Adebayo adedeji biography examples

There was a serving President in attendance- H. Amos Sawyer of Liberia. I want to commend Ms Vera Songwe and her team at the ECA for putting together what turned out to be a befitting tribute and a fruitful symposium. Instituted in , the Professor Adebayo Adedeji Lecture Series is a major annual event on the ECA calendar, and that international body has consistently celebrated him during his lifetime and now, after.

There is an important lesson here for institutions and governments in Africa. We often find it difficult to remember, we forget too easily, and in the hot egoistic environment that Africa is, once a man leaves a position or organization, he is soon forgotten and pushed aside and his achievements are trampled upon by ambitious successors.

In its various activities, the Economic Commission for Africa continues to prove that it is an institution that is driven by values, memory and ethics. By remembering and identifying icons and past memory for present constructions, we link the past with the present and erect new paradigms in the corridors of history. What the Nigerian government has failed to do for Adedeji is what the ECA has done for him, by properly promoting him as an icon, and placing the right emphasis on his significance.

Adebayo Adedeji (21 December

In Nigeria, governments detest memory. They prefer to quarrel with the past. It is in part for this reason, I believe, that Nigerian government officials were conspicuously absent at the Adedeji symposium. There is yet another reason. A few government officials also showed up at his burial in Ijebu Ode on July 6, wearing resplendent agbada. They probably just knew Adedeji as that old Ijebu intellectual and had no real inkling about his place in history.

Nigerian leaders love ceremonies, any ceremony that would give them an opportunity to wear fine clothes and shoes, take photographs, and pretend to be what they are not. The anti-intellectualism of not just Nigerian leaders but African leaders in general, with very few exceptions, is largely responsible for the crisis of mis-governance in the continent.