The Permanent Secretary Who Writes Poetry on His Lunch Break

Ikenna Afolabi's office on the fourth floor of a federal ministry building in Abuja's Central Business District has the usual furniture of Nigerian bureaucracy: a sagging visitor's chair, a framed organisational chart nobody has updated since 2019, a wall calendar from a construction company that once wanted his department's contract. What it also has, tucked inside the bottom drawer beneath expired biro refills, is a battered notebook where, for the last eleven years, Ikenna has written poems under the name "Odogwu Light."

Few of his colleagues know. Those who do found out by accident — a printed poem left in a shared printer tray in 2017, traced back to his staff ID through an IT request log, of all things. "I nearly resigned out of embarrassment," Ikenna says, laughing now at a memory that clearly still stings a little. "A director called me into his office. I thought it was about the poem being critical of government. He just wanted to know where he could buy the book."

A Poet Hiding in Plain Sight

Ikenna's three collections — Lagos Does Not Wait, Small Mercies, and the 2023 release Memo From a Tired Country — have sold modestly but steadily through independent bookshops in Abuja and Lagos and a small but devoted following built almost entirely through word of mouth and poetry nights at a café in Wuse 2. He writes about things a civil servant is not supposed to write about: delayed salaries, the absurdity of budget meetings, a minister he never names but everyone in Abuja seems to recognise. "Poetry is the only place I am allowed to say what I actually think," he says. "In the office, I write memos that say 'the Honourable Minister may wish to note.' In the notebook, I write what I actually noted."

He started writing poetry almost by accident, during the 2014 fuel scarcity, stuck in a queue for nine hours outside a filling station in Garki. "I had nothing to do but think and be angry," he remembers. "I wrote the anger down instead of shouting at the attendant. It became a habit — every time something made me want to shout, I wrote instead." He has kept nearly every notebook since, nineteen of them now, stacked in a cupboard his wife has twice threatened to donate to charity.

"A civil servant who tells the whole truth out loud loses his job. A civil servant who tells the whole truth on paper, under another name, keeps both his job and his soul."

Ikenna is careful about the line he walks. He has never written anything that names a sitting official, never published anything during an active posting to a politically sensitive department, and has twice held back poems his editor wanted to include because, he says, "the risk to my family wasn't worth the applause." His wife, a schoolteacher, has come to see the pen name less as a secret and more as a pressure valve. "She said to me once, 'I would rather you write angry poems at night than bring that anger home to me and the children,'" he says. "She was right. The notebook saves my marriage more than it has ever threatened my job."

What the Civil Service Teaches a Poet

Ikenna insists his two lives feed each other more than they conflict. Nineteen years inside the federal bureaucracy have given him material no creative writing programme could replicate: the specific cadence of a query letter, the theatre of a budget defence session, the particular grief of watching a well-designed policy die quietly in an inter-ministerial committee. "People think civil service kills creativity," he says. "It didn't kill mine. It gave me a filing cabinet of grief to draw from."

He has turned down two opportunities to reveal his identity publicly, including an invitation to a national literary prize shortlist that would have required him to appear under his real name. "I am fifty-one years old," he says. "I have maybe nine years left before pension. I will not throw away a lifetime of work for one night of applause." Instead, Odogwu Light will likely retire into daylight the same week Ikenna Afolabi retires from the ministry — two names, two careers, finally allowed to become the same tired, hopeful man.