One of those who composed Nigeria’s national anthem, and whose words make up most of, if not all, of the second stanza of the anthem, Babatunde Ogunnaike, is dead, aged 66 years, after a prolonged battle with cancer.
Ogunnaike died in the United States, where he’d been a professor for over 25 years, and lately Dean of Engineering at Delaware University, on Sunday, February 20, according to the Chief Executive Officer, CEO, Veritas, Ibadan, Gbenro Adegbola.
Ogunnaike responded to a call, in 1977, as a 21-year-old National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, member serving in Port Harcourt, to a call for entries into a competition organised by the Federal Ministry of Information, to replace the Nigerian national anthem.
He emerged as one of the five, whose words and phrases were combined to form the anthem.
The others are: John A. Ilechukwu, Eme Etim Akpan, Sota Omoigui, and P.O. Aderibigbe. Deputy Commissioner of Police, DCP, Ben Odiase, the then Director of the Nigeria Police Band, out the words to music. He had entered the competition as a private citizen and not as a police officer.
Other contenders in the music category were Akin Euba and Laz Ekwueme.
When the new anthem was officially adopted in 1978, Ogunnaike was already in Post-Graduate, PG, school in the US.
The telegram announcing the choice of his lyrics informed him of a prize of N50, which he never got until his death.
Ogunnaike had said, “That was a reasonable amount of money at the time, but I don’t think I ever got it.”
In a 2012 interview, Ogunnaike said he feels both pride and sadness whenever he hears the anthem, adding, “It reminds me of unfulfilled promises.”
He added, “Nigeria has so much potential, and the words of the anthem were meant to reflect this.”
Condemning the anonymity given to the writers of the anthem, Ogunnaike had this to say, “Everyone knows that Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics to the American national anthem; (even I, a recent immigrant, know this). At the very least, the people of Nigeria should be told who wrote their anthem.”
Interestingly the two youngest of the five writers of our anthem, Ogunnaike and Omoigui, eventually emigrated and became Americans.
Academically, Ogunnaike was a prodigy in his field of Chemical Engineering.
He grew up in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital and attended the prestiguous Government College, Ibadan, GCI; from where he proceeded to the University of Lagos, where he graduated with First Class in Engineering.
He is a member of the American Statistical Association, ASA and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ASAS.
