Very few persons anywhere turn 80 years with the pedigree and accomplishments of Professor Bolaji Akinyemi. With his bow-tie and methodical speech, Prof. Akinyemi is a familiar persona in the Nigerian mind.

He turned 80 January 4, a diplomat, teacher, professor, politician, human rights advocate, pro-democracy crusader, public intellectual, public speaker, polemicist, author and administrator. He is best noted as Nigeria’s face to the outside world when he was appointed the country’s external affairs minister. He occupied that position during the military era of General Ibrahim Babangida (IBB). Indeed, Babangida recently paid tribute to him as a sort of unwitting intellectual mentor in that he visited as a soldier the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) when Professor Akinyemi was the director-general.

He impressed the general with his rigour and candour. When he became head of state, it was not difficult for him to appoint Professor Akinyemi to serve as the nation’s premier diplomat. Invisible mentee became boss who would still be learning at the table of his teacher-appointee.

In that capacity, Akinyemi brought flair, imagination and audacity to the task, and he is perhaps the most consequential figure we have had at that desk.

Okoi Arikpo is probably a second position to him. Arikpo was a cerebral fellow who dealt with the pangs of a post-colonial nation that also grappled with the stress at home. But it was a relatively calmer time for foreign relations.

Akinyemi came with a vision for a country and continent in search for identity. His ideas of a ‘black bomb’ and Concert of Medium Powers were part of his attitude towards a country and continent still seen by the west as the backwaters of civilisation.

He did not flinch to assert the instinct of a black race and a proud nation in spite of the democratic deficit and woes of underdevelopment.

It was an optimistic face he gave to the world and the continent. His Concert of Medium Powers was an original idea following on the coalescence of countries in the world to assert their position and influence.

With the concert, he wanted to place Nigeria in the centre of global power games, and by that throw our weight on issues. His was not a rhetoric like that of General Murtala Muhammed who said “Africa has come of age.” That was never fledged out into a system. It turned out to be no more than a bluster, even though well-intentioned.

The idea of a ‘black bomb’ was sometimes thought as comical but it was a clever counterblast to a western military triumphalism, and a rallying cry to self-defence. “Nigeria has a sacred responsibility,” he said, “to challenge the racial monopoly of nuclear weapons.” In the words of a seasoned diplomat and Nigeria’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Dapo Fafowora, “Neither the country nor the military who appointed him was ready for such visionary ideas. He was ahead of his time.” The west chafed at it and intervened. Northern leaders persuaded IBB to fire his mentor. That was one of the paradoxes of Nigerian diplomatic history.

Akinyemi’s time as Nigeria’s chief diplomat synthesised his ideas over decades of scholarship around the world, beginning in Nigeria where he attended Igbobi College in Lagos and Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti. He travelled to the United States where he studied at Temple University, Pennsylvania, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University and Trinity College, Oxford. He was also lecturer and visiting professor at Graduate Institute of International Studies, the University of Nairobi, Kenya, the University of California at Los Angeles and, of course, at the University of Lagos. He capped that sterling scholarship at the NIIA.

In the febrile period of democracy struggle after IBB stanched M.K.O. Abiola’s June 12, 1993 victory, Akinyemi was a staunch member of the struggle to restore democracy.

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