Brief Autobiography

The Portrait of a Naija Man

I was born on the seventh day of one February to Alexander and Josephine Oyibo, in Ilorin, Nigeria.

At three, I was enrolled at the nursery school at the Ilorin Teachers' College, so that while I learnt English at school, I spoke Urhobo at home, and Yoruba with my playmates.

At six, I started my elementary education at Federal Staff School, and was to earn my First School Leaving Certificate from there six years later, in 1991.

My family then moved to Lagos, where I accepted an admission to Command Secondary School, Ipaja. That acceptance was to prove to be a mistake of sorts, for the next six years were to be some of the bleakest in my repertoire of experiences. (My travails at Command are recounted in my unpublished memoir, Last Man!).

I graduated from Command in June 1997, and subsequently began a six-month data processing program at AB Computer College, Anthony Village. I learnt MS-DOS, Word Perfect, Lotus, QBasic, dBase, Programming in dBase and General Computing.

AB Computers was generally a good experience. I was fascinated by computers, and formed my decision to be a computer professional during those days. There was one incident, though, in which Mr. Donald, my belligerent instructor, stormed into the computer lab, and accused me of copying Lotus 1-2-3 (an electronic spreadsheet program, like Microsoft Excel) onto a floppy disk.

Here are the facts: I had no personal use for spreadsheets (much less the Lotus 1-2-3 sort). If I had, in fact, been copying anything, it would have been in practice of the COPY command, rather than a malevolent act. Furthermore, Sophia International School, where I held a position as the administrative assistant to the proprietress, had a more recent release of Lotus collecting dust on the shelf.

(I received an e-mail from Mr. Donald recently. A reconciliatory overture maybe?)

Any how, after my stint at Sophia International School, and the program at AB Computer College, I enrolled in the science remedial program at the University of Ilorin in Ilorin, the very city of my birth.

The remedial program was undoubtedly one of the most distasteful enterprises I had ever entered into. The class size was so large and the learning conditions so asphyxiating as to transform the entire “remedial” program into an exercise in futility.

Because my chances of admission into the program of my choice (Computer Science) through the program were slim, especially if I were to refrain from bribery and other such machinations, I (actually, we) decided to use the American visa that had been laying fallow in my passport for some two years.

So here I am, a recent University of Illinois at Chicago, Information and Decision Sciences graduate, and an aspiring Naija man in Diaspora.