Have you heard?
That a former Nigerian Petroleum minister, Prof. Tam David-West, is dead!
Wondering who he was? Just relax and let’s show you twelve things you should know about the great elder statesman.
- Professor Tam David-West, aged 83, once served as minister under two military Heads of State, as Minister of Petroleum Resources (1984-1985) under General Muhammadu Buhari, and that of Petroleum Resources initially, and later Mines, Power and Steel under General Ibrahim Babangida (1986).
- He was a consultant virologist, who lived in an apartment in the premises of the University of Ibadan, in Oyo state since 1955 until his death.
- He was an Ijaw Kalabari from Rivers state.
- His full name was Prof. Tamunoemi David-West, while his father’s name was Sokari David-West. In an interview he once granted Daily Trust, he said: “Tamunoemi means, ‘There is God’, while my father’s name, Sokari, means ‘I look up to heavens.’”
- He did his first undergraduate studies at the University College, Ibadan, (now University of Ibadan) in 1956, where he got full federal scholarship to study Medicine abroad.
- He attended three different universities in the United States of America, namely: Michigan State University, Yale University and later to McGill University – all on full scholarship.
- His maternal grandfather, nicknamed Scorpion, influenced Prof. David-West childhood and growing up years. “He was always stubborn for what was right. He was very upright and didn’t take nonsense. He would always tell us that a good name is better than gold,” Prof. Tam recalled in an interview with Daily Trust two years ago.
- “Buhari is a clean man. I can take any oath that Buhari is very clean and I won’t die. I cannot do that on Babangida. I cannot vouch for him not because he put me in jail but because that is the fact. Buhari has some good qualities, some positive characteristics that Babangida doesn’t have,” Prof. Tam David-West once told Daily Trust in an interview conducted two years ago when asked to compare the two previous military presidents he had worked with.
- He was jailed in Kirikiri Prison for six days and later in Barma Prison for nine months, over alleged corruption charges filed by the then General Ibrahim Babangida-led military government against him. But he was however discharged and acquitted by the Supreme Court headed then by Justice Coker.
- As a Petroleum minister, he was always at his office seven times a week. “I used to arrive in my office latest 7.20am,” he once told Daily Trust.
- When asked about his experience as Petroleum minister while in government, Prof. David-West recalled that he rejected house gifts from oil companies, despite being a two-time minister in the federal government. “Oil companies actually wanted to build a house for me but I refused. I don’t want to mention their names in order not to embarrass them. A king once asked them to ask me what I wanted them to do for me but I told them nothing,” he once told Daily Trust.
- Until his death, Prof. Tam David-West believes in restructuring of Nigeria. “I believe in restructuring because what you have today may change in the next 10 years, and that means you need to look for a way to adjust it again. Even God restructured. The theory of organic evolution by Darwin is a good example of God restructuring. God created certain animals in a particular time on earth and when the climate changed, they could not survive again and He then chased them away and brought other animals that can survive. That is restructuring by God. God who created us restructured, so who are we not to restructure?” he once told Daily Trust in an interview.
