IN the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) family, Yemi Lijadu is a very constant name. He has had a long-time association with the UN Agency. By his own account, he started his sojourn in the Paris-based organisation in 1964, at age 35. Today (November 6, 2011), the octogenarian, who is popularly referred to in the UNESCO circle as Uncle Lijadu, clocks 82, yet he shows no sign of tiredness that ought to be associated with people of his age. He takes MOHAMMED ABUBAKAR on a journey through his life, dotting on his love for wine collection, which he described as a pleasurable experience and many other issues.
AT your age, one would wonder why you carry on with such agility, what is the secret?
I do everything but everything in moderation and I have enthusiasm for anything I do. It is also important to keep a healthy lifestyle and the grace of God, nothing more.
Journey through life
I WAS born in Lagos, at Moloney Street in Obalende, on November 6, 1929. I am 82 years today. I grew up in Lagos, though my family originally came from Abeokuta, Ogun State. I’m an Egbaman, but I’m very much a Lagosian because my mother was born in Tinubu Street in Lagos and her mother was also born in Lagos. So you see, as we say in the language, a bird never flies with one wing; it has to do so with two wings. Lagos of those days was a kind that you cannot imagine today. For instance, when I was growing up, I’m sure there were less than one million people, in fact, less than 500,000 people living in Lagos proper (Lagos Island).
That was a Lagos where everybody knew everybody, the whole society was interested in building you up; you didn’t get out of the house and start misbehaving because any adult that sees you misbehaving was prepared to discipline you. Your only problem was that you would want to beg the person that since he had disciplined you, he should not report you to your immediate family. I hope that children still have that kind of attitude, but I’m not sure and I don’t want to pass any judgment.
I attended CMS Grammar School in Lagos, and when I left school, I started working with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), I did a few months with a friend, Professor Hollseten, because he was working with the Customs; I was working with him. But after five months, I had to leave. Then I started in broadcasting. You know in those days, we didn’t have proper broadcasting in Nigeria; what we had was re-difussion. In other words, you had a box, which had a switch that is either on or off, so you either had a programme or you didn’t have one because you cannot tune into something else because it wasn’t a radio, it was a box for transmission, a re-diffusion box.
About the time I went into broadcasting, a team was sent from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) led by a gentleman called Tom W. Chalmas; they were brought to Nigeria in 1950 to establish a proper broadcasting culture in Nigeria. I joined in 1951 after the second World War. We had an office along the Marina, next door to the General Post Office; it used to be seamen’s canteen, because of the presence of seamen, soldiers and others. Those soldiers, because of the effect of the war, only catered for expatriates, who used to come into the country on boats as sailors.
However, when we started broadcasting, it was a slow thing because the Broadcasting House had not been built then; we were broadcasting from Glover Hall just down the road, and what they did was to gather who they thought had the quality and who would be interested in broadcasting to join the team.
Let me tell you the kind of people we had then: the Head of Talks was Prof. Chinua Achebe; the Head of Features was Cyprian Ekwensi, one of the first Nigerian writers; the Head of Music was Fela Sowande, the big man of music who died in the United States some years back while the late Governor of Ogun State, Chief Bisi Onabanjo was our Head of News. There was another gentleman called Horatio Ageda, I think he has passed on now. We had people like that, who were people of quality, who were being trained by these people from the BBC.
I got into broadcasting because of my musical background because I come from a family that has a lot of music. I grew up singing. I was the Head of the Choir and the soloist of the Cathedral Church of Christ for many years; I was a soloist for the school choir too when I was growing up.
I will not go into the details about growing up in Lagos but suffice it to say that Lagos was a different Lagos because it was a town where people lived together; a town where people felt part of a family.
My old Lagos…
Lagos was a place where values thrived and people didn’t think that they should do anything that would disrespect the law. You could walk in the street without worry. The first time I ever saw a policeman or a soldier carrying a gun was when I came to Paris in 1964. Then, we hadn’t had the coup, but of course after the first coup, things changed. The only time you saw a soldier or policeman carrying gun was once a month. There used to be a lorry carrying salaries on an open back lorry and the policeman sat down there with a gun pointing to the air scaring people. And prisoners, you will see them cutting grasses on the streets of Lagos, making the place tidy and neat; there would be about 10 prisoners, all very smart and clean with one policeman who would have no gun; all he had was his stick. We never heard of those people taking the stick from the policeman or killing him and running away with it; we never heard of armed robbers and those sort of things; we never heard of anybody attacking that lorry with that single policeman with the empty gun pointing to the air. , That was the atmosphere that we grew up in Lagos and I’m sure that this was happening in other parts of the country at that particular time.
Now another aspect which will be of importance is that, there was a lot of activities, bringing together children of school age that were sports lovers… there were also people who were interested in music like myself. There was a festival of the arts, which we had every year; we had all kinds of competition in music, singing and playing musical instruments, and this brought people from all kinds of backgrounds together, although we didn’t go to same school, we knew one another and this was the way we built up the sort of Nigerians who were expecting independence around 1957, 1958 and 1959. It was a group of very proud Nigerians; we were very proud of ourselves, we were very sure that we would succeed, that Nigeria would succeed, we didn’t have any doubt about that at all.
Journey to Paris
I came to France when I was 34 years old and I have been here, in fact, I have lived here longer than in Nigeria, but I visit home — sometimes, two to four times in a year; it is not as if I have abandoned the country altogether. But my kids are well at home. I have four sons — the oldest is in the Republic of Ireland; the second is in Lagos; the third is in Manchester and the fourth is living not too far from Manchester, but they are all in touch with Nigeria, and the one who is in Nigeria is very much at peace with the society.
When I left Nigeria, I was Head of Department of Drama at the NBC and with all modesty I was one of those responsible for bringing drama to the radio. I don’t know if you ever heard about a programme called Shaky shaky, it was the first dramatic series that was ever broadcast on a radio in Nigeria. It was the first time we were using Pidgin English. This was before the Village Headmaster, and those related plays on radio. I involved practically everybody, a lot of people wrote for me. For instance, a friend of mine, who was called Aig-Imokhuede, was the principal writer; there was also Ralph Opara; even Prof. Wole Soyinka wrote episodes of the play in those days, and we had a very healthy drama department at the radio.
Then, there was an advertisement internationally for a producer to come to UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. I applied; I had even forgotten about it, and was somewhere in the East with Wole Soyinka-led The 1960 Mask Group making a film for one of the petroleum companies in those days — the film was called Culture in Transition — I got a telephone call that they were waiting for me in Paris.
So, I came and occupied the position of the Deputy to the Head of English Production in the radio and visual information department at UNESCO here in Paris. That was my starting point here. We made several films for UNESCO; we made hundreds and hundreds of radio programmes because there was this radio English broadcast at the UN, which is disseminated to all English-speaking countries of UNESCO. I was number two in the English section, but we also had Russian section; Spanish section, the French section and Arabic section. This was how it was.
After some time, the head of the English Department retired and I was made head of the department. I did that for a few years and I disseminated more of public information in a bigger sense for member-states and I used to go on behalf of UNESCO to the UN to lecture producers and journalists on how to use materials on UN system. After some years, the Director-General then decided to send me to New York as the Deputy Director of the UNESCO office there. That meant I was the Deputy Representative of UNESCO to the UN. After a time, the head of the office was moved and I took over from him, and stayed in New York between 1974 and 1978-79.
When I was brought back to Paris, the Director General had just created some sort of geographical divisions, whereby the interest of all the geographical blocks would be looked after, and I was made the Director for the African division, and of course that meant working with countries all over Africa.
By the way, when I was in New York, we didn’t have too many offices in the Caribbean, so, I was also responsible for contacts with the English-speaking Caribbean countries because Spanish-speaking countries surround them.
After a few years, the Director-General then, Mr. Amadou Mata M’bow, a Senegalese, the first African Director-General of UNESCO, said, ‘look Lijadu, you better come and be in charge of the cabinet’; that was when I became Chief of Cabinet of the Director-General’s office until he retired and that was two years before my own retirement. He left in 1987 and I left in 1989. So, for the last two years, contractually, I was in charge of cabinet of the DG; when there is a change in that area, it is like saying when a head of state goes, I couldn’t stay with the new one, I moved out; but I was an international civil servant, so, I was given a post they called Chief de mission, responsible for the development of communication. That is how I stayed until 1989.
Something happened a few months before I retired; the ambassador of Nigeria to UNESCO named Yahaya Aliyu came to my office to say he had been asked by the Executive Board to sound me out, that they wanted him to become the Chairman of Executive Board and he asked whether he should take the post; I said he should. Though he knew it was a great responsibility, I told him that if he needed any help I would be of assistance. He said to me that I was retiring, and I told him that if he became the Chair of the Executive Board, I would be there to help him. So, when I retired, he held on to me. That is how I accepted to go and help as an Adviser to the Permanent Delegation.
When I retired, I had 25 years as an international civil servant apart from the 12 years I spent in Nigeria with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. When I moved to the Permanent Delegation, we were Chairperson of the Executive Board and it was a very wonderful opportunity to work with ambassador Aliyu; he was an excellent person in the true and the best tradition of Nigeria. We were able to show the side of Nigeria, which is sometimes not open to outsiders and friends of Nigeria. I stayed with the Permanent Delegation until 2007 — 18 clear years after my first retirement and as you can see, I’m still helping the Permanent Delegation from time to time, but I retired the second time in 2007.
Your foray into broadcast, has it anything to do with family tradition?
Oh, you are going into another thing now; my father was the editor of Daily Times and he was connected with the organisation for a long time; he was the editor of the Times, at one point, my younger brother who was the MD of NICON Insurance, Yinka was on the board of Daily Times for very many years, but my father was the editor. He was editor before he went to India and Burma as a War Correspondent, during the Second World War, though I do not know the exact date, since he was in India and Burma in the 1940s, he must have been editor of Daily Times in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
When he came back, he was employed by the government of the day and he became the Assistant Director of Information and he was sent to Enugu at one point to be the Director of Information and he came back to Lagos, but unfortunately, he was not blessed with long life; when he died, he was 54 and I was 24; it was a very sad story.
As honorary adviser, what do you do now?
Almost anything in the sense that the ambassador can call on me at anytime and ask me to do anything or she could just discuss things with me or exchange ideas on how she thinks things should be done; and we are very lucky to have Hajiya Maryam Katagum as the ambassador to UNESCO.
At what point would you say you are done with being an international figure, do you have that plan?
Home is home any time and I’m at a stage now where I can go between Nigeria and France all the time. So there is no problem at all with that, and as you can see, I’m a man of the world in the sense of the length and breath of the world that I have seen; but you know I’m still deeply a Nigerian.
‘Wine And I, forever I Love’
OF all hobby, why do you choose to resort to wine collection as hobby?
You see, the point is that I don’t believe that you should come from home to live anywhere, not only even in France and not take an intelligent interest in your surrounding. You must imbibe some of the ways. I have imbibed a lot of things about French, not only the wine, but the cooking. Apart from music, reading and learning, one of my greatest interests in life is cooking, I do a lot of cooking, and I even cook in my home.
Now, talking about wine, it is one of the treasures that France has, they really have a lot if good wines, and if you do not abuse it, it can be a really delightful thing to drink. Of course, if you take the right wine with the right meal at the right time, not just drinking it to show off, but drinking to enjoy and know the taste of it, to know the aroma of it and to use it as something to enhance human life, and not just something to abuse and get drunk with. As old as I am now, nobody will tell you that he has ever seen me drunk in my life.
Wine collection is a very interesting thing and I love it and I have very many collections. When you collect wine like that, it is like a lucky dip, sometimes you keep a bottle of a very expensive wine for a long time and when it comes to drinking it and you open it, it may not taste like anything under the sun, it may not be very good. I had this experience when a friend of mine brought this former Head of State of Nigeria to my place and we spent the New Year eve together, and so I said ‘Mr. President, I have to open this special bottle of wine’; so I went to tab (where you keep the wine underground) and I brought this wine which was about 40 years old, so I opened it gently not to disturb all the dents at the bottom to ensure that there is no dirt going into up, I gave it a little time to breath a little before serving it, but when I served it, it had a taste of cork! And yet this is the wine I kept properly lying on its belly all the time, but of course either air had gone into it or the cork had disintegrated in-spite of the fact that it was musty, but I got another bottle of wine, which was about 19 years old and then we had a very good drink.
I was looking to bring out something about 10 days ago, I saw at least a 1968 bottle of wine and a 1979 bottle, but there was one that I thought it could be in the class of 1980, but the label had deteriorated, because they are old, and it is not good wine with Amenyak, which is like brandy, it comes from the region, you see these names —Champaigne, Amenyak, Coignac, those are geographical areas of France, and you can get for instance some of them which are 90 years old. I gave a friend a bottle of a 90-year old Amenyak for his birthday last year, though they are very rare, but they still exist.