- For Ige, free education was not debatable
The late Chief Bola Ige embodied the humanist ideals of the Obafemi Awolowo School of Politics, his protégé, Chief Bisi Akande has said.
Akande, in his book, ‘My Participations’, said he was not sure of what would have happened to Oyo State if another person had been the governor in 1979.
Ige, he said, fitted the role because he was a leader and a hero who was courageous in the face of adversities.
“Since Awolowo left the saddle in 1959, no one had served the people of the old Oyo State as Bola Ige did.
“He bathed in the adulation of the people. He loved them with uncommon passion and guileless devotion.
“It is a poignant irony that in the end, he met his ultimate fate in the hands of his cowardly assassins in the same Ibadan, the city of his glory,” Akande said.
He went on: “Ige was one of the young radical intellectuals who followed Awolowo to the historic Jos convention of the Action Group where the schism of the party burst into the open.
“It was there he was elected the National Publicity Secretary of the party at the young age of 32.
“By the time he was elected the governor in 1979, he had passed through the furnace to emerge one of the leading lights of our society.
“Persecuted and hunted during the turbulent sixties, he had become an established leader by the time of the first coup in January 1966 and served as a commissioner in the military government of Colonel Adeyinka Adebayo.
“By the time we were coming to power, he was a vigorous man at the height of his game.
“He would not suffer fools gladly and would not hesitate to give anyone the length of his tongue.
“In our cabinet, he was our colleague as well as our big uncle and guide. How much we loved him!”
The elder statesman and former Osun State Governor also wrote that for Ige, the free education policy of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) was not debatable.
He said the late Chief Bola Ige insisted that the administration should be guided by the UPN’s four cardinal programmes: free education at all levels, free health services, integrated rural development and full employment.
The late Ige was governor of the old Oyo State under the UPN.
The party’s leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, failed to become the President and in Oyo State, limited resources were threatening the free education programme.
“Right from the Liberty Stadium where he took his oath of office, he proclaimed his programmes to the people and declared free education to all our children of school age,” Akande said.
He said Ige’s administration inherited 132 secondary schools of which 43 were in the Ibadan metropolis.
Akande recalled: “Many children and their parents were ready to take advantage of the new policy and embrace the dawn of a new age.
“The eighth meeting of the Oyo State Executive Council of Wednesday, March 26, 1980, directed the State’s Tenders Board, of which I was the chairman, to award contracts for the blocks of new classrooms for the deluge of pupils expected to take advantage of our free education programme.
“At the meeting, we also learnt that an optimum classroom should consist of a minimum of 30 pupils and a maximum of 35.
“It was also proposed that any community with a minimum of 70 post-primary pupils would be allocated a secondary school and that an optimum school would have a four-arm stream of student intakes, making a total of (35 by 4) 140 pupils per class and 840 pupils per school.
“By that calculation, about 100,000 pupils were expected to be registered in the old Oyo State for the 1980/81 session.
“In fact, 132,500 were eventually admitted.
“Things only began to stabilise at about 126,000 pupils for 1982/83.”
The Nation
