I was not the only son of Bayelsa State to have felt the urgent nature of the assignment that had suddenly fallen on the lap of former President Goodluck Jonathan. I worked closely with him, yes, and wrote the speeches he read in the 18-month period he served as Governor of Bayelsa State.
But now, as President and Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, he was surrounded by an extensive panoply of presidential authority, and there was just no room for me to reach him. The least I could do, therefore, was to try the good old way.
The post office had evolved into the internet, and everything, every bit of news, every shade of opinion, could be transmitted instantaneously, at the touch of a button. That was how I posted the first page of the Epistles to the President on Tuesday, 29 March 2011, from my humble bedsitter in London.
I resolved to write regular letters to the new President in the belief that he might get to read stray copies, and I ended up writing 100 pieces to underscore the fact that a son of the Niger Delta was at the helm of affairs when Nigeria marked her centennial anniversary.
My concern spanned everything there was to do with good governance, and I had something to say about practically every sector of the economy. With respect to agriculture, I had fallen back on the wonderful example I witnessed in Israel as a pilgrim. I cited what the Israeli government was doing in an arid land that lacked the abundant supply of rain we enjoy in Nigeria.
I knew little of the fact that another noble son of Bayelsa State was possessed by the same spirit of anxiety for the success of the Jonathan presidency. In the quiet corner of Achievers’ Farm, Chief Lionel Jonathan-Omo was scribbling his own letter to the then President. The result is the only book that has survived him.
In the end, it is gratifying to record that Layo’s ambition to write a book did manifest. He entered the hallway of eternity as an author, an example of a soul which shared its best ideas with his neighbours and with humanity. He is survived by a book with a long title: A Comprehensive Solution to the Niger Delta Crisis, with a subtitle, Letter to the President.
Overcome by the pressure of words even in his silent moments, he was compelled to take up pen and paper. He scribbled a long letter to then President Jonathan in the heydays of that administration, apparently to underscore a few pertinent ideas that were making him sleepless.
It is remarkable that a man who was so much in love with big words could have equal passion for farming, and speak about agriculture with lucid felicity. The content of his book is about farming, about how agriculture can save Nigeria when the oil dries up at a future date to come.
Since he did not quite have the political wherewithal to pursue the dream of agricultural revolution that had taken hold of his mind, Lionel Jonathan decided to demonstrate what he meant by investing his entire fortune on a farming venture. He saw farming as an open field waiting to be cultivated, to nourish crops that would feed the hungry multitude. And he took his bearings from the Bible.
He remembered the days of Joseph and Pharaoh, the days of famine in the land of Egypt. He was struck by the fact that the king consulted a dreamer in jail, and found a solution to the crisis of hunger that was to face the land for seven straight years. Store up grains in the days of plenty, saith the Lord, that there shall be food in the days of hunger, and Joseph shall be in charge of the warehouse.
Layo was in love with Bible stories. He was in the habit of quoting passages from the scriptures. I could not help but notice that he carved verses from the book of Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes into the trunk of trees, as if to remind himself of beloved homilies from the sacred tomes as he strolled through his farm. He didn’t leave it at that. His conversation was spiced with his most favourite verses.
The race, after all, is not to the swift. But time and chance happeneth to them all. And Layo would go on to pontificate about the inexorable order of nature, and contemplate another fundamental omission that had left the world ignorant of the importance of agriculture in the life of a nation.
As I said, Layo’s last call to me came right out of the blue. He was the last person I expected to hear from that morning. He went straight to the point. He had just read my short tribute to my childhood friend, Inowei Dede. He was overcome with gratitude and thought he should share a word with me.
I had given voice to what he felt deeply about Inowei, one of his ardent followers, and he felt obliged to give me a thumbs-up. On my part, I was flattered to hear from such a respected senior, and I could not help but go back to the script in the quiet of dawn.
Not long after that, I heard that Lionel Jonathan-Omo had tumbled from the balcony of his two-storey building in Nembe, and broken his bones. It sounded like fiction at that time. Come to think of it, Layo was not a mason or a bricklayer, nor was he a carpenter. So what was he doing up there at the parapet of his building?
At first, the story did not make sense to me, frankly, that he was reading a book at that high pedestal, leaned over the open balcony to spit, felt a sudden dizzy spin in his head, tumbled over the edge, and landed on a heap of sand. Thankfully, that is what he himself told anyone who wanted to know. He lived long enough to confirm that, and was taking treatment at the hands of a known masseur.
As I said, in the days when I was a school boy at Nembe National Grammar School, the name of Lionel Jonathan was the very stuff of legend. I enrolled in college in the very year he passed out, so I didn’t know what he looked like at that time. I was simply inundated by stories having to do with Lionel Jonathan and his bosom friends, Danfebo Derri and John Oruama. Of the three, I was to meet first with John. The story goes that John O, as he was fondly called, was the roughest and toughest of all three. He was stubborn to a fault.
After college, it did not come as a surprise that John O left for America, returned with a degree in cinematography and was set to make great films. In the early days of Bayelsa State, John O was a senior information officer in the Ministry of Information. He had conceived of the first documentary on the state, and chosen me to narrate the script for radio and television. Following the success of that documentary, he engaged me to voice another copy on the menace of flooding in the young state. He was the first person to take me to see the first oil well at Itokopiri. We were still thinking of the next documentary on that when John Oruama died.
I did not work that closely with Layo, but I felt much closer to him. And that is why I’m happy that Lionel Jonathan actually wrote a book. The words he took the pains to spell out are in the hands of people. The sound of his voice is captured in those pages, and the ideas he sought to impart are expressed therein.
Lionel Jonathan’s book is a long letter broken into seven instructive chapters. From the first page to the last, he demonstrated his obsession with farming, the need to grow more food for the dining table, the need for government to work outside the dictates of the oil and gas market, to provide an alternative platform for creating jobs for the youth, and to bring revenue to the national coffers from foreign shores.
In this book, Lionel Jonathan laid bare his experience as President of the Bayelsa Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He spoke as one who was abreast with the intricacies of the Niger Delta environment, as one who had come to a seated understanding of the challenges facing the ordinary people, as one who had discovered an all-time panacea to a recurrent deficiency.
The book is enriched by two additional letters, one to former Senate President David Mark, and the other to Layo’s one-time student at Government Girls Secondary School, Bassambiri, namely Mrs Patience Jonathan, wife of the former President. In both letters, he reiterates the validity for intensive agricultural production, and proffers workable modalities that government would find useful once it summons the political will to undertake massive food production across all seven hundred and seventy-four local government areas of Nigeria.
Lionel regarded his book as a “hotch-potch of ideas about farming,” but the content is definitely more than that. It is a book that draws on the author’s wide and methodical reading of scholarly authorities, a book in which he brings his competent abilities as a researcher into play.
This book deserves all the attention it can get. It is the only such document dealing with farming and the imperative of starting a green revolution in the Niger Delta by a man who devoted his time and resources to cultivating the land for its precious yield, acting in the larger interest of the society that bred him.
In a foreword that recommends the book to the common reader, Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa, emeritus professor of history, testifies to the importance of this detailed and painstaking document that will come in useful for any government, at the state or national level, which seeks to place premium on agriculture as the mainstay of its economy. This book deserves a reprint.
