In Memory of Ayo Adebanjo

DIALOGUE WITH NIGERIA

AKIN OSUNTOKUN

The Obafemi Awolowo ‘papal bull’ issued against President Olusegun Obasanjo designating him as number one enemy of the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, was more than enough cue for Awoists to regard bellicosity towards the former President as virtue. 

You remember the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, party convention in Yola in 1982 dubbed the night of long knives? It was the occasion where Chief Bola Ige was going to be expelled from the party for fraternising with Obasanjo (who had mediated in the conflict between Ige and his estranged deputy, Chief Sunday Afolabi). Obasanjo was mutual friends with both of them.

Whenever Obasanjo made a pronouncement that is liable to be construed as antagonistic to the cause of decentralisation and devolution of powers, Adebanjo’s venomous standard refrain was “he is not one of us”. Against this background, many of us were therefore stumped at the newfound cordial relationship between the two.

Adebanjo responded to nonplussed inquiries about this unlikely cordiality with the explanation that he had nothing personal against Obasanjo. He said the latter had transcended his status quo ideological convictions that hitherto kept them apart as reflected in Obasanjo’s public adoption of the restoration of federalism platform. 

I do not know a more hawkish Awoist than Pa Ayo Adebanjo. I was thereby pleasantly surprised to find that there could be an element of broad mindedness to his politics. This disposition might have something to do with Awolowo’s frame of mind when, in 1983, he wrote that “some outstanding Yorubas have been in the Council of Ministers since the last Federal elections. There are others in the NPC. These persons are as loyal to the cause of the Yoruba people as those of us in the Action Group”. 

Several moons ago, when I was not quite close to him, Adebanjo had repeatedly called me but I didn’t answer the call. It was a Friday night, so I correctly and nervously assumed that the call had to do with my weekly column. I had criticised Awolowo for quitting as Premier of the Western region in pursuit of the mirage of seeking the office of the Prime Minister of Nigeria. I imagined he was calling to express strong reservations about the article. 

The momentum of the socioeconomic development of the Western region which had been generated by the leadership of Awolowo was on the upswing and needed to be consolidated.That purpose was best served by him remaining the Premier especially within the context of a dysfunctional Nigerian status quo that was constitutionally and structurally rigged against reformist minded politicians like him. 

Awolowo spent the rest of his political life learning this hard lesson. He kept running against insurmountable obstacles that belittled him and kept him floundering from pillar to post. It was such confusion that drove him to take the politically obtuse decision of fielding a South West/ South East presidential ticket in the 1979 presidential election.

In conception and potential, it was a grossly flawed ticket. It failed the eligibility test of being deemed as positively responding to the challenge of national unity and integration. It was self-defeatist, patently divisive anld gifted a ready made club to his undeserving opponents to clobber him (if they needed any).

In 1979, there was no realistic basis for expecting the South East to find common purposes with the South West for a political confrontation against the North. To be categorically clear about this intention, the Chair of the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, was Oyibo Odinamadu, from the South East. 

Panterbrick had raised the pertinent question of “why have the Ibo and Yoruba been so unsuccessful in combining against the Fulani, allowing the latter to play one off against the other-even to the extent of accepting the NCNC as partners in the Federal government from 1959 onwards?”

In grappling with this notion, the objective was best served under a parliamentary system of government in which there would be no need to openly advertise such a regionally skewed presidential ticket. At any rate, any potential of the ticket was completely snuffed out when Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe floated the Nigerian Peoples Party, NPP, and became its Presidential candidate.

If there was any hope for the Yoruba/Igbo ticket, it went up in smoke after Azikiwe joined the fray. 1979 was only nine years after a civil war in which Awolowo had played the decisive role of partnership with the North to defeat the Biafra secession. His account of the role he played in the civil war was naturally quite different from the interpretation of the Igbo political elite. 

in an interview with Peter Enahoro of the daily times in 1981, Awolowo offered an extenuation that “When, (on the eve of the declaration of the Biafra secession) the National Conciliation Committee asked me to lead a delegation to Ojukwu, I saw it as an opportunity and seized the opportunity very firmly. I asked Ojukwu again and again, “he shouldn’t go to war”-..Let the section of the country which does stupid things know that two regions don’t approve of their policy and attitude to Nigeria”.

“I did everything that any human being could do to see that there was no war. All I said about secession was that if the Ibos by any act of commission or omission were pushed out of Nigeria, then we won’t stay”.

The paradox of Awolowo’s politically precarious situation after the war was that the fact of being so effective in managing Nigeria’s war economy, meant that the decisions he took to weaken Biafra’s war capacity impacted negatively on the larger Biafran population-resulting in his being made a scapegoat for the suffering and defeat of Ndigbo. 

The attendant economic disaster was conflated with the contentious and controversial pronouncement that ‘If the East seceded, the West will follow’. The Igbo understood this statement literally. Awolowo protested that it was a case of calling the dog a bad name in order to hang it, of distorting what he actually said, which he restated as “If by commission or omission, the East is pushed out of the Federation, the West must equally stay out ‘.

As it was with the misconstrued ‘starvation is a legitimate weapon of war’ pronouncement, so it became with the political version and the clarification amounted to little more than medicine after death. This back and forth politics of ‘sinning more than sinned against’ between the Igbo and Yoruba goes back to 1951. 

My father was one of the elected parliamentarians whom Azikiwe accused of cross carpeting from the National council of Nigerian citizens, NCNC to the AG, so I know it was a wrong accusation. He contested and won the Ekiti constituency election to the Western region house of assembly 

as an independent candidate not as a candidate of the NCNC. Regardless, this mythical allegation continues to this day. 

The big elephant in the room was the historical conspiracy between the British colonialists and their protege, the Northern region, to programme Northern hegemony into the Nigerian constitution. Which begs the question, was Awolowo not conscious of this when he bravely took leave of his Premiership to gamble for the position of the Prime Minister? 

Richard Sklar had drawn attention to the fact that “The final date of independence was fixed not only to accommodate the Northern Region in respect of its own date of self-government in 19 5 9 but also to enable the leaders to agree to certain provisions in the Constitution whereby the Northern Region has been assured of a predominating voice in the Federal Government”

Of equal mind was the late distinguished international legal scholar and first Attorney General of Nigeria, Dr Taslim Olawale Elias who made the point on the floor of the Nigerian house of representatives in 1962-”I think I would remind you that the only region, perhaps in practice not in theory, it may be difficult for the house to secure a two thirds majority to deal with is the Northern region” Elias, p 39. 

In the spirit of reciprocation, Awolowo might have anticipated the support of the North in appreciation of his partnership with them to defeat Biafra. Not if the assassinated military head of state, Murtala Mohammed was a credible front of the North. 

He had opined that it would be unfair to allow Awolowo to benefit from the vacuum created by the deaths of Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and the Premier of the Northern region, Sir Ahmadu Bello. Mohammed’s preference (if it must come to the Yoruba) was a candidate of his generation not any member of the Awolowo/ Azikiwe/ Ahmadu Bello generation. 

No one could have foreseen the escalation of the AG factional schism to snowball into the 1965/66 violent crisis. What we know for certain is that no such crisis would have erupted were Awolowo to have remained Premier of the Western Region. 

All the above ruminations constituted, more or less, the substance of what I had argued in the said column but I was wrong in the assumption that Adebanjo would find it offensive. To my utter surprise, he was calling to compliment me!, that he was of the same opinion. 

Inadvertently, that singular decision has served no purpose other than setting in motion the disastrous turn the Western Region and Nigeria has taken since 1962.

Fittingly and to his eternal credit, Adebanjo fought his last battle on the platform of keeping fidelity to the original conception of Afenifere. There has been no better clarification of this than Awolowo’s address to the annual convention of the Western Region arm of the AG in 1963:

“Those who, however, believe in the unity of the Yorubas, of the Ibos, of the Hausa, etc., must never rest on their oars. But the line has been drawn, and must be kept indelible, between a Cultural Organisation like the Ibo State Union, Ibibio State Union, Egbe Omo Oduduwa. Etc., on the one hand, and political parties like the Action Group and the NCNC on the other” 

“It is erroneous to equate the Action Group of Nigeria with the Yoruba people, or to regard our party as being a Yoruba organisation. Furthermore, whilst the Action Group does not participate in the Federal Government since January 1960, some outstanding Yorubas have been in the Council of Ministers since the last Federal elections. There are others in the NPC. These persons are as loyal to the cause of the Yoruba people as those of us in the Action Group”.