By Gbenro Adegbola
https://www.digital.zenithbank.com/ZEQ/ZEQ-jan-2026/index.html#p=1Babatunde Ogunnaike 1956-2022.
The death has occurred of Tunde Ogunnaike, whose words make up most (if not all of) of stanza two of our Nigerian national anthem.
He died in the United States of America where he had been a Professor for over 25 years and lately the Dean of Engineering at Delaware University.
In 1977 as a 21-year-old NYSC member serving in Port Harcourt, he responded to a call for entries into a competition organized by the Federal Ministry of Information to replace the Nigerian national anthem.
The rest as they say, is history.
He emerged as one of five, whose words and phrases were combined to form the anthem.
The others are; John A. Ilechukwu, Eme Etim Akpan, Sota Omoigui, and P.O. Aderibigbe.
The words were put to music by DCP Ben Odiase, the then Director Nigerian Police Band.
Ben Odiase was said to have entered the competition as a private citizen & not as a policeman. Other contenders in the music category were Akin Euba & Laz Ekwueme.
The new anthem was officially adopted in 1978. By this time Tunde Ogunnaike was already in PG school in the US.
He was supposed to get a N50 prize, according to the telegram announcing the choice of his lyrics.
“That was a reasonable amount of money at the time, but I don’t think I ever got it.”
He was never paid the N50.
In a 2012 interview, he said he feels both pride and sadness whenever he hears the anthem. “It reminds me of unfulfilled promises,” he says.
“Nigeria has so much potential, and the words of the anthem were meant to reflect this.”
On the anonymity given to writers of the anthem, he had this to say; “everyone knows that Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics to the American national anthem (even I, a recent immigrant, know this). At the very least, the people of Nigeria should be told who wrote their anthem.”
It is interesting that the two youngest of the five writers of our anthem, he and Omoigui, eventually emigrated and became Americans.
Academically, Tunde Ogunnaike was a prodigy in his field of Chemical Engineering. He grew up in Ibadan and attended Government College Ibadan.
According to Alchetron.com, Babatunde Ayodeji Ogunnaike was an American Chemical Engineer of Nigerian descent and the William L. Friend Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University Of Delaware (UD). He also was the dean of UD’s College of Engineering.
Academics and Research
Babatunde was born on March 26, 1956 in Ijebu-Igbo, Ogun State, Nigeria. He attended the University of Lagos for his bachelor’s degree, graduating with First Class Honours in Chemical engineering in 1976. He commenced academic work as a lecturer at the Department of Chemical engineering, University of Lagos, in 1982 and became Senior Lecturer and successively, Associate Professor of Chemical engineering. He continued lecturing at the University of Lagos until 1988. He furthered his studies and earned an M.Sc. degree in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. in Chemical engineering also from the same University in 1981. He was a Research Engineer with the Process Control group of the Shell Development Corporation in Houston, Texas from 1981 to 1982.
He worked as a researcher for DuPont and was also a consultant to several companies including Gore, PPG Industries, and Corning Inc. He joined the faculty of the University of Delaware in 2002 and became the Dean of the College of Engineering in July 2011. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the African University of Science and Technology, Abuja. He is the author and editor of several books, papers and book chapters, used to educate engineers in instrumentation, systems and control at many universities. He was associate editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and the American Chemical Society’s Industrial & Engineering Chemistry. His research focuses on modeling and control of industrial processes; the application of process analytical technology for control of pharmaceutical processes; identification and control of nonlinear systems; the interaction of process design and process operability; applied statistics; biological control systems; and systems biology with application to neuronal responses and cancer.
Honours
American Institute of Chemical Engineers 1998
CAST Computing Practice Award 2004
University of Delaware’s College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching award, 2007
ISA Eckman Award 2008
AACC Control Engineering Practice award.
Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Engineering,
Fellow of American Institute of Chemical Engineers,
American Statistical Association,
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American National Academy of Engineering
Selected publications
Ogunnaike, Babatunde; Harmon Ray, W (1994). Process Dynamics, Modeling, and Control. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509119-9. F.J. Doyle; R.K. Pearson; B.A. Ogunnaike (2002). Identification and Control Using Volterra Models (Communication and Control Engineering). Springer. ISBN 978-1852-331-498.
Babatunde A. Ogunnaike (2010). “Random Phenomena:Fundamentals of Probability and Statistics for Engineers”. Wiley Online Library. American Institute of Chemical Engineers. 56 (7). ISBN 978-14200-449-73. doi:10.1002/aic.12294.
Patents
US Patent on Predictive Regulatory Controller.
Gbenro Adegbola is the CEO of First Veritas, Ibadan.
