The over 920,000 shareholders of Access Holdings Plc are excited that the banking group’s rights issue will soon open today, providing another opportunity to expand their stakes in Nigeria’s biggest financial company by assets. Barring any unforeseen development, Access Holdings rights issue to raise N351.09 billion will open on today, July 8 and close on Thursday, August 8. It is one of the largest capital raising programmes in the nation’s capital market in recent years, instigated largely by the Central Bank’s upward review of the minimum share capital for banks. International banks, of which Access is one of the few, are expected to grow their capital base to a minimum of N500 billion, according to a CBN policy announced last March by Governor Yemi Cardoso. With the additional N351 billion, Access will easily surpass the target, becoming one of Nigeria’s biggest financial services company by shareholders’ funds. It already occupies the top spot by assets and number of customers.  

Recently, Access Holdings held a formal signing ceremony with key participants in the offer as part of the arrangements to raise the funds. The money would be deployed to enhance its working capital requirements, and this includes organic growth funding for its banking and non-banking subsidiaries. Simply put, Access Holdings will use part of the N351 billion to acquire other banks and non-bank businesses across the world. Opting for solely a rights issue instead of combining it with a public offer as done by other banks is a deliberate attempt to protect the retail shareholders from dilution. ‘’In 2002 when we took over Access Bank, we had promised the existing shareholders that they would always be carried along as we grow. This rights issue is one example of our commitment to that pledge,” says Access Holdings Chairman Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede.

 It is a vow that resonates with the shareholders. Says Chief Sunny Nwosu, a well-known investor in the banking industry and an important player in the capital market, ‘’Access Holdings’ stocks are easily some of the best investment options in the country. I am sure that this offer will be oversubscribed, especially with the array of well-heeled foreign investors in its books’’. Another shareholder, Mrs Bisi Bakare puts it more succinctly, ‘’the quality of management of Access Holdings; its resilience; time-tested traditions of integrity and transparency endear the bank to the investing public. Consistently, we have seen our investments grow and we are happy.”

 The signing ceremony with respect to the Offer was held at Access Tower, the corporate office of Access Holdings in Lagos. Access Holdings’ shareholders had at its 2nd Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Friday, April 19, unanimously backed its plan to execute a Capital Raising Programme of about US$1.5 billion as well as the subset initiative to raise capital through a Rights Issue of ordinary shares to its shareholders. Under the Rights Issue, the bank will offer 17.7 billion ordinary shares of N0.50 each at N19.75 per share on the basis of one new ordinary share for every two existing ordinary shares held as of Friday, June 7, 2024. “The Rights Issue is a significant step in delivering our 2023-2027 strategic plan. The additional capital will enable us to maximise emerging opportunities and deliver long-term value to our shareholders’’, enthused Bolaji Agbede, acting Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Access Holdings at the signing event.

The offer is opening at a moment of great buoyancy for the bank, coming after winning a series of awards in the last few months. Just last week, Access Holdings was named the leading Tier-1Bank in the 2024 Proshare Bank Strength Index (PBSI) report. The PBSI evaluates banks based on a comprehensive set of financial metrics derived from audited financial statements for the Financial Year 202. This award therefore, underscores Access Holdings’ significant strides in the banking sector. Proshare’s latest report places Access Holdings at the forefront, alongside other prominent institutions like Zenith Bank, FBNH, Ecobank, UBA and GTCO.

As the Nigerian banking sector evolves, Access Holdings stands out for its proactive approach to addressing macro and microeconomic risks. The report draws parallels to the challenges faced by United States banks where some banks like Silicon Valley, First Republic and Signature Banks, failed in 2023 due to poor asset and liability management (ALM). With the CBN’s recapitalisation programme, the report highlights the importance of investment in financial technology, customer service scalability and digital asset engineering between 2024 and 2026. The analysts emphasise that, “With higher capital levels, banks must use the larger amounts of cash available to improve shareholder returns and customer service experiences. Many banks will get cut at the knees by lacking a deliberate strategy to transition from cash flow to value creation.”

The report further highlighted Nigeria’s economic trajectory, noting, “Nigeria’s GDP in 2005 was N38.78trillion and rose to N77.94trillion, roughly two times in 2023, suggesting an average annual growth rate of 3.55 per cent in the last two decades. However, between 2000 and 2005, bank equity sizes grew over ten times or by 1,150 per cent from N2billion to N25billion. In other words, for a decade and a half, banks have used ten times more equity in their businesses than before 2005, yet the country’s GDP growth has been modest.”

The report, however, clarifies that simply raising Nigerian banks’ equity base is not a guarantee for economic growth and development. “Transforming bank equity into drivers of economic growth requires more than money; it requires a coordinated public and private sector plan, with what Proshare analysts have repeatedly called a whole-of-government approach to policies, programmes, and processes.” Reviewing bank performances in 2023, Proshare analysts observed that banks were pursuing increasingly aggressive approaches to acquiring digital market share while supporting lower operating costs (lower cost-to-income ratios (CIRs).

In May, Aig-Imoukhuede was honoured with the prestigious African Banker Lifetime Achievement Award at a gala in Nairobi during the Annual General Meeting of the African Development Bank. About the same time, the banking conglomerate also won the top spot in the Brand Finance’s Top 500 Banking Brands for the third consecutive year.

On 22nd June, 2024, at a sporting event organized for civil servants as part of activities to mark the 2024 Civil Service Week, the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), Dr. Folasade Yemi-Esan, made a fundamental claim about the status of the Nigerian Civil Service. At that event, the HCSF commended the hardworking and intelligent civil and public servants, and noted that Nigeria has the best civil service in the world. That was a most fundamental statement coming from such a significant personality in the civil service hierarchy. That statement has sufficient weight and implications as to defy the gravity of silence. And it was only just to be expected that this would not just be brought to my notice, but that I would be asked by many, including a few revered global scholars that I cannot ignore, to make a statement about it. The HCSF and I occupy positions that are key in the chain of structural and institutional integrity of the civil service system in Nigeria. We are both aware of the internal working and potentials of the civil service system. But more than this, we both are sensitive to the public service value of esprit de corps, that unwritten rule about our collective responsibility and loyalty to the institutional well-being of this great institution that is responsible for transforming the lives of Nigerians as the engine room and brain box of government.

But there is no doubt that such a statement would generate some forms of reactions from Nigerians. There would be some that would simply wave it aside as a mere statement that does not deserve a response. But, as Simon Kolawole has exemplified, there are those who take the statement with deep umbrage given that it does not represent their felt perception of the efficiency level and the image that the civil service has earned for itself within the context of Nigeria’s democratic governance. But I will go beyond these two kinds of reaction to the statement of the HCSF to articulate a more nuanced understanding of how the statement should be interrogated but without the benefits of a rebuttal or a critique, the reason that this essay is deliberately made somewhat academic. Like the HCSF, I am an insider who have a sense of the struggles and laudable visions of the HCSF and could spin her sense of the heights the civil service system needs to attain.  

So, I think I understand where the HCSF is coming from when she made the statement. My first instinct on reading the submission of the HCSF is to imagine that a similar statement had been made in a conference of public administration experts, scholars and professionals. One methodological approach of a response to this statement—suggested by my research and comparative inclinations—would be to situate the HCSF’s confidence within the historical trajectory of the civil service in Nigeria. There are two significant administrative moments in the evolution of the civil service history in Nigeria that foretell its immense possibilities. The first is the immense administrative achievements of the old western region civil service, one regional administrative success story that I had studied and publish on. Within the context of the Awolowo-Adebo governance collaborative paradigm therefore, the civil service in Nigeria in the ‘60s became renown as one of the best in the Commonwealth community of practice. The second was the critical and outstanding performance of the General Yakubu Gowon’s super-permanent secretaries before, during and after the Nigerian civil war. But then, despite having the credentials to lay claims to being one of the best civil service systems at those moments, such a statement was never made. The nuance in the story is to know why. To say a civil service system is the best in the world demands that certain administrative minimum and maximum be already in place. Indeed, such a statement would have already found the country backstopped by civil service system on top of many human development indices and ISO certification to boot.

Even though the grammatical form of what the HCSF said does not support my next claim, one could think that the statement was actually meant to be taken in aspirational terms. In other words, given the dedication, intelligence, patriotism and credentials of the crop of civil and public servants Nigeria is blessed with (who are unarguably a minority), as well as the quantum of reform efforts that had been sowed, the civil service has the real potential to become one of the best administrative systems in the world. It would be unfair to the HCSF to imagine that those who are grinding within the civil service system do not have a sense of how crippling the dysfunction of the system is. And yet, they keep toiling to keep afloat a system that was once one of the best and that keep standing staunchly as the engine room for making Nigeria’s democratic governance work. And I can make a parallel claim that Nigerian civil servants are among the best I have met anywhere in the world, as I had observed for decades how they keep toiling in an impossible administrative system, and finding it hard to understand why they are being derided by everyone in spite of their best effort. But who has the responsibility to fix that system but the civil service profession itself?

Taking the HCSF’s statement as an aspirational one implies grounding it within a context of to-do policy initiatives that take institutional reforms seriously (what I am sure the HCSF is aware of but is not at liberty to disclose at the occasion). In other words, what would such a civil service system like Nigeria’s do to live out the dream of being the best in the world? This question is highlighted by the governance performance of the Asian Tigers, a performance that is founded on their developmental value orientation and capable state model. A significant form of aspirational policy design is already captured in the 2007 National Strategy on Public Service Reform (NSPSR) that has the vision of facilitating the emergence of “A world-class public service delivering government policies and programmes with professionalism, excellence and passion.” One must concede that the series of reform efforts of consecutive Nigerian governments from 1999 to date have been geared towards the fulfilment of this institutional aspiration.

The crucial issue is to decisively deal with the bureaucratic culture that is already consolidating the failure of the civil service system to become efficient. Bureaucracies across the world, by their very nature, are complex and multi-layered organizations designed to backstop the processes of democratic governance through the values of impartiality, uniformity, neutrality, fairness through the enforcement of governance codes in the interest of the public good. However, these bureaucracies that are supposed to complement democracy have become hindered by three structural matters. The first is that they have become so dedicated to their internal processes and mechanism that they have become closed systems—self-protecting and anti-intellectual. They are therefore incapable of taking full advantage of the seminal culture of cross-fertilization of ideas that enables the flow of ideas from the local and global (glo(cal) knowledge and information networks, and hence too rigid to be significantly innovative. The heavy reliance on administrative precedence and models that worked very well in the past implies that the civil service system becomes backward-looking and resistance to reform and change. And this automatically puts the civil service in a significant conflict with the private sector since it now begins to prioritize rules, regulations and procedures over and above efficiency, effectiveness, performance and productivity.

The second structural matter that hinders the Nigerian civil service system is the fact that it operates within the constraints created by Nigeria’s political culture that politicizes everything. The fundamental problem therefore becomes that rather than aiding the successes of institutional reforms for high-performance of the system, the reformer has to keep overcompensating for distortionary politics. The third structural issue has to do with the ways past reforms of the system have been carried out. The passion the reforms generated have not been founded on adequate knowledge, and so this keeps occasioning a huge gap between the conception of the reform initiatives and the reality of dysfunction. For instance, there has always been a heavy reliance on external expertise in ways that is devoid of internal validation and buy-in.     

The goal of the institutional reform of the Nigerian civil service system is to create a strong, capable, value-based, efficient, flexible, technology-enabled, performance-focused, transparent, intelligent, professional(ized), entrepreneurial and accountable system. Indeed, any contender for the space of the best civil service systems in the world must demonstrate verifiable evidences that play out in terms of policy intelligence, administrative efficiency, service delivery standards, and the productivity paradigm it facilitates. There are several reform initiatives that have the possibilities of concretizing the fundamental significance of the Nigerian civil service as the backbone of an emerging developmental state in Nigeria.

One of the most critical issues to address in terms of reforming the civil service system in Nigeria stems from articulating its autonomy in ways that enhances its status as a vocation. And this can be done when the entry requirement into the profession is adequately monitored, capacitated and incentivized in ways that allow the civil service in Nigeria draws the best graduates the Nigerian tertiary education system can offer. Unfortunately due to adversarial unionism that renders the system over-bloated as the non-performers can hardly be exited, we still operate a personnel policy that supports the recruitment of 1000 mediocre to do work that can be better performed by 150 expert professionals that are adequately remunerated. The idea of public-spiritedness and professionalism, for example, would need to be stretched into a mechanism for professional progression and career pipelining that measures outstanding performances among staff, spiritual values (like integrity), knowledge, expertise and competences in assignments. This must then be complemented by regular cataloguing of benchmarked skills and competences matched with talent management protocols at every career professional level to pipeline officers for higher responsibilities.

Such professional gatekeeping must eventually devolve into a concern with workplace culture and public service values that must be cultivated to enable the rebranding of the civil service system. The administrative leadership, in this sense, will need to provide the means by which a critical mass of new public managers emerge—through the gatekeeping of the entry level requirements—as the clear exemplars of what the civil service stands for.  We also must not fail to add the urgency of a vibrant action research and analytic policy analysis—through the core competences approach—that must be deployed across all the MDAs as the modality for extrapolating detailed information and statistics that backstop policy design, evaluation and problem-solving mechanisms on a case study basis.  

Lastly, the civil service must instigate a fundamental level institutional openness to knowledge and innovation as well as peer review that enables continuous learning culture within which the system can validate its efficiency through corporate governance codes domesticated from global best practices and principles. Such an openness will facilitate a strong mechanism of intra- and inter-institutional professional relationship and partnerships in the form of the public-private partnership (PPP), global and local partnerships, policy and research nexus, inter-agency and inter-governmental collaborations, and so on.

The point therefore is that when the HCSF made the statement that the Nigerian civil service system is the best in the world, it was a critical statement that loads the dice in favour of the intelligent, smart, committed and patriotic Nigerian civil servants who are in the minority, but who have the capacity to make the system the best Nigeria needs to become capable in terms of democratic governance.  

In the last two days, my social media feed has been suffused with impassioned expressions of grief and outrage from Nigerians over a putative June 28 agreement that the Nigerian government has signed with the European Union to legalize LGBTQ+ rights in the country in exchange for a $150 economic package.

It turned out that a July 4 Daily Trust titled “LGBT: Knocks As Nigeria Signs $150 Billion Samoa Deal” might be the source of the cultural and social anxiety that Nigerian are expressing about Nigeria becoming an “LGBTQ+ nation,” as someone put it on social media. 

Unfortunately, the Daily Trust story failed to cite the portion of the Samoa agreement that mandates Nigeria to change its laws to accommodate LGBTQ-friendly policies. It based its headline and entire story on an unnamed report without even citing evidence from the report. 

“The agreement reportedly has some clauses that compel underdeveloped and developing nations to support the agitations by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community for recognition, as condition for getting financial and other supports from advanced societies,” it wrote.

The paper then proceeded to fish for people who would express fury and consternation over a piece of information that it hasn’t originally seen, and these expressions of fury and consternation created a self-reinforcing loop. We call this circular reporting.

Circular reporting, also called false confirmation, occurs when a source contrives a piece of information, repeats the information to multiple sources in the form of interviews (in the case of journalism), and then cleverly passes off the views of the interviewees as the original source of the information. It’s basically creating something from nothing.

I read the 12-page agreement titled “The Samoa Agreement with African, Caribbean and Pacific States” that is posted on the website of the European Parliament. There is no obligation in the agreement that requires African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries adopt LGBTQ+ rights.

However, page 2 of the document states, “The chapter on human rights should explicitly list the forms of discrimination that should be combated (such as sexual, ethnic, or religious discriminations) and mention sexual and reproductive rights.”

Even so, there is an admission in the document that several countries, including European Union members, are resistant to enshrining “sexual rights” in their legal codes. 

On page 5, for instance, we see the following: “As of 22 November 2023, however, 30 OACPS members, mostly African and Caribbean, had failed to sign…. Some leaders explained they wanted to check whether the agreement would be compatible with their legal order, notably as regards same-sex relations and sexual health and rights. 

“This move surprised several commentators, as the wording on these topics does not go beyond existing international agreements…) and was agreed after years of negotiation; in addition, the agreement includes the possibility for the signatories to make interpretative declarations or reservations.”

Again, page 8 of the agreement notes that not only African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries but also some European Union members resisted being bludgeoned into agreeing to LGBTQ+ rights.

It says, “While the parties will commit 'to promote, protect and fulfil all human rights be they civil, political, economic, social or cultural', some ACP states were reluctant to see the foundation agreement mention sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTI rights) – an issue on which there are also differences among EU Member States.

“As a matter of compromise, the parties will commit to the implementation of existing international agreements – notably the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action on sexual and reproductive health and rights, the Beijing Platform on gender equality and their follow-up (negotiated agreement, Article 36). The wording however falls short of the EU negotiators' ambitions,” the document says.

Further down on page 9 of the document, it was made certain that the European Union was unable to universalize the merit of protecting sexual health. “Access to sexual and reproductive health services and information will be promoted – without further details, as the parties have varying views on this concept.”

In other words, although the European Union did want to get countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific to embrace an expansion of the notion of human rights to include sexual minorities, they got a sustained pushback, not only from them but also from some European Union members. 

The only rights that Nigeria and other countries agreed to in the Samoa Agreement are the rights they have already been signatories to for years such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action, and the Beijing Platform.

Plus, a provision in the agreement, which states that countries that signed the agreement have the latitude to “make interpretative declarations or reservations” about controversial issues means that they can understand “sexual discrimination” in ways that suit their cultural peculiarities and existing laws.

Anyone who takes the trouble to actually read the 12-page agreement would know that our lazy, stenographic news media ecosystem has merely created a storm in a teacup. In addition to the reality that the cultural soil in Nigeria is too inhospitable for the seeds of LGBTQ+ rights to germinate, much less flourish, no halfway sane Nigerian politician would risk irrecoverable political, social, and symbolic self-diminution by signing an agreement that violates an existing domestic law, i.e., the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, and that causes extreme anxiety in a cultural conservative country like ours.

In all this, my major worry is that Nigerians waste precious emotions and expend tremendous amounts of energy over issues that are really of no consequence to their everyday lives but look away when threats that smolder their souls and annihilate their very existence confront them. The World Bank and the IMF routinely give loans to Nigeria and attach punishing conditionalities to them.

The removal of subsidies on everything, the devaluation of the naira, the shrinking of expenditure on education and health, etc. are some of the conditions these evil institutions attach to the loans. Someone close to people in power told me a few days ago that Tinubu’s resistance to the IMF’s insistence that he increase petrol price has dissipated and that it’s a matter of when, not if, he’ll approve a price increase of over N1,000 a liter.

When that happens, people will merely grumble, thicken their skins, make peace with their suffering, and move on. So long as LGBTQ+ people have no rights, so long as our religious and cultural values are respected, it doesn't matter if the IMF and the World Bank instruct our leaders to murder us piecemeal. 

That’s why people in positions of power will perpetuate their dominance of society and sustain their oppression of the people intergenerationally. They know that most people are governed by their emotions, not their intellect, by their hearts, not their heads.

 The day Nigerians are as engaged and as enraged as they are about this non-existent LGBTQ+ conditionality in a European Union economic package as they are about the IMF’s and the World Bank’s conditionalities that ensure that our people continually live at the subhuman level is the day true liberation will start. 

•His last interview with Taiwo Obe

Tam Fiofori, who passed away on Tuesday, 25 June 2024, at 82, will miss this. Jamaica’s fiery sprints squad at the upcoming Olympics Games in Paris would have kept him on the phone, confirming schedules, reliving moments of athletic apogees, and making predictions of which Jamaicans would shake the world.

Fiofori was a former long jumper, which explains the bounce in his steps. He was an athletics buff and set the pages of The Guardian aglow with his crisp reports and photogenic images that foretold the sprint dominance of “My Jamaicans Gals,” as he titled one of the stories.

The story was told 41 years ago at the inaugural World Athletics Championships in Helsinki, Finland, 7-14 July 1983. Despite winning just three medals — one gold by Bert Cameron in 400m, a silver medal by Merlene Ottey in 200m, and a bronze medal in 4×100 m from the team of Leleith Hodges, Jacqueline Pusey, Juliet Cuthbert, and Ottey — Jamaica showed it had a bright future in athletics.

Grace Jackson, a prominent figure in Helsinki, won a 200m silver at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul behind Florence Joyner of the US. Jackson’s marriage to Hugh Small, Jamaica’s minister of industry, commerce, and production, in 1990 shortened her athletics career. She quit the sport two years later, at 31.

At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Cuthbert won silver medals in 100m and 200m, and Ottey won a 200m bronze. The Jamaican Girls phenomenon continued with Ottey leading the charge. Ottey won two silver medals (100 m and 200m) and a relay bronze at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Four years later, Jamaican Girls won five silver medals in Sydney, and Ottey won a silver and a bronze.

Ottey, one of the world’s most decorated athletes, led the era of brilliance and longevity of Jamaican female athletes, being named Jamaica Sportswoman of the Year 13 times in 23 years of racing for Jamaica and another 10 years for Slovenia.

When Ottey retired at 52, she had logged nine Olympic medals, 14 World Championship medals, and others at the Commonwealth Games and major international events. An Olympic gold eluded her. Ottey was 36 at the Atlanta Olympics when she lost the 100m gold to American Gail Devers, though both clocked 10.98 seconds.

Fiofori’s “My Jamaican Gals” was a parody of Grace Jones’ 1981 hit, “My Jamaican Guy,” a tribute to Sly Dunbar, whose pelting of drums in ways only he could, left his touch on most reggae hits of the time. Now, 72, Sly is still at it. He revolutionised drumming across different reggae bands before computers colonised the role. Jones warmed her way to filling more dance floors in more spots globally with “Pull Up To The Bumper,” from “Nightclubbing,” the 1981 album, still rated as number two in her repository 43 years after its release.

A lot of Fiofori was about music. He started his journalism career as a freelancer in 1965 because he cherished his independence, according to an interview with Taiwo Obe in a 2023 interview. Fiofori reviewed music and arts for international publications in England and the US, where he also schooled.

Musicians impressed him if they were literate. He explained that literate musicians could read music, write music, teach music, and play different instruments. The top Nigerian musician for him was Peter King, who met the criteria. In addition, King ran a music school in Badagry, where more than 2,000 students passed through his guidance. Asa was among them.

Fiofori would often say, “Nigerians don’t know PK. If they did, they would respect him. He won international awards for his jazz and Afro music decades before people filled every space with noise”. PK passed on in 2023.

Brodaa Tam, as I called him, was sad at the scant recognition King received, in life and in death, for all he did for music. He was the one who drew my attention to King’s death, wondering why it was not in the papers.

On Sunday, Nduka Irabor asked me, “Tam Fiofori gone? And the news is not in all the papers?”.

Fiofori was a student when he met Peter King, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Wale Buckor, and Adams Dagogo Fiberesima in London. The quartet was studying music at Trinity College, which was a school of the University of London. He was well-acquainted with them, and they remained friends until they all transited before him.

Back at The Guardian, where Fiofori was sending loads of pictures to Sunny Ojeagbase (may the Almighty rest him), the sports editor, each package that arrived from Helsinki gave the newspaper, just months on the streets, an advantage that matched The Guardian’s advertisement, “Sooner or later, you will read The Guardian.” It was sooner.

We stole glances at the pictures as Ojeagbase held them with respect fit and proper for sacred objects. When they were finally splashed on the newspaper, they were at sizes unknown in newspapers then. Ojeagbase created the magazine effect for sports pages. “These pictures cannot be wasted,” Ojeagbase would say. He was spoilt for choice.

If photography were a religion, Fiofori would have been its faithful priest, not striving for titles or positions. This priest smoked and drank his beer with a quietitude that could make you a convert or, if you were already one, lead to renewals of the bottles as you discharged them into your waiting throat.

Once he starts with, “Let me tell you this”, usually prefaced with your name, to get your maximum attention, you would be at the feet of a raconteur who would take you on a compressed trip round the world with stops at major global arts capitals, or where film festivals held. Sports were not excluded.

During our 1987 trip with Nigeria’s athletics team to Burkina Faso, he was as enticed by the egregious young jumper George Ogbeide, more known as Lakayana, who had boasted he would break the national record, as much as arranging his participation in the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, FESPACO, an annual, international film event that has respected a place in the global calendar. Lakayana would win the National Collegiate Athletic Association, NCAA, long jump gold in 1991. The NCAA is the zenith of American university sports contests.

Fiofori’s films and documentaries were heavy on the devastation of the Niger Delta, culture, and music genres across Nigeria. He was good with words and his work. His best boast was to remind a gathering, “shoe get size”. He was right.

Cast in the general neglect and scorn Nigeria has for the creative industry, Fiofori and his generation got minimal attention as they searched for resources to maximise the reach of their works. He was mainly a self-funder of his works, though there were commissioned ones.

A simple man who lived for over 40 years in the same Surulere house that he cluttered with his works at varied stages of completion, I would walk in gingerly, careful not to step on a piece of history in some form or format. Before taking a seat, I would wait for him to clear some pictures he was working on overnight.

I guess the volume of work in that apartment, their security in the order he arranged them, and the uncertainty of how they would fit elsewhere hugely accounted for his long stay. He was not one to meet when he was angry. “Get this done before I blow my…top,” he would charge over delays in completing his productions, rising mannerlessness, or poor electricity, which often wore him out. I left out the expletive, which came sparsely for someone who lived in Harlem in the nuanced sixties.

Fiofori grew up in Benin City, where Emmanuel, his father, taught at Edo College, but he was from Okrika, Rivers. He attended King’s College, Lagos, and later King’s College London for higher education.