Olarinde Smaranda, FCArb, FCAI

THE WOMAN WHO LEFT THE PREMIER FOR THE BUSH — AND BUILT A CITADEL A full-flower tribute to Prof. Elisabeta Smaranda Olarinde, FCArb, FCAI Vice-Chancellor, Afe Babalola University, @Abuad_Uni Ado-Ekiti Primus inter pares. Ex nihilo, ad excellentiam. Forget the misspelling. Forget the rumour. The name on the granite is Elisabeta Smaranda Olarinde. Romanian-born. Nigerian by labour, oath and harvest. Professor of Law. Third substantive Vice-Chancellor of ABUAD. A woman who already held a Master’s in Law at twenty-one, walked into University of Ibadan in January 1984, and decades later walked out of comfort into thicket — then turned that thicket into one of the most decorated private universities on the continent. This is not a polite citation. This is the full book. I SAW HER AT UI. I CANNOT NAME THE CLASS. I CAN STILL FEEL THE ROOM. That is how some legends enter a life: not as a syllabus code, but as weather. I saw Prof. Olarinde at the University of Ibadan. I cannot now retrieve the exact course, the hall, the semester. What survived is simpler and harder to fake: she was well loved. In a faculty that minted argument for a living, love is not cheap applause. It is what students give a teacher who is exact without being cruel, demanding without being distant, foreign-born without being foreign to the work. UI was not a cameo. It was a generation. She arrived in January 1984 after the 1979 LL.M. at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, and her 1983 call to the Nigerian Bar. She carried two legal worlds in one head: Romanian civil law and Nigerian common law. That double vision became her comparative edge — family law, medical law, the rights of women, children and adolescents, clinical legal education. Then the offices came, not as ornaments, as duty: Acting Head, Department of Public & International Law — three tenures Sub-Dean, Undergraduate Pioneer Sub-Dean, Postgraduate, Faculty of Law Pioneer member and Fellow, Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies (CEPACS); Editor-in-Chief of the maiden Law Journal of Public & International Law [PIL] She taught. She edited. She clinic-trained. She did @UNICEF work in Oyo and Niger. She researched for IDRC & the @WorldBankGroup on land, gender & the status of women. She sat on the FIDA drafting work for Oyo’s Child’s Rights Law. She gave pro bono hours at the Women’s Law Clinic as if the gown were also a duty to the unprotected. Twenty-seven years in Nigeria’s premier university. Name already made. Tenure already won. Then she did the unfashionable thing. THE PIONEER BET: FROM GREAT UI TO A UNIVERSITY STILL CLEARING BUSH #ABUAD opened academic life on 4 January 2010 with 240 students and three colleges. Official profiles place her continuation there from 2010; she has described the UI years as 1984–2011. The disagreement is a date. The decision is the thunder. She left the safety of Ibadan for Ado-Ekiti when ABUAD was still a wager by Aare Afe Babalola, SAN — vision, land, stubbornness, and no inherited prestige. Many tenured scholars would have sent goodwill and stayed. She packed the goodwill and went. Watch the ladder she climbed by building it: 2011–2015: Acting Provost, College of Law 2015–2021: Provost, College of Law, & Pioneer Director, ABUAD Law Clinic Pioneer Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Administration Acting Vice-Chancellor from 21 June 2019 Full Professor at ABUAD, October 2015 — earned in the house she was raising, not gifted at departure Third substantive Vice-Chancellor from 20 June 2022 That is not a late honorary crown. That is a woman who mixed the cement, then got the keys because the Founder had watched her work. Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo. Firm in the thing itself. Soft in the advertisement of self. THE LAW SCHOOL HUMILIATION OF THE OLD ORDER If you want the jaw-breaker, start in the College of Law. Nigeria’s legal education has a famous sickness: theory that cannot stand up in chambers;