By Oyeyinka Fabowale
Dr. Stephen Lawani emerged the graduating Chemistry student of his set at the University of Ibadan in the 60s with a university scholarship offer to train him to PhD level. But he rejected the offer and opted to study librarianship.
Ever since, Lawani’s world has revolved around books, documents and the written word both as curator and ‘creator’.
In this interview with Saturday Sun, Dr Lawani, the first Director of Information Services, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), former manager at the World Bank, erudite scholar, prolific author and newspaper columnist, who joined the octogenarian’s club on Saturday July 13 2024, tells his life story.
Did you ever hope to get to where you are today?
I’m most grateful to the Almighty Father for having had a very, very fortunate life. I was the last born of my mother, and before me, there were three older sisters. The very oldest of us was male. So, I was pampered, really pampered. I enjoyed a beautiful childhood. I can’t even now think of having a better childhood, although my children would tell me that they had a better childhood because they grew up in the environment of IITA. The oldest of them was about four years old when we moved to IITA. And they lived there until they went to boarding school, secondary school. A beautiful, free environment where they could ride their bicycles all over the place, there were swimming pools, everything. So, they have a point but what gave me satisfaction at that time is not describable in those physical terms. In the circumstances I grew up, there were many educated people in the area and education was taken for granted. Fortunately for me,
I went to what I still consider, at least for that time, one of the best, the very best secondary school in Nigeria, Christ School, Ado-Ekiti. At Christ School, the principal, Canon L.D. Mason, took quite some interest in me, I suppose because I was one of the youngest in my class and also, I came from a relatively far place, from Igarra, in Akoko-Edo, in Benin-Delta Province. It’s the headquarters of present-day Akoko-Edo. In those days, most of the students were from Ekiti area or their parents were Ekiti, but I wasn’t from Ekiti, so he looked after me and I had an excellent time. The school also was influential in my choice of career. They had the tradition that if you are one of the very top students academically and had the best result in English Language when you were in Form 3, going to Form 4, you were qualified to work in the library. So, working in the library was a privilege, it was a distinguished place to work. While others were cutting the grass and sweeping the roads, you were in the library.
So, after obtaining the best result in chemistry in my class at UI and getting a university scholarship to do a PhD, I chose to go into librarianship. Other people saw the library profession as something not really important; they thought it was for only those who studied English or for women who don’t really have any other opportunities. I had the university scholarship and chose to do a project in theoretical chemistry, which even most of my teachers didn’t understand. They already found a place for me in Canada to go and do a PhD under a distinguished theoretical chemist. But then I said, if I can’t do a subject or choose a profession that I can discuss with anybody, one that even the brilliant chemists don’t understand, is that what I’m going to do for life? Since I like books, I like a wide range of subjects, I opted to do librarianship. In fact, the decision was so unusual that I couldn’t tell many of my friends. When my Head of Department heard about it from the head of the Institute of Librarianship – they were both expatriates – he called and bullied me. He said: “It is rubbish! You’re not going to do it!” So, I avoided him until they called me from the Institute of Librarianship and asked, “Are you really serious that you are coming or you are just playing games?” I said I was coming. So they said, “If you are coming, you will have to arrange your university scholarship for PhD, because the one you have doesn’t cover this one.” I said I knew. They said they would arrange scholarship for me. They got the Rockefeller Foundation to give me a scholarship. The Rockefeller Foundation promised to give me a scholarship but on the condition that when I completed one year here, I would have to go to the United States for further studies in librarianship, and that they hoped I would be interested in working on a project they were developing called the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. They also expressed the hope that I would be coming there to work. So, that gave me further strength and I daresay I have been very fortunate and kindly guided in my choice of career.
You had a stint at the World Bank as manager. You are also a writer and publisher. How did that all come about?
Well, again, after being interviewed at the Rockefeller Foundation headquarters in New York City, I came directly to work at the IITA where I was given the responsibility to establish the Library and Documentation Centre. So, I recruited everybody. I came home and took charge of the whole Library and Documentation Centre. This was in June 1969, and from June 1969 to 1983, I was in charge of the Library and Documentation Centre. The highlight of that was really that it became the best agricultural library in the country. Also, the place where people want to come and have experience in how modern libraries are should be organised. Moreover, we computerised the whole library. The first fully computerised library in Africa, and that tradition has kept improving. Today, the library is completely digital. If you go there now, all you will see are tables with computers. Everything was digitalised. In 1983, I was promoted to be in charge of not just the Library and Documentation Centre but all public affairs, information and publications. I moved away from the library into the central administration and got designated as Director of Information Services which included being in charge of both editorial and printing of publications, audiovisuals, everything. That’s what I did for almost 10 years until it became almost routine. There was nowhere else to go since I was not in agricultural research and I couldn’t be the deputy director general. Since there was no higher rung to climb, I decided to take an early retirement in 1996. But while there, I tried to link up with the media in a structured way. I established what we called at that time Media Forum for Agriculture. I got grants from the International Development Research Centre of Canada so that I could bring journalists to introduce them to what agricultural research is really about. Not just IITA, but of course, naturally, for the promotion of IITA, but also generally to educate journalists on agriculture and to get them interested in reporting agriculture. Since I had external funding for it, the Media Forum for Agriculture was not subject to the limitations of IITA’s budget. By 1996, I felt that I needed to make a change.
By 1996, it just happened that there was an opening at the World Bank for what they call division chief at the corporate headquarters, a division chief for the executive director’s offices. That unit was responsible for archives of the whole World Bank. It was also responsible for providing information research support to all the executive directors. Unlike most companies, the World Bank has residential executive directors. The executive directors represent groups of countries or single countries, but they are resident, they are there permanently and they had to be supported with the needed research. Each time there is a project that they need to discuss, they need to ask for information – the resource to do it and also the archives. The archive is controlled by the division chief for that unit. Later on, the designation of division chief was changed to manager. So, I became the manager for that division. I found that the people, the executive directors from different parts of the world, would come in and nobody would know of their existence. So, coming from an information background at IITA and the media and with the media forum exposure, I decided that I would be writing about each of the executive directors, especially when they joined the World Bank newly. At that time, we already had a website, but it was just a video, a visual website. So, we promoted the whole unit and at the time we had maybe more than nine nationalities working under me. I was happy at the level of harmony I created within the division. I found that people from Mauritius, the United States, Uruguay, and many East European countries got along very well and I felt very proud of that. Then you found different nationalities like that, even people you would ordinarily consider arrogant, would come to seek your advice.
As a book person, please permit me to use that word…
I feel proud to be a lover, extreme lover of books.
Which is the most interesting and most important book you have ever read?
Obviously, from our conversation so far, the book that I can say has made the greatest impact on me, and that has really touched me, with which there’s no comparison, is In the Light of Truth, The Grail Message by Abdu-rushin. Why do I consider it so? For me, it is logical. It hits me as true. It hits me as a revelation. It answers the key questions of life that I’ve always had. Why are we on earth? Where do we go after death? We talk about the Kingdom of the Almighty. What is this kingdom? Is it just one single entity? Does it consist of many planes? As they say somewhere in the Bible, my father’s house has many mansions. Does this mean that the father’s house is really creation and that the many mansions are the planes in this creation? Is that what it means? Those are questions that I always ask myself. In The Grail Message, I found answers.
Outside academic papers, you write mostly on spiritual matters. Why so?
As a matter of fact, I have written more on bibliometrics, information science and library science. Both mostly in scientific journals. I have more than 60 scientific publications in scientific journals. Even now, years after I’ve left the corporation, many of my articles are cited, and interestingly, it’s all over the world, even journals whose languages I don’t understand. So, that has been the case. In fact, the first time I would write outside non-technical, non-scientific work and publish it was in 1987. At that time, I was still at the IITA. I was there from 1969 to 1996. By 1987, I had come across this work, In the Light of Truth, The Grail Message. Having come across it, in my own reflections on the work, I felt that you can only believe, you can only fully accept, logically accept the work, if you believe. The author, of course, says you must be personally, individually convinced about his work. He says, “I offer, I do not solicit,” and he says, you’re wasting your time if you don’t fully accept it, understand it, and then decide to live by it. In my own reflection, I resolved that one must believe in reincarnation. That if you don’t believe in reincarnation, the whole system, as I understood it, could not be true. So, I did a special reading on the reincarnation, including especially the Bible since I was aware that some Christians, not all, do believe in the reincarnation. But it turns out that there were quite some Christians who did not believe in the Incarnation, and therefore those people would not find the great message convincing, they would not understand it. So, I wrote the book. I wrote drafts and drafts and rewrote it. By 1987, I was ready to publish it. I gave it to many major publishers in Ibadan and also to some other people outside Nigeria. And in each case, they were willing and anxious to publish it, but they would say, you should tone this down, rewrite, this chapter to make it acceptable to the readers. I told myself that I’m not going to compromise my views in order that the publisher may accept it. So, I decided, after thinking for a long time to establish a publishing house, and I formed Millennium Press. But before getting to the publishing, the printing and distribution, I must mention that I had a problem with the name. Working for an international research organisation dealing with agriculture and holding a rather significant position in the organisation, I thought it might be odd for me to publish a book on reincarnation, a deeply religious philosophy. So, I decided I was going to use a pseudonym. I recall I was driving to town from the IITA campus where I lived. I went to a part of town and on my way back, I remember it was around UI gate area, the name Lampe just flew in my mind. I knew enough German at that time to know that Lampe means lamp. I said since I was throwing light on a subject, that would be a good name to adopt. But as I was driving home towards IITA, I began wondering whether human beings bear Lampe. As a librarian, I knew that there are ways of checking in the catalogue of names, and you will find it there if it is a real name. I got there, and of course, I saw many Lampes. That’s why I adopted Lampe but also retained my personal names.
You went into self-publishing. How rewarding has that been in terms of readership, patronage, as well as in material terms?
The story of my getting involved in this kind of writing has nothing to do with looking for money. I had an excellent job, well paid. Indeed, I was paid in dollars, and that was because I was an international staff recruited in the U.S. It also meant that I was being very heavily taxed, but that was in dollars. So, money was not a consideration.
You used to write a column for The Comet, The Nation and The Guardian. How would you assess the quality and adequacy of public affairs analysis and commentaries in today’s newspapers in terms of understanding what the issues are and how to solve them?
You’re right. I was a newspaper columnist for some years. I started with The Guardian on Sunday and the column was called Millennium Wisdom. I started writing it shortly before I left IITA. Again, this is where my name, Lampe, became useful. I couldn’t have been writing as Lawani when I was still at IITA at that time. I don’t recall getting paid anything. I did it for free. I was writing the column completely out of interest, and the objective was to bring the knowledge, the wisdom in the Grail Message to bear on current affairs issues. That was the whole point. When my contacts at The Guardian – Lade Bonuola, the Managing Director, and Femi Kusa, the Director of Publications established The Comet, by that time, I was already at the World Bank, I decided to shift the column to The Comet and I continued with The Comet until it became The Nation. At that point, I coincidentally, decided not to continue the column because I wanted to face my spiritual writings full time. I didn’t think I would have time for a weekly column.
There are so many columnists. Some columnists you just admire and you read everything they write. Some other columnists, you can see they are struggling. You can see they’re not writing from deep within, and they’re somewhat superficial. But I think one general point one can make is that if you want to be a columnist, you have to choose a subject in which you are personally very much interested, and a subject that you would be reflecting on, even if you are not a columnist. In other words, you should be inwardly-driven as you pursue your subject. And when you are inwardly-driven, you are likely to have commitment to your ideas. You are not likely to write superficially. You are also likely to put your very best into each piece you disseminate. That’s the way I look at it. You can say standards are falling generally, but there are still very, very good writers, obviously very knowledgeable, very committed to the messages they are trying to communicate.
You wrote from spiritual insight in explaining what the issues were. With conventional approaches to viewing and dissecting secular matters and proffering solutions, how do you expect readers to understand and accept your standpoint?
I think, first of all, regardless of what subject one is looking at, one must be logical. You have to know that what you’re writing makes sense, that it is objective, it’s not something emotional. It’s something that any serious thinker can see the objectivity in it, can see the logic in it. And one of the most privileged positions one can be in, is to have a source of knowledge that you know is comprehensive in terms of applicability to every subject or field, that it is completely logical, and therefore, one can proudly and honestly defend any position deriving from it.
Writers are supposedly seers and healers. Why and how would you say we are in the situation we have found ourselves in this country and as humanity? And what’s the way out?
I think that the problem of Nigeria is not unique. You look around the world today and it’s hard to find a country that stands out in peace, being well governed, being peaceful, looking for peace, a model of what our deep inner selves would want. In short, one can see that humanity has a common problem, common challenges, and I think it is spiritual, that we don’t even know that we, human beings, are actually human spirits wearing physical clothes. And that these physical clothes, which some people do anything to satisfy, to please, to kill, to steal, to dispossess whole societies, just to satisfy the ego of this physical body, that it is completely wrong-headed. That’s why human beings are developing wrong civilizations, wrong cultures. We develop bad traditions and we don’t want to drop those bad traditions.
What’s the solution?
The solution to me is to ‘know thyself,’ know that you are a human spirit, know that you are just a creature of the Almighty, know as a creature of the Almighty, how you are supposed to live, and know that only in living within the perfect laws, that is, only living in accordance with those primordial laws I told you about shall we have a fulfilled life, a peaceful life, and all together find harmony and happiness within ourselves.