Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, at the weekend, paid tribute to a former President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Dr Wale Okediran, who turned 70 years.

Olaopa delivered the tribute titled, “Writing the Public Service into the Nigerian Consciousness,” during the 70th birthday event/celebration of Okediran and a reading/writers’ dialogue held at the Mamman Vatsa Village, Abuja, organised by the Abuja chapter of ANA. Okediran, a medical doctor-turned-writer, has equally made a foray into politics, where he was a one-time member of the House of Representatives.

In his congratulatory message, Olaopa, who noted the role of the writer in national development, specifically drew attention to how Okediran has used his medical, literary and political trajectories to improve the lot of Nigerians in particular and humanity in general. He said: “Okediran has come a long way and has blazed many trails so consistently that at a beautiful age of 70. He has achieved a sublime legacy that embodies existential fulfilment.”

“Okediran is Nigeria’s answer to C.P. Snow’s two-culture thesis. According to that thesis, there is a significant and unbridgeable divide between the humanities and the natural sciences in ways that ensure a seeming lack of communication between the two. The literary intellectuals and the natural scientists pride themselves on their inability to understand each other, and this, Snow argues, leads to an inhibited intellectual progress. In Wale Okediran, we have a fluid and exemplary personification that firmly undermines that thesis. Okediran fluidly incorporates the love for science and the humanities.

“Okediran is the very embodiment of the “renaissance man—the multi-talented man imbued with a secular sensibility that draws on the human condition to articulate an Afropolitan sensibility of humaneness, compassion, strength, open-mindedness, passion and empathy.

“It was almost inevitable that Okediran’s love for medicine and literature would be deployed in the service of humanity in Nigeria and on the continent. Medicine is not just physiological and psychological, at least not in Africa. Medicine ministers to the brutalised bodies of Africans. As a medical doctor, therefore, Okediran has the unenviable space to confront the many psychotic manifestations of governance failure in Nigeria.”

Olaopa said that Okediran’s literary interests and skills provide the opportunity to tell the postcolonial Nigerian stories as he encountered them throughout his own personal existential and professional trajectories, adding that this explains Okediran’s path into politics; what better way to effect significant changes than being in the corridors of power?