For JAMB’s Ishaq Oloyede

In 1528, the sixteenth-century Italian writer Baldassare Castiglione published his classic, The Book of the Courtier (Il Libro del Cortegiano). One of the memorable words in that work is sprezzatura—his description of the art of making difficult things appear effortless. Oga Ray Ekpu invoked that word last week to describe Professor Ishaq Oloyede’s manner and his work.

I thank the legendary Ekpu for sending me back to Castiglione. In writing about the same man, however, I would rather use a string of simpler words: grace. Quiet strength. Emotional resilience garnished with uncommon candour. Succeeding where others fail is a gift; standing upright where others stumble is grace painted in theological colours.

Those are the words and phrases I choose for the man whose remarkable ten-year tenure as registrar and chief executive of JAMB now draws to a close. Professor Ishaq Oloyede has grit and grace, and the nation has watched them at work.

The Yoruba understand the limits of destiny. They say a benefactor may secure you a job, but he cannot do the work for you. Alágẹmọ may give birth to a child; whether that child dances well is entirely the child’s affair. Oloyede once told a gathering of editors that a former president recommended him to President Muhammadu Buhari for the appointment. The man who mentioned his name may have opened the door; but the mentioning did not keep him inside. His staying power was the way he handled himself and the job. The strongest testimony to that performance and his emotional intelligence was that he kept his office, his head and his credibility even after the two presidents had fallen out.

“When I was appointed registrar of JAMB ten years ago, it was strange to me. Did I need it? I was enjoying myself after serving as vice chancellor,” he told a room full of media men and women, academics and the civil society who had gathered last week to send him off at the close of a tenure that stands almost alone in its worth and consequence.

He described the beginning as strange. For the public, the dominant reaction was cynicism. It was another appointment by a government that had become synonymous with the drab and the dour. So, when Oloyede arrived a decade ago, many Nigerians dismissed him as just another labalábá—a butterfly destined to flutter briefly before vanishing into our vast forest of the forgotten. To the surprise of the watcher, the man cut through turbulence and calm and completed his long-haul flight with his wings colours intact. Ernest Hemingway, in a 1926 letter to the author of ‘The Great Gatsby’, F. Scott Fitzgerald, coined the phrase “grace under pressure.” That is an ideal which Oloyede spent ten years in JAMB turning into public administration.

Year after year, what others had treated as barren ground became, in his nimble hands, fertile soil for innovation, for integrity and measurable results.

Shakespeare wrote in ‘The Tempest’ that “What’s past is prologue.” Oloyede seemed to read that line as a challenge: so, with him, every successful year became merely the introduction to a better one.

You look at the man and remember Aesop’s fable of the thirsty crow. Faced with a pitcher whose water lay beyond reach, Aesop’s crow did not lament the obstacle or curse its fate. It patiently dropped pebbles into the vessel until the water rose to meet its mouth. Others walked away from the same problem; the crow found a solution. That, more than brilliance, is the mark of transformative leadership: the patient intelligence that raises the level instead of complaining about it.

There are people in whose hands every assignment becomes impossible. They are the sort in whose mouths even àkàrà turns into a jaw-breaking bone. Then there are the rare few like the outgoing JAMB minder, for whom àkàrà remains àkàrà; persons in whose mortar old yam and new yam are pounded with the same ease and mastery. In such hands, difficult tasks lose their menace, for competence is second nature.

To the self-possessed pilot, turbulence is merely the sky clearing its throat. That is my further description of Ishaq Oloyede: unflappable. He remained steady-handed throughout the few difficult moments he had to grapple with managing JAMB and its combustible affairs. The pilot never allowed the severity of turbulence to dictate the course of his flight.

Wordsworth wrote that “the best portion of a good man’s life” consists in “his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” Public service demands a wider canvas, but the principle is the same. The worth of a public officer lies not in speeches but in the quiet accumulation of honest, heroic deeds whose effects outlive applause.

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The exiting man’s score is not a hundred percent, but it is certainly above seventy-nine. What he could not fix is what his successor has been appointed to fix. I wish the new man, 40-year-old Professor Segun Aina, an even more fruitful tenure. British statesman, novelist and two times Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, once observed that “almost everything that is great has been done by youth.” We will watch closely to see whether the new registrar proves Disraeli right. I pray he does. Pray, I must. I have no other choice: his Otan Ayegbaju hometown is only a four-minute walk from my Eripa.

Seventy-one-year-old Professor Ishaq Oloyede is one of the reasons this democracy has not scored a big, fat zero, as round and vacant as a shark’s eye. As the man takes his leave of JAMB, one hopes that Nigeria, a desert of competent, trustworthy players, will not ask its striker to hang up his boots. The nation still has new fields to till, new frontiers to cross, and new medals to win.