The Faculty of Management Sciences of the Rivers State University, Port Harcourt, has announced its decision to immortalize one of the school’s illustrious alma maters, Mrs. Alaere Augustina Timi Alaibe. On the ninth anniversary of her demise, the Board of the Faculty says it is naming the Library in its new building after Mrs. Alaibe. “In line with this desire to immortalize her as an Alumnus of the faculty, precisely the department of Banking and Finance, as well as her contributions to education through her Family Reorientation Education and Empowerment (FREE) Programme, we decided to name our Faculty Library after her. This Library will now be known as the Alaere Augustina Alaibe Library,” Professor D.J. Hamilton, the Dean of the Faculty of Management Sciences of the Rivers State University, said in a statement.
The official unveiling of the Alaere Augustina Alaibe Library at the new Faculty Building of the Faculty of Management Sciences of the Rivers State University, Port Harcourt is slated to hold on Wednesday January 31st 2018.
The Late Mrs. Alaere Alaibe obtained her Bachelor’s and Masters Degrees from the Faculty of Management Sciences of the Rivers State University. However in considering her for this honour, the Dean said the Faculty significantly considered the great and selfless efforts the Late Alaere Alaibe deployed during her brief but eventful life on earth, to positively touch hundreds of lives in several rural and impoverished communities in the Niger Delta region of the country, through her pet project, the Family Reorientation Education and Empowerment (FREE).
Under the able leadership of the late Mrs. Alaere Alaibe, Family Reorientation Education and Empowerment programme became the most innovative intervention in adult literacy in the whole of the Niger Delta and perhaps Nigeria. Several years before the Federal Government of Nigeria conceived the Presidential Amnesty Programme for former armed agitators in the region, Mrs. Alaibe was already crusading and fiercely advocating for the transmutation of armed militant agitation to “intellectual militancy” in the Niger Delta. It was a mission she pursued with uncommon clarity and vigour throughout her brief but memorable years on earth. In fact, she became a one-woman-riot squared in her quest to change the sordid narrative in the Niger Delta using FREE as a veritable platform to reach out to thousands of women in poverty-ridden communities, yearning for help in the Niger Delta. Indeed by 2007, Mrs Alaere Alaibe had already established thirty-three adult education schools across the States in Niger Delta. Earlier, in 2006, FREE in collaboration with an international NGO built the Support for Africa Health Centre, a fully equipped and staffed hospital (now known as the Alaere Alaibe Hospital)
Under the auspices of FREE, the late Alaere Alaibe frequently organized education and health seminars and a large number of activities, including free eye tests and the distribution of reading glasses to students. Elderly women with no education at all were a priority target group for FREE, which also accepted single mothers and youths with missed opportunities. “Our aim in this area is to design curriculum that will be good enough to make them return to standard schools so that they can fit in with other students,” the late Alaere Alaibe once said in a media chat.
Mrs. Augustina Alaere Alaibe was always quick to reiterate that she established FREE with the sole purpose of helping women in the Niger Delta resolve the development dilemmas of the region through the double edged weapon of literacy and empowerment. She once said of her pet project: “FREE speaks of freedom from ignorance. This is by far the greatest danger that faces the world today. I believe ignorance is a greater terror, because it impoverishes the mind, the spirit and makes the ignorant willing tools in the hands of profiteers. If the world would just come together, if the world would just spend a fraction of what it has spent and what it has lost in the past decade, and fight ignorance and improve the living conditions of the people of the world, I believe significant steps would have been taken to rid the world of destruction, hatred, strife and terror. Ignorance remains the most potent weapon, and impediment, against our sustainable development, and no development can help the people, if they do not understand what it offers. FREE speaks of freedom from poverty and from disease. It also speaks of our collective capacity as human beings to uplift one another. It speaks of our faith in ourselves as human beings, and hope in our fellow man.” What started informally as a community-based organisation (CBO) in the year 2000 later metamorphosed into a Non Governmental Organisation in 2005 with the mandate to reduce the level of ignorance, occasioned by the collapse of family values and peculiar development challenges in the Niger Delta region. She clearly defined FREE’s mission thus: “To reorient, educate and empower the family, with the aim of bringing back real values of hard work, honesty, morality and enterprise through education, counseling and skills acquisition programmes with special attention to the womenfolk and the girl child.” Alaere tenaciously raised awareness about Breast Cancer and other illnesses like Hypertension, Diabetes, and Cervical cancer. One of her unfulfilled dreams is the provision of Mammogram Machines in communities in the Niger Delta to enable women in the region ascertain their cancer status early enough.
Given the volume and quality of activities FREE was carrying out in communities in the Niger Delta, especially in the areas of education, maternal and children’s health care, farming, women empowerment as well as transformational and non violence training for the teeming youth population in the region, it was not long before FREE attracted global attention. Mrs. Alaere Alaibe through her work with FREE won several awards, including the prestigious Confucius Prize for Literacy in 2007 awarded by UNESCO. This was the first time any Nigerian organisation or individual won the prize. While handing out the award to Mrs. Alaibe, UNESCO applauded FREE for creating a network of learning centres and providing literacy skills to adults.
Alaere Alaibe loved to teach and lecture women of every race, creed and persuasions on how to break barriers and attain high heights. In a paper on the African woman she delivered in 2008 at the Sandton Convention Center Johannesburg South Africa titled: “Rising Above Limitations,” she shared her thoughts on how women could unleash the leadership qualities inherent in them and become positive agents of change. Of course given the success of her own NGO she devoted quality time teaching the women at the well-attended event how to set up their own NGOs. When she spoke about the work of FREE in the Niger Delta at one of the side meetings at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2008, delegates gave her a standing ovation. Her presentation drew such great attention that the then Mayor of Harlem took interest in her work and agreed to visit Nigeria to meet with beneficiaries of FREE’s programmes.
Mrs. Alaibe’s efforts at extending literacy and literary culture across communities in the Niger Delta also won the admiration and very loud commendation of the first African Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka. The icon confessed that he was amazed by the magnitude of Alaere Alaibe’s vision in extending literary culture, empowerment and self-esteem to the forgotten. “I am not often impressed with people but she (Alaere Alaibe) has succeeded in impressing me with her drive, her vision and her total commitment,” Professor Soyinka enthused after visiting FREE’s headquarters and commissioning the Library named after him in Igbainwari Community in Opokuma, Bayelsa State.
It is also worth mentioning that another aspect of Alaere Alaibe’s greatness was her ability to remain connected to the grassroots in spite of her urban background and global citizenship status. She doggedly resolved to site the headquarters of FREE in Igbainwari Community in Opokuma/Kolokuma, Bayelsa State.
The late Mrs. Augustina Alaere Timi Alaibe was born in 1964 in Lagos, of Ijaw parentage from Trofani community in Sagbama Local Government Area of Bayelsa State. Alaere held a Bachelor’s Degree in Banking and Finance and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from the Rivers State University, Port Harcourt. She worked as an accountant with Elekrint Nigeria Limited, Lagos and Ashland Oil Company between 1988 and 1994. She was a woman filled with dreams and creative ability, she established the firm of Pretty Woman, a health and Beauty Company aimed at redefining the emerging face and consciousness of the modern Nigerian woman with poise and confidence. She was married to her dear friend and closest confidante, also an alma mater of the Rivers State University, Chief Ndutimi Alaibe, a former Managing Director of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) who was also a Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta, Chairman of the Presidential Amnesty Programme and currently the Chairman of the Oil and Gas Free Zone Authority amongst others. They are blessed with wonderful and thoroughly accomplished children.
