Sixty-two years after a British journalist first suggested the name “Nigeria”, a 23-year-old Ibadan-born student gave the new country its national flag.
Michael Taiwo Akinkunmi was studying engineering at Norwood Technical College in London when he saw a newspaper advert calling on people to enter a competition to design the Nigerian flag.
He mailed his submission to Lagos a short time later, and in October of the following year received a letter inviting him to the London office of the Commissioner for Nigeria in the United Kingdom, where he was told that his green and white design had been selected. He had won 100 pounds ($281 in 1959) as well as a place in Nigeria’s history books.
It was October 1959, exactly a year before Nigeria’s independence.
Akinkunmi is now a retired civil servant who resides in one of the poorer areas of Ibadan, in a green and white house that can only be reached on foot. Separated from his wife for about two decades, his only live-in companion is his 28-year-old son.
He does not have a phone and last owned a car in the early 1990s. But he enjoys walking through the neighbourhood and further afield to visit two friends from his school days. These excursions add colour to his days.
The furthest he recently travelled was a visit to Abuja in 2014, where he received a national honour from then-president Goodluck Jonathan. He was also given a lifetime’s salary of a presidential special assistant – around 800,000 naira (roughly $4,000) is now paid into his account every month. Akinkunmi is effusive as he remembers that day, but he cannot recall what Jonathan said to him. He also has trouble remembering the names of his two oldest friends.