In an era in which people giving thanks usually celebrate themselves and receive gifts from others, retired 90-year-old Dr. Olusola Ajolore used his 90th birthday thanksgiving to appreciate his housemaid of three decades. Dr. Ajolore, a linguist and academic first at the University of Lagos, and later at Kwara Polytechnic in Ilorin virtually sourced funds from friends and well-wishers to build a three-bedroom bungalow which he handed over to Mrs. Dupe Aro, his housemaid for 28 years. He handed the key to Mrs. Aro one day after she had received a quit notice from her landlady for her failure to pay rent.
Ajolore’s gift to Aro must have derived from a high sense of gratitude and readiness to appreciate the loyalty and efficiency of Mrs. Aro for whom he had an overflowing basket of praise at the event: “I tried to find out what I can do to appreciate 28 years of faithful and unalloyed service … I want to tell you that I have never embarked on anything that had excited me like the building of this house … I want to appreciate you coming to rejoice with us on a day like this.”
The three-bedroom bungalow was built and furnished with N5 million by a man on a pension of N60,000 per month, after serving federal and state governments for 35 years. The exchange of appreciation between Ajolore and Aro at the point of traumatising economic vulnerability of Aro has many lessons.
The first lesson is the magnitude of Ajolore’s personal sacrifice to provide help to a woman on the verge of homelessness for adding value to his career and family growth before and after the passing of Ajolore’s wife 20 years ago. The kind of efficient and loyal service provided by Aro must have been stellar for the nonagenarian to say that Aro is like his first daughter. Compared with the low-level of efficiency and loyalty in both formal and informal sectors today, Aro must have been an invisible icon for professionalism and loyalty, the type that is generally missing in high and low-paying jobs in our country today.
Just as Mrs. Aro’s work ethic graphically described by her boss is extraordinary, so is Dr. Ajolore’s appreciation of her good work and generous reward to her, untypical of members of his class. Dr. Ajolore’s altruism with the little he has, N60,000 pension per month, contrasts starkly with the crass materialism and infinite acquisition of the country’s political elite, for which Nigeria has become a poster child in recent time. With a meagre pension that must have made it a challenge to sustain the quality of his life, Dr. Ajolore’s ‘superannuation gift’ to his housemaid is reminiscent of Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s gifts to his cook and driver for loyalty and good service more than 30 years ago, and Senator Bola Tinubu’s legendary generosity to his drivers and domestic workers during and after his tenure as governor.
Dr. Ajolore’s gift to Mrs. Aro may appear interpersonal and seem tangential to matters of public policy towards millions of vulnerable citizens like Mrs. Aro; nevertheless, it should draw attention of politicians to the importance of public policy on superannuation for citizens in the informal sector, particularly in the wake of the country’s contributory pension scheme. In addition, that Mrs. Aro missed homelessness by chance underscores the importance of a more responsive public policy on housing for workers in both formal and informal sectors. Should there have been affordable mortgage and affordable rent-to-own schemes for low-income workers, Mrs. Aro would not have had to be on the verge of homelessness after working for 28 years. Given that the number of homeless and nearly homeless citizens must be far greater than that of kind-hearted persons like Ajolore, a humane social welfare programme would provide a more guaranteed way to save millions from homelessness than hoping for surprises from Good Samaritans.
The Nation wishes Dr. Ajolore happy birthday and Mrs. Aro happy housewarming.
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