There is no doubt that Akoko, Ondo State-born Dr. Olu Agunloye belongs to the league of industrious sons of the Sunshine State. From being a university teacher, Agunloye, rose to national prominence when he was appointed the Corps Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Commission, minister of Power and Steel as well as minister of defence (Navy), at different times.
As a politician, Agunloye, any day, can hold his own, though his attempts to become the governor of his state have not been successful.
For Agunloye, hard work has been a virtue he learnt right from his childhood and its principles have remained his guide in all his endeavours.
When I was special assistant to Bola Ige, there was a time a lot of ideas were coming up and I later found out that the decision for Bola Ige to accept to be minister of power actually came from Bola Tinubu himself, because what Ige wanted was minister of communications
“As a child, it was work, work and work. I never knew I could become a minister. I was fairly a lucky child because I entered the school before the correct age. Being who they called ‘Omo teacher’ at that time, paid off for me. At any time in school, I did not have a classmate that was younger than myself. You may be my age but you won’t be younger. As a child, I started from class one to primary one or standard one at that time. I finished from one class to the other, from my primary to secondary, to the university, to post graduate and my first appointment was as a lecturer at the University of Ibadan. So, you can say from age ten or eleven, I went through all of that until I got a Phd at age twenty five. And, of course, for money, I went through school with scholarship,” he says.
But bagging a Doctor of Philosophy degree at such a relatively young age meant nothing to Agunloye until he began to have as students people who were far older than him.
Reflecting on that, he says, “To me, if there was another class to go, I would have gone. It’s common, too, if you are not interrupted. I was not interrupted; I was going from one class to the other until “I finished reading all the books”. And U.I appointed me even before I defended my thesis. To me, it did not mean anything till later that I found out I had become a teacher to those who were older than I was.”
Asked if people then saw him as the rave of the moment due to his academic attainment at such a young age, the former minister quips, “I don’t know if they did (laughs). But that is the painful part. Really, you don’t know the best of your time is when you are between twenty one years old and thirty five years old. Anything, you had it, energy, you had it. You could come from Ibadan to dance Fela in this place (Lagos) and without sleeping, go back again. I remember during some of the examinations, on the day of exams, we would still be drinking on top of the bookshop in the morning and we would rush from there to the exam hall. You have everything going well. If that portion of your life was disrupted, you may never recover from it.”
How was he able to manage his social life and still stand out in his academics, Agunloye recalls, “Well, I behaved like a pastor. You know the pastor rests for six days and work solely on the seventh day. For me, do classroom all through and Saturday was a free day. Saturday, you are allowed to do anything and I still do that up till now. On my Saturdays, I don’t have programmes but Sunday, after service, I go back to work. I remember, too, as a young person, I used to attend 7am communion service and by 9.30am, I’m on my desk.
“Now, I am an older person. When you get older, you get closer to God. As a younger person, I studied hard only on Sunday. I worked very hard on Sundays like the pastors. You can’t get me to walk around on Sundays. Sundays after breakfast, I would be in the library, I would be in room B11 in Physics Department or room C5 or one of the places studying. I would do that, come to eat lunch, go back, and come to eat dinner, go back. I used to study close to eighteen hours on Sundays but on Saturday, I am a free man (laughs).”
Surprisingly, none of his children has taken after him in the area of academics, though, according to him, they have all been doing well in their various endeavours.
“It’s difficult to say. I have Phd, my wife has Phd, but none of my children has Phd. They all have first degrees. I reckon that they have looked at their father and mother, that they didn’t get anything out of the Phd. So, there was no motivation, I guess, for them. But my children, without exception, perhaps, are hardworking or more hardworking than I had been,”
he says.
Speaking on speculations that his decision to leave the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria for the Labour Party in his quest to become the governor of Ondo State, brought setback to his political career as he had to also part ways with Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the former minister says he had never been close to the national leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress.
Agunloye says, “You must give credit to Tinubu as a strong politician, you must give credit to him as a strong business man and you must give credit to him as a strong Nigerian. I have never been in the books as one of the pals of Bola Tinubu. If it could be one of the reasons I was not considered for the ticket, I don’t know. And then I remember people were saying they were not seeing me in Burdillon Road. Some of my friends said look, if you want to get this ticket, you come to Lagos and stay more often and they gave examples. I countered it that I was aware that Tinubu was sending people to Ondo State to survey what was going on and this was confirmed to me by a very close friend of his, who confirmed to me how much was paid to a consultant on how Ondo was doing and I said to them I believe Tinubu wanted result and he would be happier with working on the field in Ondo State than opening doors for people in his sitting room and serving drinks to his visitors.
“Besides that, my first personal contact with Tinubu was not at NADECO. At that time, he played his own on a side and I played mine more with Soyinka and we did not come together. But when I was special assistant to Bola Ige, there was a time a lot of ideas were coming up and I later found out that the decision for Bola Ige to accept to be minister of power actually came from Bola Tinubu himself because what Ige wanted was minister of communications. At that time, we generated ideas. When I was minister of power and steel, I could stay in Hilton or Sheraton Hotel or elsewhere, but I chose to stay with Bola Tinubu at that time. Each time I came to Lagos, somebody in his office would be contacted from my office and I always stayed somewhere in the GRA, one of his guest houses, and that got me close to him. I also know when Agagu was minister of power; I also did some brokerage with him and Bola Tinubu at one stage, being a close friend of Agagu and being somebody who was part of that new power system in Nigeria at that time.
“Up till now, I know if the programme of Bola Tinubu and Bola Ige in the area of power had been followed, we will not be where we are at the moment, because the project was quite solid. But it was frustrated and aborted by special interests. After that, I did not have any contact with Tinubu until I wanted to become governor. And on the day I left to join Labour Party, I received five calls from Bola Tinubu and I said to myself, if I got this five calls in the last two months, maybe I would not have left, and since then, I have never come across him in real life or in my dream, except in newspapers and TV.
