By Rafiu Abdu

The yearly World’s Teachers’ Day was marked in our land on Monday. It is a celebration inaugurated by UNESCO to draw attention to teachers and invite appreciation for their high tasks as the primary builders of society. They mould character of children; they impart knowledge to them. They set their gaze high. Many of the teachers want to be seen as role models in conduct and application to work. Their guidance and admonitions ring loud in the hearts of many a pupil or students even long after they have left school. Their responsibilities are onerous and their duty is sacred.

The celebration of Teachers Day began in 1994, and this year marks the 60th anniversary of when serious thought was given to the status of teachers by ILO in collaborative working with UNESCO. In our clime Teachers’ Day is a time of exhortation by the political leaders in government to trigger reflection by all and sundry on how the teachers are faring, and on what encouragement and support they are receiving from every sector of society. How high is the esteem in which they are held? Undoubtedly, teachers work under harsh conditions, especially in rural areas—outside towns and cities where there may be no access roads.

As I did allude to the deterioration in the facilities last week, in many town, school building walls are dilapidated. Classrooms are congested and in some rural areas, pupils sit on the floor. Desks and chairs are broken. The National Secretary-General of the National Union of Teachers said on television, commenting on the workload of teachers in remote towns and villages, there could be just two teachers and the headmaster in a whole school, teaching all the classes! One can’t but reflect deeply on the difference in the gap between the old and the present in terms of working conditions, workload and the esteem teachers were held then and are held today. To demonstrate the appreciation for the crucial roles that teachers play in raising the citizens of the future and to honour them, Oyo and Ogun states declared last Monday a work free Day.

What could be more sobering than in remembering that at different times, the Almighty Creator sent down to this earth Teachers of Mankind apart from Prophets. I have mentioned them a few times in the past. To remind us, they are Lao-Tse, (600 B.C.) sent to China; Buddha born (550 B.C.) in India; and Zoroaster born also (600 B.C.) as Lao-Tse. I can’t but mention Jeremiah in particular among the Prophets, described as admonition prophet born in Palestine (630 B.C.). There were some referred to as Helping Messengers sent also from On High. There are also Nature Beings who teach and admonish human beings—those who are not closed and can hear them. As Terence McKenna was to say in his great words: “Nature is not mute, it is man that is deaf.”

In the course of my reflection, I reached out for a piece I wrote back in 1994 in these pages which dealt largely on the concept of time, and briefly in response to how Dr. Omololu Olunloyo, a Wizkid, saw it at the time in his column in the Nigerian Tribune. I am also drawing attention on the occasion of the Teachers’ Day to Olunloyo’s tenure as Commissioner for Education in the old West and the reforms he brought about in the field of education in the Region, such as academic excellence which put him in his own elements, and the minimum institutional standards all schools must meet. The piece at the time, some 32 years ago, also touched briefly on that tenure as Education Commissioner. Come with me:

“Dr Omololu Olunloyo is a very visible public figure. He is a multi-talented enigma often remembered as the dynamic Commissioner for Education in the old West in General Adeyinka Adebayo during General Gowon’s era. He loved his job and brought the freshness and energy of a youth to bear on his responsibility in the portfolio. His mistake in the assignment, in my view, was the dramatic redeployment of many secondary school principals long established in their colleges. They were synonymous with the schools and colleges they headed.

Talk of Olivet Baptist High School (Olivet Heights), Oyo and your mind would immediately go to Lafinhan. Mention Government College, (GCI), Ibadan, your mind would go to Bullock, or talk of Ijebu-Ode Grammar School, and your mind would race to N. E. Ade Oshisanya. Talk of Ibadan Grammar School and you would fix your inner mind’s eye on Alayande. And Muslim College, Ijebu-Ode, there could be no other than Sanni. Dr. Olunloyo was also governor of Western State briefly before Muhammadu Buhari’s troops rolled in their tanks to disperse Shagari’s jolly men on December 31, 1983.

I don’t intend to discuss Olunloyo’s memorable tenure as Educational Commissioner nor his politics. It is to his clear, uncluttered thinking for which mathematicians are generally known that I prefer to advert my mind. Mathematicians, from my experience with them, appear to pay a great deal of attention to and lay stress on principles out of which logic flows. Two plus two can only be four. The figure becomes immutable. Development can, therefore, only be built on the principle that 2 plus 2 is 4. If what is arrived at is 3 then the structure must collapse. The straight line, the mathematician will insist, is the shortest distance between two points.

Predictably, Olunloyo has sought in his column to hew a logical way out of a labyrinth of thoughts and ideas with which the world has been inflicted. Lately, he has sought to unravel the concept of time. Olunloyo has been chewing the knotty question for two Mondays running in the Nigerian Tribune. ‘What is time?’ he asked last Monday in a follow-up to ‘The Riddle of Time’ published the other Monday.

I do not think he has landed, and, so, cannot yet fully join the debate. But he has provided a good deal of food for thought to encourage, at least, a passing observation and make preliminary remarks. It is possible for one to see a picture different from Olunloyo’s which nevertheless points to a common direction in some respects. Olunloyo, it would appear, sees a jungle of human conceptions of TIME, which at the end of the day boils down to a foggy vision. What is TIME really?

All the odds are that there would be as many answers as the number of people asked to define this common word that is on the lips of everyone practically every day. Olumloyo has shown that on the loose today’s language can get in trying to form an audible channel to capture intuitive essence. Really, don’t we ask what time of the day or year it is, that is, that something is, talk of a time piece, say the committee finished its work ahead of time, wonder if we would have time to attend a party, explain that our time is choked or that we have no time? Nor can we forget, as Dr. Olunloyo has suggested we should not, the popular saying, ‘there is time for everything…?’

TIME: We even say time flies. To where? It may be asked. But really, does it fly? Let us consider two scenarios. What we call one year on earth is the number of days and nights it takes the planet to go round the sun. This is 365 or 366 days as the case may be. We call it one year. But it takes another planet, Pluto 90, 658.2 earth days and nights or 247.7 earth years to go round the sun and yet another planet, Neptune, 164 earth years to accomplish the same task. In other words, as one year on earth measures 247 years on Pluto and 164 on Neptune, time cannot hold the same value always for a Victor Omololu Olunloyo who has to live on earth today, in Pluto tomorrow and on Neptune the next.

Perceptions of time, therefore, must be related to the rhythm of the movement of that which is experiencing time and its distance from reality. An enjoyable day thus appears to fly past whereas a five-minute encounter with armed robbers seems like ages. Consider our dreams. In a dream of five minutes or even one minute, we perceive and go through experiences covering a lifetime. We travel; we hold meetings; we celebrate or attend wedding ceremonies or attend funeral rites. We weep; we cry and wake up surprised. We encounter friends and relations who may have passed away. Sometimes we cannot keep the experiences within ourselves. We look to share the experiences with friends or with a person believed to have the ability to interpret dreams. Nothing fetters the spirit that is in activity when the frontal brain, the cerebrum with its density, is resting. The dream is with the hind brain, the cerebellum which is the spiritually receptive part of the brains. With the dream experiences we can begin to understand the statement that in the Light Region, Paradise, experiences of a thousand years on earth are as one day!

We are told, drawing from “In the Light of Truth”, the Grail Message by Abd-ru-shin: “The further a human spirit shinning forth from out of its body receives the possibility of sensing real life through a lighter, less dense environment, the more it will be able to experience inwardly, so that in the time of one earth-day it can absorb far more experiences in its particular environment than can an earthman with his denser brain in his heavier and more solid surroundings.

‘‘According to the nature of the perviousness, i.e. according to the less dense and more luminous nature of its environment, a human spirit is able, through easier receptivity, to experience in the time of one earth-day as much as in the time of one earth-year, until in the Spiritual Realm itself it can experience in the time of one-earth-day as much as in a thousand earth-years!”

A person genuinely with a lot to do finds he does not have time to accomplish everything as he would like to. Time, therefore, stands a constant timeless, spanless, ageless, unchangeable and eternal. Time, in fact, stands still. As we are permitted to know in the new and higher knowledge available on earth today, time flies not. It moves not. It is we the forms, swinging in the waves of its power, who march into time. We rush into it.

We and the worlds came into being through it, are permitted continued existence by it, journey in the currents of its power, cull from its records to enrich our knowledge for what has been collected there as time has lost nothing. It has recorded all things for us some day to mature thereby and come to flower. Ladies and gentlemen, Time is life, the perfect Equilibrium. Any wonder, the riddle surrounding Time!”

Upon reading the Column and considering the thoughts expressed on the concept of Time novel, Dr. Olunloyo got in touch with me and from then we got close until he departed earthly life in April last year, aged 89. Indeed, he was only a week to being 90 when he took his exit.

LAST WEEK’S FACTUAL ERROR: I did state that Dr. Tunji Braithwaite attended King’s College. He was a product of C.M.S. Grammar School, Lagos. The mix-up occurred remembering that his bosom friend, Ikemba Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, briefly attended the college, the first secondary school in Nigeria. Ojukwu started there at the age of 10 in 1943. By 1944, he transferred to King’s College.
The error is regretted.