By Banji Ojewale
Gbolabo Ogunsanwo,
Nigeria’s most captivating columnist of the 1970s who rewrote
history as editor of Sunday
Times of that era, once
returned from Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania and thrilled his compatriots with an
account of the stoic exploits of this illustrious African leader. Just like his
staid gait, Ogunsanwo said, Nyerere had no airs about him to suggest he was the
president of Tanzania.
 |
| *Nyerere |
This
picture of an abstemious statesman sharply contradicted the Nigerian paradigm.
Here, our leaders, even at the local government scene, would loot the public
till to build personal empires, to satisfy their palatial palate.
The predilection of our leaders for financial rape has always been there and
Ogunsanwo was among a small circle of ethical journalists who railed against
this evil.
So the Tanzania experience
had to excite this colourful columnist. Through his celebrated style of writing
that nettled bad leaders and won applause from the public, Ogunsanwo said that
if he placed the lifestyle of Nyerere side-by-side with what we had in Nigeria,
the weight of the East African leader wouldn’t surpass the wealth of a level 9
officer in the Nigerian Civil Service. A shocked Ogunsanwo said something to
the effect that the home of Nyerere had uninspiring furniture compared to what
a middle level civil servant in Nigeria might
offer. Nyerere’s was a study in Spartan decor.
Years later in 1999 when the beloved Tanzania leader
died at 77, the New
York Times correspondent, Michael Kaufman, wrote what has gone
into the books as a most charitable essay by a Western reporter on an African
president who mercilessly chided capitalism as a curse on humanity, thus
confirming Ogunsanwo’s point. He admitted Nyerere’s “habits of modesty and
ethics.”
