I wrote my only book on the tenure of the Military Administrators in Bayelsa State purely by chance. I happen to have attended a grand international Ijaw summit hosted by Prof. Steve Azaiki, and ran into Navy Captain Caleb Olubolade, a former Military Administrator of the state. In the course of exchanging pleasantries with him, he told me that he was set to mark his 70th birthday anniversary in Yenagoa, the state capital.
I congratulated him and told him in one breath that the occasion should be marked by a book on him. His eyes lit up as if I had switched on the light in a dark room. Was that possible? The event was only 40 days away. I told him it was possible, and I would deliver it to him. He referred me to Azaiki, and I told him he should be the one to break the news and give directions accordingly. Azaiki’s prompt response, at any rate, was that I couldn’t meet the target. I felt slighted, so I resolved to do it. On Day 40 of the project, I handed a copy of the book to Olubolade, with his face on the cover, and dropped copies for Azaiki at his home.
In an invitational epistle to Governor Douye Diri which became the preface to the book, I explained the title of the book to the effect that, while Navy Captain Philip Ayeni was the first Military Administrator appointed by General Sani Abacha at the creation of the state, and therefore the first to occupy Government House, Yenagoa, it took the arrival of the second Military Administrator, Olubolade, to christen the seat of power in the state as “Creek Haven”. For that reason, while Ayeni occupied Government House, Yenagoa, Olubolade was the first captain to take charge at the Creek Haven.
It was a valid argument and a second edition of the book was published to mark Olubolade’s untimely death four months later. The fact remains that, at first glance, for any student of Bayelsa history, it is easy to mistake Olubolade as the first Military Administrator of the state. Pictures do have their uses, and they tend to stay long in the mind. As the saying goes, one picture can tell a thousand stories. That is why Ayeni’s face has come into reckoning in this new edition of the book.
The 30th anniversary of Bayelsa State has only made it even more imperative to put history in proper perspective. Among the four Military Administrators who governed the state in its infancy, Olubolade served the longest. Even so, the story of Government House, Yenagoa, began with Ayeni, the man who refused to govern the state from a cozy distance.
When the then Military Administrator of Rivers State, Colonel Shehu Musa persuaded Ayeni to stay back in Port Harcourt, and govern Bayelsa from the Rivers State capital for at least three months, Ayeni had replied with a question that smacks of patriotic eagerness to serve. ‘Are there no human beings living in Yenagoa? If there are, I will go and live amongst them’.
It is not enough to dedicate a book to such a man. It is more gratifying to give him the honour of gracing the cover. This third edition of the book on the tenure of the Military Administrators has also benefited from two additional chapters with a focus on Ayeni’s five-month tenure aa pioneer Military Administrator.
