Background
About half-way through my career in academia in the late 1970s, I decided that a proposed bungalow to be built in my hometown would have the largest room serve as a library. A decade or so later, I resolved to build a stand-alone library. Although the two-storey library building was completed in the late 1990s, I decided that it would only be furnished and commissioned for use after my retirement. It has capacity for over 12,000 volumes and is called a public affairs library because the majority of the titles deal with different aspects of public affairs, covering the humanities and social and management sciences.

Users of the Library
Although the library is primarily a private collection of books and other documents for the owner, there is a limited public access. Specifically, it has a reading room for users that can seat 12 persons, and space for a library assistant.

The majority of users of the library are final year secondary school students and post-secondary school students preparing for entrance examinations into tertiary education institutions. Some other secondary school students also use the library from time to time. Undergraduates in the community use the library during their vacations and, to a lesser extent, some teachers in the community also use the library. Every year, there have been occasional users of the library from Iju’s neighbouring community, Itaogbolu.

The users of the library peak annually for about two months before the annual Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) entrance examinations to tertiary education institutions. During this period, there are usually more users than there are spaces on a daily basis, and a few could be found on benches provided ad hoc in-between shelves. Between July 2012 and March 2020, there were over 750 registered users of the library.   

Internet Facility
Free Internet facility is provided in the library since April 2010.  

Following the sharp decline in students’ use of the library due to the 2020/2021 Covid-19 pandemic, I abandoned hiring a library assistant in 2022.  Then, early in the same year, I donated the library’s 508 books on secondary school education to Elu-Iju Comprehensive High School, the only public secondary school in the community that had a stand-alone library building with adequate space. The books cover, in varying degrees, virtually all the secondary education subjects: natural and physical sciences, social sciences and languages (English, French and Yoruba). Finally, in March 2023, I donated the reading cubicles and chairs in the library to the same school. (Earlier in 2017, I was prepared to acknowledge the superfluity of keeping hundreds of books on French Language, Literature, Politics and Society that library users hardly ever consulted. The Department of Modern European Languages in Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) was the beneficiary of 542 books in French, the entire collection except those that were specifically for secondary school students and a few titles that I kept for myself). After these donations to educational institutions (4,220 titles), there are now about 3,500 books in LAPAL, comprising mostly Nigeriana, Biography and Literature books.