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Last of the Originals
When the late Chief Ayo Adebanjo marked his 90th birthday six years ago, his family commissioned a collection of tributes published in a coffee table book entitled, A Legacy of Consistency. This essay was culled from that book of tributes.
Eniola Bello
It is one thing to grow to the ripe old age of 90. Many have hit that milestone bedridden – unable to see nor hear nor walk nor eat nor remember – having been weighed down by diseases associated with old age, reduced to a vegetative state, an uneasy burden on children and family members. It is yet a different thing to, at 90, still have the physical and mental strength to be socially active – up and about without any form of assistance, human or technological. Chief Ayo Adebanjo is one of the very few nonagenarians who has defied the disabilities of old age, and remains physically strong and mentally alert. Some have attributed such uncommon blessing to heredity, Chief Adebanjo having been well into his 70s when his father died.
However, genes alone couldn’t have made this possible without personal discipline derived from good breeding. Like men of his generation, Adebanjo was raised on a strict moral code. He once told an interviewer (Vanguard February 19, 2011), “In our days, moral instruction was one of the things that were very important…. Every morning in the CMS Grammar School, before we left for classes, there was a moral instruction where they talked about the evil in the society and we were taught how to guide against it…Through all those moral lessons, I got the character of godliness, straightforwardness and honesty in public life, and even private life.”
Chief Adebanjo’s politics of ideology, fidelity to principle, and unbendable dedication to a cause was forged in the fire of the strict moral code in his early life. In 71 years of politics and political activism, Adebanjo has remained consistent, an apostle of Obafemi Awolowo’s political philosophy of Social Democracy, and an advocate of a restructured Nigeria to a federation in line with the principles of the 1963 Constitution. Adebanjo, unlike many of today’s politicians, makes his living from law and not from politics. Most of those claiming to be Awoists have hopped from one party to another in a bid to occupy elective or appointive offices, while acquiring wealth for its own sake in the process.
Chief Adebanjo has, at different times, walked the political minefield of treasonable felony trial, exile and detention, and yet stayed the course. One of the last of the original Awoists, men who could be counted on the fingers of one hand, Adebanjo has continued to espouse the principles of Awoism from the time of the Action Group in the first republic, through the days of the Unity Party of Nigeria in the second republic, to the Alliance for Democracy in the present dispensation. Not lost on him was what he first learnt in 1947, when as an organising secretary in the Action Group, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo had said at a seminar: “You don’t have to tell any lie to the people. Just tell them what we will do. Tell them what is wrong in the society that we are going to correct.”
In today’s politics of “Change”, it seems to win elections you need to tell the people a basket of lies and promise to do what you may not be able to in 10 life times. It could be argued that throughout the different phases of Nigeria’s political development, first Awolowo, then his followers, failed to work out the right strategy to acquire power at the centre. Indeed, at the beginning of this political dispensation in 1999, the national political establishment conceded the country’s presidency to the southwest, in apparent compensation for the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election and the death, in detention, of Chief MKO Abiola, the winner of that election. Even at that, the Awo group or Afenifere, as represented in the Alliance for Democracy, the Yoruba mainstream political establishment, could still not cobble together a winning formula.
Indeed, the processes leading to the selection of the party’s presidential candidate caused a schism, and the bitterness arising therefrom resulted in the decimation of the party and its loss of the southwest in the 2003 elections. Some have attributed the crisis in the Alliance for Democracy to the Afenifere Conclave of Elders, particularly the Ijebu quartet of Adebanjo, the late Abraham Adesanya, Olanihun Ajayi and Solanke Onasanya – their insistence on the old ways of doing things, their refusal to embrace new ideas, their failure to allow compromises, and their desire to have the party acquire power on its own terms.
No matter. Adebanjo, like those men of his generation, at least stood for something. He exuded strength, courage, mental fortitude, and stood up to authority when the Yoruba were being persecuted by the administration of the late General Sani Abacha. His is still a loud voice in the campaign for a better deal for the people in a restructured Nigeria. His is a constantly stringent voice against the politics of cant and deceit. Passionate about Nigeria and robustly aggressive in pushing his cause, Adebanjo is an example of how to serve the country outside of government. Have the people been better served by the Renaissance Awoists who undermined the Adebanjo generation to chart a different path? The jury is still out. In Adebanjo’s politics, however, are three immutable attributes – consistency, loyalty, and integrity. Nigeria would be better served should those in government take a dose of these attributes.
