He has a strong commit­ment to quality educa­tion, not just because he is an educator, but also primarily because he sees it as crucial agent of change. He is assertive about reforming the ed­ucational system for all and sun­dry, particularly the universities. The transmission of knowledge and skills allows empowerment and enables one generation to feed the next. Without that knowledge, constantly updated and applicable, a people can be left behind and the country can become irrelevant or paralyzed or find itself in a state of coma. In a piece devoted to the impor­tance of knowledge [“Are We Falling Off the Knowledge Map,” Punch, August, 2014], he calls for the creation of a “knowledge society” whereby aspects of the culture of the past will be cata­logued as well as preserved and put to good use.
The creation of that knowledge society, Olukotun links to “vision­ary political leadership” that will put policies in place and not de­value scholarship. After praising his alma mater, Obafemi Awolowo University, he called for a new orientation in the following wise words:
The challenges for the future include re-situating the university on the world map in an age of de­clining federal grants, restoring the sanctity of the academic calendar too often broken by unionist as­sertions, upgrading the quality of graduates as well as recaptur­
ing the intellectual audacity of a bygone era in an age of increasing philistinism both nationally and within the university communi­ties. Daunting agenda no doubt but Ife must somehow find the nerves to pursue that ennobling vision in order to matter in a knowledge-driven global marketplace [“Great Ife at 50, Glancing Back, Looking Ahead,” Punch, No. 8, 2012]
But that knowledge itself must be tied to a society that functions and creates a motivational reward system that would provide true he­roes and heroines as models. The national honors system, he argues, has been badly managed, if not damaged, by office holders and po­litically influential people such that rather than recognize those who distinguish themselves, the honors reward those with connections to political parties and those in pow­er. As with his previous stands, he links the abuses to the state itself:
From the point of view of a po­litical system that does not aspire to excellence, new departures or indeed seek to inaugurate new, edi­fying values, the awards may not cause much offence. Rather, they reflect the worldview of the cur­rent political culture, its dominant values, its over-politicisation and its definition of the nation from the point of view of the advantages of its current managers. [“Wanted: An Alternative National Honors Sys­tem,” Punch, Thursday, September 13, 2012]
Olukotun, the leader of our Juma’at, leads our Umma towards a positive destination, towards our rejection of alienation, as well as our overcoming the legacies of co­lonialism and domination, and our collective oppression. His support for peasants does not create an ide­ology of class exclusivity. His anger at political leaders does not appeal to our raw emotions, but to our ra­tionality and logic. We may be in distress but we can still shout hal­leluiah.
Our oppressors, Olukotun as­sures us, are not our terminators, as long as we are men and women of ideas and actions. They cannot de­stroy us, but we should not fold our arms and do nothing. Our tactics can lie in using the ballot papers for change, to throw out bad leaders. We may even engage in strategic responses as in organizing strikes, conference deliberations, and po­litical mobilization. He enjoins us to make conscious choices while we retain our moral high ground. There is no need for the Igbo and Yoruba to resent one another or for the Tiv to sow the seed of enmity with the Kanuri. His visceral re­sponses to our “condition” reflect our collective disappointment, the betrayal of our hope.
In his paradigm of moderniza­tion and democratic institutions, Olukotun sees change as impera­tive and constant in the bigger project of modernity. While I have not seen a theory of the impact of change on identity in his writings, I do not think that he sees modernity as necessarily rupturing the identi­ties of Hausaness or Tivness, but as those identities responding in order to protect their integrity. Nothing has to be preordained, as in the theological arguments of the Imam and fundamentalist pastors.
Our subjectivity, in Olukotun’s pen, becomes an image full of col­ors, a frame with overlapping in­ferences that we must interpret as we gaze upon it. His voice, which he controls with the power of lan­guage, is an agent of self-substan­tiation, but in the service of the collective. There is a quest—to see transformational changes— but there is also the problematic nega­tion of that desire whereby the quest that is sometimes expressed as the pursuit of a chimera. The reclama­tion of the past is not possible, in spite of gestures in that direction, and the road to the future is unde­fined. A deterministic state-centric analysis is important but it should not foreclose other possibilities. The conventional wisdom of link­ing development to the state has to be modified in search of a paradigm that links development to people, combative people who reject bad leadership, who support account­ability, who fight.
Olukotun, the writer, is also a teacher, as well as a researcher. It is the particularity of these eclec­tic skills that defines both the bril­liance and eccentricity of the meth­odology, the density of the thought processes, and the rationale for the recommendations that he proposes: Olukotun’s writings must make it to the classrooms to teach the art of writing, the art of reasoning and logic. And of course to discuss the content, as some of us already do via the USA-Africa Dialogue.
Let me make a case for this inser­tion into the curriculum. As we all know about the journalistic mode, the topic must connect. But he also inquires; he interviews; he talks to people. Two of his pieces emerged from a private dialogue that we had. I was struck on one occasion when I pointed his attention to the traffic of the sick and ill to India early in the week, that it became his principal message on Friday. I have disagreed with him on a few pieces, privately expressed, and we had a polite discourse. Dialogue and the intel­ligent responses to disagreement show the capacity for intellectual courage, the avoidance of reckless statements and conclusions that are not based on facts and reason, and a very delicate balance between ri­gidity and flaccidity.
Let us reproduce more Ayo Olu­kotuns so that we can expand our ecumenical senses, our progressive credentials, our manifest destiny, and enrich our humanistic values. We must build strong communities, live in harmony, and create coop­eration and interdependence among groups and citizens, irrespective of our religions and ethnicity. In the end, we will have perfect rest so that, as the psalmist intoned, we can scream aloud, as inscribed on Dr. Martin Luther King ’s tomb, we are free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!
.Prof Falola is of Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Tex­as at Austin.
-Concluded.

Ayo Olukotun: Messianic oration and narration of the nation (3)