30th March, 2015
By Kola Johnson
The fundamental purpose of this write up to expound that over the years, Nigeria’s problem had consisted largely of the lamentable lack of checks and balances which had informed the tapestry of political coalition and alliances. This for, instance, is reflected in the malignantly gaping dissonance which had assailed its asset-pearl of the progressive bloc.
It was a tribute to the visionary genius of the Great Awo, that he was indeed quick in realizing this aberration. Unfortunately, all spirited effort on his part, to galvanize the progressive bloc under a common umbrella, was to meet as always, with stiff resistance, as the reactionary forces on the seat of power had a field day, of course in collaborative solidarity with fellow back-up cronies in other political parties.
The crystallization of the All Progressives Congress, APC, as a coalition of the Progressive Forces, eventually proves a salient vindication of Awo’s patriotic struggle.
Going down the lane of history, we will easily recall that the Sardauna of Sokoto, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr Nnamdi Azikwe all of blessed memory, were three figures, who played pivotal roles in the annals of Nigerian history.
In the historic electoral process that ushered in the epochal era of independence, Awolowo advanced the proposal of an alliance between the Action Group which he led, and Zik’s NCNC, on the other hand. Indeed, in no equivocal terms then, did Awo expressly signify his readiness to concede the reins of leadership to Zik, if only to save the nation from the disastrously reactionary stranglehold, which the NPC epitomised.
Unfortunately, Zik, in his popularly acclaimed maradonic equivocation – or is it Fabian stratagem – dramatically negotiated a detour to the NPC. Yet, it could not be gainsaid, the fact that he was cognizant of the dire implications of the imminent memorandum of understanding to which he was subscribing with the devil of the NPC.
The rationale behind the proposal was clear enough, at least in terms of the concurrence of the liberal democratic tenets that circumscribed the two parties, as diametrically opposed to the ultra conservative feudal dogma of the Hausa Fulani Northern Peoples Congress – whose nomenclature “Northern” – pinpoints an iron-cast exclusivism of the religio-tribal, hue.
It was a popularly acknowledged subject of history rather than an exclusively hidden secret agenda, that the NPC were rather circumspect about the granting of independence.
Going down the lane of history – it should have been visible even without the paranormal sense of prescience – that the primordial ship of independence had right from the onset, made a navigational head-start for the fatalfall it sure did.
That the Northern Peoples Congress was devoid of any developmental blueprint for a larger Nigerian macrocosm, was manifestly clear as crystal. Also was it no secret, that they were propelled by the over riding animus of “dipping the Koran in the sea” – a euphemism for its obsessively chauvinistic Jihadism, predicated on the reactionary visionary negativism to over-run the entire west – in fulfilment of its religio-feudal motivation of the impartation of Islamic theocracy on the macrocosm of the vast Nigerian landmass.
Indeed, their impression, which then hinged upon the idea of a Nigerian nationhood, as a mistake- could only have begun to fizzle off with the sudden discovery of oil in the far south.
For instance, their tergiversated fixation to independence, during the historic motion for independence in the 50s and their malicious resort to a confederal idea, as a euphemism for their avowed vision of a balkanized Nigerian nation state – when they were booed on the streets of Lagos on that historic day at the end of the parliamentary proceedings – for their inglorious attempt to thwart the all important motion for independence, was an eloquent demonstration of this fact.
The foregoing to be sure, present an unassailable body of facts converging at the truism that the feudal oligarchs could conceive plans for every other thing, but a democratic united corporate Nigerian entity. Yet, the British, despite this manifest drawback, were bent on foisting this same bastion of feudal anachronism on the seat of power.
It need be noted as have of course been amply proved to popular knowledge, that right from the onset, British colonial policy had infinitely favoured the political dominance of the Hausa-Fulani oligarchs, in a post independence dispensation.
For instance, it was no less a personality than, K.C. Weares an English Jurist, and the most universally acknowledged authority on federalism, who once stipulated that in any federal setting, on no account should any component part, be so large enough as to overwhelm the other component parts put together.
Unfortunately, the British policy was to prove a diametrical antithesis to this self-evident postulation, as evident in the sense that while it left the entire northern geopolitical fabric intact as a monolithic entity – in the particular context of the componential southern segment, it deemed it of no consequence, in the irrational wisdom that inspired its policy emanations, to apply similar treat of monolithism, except to subject it to a bi-focal regional compartment of south, on one hand, and west on the other.
The logic inherent in this structural aberration is simple: to confer a hegemonic status quo of perpetual continuity on the Hausa-Fulanis, by ensuring that in any election, the north, by virtue of its monolithism, would always secure an upper hand. And this it actually turned out to be.
In what way does this essentially accrue unto a beneficial interest to the British, one may ask? Simply, of course, that it would afford it a leverage to perpetuate its stranglehold on Nigeria – hitherto superficially renounced through the formal grant of independence – under the guise of neo-colonialism, in such a way that manifestly portrayed that nothing had actually changed.
The particular preference of the north in this context, was borne of the reasoning that an Awolowo or Zik, would present too strong a character for them to dominate – unlike the north, whose gullibility then – due to their educational backwardness, aided by their reluctance to embrace the modernizing stimulus of Western education and civilization was an attitude that then secured the ready consent of the British, who saw in this as a veritable leeway, to manipulate that point of weakness to advantage, in a post–independent Nigeria.
This of course, was apart from the predictably ready disposition of the north which because of its appreciative gratefulness to its British masters for entrenching them with imperial fiat, on the manorial estate of the Nigerian polity – would always be ready to kowtow to their whims – as of course eloquently attested to, in their sheepish acquiescence to the Anglo-Nigeria Defence Pact of 1962 – which but for the massive backlash of protest it elicited, particularly from the generality of Nigerian students and citizens, at the time in question, was as good as an accepted article of faith.
It could be recalled that not quite long ago, in an interview granted Vanguard newspaper, Chief Richard Osuolale Akinjide who traced Nigeria’s fundamental problem to this crucially pivotal theme of structural imbalance, blamed Awo and Zik, not only for their inability to join force in challenging the British Colonial suzerain to rectify the aberration with every vehemence at its disposal – but also for the fatal lag inherent in the lack of a united resolve; to counteract the Hausa-Fulani ascendancy, at a time it mattered most in the year before independence, and even thereafter.
It was no wonder therefore, that right from the inception of independence – the ruling feudal Northern Peoples Congress, having secured a veritable consort in Akintola – the then premier of Western Region, made good use of the latter, in their vicious centrifugal divide and rule machination, which tore the rank and file of the A.G. – to usher in a regime of chaos, carnage, conflagration and anarchy – which swept through the West, to engulf the entire nation.
Thus, the crisis spawned such a monster that couldn’t be tamed. There was no doubt that it proved a veritable alibi for the advent of the first military interregnum in the body politic.
The point which pertinently comes into play in this context, was that as long as the crisis lasted, Zik, with his towering stature, charisma, immense talents, endowment and erudition looked on like a helpless spectator – all for no other cause, than his constitutional incapacitation, as a ceremonial Governor–General.
The best he could do under the circumstance were mere insipid sermonisations and preachments- which of course were to prove so puerile and devoid of any consequence, until the military takeover of January 15, 1966 – which spawned the retaliatory, Hausa Fulani inspired coup of 29 July of the same year, culminating in the Civil War in 1967, which not only engulfed the entire nation – but also dangled the ominous portent for a balkanization of the corporate Nigerian entity.
Similar scenario was to again play itself out, in the similitude of a recurring decimal, after the electoral mumbo-jumbo which awarded the NPN a trophy rightly dubbed in the descriptive phrase of a “stolen presidency”.
The NPN, after the magico-legal shenanigan of the twelve-two-third, were soon ensconced in a dilemma, in respect of its inability to wield adequate numerical strength required for seeing their candidates through in the electoral process entailed in securing their members to principal offices – both in the Senate and House of Representatives.
Meanwhile, Awo, convinced of the ominous prognostications which the notoriously kleptomaniac NPN promised to unfold in what eventually turned true to expectation – in the lamentable retardation of the progressive march to the fulfilment of destiny – once again extended a progressive hand of solidarity to the Zik-led NPP. To this, Zik reportedly gave though a nodding acquiescence, but quite in similar unfolding – as enacted 20 years earlier – the progressively minded Nigerians, woke up to learn that Zik had indeed kowtowed to the alliance bid of the NPN.
So did it unfold, that once the NPN had used Zik’s NPP, to secure the majority deemed instrumental to the voting in of its members to the principal offices in the Senate and House of Reps – it disowned the NPP like a leper.
The venom input of the verbiage of dissonance pouring forth from the Akinloyes of the “Landslide” “Moonslide” “Sunslide” fame – remain eternally etched on record.
Thus did the NPP languish in the cold – as the NPN waxed and seethed in conquistadorial tyranny and untrammelled robesperrian terror – the unfolding of which the deportation of Shugaba, and the infamous Bakolori massacre, represented a veritably memorable benchmark. Just as one could have rightly predicted the hitting on the rock of the First Republic – in similar wise could one rightly predict that the Second Republic, was surely bound for the rocks.
It was therefore not unexpected, that on the eve of the 1983 election – they had been able to garner such formidable capacity-base for tyranny – that the generality of Nigerians were not surprised at the landslide victory which they had earlier awarded themselves and later confirmed in the ensuing electoral tomfoolery – thanks to the patronizing aiding-and-abetting role of the Zik-led NPP – which conferred onto them, the enabling leverage for their untrammelled scheme of sadism.
Zik, jolted by the ensuing charade and phoney electoral mumbo-jumbo, was soon to rise from a deep slumber – in a belated fit of lamentation and condemnatory outpouring, which elicited a viciously venomous exchange of diatribes – in a scenario that condescendingly pitched him at levels with the recklessly loquacious Chuba Okadigbo through the infamous “ranting of an ant” metaphor hurled at the great Zik, courtesy of the exuberant fire-spitting Young Turk- and the consequent proclamation of death – curse on him, from the revered Zik.
But then, the foregoing could be likened to a cry over a spoilt milk or broken egg that defies any magic of refill or re-mend. It was evocative of the metaphor of medicine after death – it was a puerile melancholic lamentation that could least avail, in terms of its inability to repulse the antithesis of the Buhari/Idiagbon spell of martial interregnum, which the Zik-led NPP, had courted -though unwittingly; through its memorandum of understanding with the luciferous NPN, dubbed in befittingly aptly terms, in the cognomen of “No plan for Nigeria” a devil incarnate of the old NPC – which as earlier portrayed, had similarly showed in its parlous ineptitude, that it was shorn of any plan for a united and progressive Nigerian nationhood.
History does not just consist in the regurgitation of the past. It is to prove that the past, present and future, are all an interwoven continuum; far from a disparately segmented epochal entities.
The foregoing is explicable in the light of the fact, that the past interprets the present, just as the present explains the past, and brings an illuminating insight to bear on the future.
Essentially, it is the fundamental import of this discourse, to prove that the contemporary Nigerian problem is a symptom of a fundamental malaise, to which other problems are merely secondary.
For instance, the idea of a United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA) which later came up between Awo’s A.G. and Zik’s NCNC, as a bulwark of negativism to checkmate the excesses that was to culminate in the January 15th coup – wouldn’t have been, had Zik taken the right step in 1959.
Similarly, the idea of the Progressive People Alliance, (PPA) to which his party (NPP) resorted with Awo’s UPN, GNPP and PRP – which unfortunately, could not avert the Buhari-Idiagbon interregnum, couldn’t have been necessary, if it had not repeated in 1979, the same fatal mistake of 1959. These are ostensibly unpragmatic panacea, which are essentially analogous to medicine after death.
The Babangida phenomenon, its associated June 12 annulment, and its violent aftermath; the Buhari Idiagbon intervention and sundry manifestations in the dynamics of the nation’s political history to date – were all dialectical offshoot of this primordial Zikist slip, which had wrought untold consequences on the nation.
From the fore-going one discerns with unassailable clarity, that Awo’s progressivist praxis, based on his egalitarian vision for the liberation of the down-trodden, and his broadly all-encompassing pan Nigerian transcendentalism, contrasts in repulsively unaltruistic asymmetry, with the surreptitious motivation – that is talking now of Zik – that a mutual compact with the Hausa-Fulani NPC and Zik-led NCNC and NPN and the Hausa-Fulani NPN, and Zik-led NPP in the first and second republic respectively – betokened an auspiciously salutary, scenario endemic with all enabling leverage for his familial Igbo kins over the Yorubas, prejudiciously perceived by him as arch-rival of his people on the segregationist specrum of the tribal divide.
It remained an irony of a dramatically bizarre turn however, that when the feudo-fascisistic bastion of pan–Nigerian Islamism, eventually flaunted its fang in the fullness of its terror, it was the Igbos, their acolytes in the inner portals of governance, that turned out the loosers as the consecution of events strained in fissurial chasm – to the limit of tolerance.
This of course was contrary to the initial expectation – based on the unfolding scenario then – when it seemed as if the Yorubas who were at the receiving end of the untrammeled fit of fury of the Hausa–Fulani tyranny – as manifested in the events of the Wild West – were the people perpetually fated as the unfortunate butt of northern oppression.
For Zik, it need be recalled that if by any stroke of foreboding, he has had an intuitive prognostication of any sort at all, that his unholy covenant with the NPC, on account of its callously filiopietistic narrowness – at the expense of a larger Nigerian universe, was bound to provoke the spectral bug of marginalization devastating the Ibos – as vaunted in ever growling remonstrance by the very biafran horse-mouth themselves – he certainly would have had none of it.
Apart from the larger macrocosm of political parties, as exemplified in the synergic misalliance by the Zik-led NCNC and NPP in the first and second republic respectively – instances of reactionary miscegenation in the universe of individual options and preferences, abound to boot, in more quantum than few.
Salient in this allusion was the tragically portentous anti-climax implicit in Enahoro’s cohabitation with the NPN, after a turbulent, but hitherto progressive spell of activism, dating back from his heroic struggle during the nationalist ferment of the pre-independence era.
Readily coming to mind from this point of departure, was the suicidal committal – ideologically speaking of course – creditable to the Sam Ikokus of this world – who in an unconscionable fit of debauchery, dismissed the great Awo as a Hegelian welfarist and Yoruba irredentist – not minding the fact that it was this immortal sage of blessed memory, who picked him literally “from the gutters” – that is quoting the great sage in descriptive exactitude.
To be sure, Ikoku’s plunge into the leprositic revisionism and harlotic somersault of a most heinous dimension – viewed within the context of his antecedent as the intellectual theoretician of Abacha’s creed of power perpetuation – marked a diametrical transmogrification from his departing tower of glory – as epitomized in his leviathan clout in the halcyon days of yore – as a progressive devotee of the Marxist socialist hue and intellectual bastion of the revolutionary forces animated with every ounce of fanatical fervor towards the egalitarian reconstitution of the socio-political space of the larger Nigerian terra – firma.
And for the Ikemba of Nnewi, one demands to know by what stretch of imagination, he might seek to chip in an attenuating plea of non-culpability when after a harrowing spell of thirteen years in exilic self-sentence in far away Ivory Coast, he sought a suitable party for a progressive romance and found none, except the NPN.
This is because going by the question of antecedents, what number of people within the frame of membership of that party at that time, could rightly lay claim to previous demonstration of empathy with the Biafran cause.
This poser is necessary, since the character of an association of any sort, is the cumulative aggregation of the totality of the characters of the individuals constituting it.
And what indeed is endemic in the NPN, in terms of the compelling force of ideological fundamentals, which especially commend it to the ex Biafran warlord.
Fact is that the Ikemba knew quite better. Only that the endemic instinct of self-preservation loomed large in his ideological calculus at that time, above the sacrificial martyrdom for his larger Igbo Kin, talkless of the larger corporate frame of the Nigerian nationhood.
However, as it would later turn-out his canon fodder usage by the feudal cabals of the moment was soon to dawn within the cognitive space of awareness; but lamentably so late in the day. The damage irrevocably wrought in surreptitious conspirational manoeuvre – that pitched the Ikemba in a disappointing fall into the abyss of the senatorial poll, which he lost to one Dr. Onwudiwe of the NPP.
Thus began for the ex Biafran warlord, a progressive spell of recantation, arising from the atrophied Ikemba/NPN-led federal romance – as he latched onto a new tune in his vociferous evangelism for a bipartite East-West compact, as a recipe-artifice to harness the political potential of the south to the maximum, as a bulwark of negativism to the northern feudal despotism.
Portrayed in poignantly bold relief, Ojukwu recoiled more than ever before, to the familiar particularism of his pro-biafran idiom and shibboleth – exuding every inch, the micronationalistic primordialism of Igbo irredentism – with the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) – as the canalization – just as much as it was at the same time – a fortifying bulwark of that sentiment in its expressive dispersal on the political arena.
For Joseph Sarwuan Tarka his colossal dominance on the middle-belt canvass is a theme of reference bordering almost on a cliché in the salutary populism of that expression.
But be that as it may, Awo’s identification with the middle-belt struggle, as a cardinal content of a broader article of covenant hinging on the support of the minorities in their rightful agitation for the extraction of social justice contributed to no mean measure in bringing the Tiv-born politician and later the most conspicuous glamour – boy of Nigerian politics – to greater limelight than ever.
However, in an ironic twist of circumstances, Tarka, animated by the consciousness of an ex aide already matured of age, soon “dismissed” and dumped Awo, for an unholy political razzmatazz with the Hausa Fulani oppressors of the Tiv ethnic group of Tarka.
Decades after the glorious passage of this remarkably colourful political gem, observers remain almost intact in remarkably overwhelming unanimity, that an Awo-Tarka ticket coming to fore by whatever stroke of happen stance, in the second republic, would have mounted such a formidably dynamic force of onslaught, and populist appeal that no opposedly antithetic tendency would have been able to counteract.
As for Aminu Kano, all overtures sustained in spirited zest and gusto – emanating from Awo to the expectedly effectual consummation of a working alliance with him, were to meet with a disconcertingly stiff rebuff.
And looking back today, one is helplessly lost at sea if not possessed of the justified remonstrance of bitter agitation at the brick wall of stout resistance mounted by the acclaimed leader of the Talakawas to stop the duo of Abubakar Rimi, and Abdul Kadri Balarabe Musa – the then ex PRP Governor of Kano and Kaduna, from attending the meeting of the twelve progressive governors, in a show of primordial consaguinal empathy and parochial ethnic suggestibility, borne of an overt disapproval of a possible geo-regional alteration of power base from the Hausa-Fulani controlled NPN, to the southern hemisphere of the Nigerian federation.
And for the renegade band wagons here in the contextual allusion of the Afeniferes and the Ebenezer Babatopes of this world in particular, it becomes apposite at this juncture to capitalize on the nostalgic memorial of the great Awo, to chip in that all–important advice, on the need for them to not only learn, but also profit, from Awo’s life of unfetteredly sacrificial altruism – because all the wily hanky panky, pseudo progressive mumbo jumbo, ignoble charlatanism and amateurishly puerile historical revisionism can never save them from the devastatingly virulent magisterial hammer of history that is sure to come. It’s not too late for a change.
Indeed, a great world of good, will it do us, if only to harness the opportune celebration of this great soul, to chip in an admonishment for sober reflection – that familiarly oft-repeated cliché of infinitely vital significance.
And the question to ruminate: How shall the world mourn our own turn; at the critical moment of our appointed departure. Will it appertain to that seemingly hallowed trivia of the so-called state burial by the conurbation of clowns, which of course stands in apt denotation of the PDP band of jesters – or a salubrious
pathos of empathy by the vitally pivotal stratum of the hoi-polloi (the masses that matter).
Let it therefore be said, as it is indeed apposite to emphasize at this juncture, that the Great Awo, that enigmatic Avatar, sage, prophet, and immortal of all times, will certainly weep – even as he savours the glory of the celestial abode of his father in heaven – over the epic saga of the tragedy of the Lost Sheep, as typified in the ideological leprosy and revisionist mercantilism of the political personality of these lamentably atrophied spent force at the arrow-head of the pseudo progressive caste – who ironically clutches – of course in empty mouthed confession – to a fanatical Awoist bent-sensing in unmistakable clarity; the personal tragedy of immensely monumental proportion, of which he (Awo’s) is wont to construe it.
As we remember the great Awo today on yet another edition of his post–humous birthday the teeming mass of the progressive compatriot of the vast Nigerian federation cannot but salute his visionary grandeur and consummate skill in pragmatic political engineering – as exemplified in the epoch–making formation of the APC.
This said, it becomes apposite to admonish at this juncture, that as countdown to a new political dispensation in 2015, gradually approaches a zero-point, the clarion call goes to the progressives to unite more than ever before, towards the imperative of political dominance, salient for the accomplishment of an egalitarian order, envisioned for the nation, in order for it to take its right position as the rallying banner of the blacks-based on its status, as a geopolitical terra firma that embowels the greatest agglomeration of blacks, both in Africa, and the diaspora. This is the greatest tribute we can pay, in immortalizing the great Awo, for his strategic political sagacity, the transcedental macrocosm of his pan Nigerian vision and world view his messianic reformational ardour and zealotry as unfolded in his egalitarian propensity, and his uncanny genius for political engineering.
•Kola Johnson writes from Lagos