BY MCPHILIPS NWACHUKWU

Ask any Nigerian and he’d probably tell you Dr. Bamanga is either an accomplished mariner, consummate administrator, frontline politician, statesman, a manager of managers, or better still a durable private sector mogul …. What with his many years of serving as President, African Business Roundtable, chief of Africa Peers Review Mechanism or arrowhead of NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa Development) . Hardly will anyone link him with the art world, particularly fine art.

But, the truth is: Bamanga Tukur is also an inveterate art lover, patron and afficionado. In short, early watchers of this prodigy as a child testified that Bamanga was one mixed tapestry of creative talents including music and fine arts when growing up.

Gleaning these traits in Eddie Aderinokun’s literary biography on Tukur titled “The Global Villager” it certainly was not easy pinning down the always-on-the-move and ever busy Bamanga Tukur to this interview. Which runs thus…

Most Nigerians will swear that you are a top-notch politician, business czar of international ambience, frontline public administrator, etc, but winnowing through the latest work on you, The Global Villager, one is regaled with aroma of you as a person with a “coat of many colours”, particularly as regards arts?

O yes! Without being immodest, while growing up, my father (bless his great soul), Mallam Hamman Tukur first sent me to Yola for Arabic education and later to Jada Elementary School. It was in these educational bakeries of life that I discovered that I was blessed with not only orthodox academic talents but also flairs for leadership, music and even literary and fine arts. Remember most people of our own era were crusted in sports, gardening and literary and debating societies, all of which sharpened our creativity teeth.

So by the time I got to Yola Middle School where my father ensured he sent me. I had not only developed academism in mathematics and sciences but acquainted my self creditably in fine arts, a propensity which not only goaded me into acquiring various items of sculpture, paintings of my own, one of which was for my father.

One painting or two happened to have been captured in The Global Villager, the literary biography on you, including one done on your father?

O yes! I still have many others (although quaintly old now as I last drew or painted way back in the fifties or early sixties owing to other contesting challenges in public offices like my roaring tenure in the NPA). The surviving ones are hung all over my houses in Yola, Abuja, Kaduna, Lagos and my ABR offices in Johannesburg, New York, Vienna, Cairo and Geneva.

During your scholarship stints at Government College Bauchi, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, and even Pittsburg University, USA, why didn’t you continue your predilection for arts, since institutions like ABU remain very famous for propagation of arts?

Oh! One thought one should not spread oneself too thin. Remember that then as Nigeria was rearing her head then towards Independence and later early nationhood, the crying need for astute public service was so thick in air and our leaders then like Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and even Chief Obafemi Awolowo who introduced me to IT when I was chief of the ports in Lagos, way back in post-civil war Nigeria in the early seventies, inclined many of those of our generation like Mahmud Waziri, Eddie Alayedeino, Yemi Buko and my humble self to equip ourselves to be competent to take over the helms of public administration from the British. Naturally, my penchant or idiosyncracies for practical arts was made to retreat into the back burners.

As regards arts, music and sports I made sure I encouraged in other peers like Eddie Aderinokun who is in literary arts, and Raymond Dokpesi who later waxed into what I will call a“Media and Communication Arts” titan of all time in our Nigeria of today as exemplified in the AIT and Raypower saga bestriding our nation’s (indeed Africa’s) broadcast avenue today, making all Nigerians proud. Is it not so?

Does that mean that your dalliance with the arts is doomed to die, hereafter, more so when you seem poised to soon sit on that hot plate of a position as the next PDP chairman?

Absolutely capital NO. My penchant for arts won’t diminish or die. What it means is talking as an adroit mariner, I will then be positioned to navigate through vaster seas and oceans of possibilities, whereby I can promote arts not only nationally but continentally in forging arts linkages between say, the ANC of the Mandelas, the Mbekis and the Zumas of this world, on the one hand , not to talk of the new emerging political parties in the Baghreb nations of Libya, Tunisia, Egypt…. down to the Rawlings, Kufuors, Atta-Mills and Quattara of the emerging democracies of our ECOWAS subregion, all of which believe in the African Personality philosophy… and that “Arts is indeed Life”, in the typical Nkrumahistic creed.