Prof. Yemi Osinbajo Attends the Book Launch of Late Alhaji Maitama Sule on 07/09/2017

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Video Transcript

An orator is a skilled public speaker, a master of words especially in the use of words to persuade, to exhort, to inspire, to set direction and possibly to create a vision.

Words are of course important, indeed they create or destroy, they edify or humiliate, and words well-spoken can uplift, encourage, and inspire.

But words are also the defining tool of nihilists, traitors, hate merchants, demagogues, and rascals of every kind. In the past few months, we have heard words intended to stoke conflict, to denigrate the ethnicities or faith of others, to divide a great people into several small and weaker parts.

So oratorical genius like all forms of genius, is not in and of itself a virtue, the character and motivations of the man or woman behind the orator is then what is crucial.

Alhaji Yusuf Maitama Sule, Damasanin Kano, was an exceptionally gifted orator, but his greatness was not in the gift of oratory. It was in the exceptional character that undergirded that gift.

He understood the power of rhetoric and persuasion, drama and theatre and he translated the sometimes exasperating twists, and turns of the Nigerian socio-political drama into words of rebuke and exhortation but ultimately of hope.

In one of his often quoted statements he said: “symptoms of revolt loom large in the horizon, in short, there is meaninglessness in philosophy, insecurity in polity, chaos in politics, immorality in society, corruption in the economy, frustration in art, and lack of creativity in literature”.

But then he was ever hopeful and in 2012, at the award dinner of the Academy for Entrepreneurial Studies, he said:  “as we overcame all the crisis in the First Republic, so shall we overcome the crisis in the present Nigeria. Therefore, I have a dream that Nigeria will soon be great; that Nigeria will be a united country, a prosperous country that will take her proper place in the comity of nations and will lead the rest of Africa, inspire Africans all over the world”.

He goes on: “that we will come to love one another because the problem in Nigeria is lack of love, our problem is tribalism and religion… Islam and Christian faiths teach the same moral values.”

Alhaji Maitama Sule was a truly great man and we can see that in the testimonials that followed his passing, in the calibre of the friendships and relationships that he built across Nigeria, in the quality of his thinking and writing, and especially in his simplicity and humility.