Abimbola Lagunju

Who is Abimbola Lagunju?

Abimbola Lagunju is a Nigerian author.He studied Medicine in St Petersburg, Russia. He returned to Nigeria in the middle of the economic crisis engendered by the World Bank/IMF Structural Adjustment Program imposed on Nigeria. It was a Nigeria quite different from what he had left in 1979. The Middle Class to which he now belonged was destitute. He would later write in The Children of Signatures:

The socio-economic melt-down of his country prompted his interest to shift from ideological idealisms of his student days to questioning the harsh political economy experiments visited on developing countries, particularly fragile sub-Saharan African countries by the Bretton Woods Institutions. He wrote in Verses from Under the Sands

The apparent helplessness of the African States in the face of this assault also reflected in some of his writings. Again, in the Children of Signatures, he wrote:

He left Nigeria for Portugal with his family in 1993, and after a brief stint of working and studying in Lisbon, he found a job as a Development Aid worker. This experience exposed him to the arduous and seemingly unending plight of extreme poverty of rural African peoples. In his novel, Days of Illusions, he blames the local politicians who are directly responsible for the precarious existence of their citizens, and also the poor people for allowing themselves to be manipulated by the local politicians.