different.
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Let me tell you how I found my path….

This was how I found my path…

In secondary school, I was in the sciences, and I knew that I had a desire for engineering. What I then needed to figure out was the kind of engineering I wanted to specialize in?

I listed the engineering disciplines available at the time and I began to subject my options to an elimination process. Think about this as an episode of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire show, you have options on the board and you need to eliminate the options, one after the other, to get to the right answer.

I knew that I had no desire for mechanical, electrical, and chemical things so I knocked them off the list. Petroleum Engineering felt like something that would work for me and so I checked the brochure to be sure I met the requirements for admission. Truly, I did. At the time, I never knew that petroleum would become a critical commodity and a wealth-generating industry in Nigeria.

It was after the JAMB results were released that my father found out that I’d applied for Petroleum Engineering and how he found was so funny. My father had a friend whose wife was a principal at St. Anne’s.  They had a daughter and they closely monitored her educational advancement. The girl and I were in the same class; by implication, we wrote JAMB the same year.

My father’s friend came to our house with their daughter one day, and during the visit, he announced that the JAMB results had been released. He mentioned that he and his daughter were going to the JAMB office to check the girl’s result. This news prompted my father to ask me to dress up and come along. When we checked the results, it turned out that I performed better than the girl. Seeing that, without any supervision, I did better than his friend’s daughter who had all the parental supervision, my father got interested in my education.

Armed with my results, my father and I went to the University of Ibadan (with his business partner at the time) to see a certain Dr. Agagu for any assistance he could render to ensure I got into the university. He was like an aburo to my father and he was a lecturer in the school. When my father mentioned my score to him, he told my father that my score was way over the cutoff for admission into Petroleum Engineering and so no reason to worry.

For the first time in my life, my father showed it that he was proud of me. “That’s my son!” He exclaimed. True, as Dr. Agagu said, my admission letter into the University of Ibadan came in the mail and that was it. That very Dr. Agagu would go on to become a governor of Ondo State.

Getting into the university, I knew the kind of life I wanted to live. I didn’t want to be about books alone. I wanted to have fun while going about serious business. I had told myself I’d leave no room for regrets; that I’d not leave the school and feel like I left some things undone. This was my mindset as I came in, so I did everything that was there to be done on campus.

I lived in Independence Hall – Indy – during my stay in school but there were semesters that I lived in Zik Hall too. We, the Katangites, never really rated those who lived in other halls of residence like Kuti or Mellanby; to us those halls were for the rich, posh kids. We were not bougie, we were the real salt of the earth. I remember I’d go join the kegites and we’d gyrate and drink palmie.

Though I was born into a Muslim family, I was everywhere. There used to a fellowship called Agape. In that fellowship they had a song they used to sing, it was like their anthem: “Hold somebody tell him that you love him…” If you had a girl you liked who was attending Agape, you’d go to fellowship and sit very close to her. Once they start that song, “Hold somebody…” you will quickly grab your girl. Also, whenever we know there will be food at the Central mosque, we would show up there too.

The real live wire of student unionism in UI, at the time, were the Katangites; that was where mobilization for peaceful protests always began and as a Katangite, I had to get into the aluta rhythm with them too. So, you see, I experienced all dimensions of life on campus such that when I was leaving, I was satisfied that I came, I saw, and I had conquered.