A respected columnist with The Nation Newspapers, Mr. Sam Omatseye just permitted us a peep into the childhood of Mr. Matthew Seiyefa, the man who took over from Daura Lawal as the Director General, DSS.
Below is how he summarized their days in secondary school:
‘Mathew Seiyefa, who replaced Daura as DSS chief, was my classmate in Government College, Ughelli, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear of his new posting. Nothing about him made us think he would end up as a secret service mogul. To us, he was a man of letters. He was perhaps the best student in the whole class of September 1973 in English. He wrote clear, elegant sentences with an eye for images and ear for music.
I recall his essay published in the school magazine, The Mariners. It was titled, “Guy way: an incessant cankerworm.” It was an essay that I read many times in those days for its beauty and message. The term “guy way,” as he put it “entailed extremely immoral acts,” and described the guys as “social misfits” “never-do-wells,” “the most undesirable” persons who “were in the wrong place at the wrong time”. He also said they had no place in civilised society. Seiyefa earned A1 in English at school certificate and no one could expect anything less.
I recall once when our English teacher, a Ghanaian named Tieku, who graduated from Pennsylvania, asked us to write an essay. He singled out Seiyefa’s as a model essay and read it out to the class.
With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen the secret service in him. He was a cheerful and dignified introvert, a lethal virtue in a secret service person. From his essays we also could have gleaned his social conscience. The guys, Seiyefa wrote, were antipodes of revolutionaries.
One of the images of him was when we were preparing for school certificate exams. The introvert walked up to the blackboard and wrote, “Barely three weeks to exams, boys still unprepared.” He verbalised it with an impish smile.’