I remember the national elections of the Society of Nigerian Artists took place in Lagos, in 1991. The flamboyant and voluble sculptor and painter, Okpu Eze, was favoured to win the Presidency of the Society on the basis of his elaborate plan to realise the construction of the still elusive National Gallery of Art.
Eze, one of the visible young artists on the 1960s Lagos art scene, made quite some impression as a painter but, in the years following the Civil War (1967-70), he disappeared from the scene, having established a successful furniture business in "far away" Port Harcourt. By the early 1980s, he returned to his art practice, revving up considerable attention as much with his monumental wood sculptures as with his famously swaggering personality.
At his campaign speech during the SNA elections, he came fully prepared and had presented his plans-I mean architectural drawings-of a National Gallery edifice in Abuja he would, if elected, cause to be built during his tenure. He carried the day, for no one, it seems, had felt closer to the dream deferred since the days of the Federal Society for the Arts and Humanities. His election was thus a mandate for the construction of the gallery. More pertinently, it revealed the sorry naïveté of that Society's membership but also how remote the possibility of Eze's purpose-built gallery.
To be sure, up until that Election Day, there was no standing fund-raising committee, no subterranean group of money bags ready to fund the building, no preliminary discussions to set grounds for the building campaign. Nothing. Just rendering of the building's design, accompanied by spirited monologue, and thundering applause. That election was won with the translucent pages of a dream.
Clearly, the SNA is not in a position, and does not have the capability, to muster the resources necessary for building the National Gallery of Art, or even any gallery at all, when it does not itself have its own secretariat building. But it can, if properly motivated, play an important role by keeping the discussion on the tables that matter, until something gives.
If it cannot lead the way in convening a consortium of non-governmental institutions, wealthy art patrons and collectors, and businesses, it can at least lobby the politicians in Abuja.
The current Director General of the National Gallery of Art, Joe Musa, has made the realisation of the gallery building one of his major tasks and he seems poised to achieve this. However, as he made evident recently, the haphazard manner in which the federal government allocates funds to its parastatals, including the National Gallery of Art, all but makes it impossible to conceive a major long-term capital project, without an extraordinary act of the Federal Executive Council.
And this is where the SNA and stakeholders can collaborate with the Director General to lobby the politicians in Abuja, to convince them of the immeasurable value of an impressive, well-designed, properly-run modern art gallery in our national capital. The lesson of history makes it abundantly clear that politicians will not support a major project, one that will involve substantial funding, except there is either a loud clamour for it, or they recognise the popularity of such a project-as with the quick construction of the 360 million-dollar Abuja Sports Stadium-or, as with the ongoing 400 million-dollar Millennium Towers for culture, its vanity quotient. Indeed it seems that this latter project that most commentators see as grossly ill-conceived and unnecessary, comes at the expense of a National Gallery building.
Initiated in the twilight days of the Obasanjo administration, the Millennium Towers is supposed to be Abuja's landmark building designed by Italian architects, Manfredi Nicoletti.
But as the Daily Sun editorial of August 20, 2006, rightly argued, the government's claim that the capital city needed its own defining architectural landmark, when it still lacked basic infrastructure, recreational facilities and, one might add, the cultural institutions you expect to find in today's major cities, was unfortunate.
Since this Millennium Tower complex-scheduled for completion in 2011-includes a "Museum" of who-knows-what, I worry that the federal government may assume that it has answered the need for a National museum of art in Abuja.
That is why there must be concerted pressure on the government to do the right thing; to commit the requisite resources for the construction of the elusive National Gallery Art.
Whenever serious discussion begins, though, we cannot afford to do things wrongly, that is, to do it "the Nigerian way." There ought to be proper consultations with reputable national and international experts. The design of such building must be selected through open competition, or at least through considerable due process.
Given that the dream of a purpose-built gallery has been deferred this long, we must get it right, when the time comes. In this, the Director General needs all the support he can get to convince the politicians of the urgent need for a decent, perhaps even stunningly designed, and hopefully professionally administered gallery of art in Abuja.