Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has said that the development of a nation is tied to the importance its leaders and citizens attach to a culture of reading.
He spoke during a courtesy call by the Chairman of the Governing Council of Nigerian Library Association , Pastor Dominic Omokaro on Monday.
Olaopa, who identified himself as a voracious reader, disclosed that he has “one of the biggest personal libraries that I know. In other words, I am an incurable book collector, reader and writer.”
Stressing his interest in books , Olaopa said he joined the Federal Civil Service as a Speech Writer and Chief Policy Analyst to the past military head of state, General Ibrahim Babangida.
He said: “Besides, I have written sixteen (16) major books (some out of print), over 60 monographs, and hundreds of Op-Eds, still counting
“I am driven as a scholar, by the strong conviction that writers, scholars, intellectuals, and authors will die, but no one and no force can abolish memory and printed scripts. Indeed, during the WWII, Adolf Hitler, intoxicated by delusionary nationalism, authorised that piles of books be burnt, but much more books and documented memories have evidently survived him even in Germany. William Shakespeare wrote enormously about kings and nobles as much as he wrote about commoners, with incredible moral lessons that moulded civilizations in time and space. Indeed, the works and writings of the likes of J. J. Rousseau, Cervantes, Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, etc, as well as biographies and documented memories in great civilizations as the Greek and Romans remain sources of strategic communication, social mobilization that galvanised many revolutions in history
“Beyond formal years of schooling and education, a society that will go far must necessarily invest in lifelong learning. Research has proved that the rate of access to information resources and reading rate per capita of the population are critical development indices that must be carefully managed through policy innovation. This is the reason that our age is called the information and knowledge age.”
While acknowledging the increasing ubiquity of the mass media, social media and the internet, Olaopa however insisted that the issue of studying and book reading should regain its prime place in public policy with focus on the systemic constraints and challenges being faced in that sector.
Lamenting the challenges that writers and publishers face against the background of the parlous economy,
Olaopa said during the meeting: “As an author, I can tell that it is becoming practically impossible to publish in Nigeria today. Where you manage to publish, recovering the cost of printing is a struggle, how much more expecting royalty payment by publishers, who themselves are barely surviving, in what has become such a disenabling business climate.
“No matter the neglect of book policy and lifelong learning, the number of published books, journals, libraries, readers, writers, translators, and publishers in a country will always remain veritable indices and fundamental drivers of the rate of growth of the economy and the critical transitions that will ignite national structural transformation.”
Noting further the place of a reading culture by leaders in national development, Olaopa recalled an article he wrote to celebrate Vice President Kashim Shettima, which was entitled “Kashim Shettima, Books, and Enlightened Leadership in Nigeria”. Meanwhile, in his speech, Omokaro said that the visit was to achieve three purposes. He said that they visited to congratule Prof. Olaopa on his appointment. While the second reason was to seek waiver for librarians to be given employment in the civil service, the third reason was to seek collaboration with the civil service.
” My plan really is to facilitate in due course a network of stakeholders as libraries, association of authors, publishers, intellectuals, writers, readers, etc. to engage him so we could leverage the celebrated passion of our own Vice President to dialogue on book policy as touching the publishing business, the state of our libraries, the lost culture of libraries cum e-libraries in schools, reading culture in Nigeria.
“In doing so, I have in another syndicated article posed the seminal question: Do Nigerian leaders read? And I offered the thesis that there is a direct proportional relationship between the quality of a leader’s reading list and governance quality in that country. In other words, it is safe to say that a reading leader would likely be a good leader
“If our leaders read, we then should be concerned about how much of the lessons of history and their openness to new ideas guide their decision making, habits and how seriously they deploy policy to build a learning and information society. And the extent to which they are conscious of existing universal theory that if the world, as part of global imperialism, must hide history-shaping ideas from the black people, then those intellectual contents are better hidden in books, written narratives and documentations, as black people don’t read.”
Olaopa appreciated the importance of the entertainment industry and religiosity amongst Nigerians. But he deplored a development where the nation’s youth and children “know nothing of significance again than dancing, merry-making, spraying money at parties, dressing to kill, almost always half-naked, and altering body forms to look sexy, a dynamic that is already driving criminality, and making ours becoming an unreflective society facing the predicament of being left behind in a smarter globalised world but for the Renewed Hope Agenda of His Excellency, President Bola Tinubu.”
“The inherited challenge by the Tinubu administration is so huge that soft issues like book policy and the reading culture might look intangible, but they have a strong game changing inherent possibility. The reason that the critical stakeholders in the book industry must read the signs of the time and sit up to be counted”,he added .
Omokaro said the visit was to achieve three purposes. He said that they visited to congratulate Prof. Olaopa on his appointment. He said that while the second reason was to seek waiver for librarians to be given employment in the civil service, the third reason was to seek collaboration with the civil service.
