Festus Iyayi (1947-2013)

He died in a road accident on his way to Kano where he was to attend a NEC meeting of ASUU in which a final decision on whether or not to end the ongoing strike action was to be taken. Effectively he died in the course of serving the nation in an attempt to end […]

He died in a road accident on his way to Kano where he was to attend a NEC meeting of ASUU in which a final decision on whether or not to end the ongoing strike action was to be taken. Effectively he died in the course of serving the nation in an attempt to end a lingering strike that has virtually paralyzed the University system. Festus Iyayi went to Government College, Ughelli where as a student he won the Kennedy Essay competition. He was later on to become a member of many different Nigerian literary organizations and in 1988 won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for his novel Heroes, which focuses on some issues surrounding the Nigerian civil war.
Festus Iyayi pursued his academic career overseas obtaining a Master’s degree in Industrial Economics from the Kiev Institute of Economics in the former Soviet Union before earning a PhD from the University of Bradford in England. His career as a lecturer in the Department of Business Administration in the University of Benin led him into radicalism as the president of the with the local ASUU branch.
He eventually rose to become the president of the national organization in 1986 and when the union was banned briefly in 1988 he was detained by the military government and removed from his faculty position.  In his literary work, Iyayi employed a realistic style of writing that depicts the social, political and moral environment and system both the rich and poor lived in. His parents were farmers who experienced deprivation, and his first novel Violence is a hard-hitting indictment of social inequalities in the midst of vast national resources in Nigeria.
Throughout his life, he was known as a committed promoter of social justice and improved welfare for university lecturers. He had reached the pinnacle of academics as a professor of business administration and head of Department of Business Administration University of Benin. The circumstances surrounding Professor Festus Iyayi’s death were particularly agonising. The vehicle he was travelling in, in the company of other ASUU officials, collided with a security vehicle in the convoy of the governor of Kogi State. Iyayi was part of the team that was heading to Kano to convene a meeting of the ASUU executive council to consider proposals to end the four months’ old strike by university lecturers.
 The increasingly regular occurrence of accidents involving VIP convoys of political office holders is part of the high incidents of deaths on our roads. Despite the successes claimed by the FRSC officials, the death rate on the Abuja- Lokoja road is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, encomiums have been pouring in since Iyayi’s death. The President Goodluck Jonathan, President of the Senate David Mark, and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Aminu Tambuwal, have all eulogised Professor Iyayi in glowing terms. It is the much he deserves in death that ASUU must now make sure the strike is resolved according to his wish.
Professor Iyayi’s family must be feeling the pain of such a huge loss; they are not alone. The nation too mourns his passing.