By Adagbo Onoja
 |
| (L-R, back row) Dr Aliyu, Onoja, Obuchi Anyanwu,
Mrs Ukachi Anyanwu & Onyedikachi Anyanwu, (L-R mid row) Chihorom Anyanwu, Ewezugachi Anyanwu & baby Hanna Aliyu, (L-R front row) Chimeriele Anyanwu, Ms Niima Aliyu & Imam Aliyu |
It is a moment I still can’t find words to describe the feelings as it
unfolded in the “Happy birthday to you” song from Comrade Columbus Chilaka Anyanwu
and Dr Musa Aliyu’s children Saturday, November 2, 2013 here in Coventry,
Midland, UK. I was actually so lost that I couldn’t sing because I couldn’t
guess for whom although the conspirators left signs.
First, they suggested I wore Kaftan when coming to town because they were
going to don same that day. Secondly, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, Executive Director
of Abuja based CISLAC who was visiting that day said something about hearing
about an occasion being planned for me when he arrived my abode.
What he was saying did not click because, one, October 31st
which is my birthday had passed. Two, although turning 50 is a big deal, more
so for me, this was happening within a time and space in which even if I did
not habour reservations against such celebrations, I still couldn’t contemplate
marking it in any memorable way. How could I here at the University of Warwick
where I am still missing my way every other day in trying to locate one seminar
room or the other, not to talk of being settled enough to think of putting
together a birthday party.
I am also yet to recover from the misery of the weather imposed dress
code of jeans and hooded winter jackets that weigh down on my sense of self in
dressing matters. Above all, the thought of my daughter weighs heavily on me.
She has consistently been coming first in her class and at a time I should be
providing the fatherly promptings, I am only a father by telephone.
Unknown to me, the two Nigerians had planned to surprise me. It was the
outcome of their coup that made Saturday November 2nd, 2013 now
symbolically unforgettable, what with the presence of the twosome, their
children, their wives, an associate like Rafsanjani, the powerful birthday
badge, the candle lights and the great eat that day. These two Nigerians are
expanding the list of people to whom I am already over indebted. As
an aide of a Nigerian foreign affairs minister, I must have travelled to or
through London too many times between 1999 and 2003 because London is a transit
port to almost everywhere else.
But these were
protected trips in which I knew nothing about queuing at immigration, taking
the train or the coach or reading maps to find my bearings. If the minister
wanted Nigerian food, there were people to bring it. My only role in that would
be to follow them, drivers or protocol officers whom I never saw reading any
maps to get anywhere and back. So, it never crossed my mind that I would have
any problem going about in London when I was coming to school, this time as a
private citizen. It turned out to be the exact opposite.
It all started on
July 22nd, 2013. I came down from my hostel room to the reception to
ask them how to get to one of the campuses of King’s College, London. I was
expecting them to say, go straight on, turn right or left and so on and so
forth. But they brought a map instead. I couldn’t make any sense out of what
they were saying. And I only managed to get to King’s that morning because an
African-American who was also attending the course from Washington DC was
having the same problem as I was. She said something about the difference
between London and US cities in this regard.
At the end of the
introductory class that first day, I asked the lady who introduced herself as a
Londoner to describe how I would get back to my hostel room from where I was.
Again, she went to a desk and came back with a map. That was after she enquired
and discovered disappointingly that I didn’t have “London A-Z”, the directional
bible of Londoners. At the end of the day, I had to forget about the maps which
was confusing me and, instead, estimate my direction since the university
website said it was a 15 minutes’ walk.
I was surprised to
find myself in front of the hostel in 17 minutes from the school area. Was this
what all the receptionists and course mates could not describe? At that point,
I came to agree with what a London based Nigerian lawyer had said before: that
actually, nobody knows London. And that everyone goes-by by asking the next
person. I find that everyday inside the bus here.
The long and short of
this background is that without Dr. Musa Aliyu and later Comrade Columbus
Chilaka Anyanwu, I would have had to do a lot of miserable map reading in
Coventry, a much less complex city than London but a city with its own
complexity as every part of UK has near equal level of infrastructural development
and urban planning. My first few weeks would have been so miserable as to
adversely affect the Warwick project if not for them, not to talk of the
birthday surprise they put together for me.
It has been a long, long way to age 50, a road paved with so many turning
points that the question I have never stopped asking is how I even survived the
numerous existential boundedness inherent in immediate post-colonial societies.
I wonder how I got education at all, becoming a journalist cum activist of the
student, human rights, gender and pro-democracy movement. Activism is a
glorious life time privilege because it means speaking for those who cannot
speak for themselves through no fault of theirs.
Then the experience of being in government for nine years, spanning the
federal and state levels, again, another glorious life time experience because
it was not just being in government but in the service of a
cause. Warts and all, the Lamido regime in Jigawa State since 2007 has the
image of an off-shoot of the radical tradition in the North symbolized by the
People’s Redemption Party, (PRP) in the Second Republic.
Secondly, it was
being in government outside my state of origin and even geo-political zone,
making it more unique experience by the ordinary standards of judgment in Nigerian
politics. Thirdly, it was being in government in which my designation had
nothing to do with the powers I had or didn’t have but essentially on a
completely personal political relationship and footing with the governor who
felt secure enough with me to have never asked me to swear to any oath of
secrecy or oath of loyalty or to beg him or be sycophantic on the job or to
observe any access protocols.
Furthermore, each
appointment, first as Personal Assistant on Media Affairs from July 1999 to May
2003 when he was Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and second, as Special
Adviser on Media Affairs on June 4th, 2007 when he became governor
of Jigawa State gave me opportunity to, among others, confirm a lot of my
training in Political Science; put my journalistic skills to the service of
Nigeria; observe at some closer range how government actually functions,
especially the consuming reality conceptualized as governmentality by the
social theorist, Michel Foucault; learn the protocols of power; benefit from
the educational and other imports of travelling around the world as media aide
of a Nigerian Foreign Affairs Minister; mix politically outside of my area of
identity or origin; test myself in resistance to the many temptations of power/proximity
to power without claiming to be an angel; to give a lie to the theory that
governments don’t do certain things because there is no money.
This is because the
government I was part of for 5 years in Jigawa State did a number of
fundamentally radical programmes which it could have conveniently said there
was not enough money to do and, golden opportunities to make inputs into
government and see them come alive.
It is for these
reasons that, in spite of having to depart unceremoniously from his government
in June 2012, I still list Alhaji Sule Lamido among the twenty or so
individuals who made my 50 possible. It
is in the nature of the political relationship I had with the governor for us
to part company dramatically because it packed along a number of
contradictions.
But the contradictions did not include the theory spread by a vicious
cabal that I left Lamido to work for Senate President David Mark or because
Lamido got a Jigawa friend of mine appointed as a minister instead of me. It
couldn’t be true because the last time I saw David Mark was
June 2007 and it was as a member of Lamido’s delegation. It was at that
courtesy call on the newly sworn-in Senate President where Lamido made everyone
clap for both of us when he came to my turn while introducing members of his
delegation and said, “Mr. Senate President, this one is your own but today, he
is my own. His name is Adagbo Onoja and he is my SA on Media Affairs. We have
been together since I was Minister of Foreign Affairs”. All the senators and
other officials clapped in obvious endorsement of his carrying a non-indigene
along. At the end of the visit, Mark tapped me at the back, I responded by
invoking the ancestral Idoma courtesies and that was it. So, I don’t know how I
could have gone to work for Mark whom I had not seen again since then.
Two, to work for Mark
in 2012 would most probably have been to become his SA, Media, a position (was)
being occupied by a non-native of Benue. To topple a non-indigene and take his
job is the last thing I would do even for the best job in the world. So, there
was no Mark to my exit.
The appointment of Dr
Nura Mohammed as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs has been so fulfilling a
thing for me that it cannot be a reason for my departure from Jigawa too. One,
it annulled a major criticism that Lamido was hostile to having educated
elements around him. Two, it translated to Lamido reproducing himself in
foreign policy, the ministry he was its minister. As Lamido’s image maker, I
worried about these two criticisms and if, for any reasons, he set about
correcting them, then my job was to clap along, more so that in doing so, he
selected someone that many people, rightly or wrongly, traced his ascendancy to
me. It was not surprising that on the day Dr Nura was sworn-in, I wrote and
published a piece comparing Lamido’s action to Julius Nyerere, ex-Tanzanian
president’s praxis of picking brilliant youthful raw materials and asking them
to ready themselves for state responsibilities, the classical example being the
case of Salim Ahmed Salim, veteran of the Organisation of African Unity, (OAU)
now the African Union, (AU).
As a PRP man imbued
with the “naki” (I hope I got this Hausa language right) mentality, Lamido can
be trusted to create a crease even when and where most unnecessary.
Predictably, he created one between myself and Dr Nura Mohammed at some point
but the seeds of the reasons which culminated in my sudden departure had
already germinated a long time before Dr. Nura ever came on the scene. Moreover,
how could appointment of anyone from Jigawa for the state’s slot in the federal
cabinet be an issue for me, especially in 2011 when I could not have haboured
the thought of being a minister or anything at the centre.
My attitude to the
circumstances surrounding the 2011 elections was such that on the Election Day,
Lamido asked me in the presence of journalists and his aides who I voted for. I
said I voted for Jonathan because I did not want to be thrown out by him,
(Lamido). He jokingly said he didn’t trust me on that and everyone laughed
because everyone knew where I stood. It was not against Jonathan as a person
but against a party which was consciously burying itself deeper than six inches
by being unfaithful to its own core principle.
Today, the mistake of
2011 is playing out before us all as the party is in tatters. Two, who would
have sent my name as a ministerial nominee since the governor of Benue State himself
didn’t nominate anyone in 2011? Thee, even if Lamido had wanted me to be a minister,
that could not be before he finished his governorship tenure and either
negotiated a space for me or he himself returned to Abuja. Four, how could I
leave a secure position in a Government House in which I was a very symbolic
signifier to go to Abuja and start learning how to work with a new boss? Fifth,
my post Jigawa plan was going to school, not taking any other government
appointment immediately.
I thank God immensely
that I have ended up in school in the post Jigawa period. I recognize the reservations
of many who think I love being in school for its own sake. The truth though is
that, for very serious reasons, schooling is still an unfinished business for
me. It has thus been an intensely fulfilling
moment to have opportunity to be in school, not to build a career but to
reflect on a career and also tidy up my entire scraps of knowledge into the
level of expertise or is it specialization. It is great to have time to devote
to acada without worrying at all about work pressure, office politics, newsroom
deadlines or anything of that sort. I am confident of coming out of Warwick absolutely
well made in social theory, that being the core missing link in my knowledge
pursuit that I am prepared to risk the financial, logistic and social stresses
to bridge quickly before it becomes absolutely ridiculous for me to be a formal
student.
The initial hassles flowing from an accommodation strategy error
notwithstanding, the University of Warwick is turning out to be the correct choice
for this gap filling mission, a project which started with admission to an
Australian ‘Sandstone’ university last February but which the geographical
distance between Nigeria and Australia as well as immigration logistics made
impossible for me to go. Then the turn to UK basically because the American
universities would want me to satisfy their GRE requirements while the
Canadians will take eternity to grant me visa. A Nigerian is in trouble as far
as visa to almost any other major western country is concerned even if he is as
clean as anyone can be. In the case of Australia, they administer the process
from South Africa and the applicant bears the freight cost.
Several UK universities to which I applied admitted me though with some
of them insisting on fulfilling English Language proficiency requirement even
when I had all my education in universities where English is the language of
instruction, come from a Commonwealth country where English is the language
from birth to death, has been an editor and then media aide of a Nigerian foreign
affairs minister, a job in which I couldn’t have been writing or speaking any
other language but English. And the fact that I have a credit in Ordinary Level
English Language which is what everyone, with almost no exception, must have to
enter a Nigerian university. At some point, I wondered if this was system
integrity or a subtle reminder that it is not yet the post-colonial moment. It
was both funny and embarrassing.
In July 2013, I took advantage of being in London to visit those universities
that had admitted me, beginning with the ones inside London before travelling
to the University of Warwick where I found a well-appointed
forest that reminded me powerfully of the rural idyllic and communal grandeur
in which I grew up. The campus seemed to be saying, this is the right place for
you. At the end of the day after going to the Departmental office of the
Politics and International Studies and taking a good look at the modules and
the reading list, I was to discover one particular module that made the
decision for me that Warwick is the place to go. I am absolutely happy that I
am offering the module today. I have never seen a single module encapsulating
virtually all of Political Science, providing me another opportunity to have
another go at some of the things I did as an undergraduate nearly two decades
ago in Nigeria.
This is the story of how my 50th birthday anniversary was
spent in the classroom in a UK university, although that didn’t abort
reflections on how I made it to 50 and of which this essay is an outcome. It is
written in response to my conclusion that I survived simply and squarely on a
vast network of charity by actors, each of whom took me out of one crisis or
the other in a way that was a turning point for me. And each and every one of
them did so either on hypodermic instructions from God or from just being good.
My argument is that it is fit and proper to use my 50th birthday
anniversary to recognize and pay homage to these individuals. Attributing my
survival to charity implies privileging individuals over and above the system. I
pledge guilty to that charge. It is my belief that in our post-colonial
context, the goodness of individuals and/or the dynamism of the informal
economy have been more sensitive, responsive, reliable and crucial
redistributive mechanisms than anything called the modern society. That’s why I
pay homage to the individuals below, arranged here in time sequence rather than
alphabetical order.
That naturally means beginning with Ikponya ‘Akaka’ (but call her Ikponya
Abba because it is only three who call her Akaka, that being her late father’s
special name for her) my mother who never went beyond Sunday School/Catechism
classes but made so much sacrifices for my education; Gabriel Ochigbo
aka Gappfiller; primary school teacher who pushed all final year pupils to
write common entrance exam, brushing aside our argument that our families
didn’t have that kind of money to pay secondary school fees for five
years; Mr. Attayi Eje, the man
who suggested I contacted Edemoga District Head to sponsor my secondary school
education; Adokwu Abah, the man who drafted the letter which got Chief
Daniel Adulugba so ecstatic about sponsoring my secondary school education
unless he did not live till September 1976. He lived and did so and remained my
bulwark in the community till his sudden demise in 2010; Col Liman
Adulugba (rtd) for pulling me out of Benue in 1981 originally to seek
admission into the School of Basic Studies of Ahmadu Bello University before I
meandered to Kaduna when the admission failed; Uncle Obagwu Abba for his
critical material intervention in my last years in the school; Okpani
Francis Adah for a transformative hosting gesture in Kaduna between 1982
and 1985.
Others are late James Audu and Alhaji Mohammed Suleiman for
employing me just like that (no connections, no letters of recommendation, no
long waiting) into the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, Kaduna in April
1982, making concrete my secondary school journalistic experimentations which
earned me the nickname The Reporter;
Abba Dabo for ferrying me across the big gulf created by the waning of the
FRCN job by getting me employed in Triumph Publishing Company in late 1985 when
he became the MD and for the occasional strategic interventions thereafter as I
moved up, especially in the Jigawa years; Mohammed Sani Zorro for the
turning point in my movement to Concord Press of Nigeria after the ‘comrades’
of which he was the head got dispersed from Triumph in the aftermath of Abba
Dabo; Chidi Ngangah/Yakubu AliyuAminu Aliyu: each for social analysis
briefings long before hand; Y.
Z. Y’au for networking me into the Bayero University, Kano
community aside from the facility of his house which made me escape the hassles
of hostel life as a mature undergraduate;
Auwal Musa aka Rafsanjani/Reuben Ziri, two different sources of
inspiration, Rafsanjani for his capability for improvisation and dynamism and
Reuben Ziri for his legendary History skills such that there is no time one
would not be missing him; Prof Okello
Oculi for always reminding me what is primary at every point; Sule Lamido whom I already discussed
above.
The list equally
includes Comrade Kayode Komolafe, the
dialectical backbone of my ‘governmentality’; Comrade John Odah, the most comprehensive intervener in me and
the ultimate in solidarity, stretching from getting me off the high horse to
re-write Ordinary level English Language without which I couldn’t have gotten
further education, mobilizing the comrades to my wedding in 2001 and cooking so
much pounded yam, (a special food in Idoma land) for them and similar many
other interventions.
The climax must be
his last act of solidarity by way of a trip to Jigawa to see Governor Sule
Lamido after I packed up from Jigawa. When he entered Lamido’s office that day,
the governor asked why he is so concerned about me as to make the trip. His
answer was that we were the two birds of same ideological feathers from our
area and whatever happened to me was his concern. I was opposed to the trip and
dissuaded him a lot because it would have weighed too much on my conscience if
anything nasty had happened to him on the road to or from Jigawa on my cause.
Thank God, it went well; Dr. Chijioke
Uwasomba whanayochi@hotmail.co.ukose
discursive, discourse, generational and social (Staff Club) compatibility
made me cope with graduate studies at the University of Ibadan in 2003. It was
such that I lived at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife from where I drove to
Ibadan; Hajiya Zainab Okino: How
would I have had the presence of mind to think of and eventually commence
putting up a building in Abuja city if not on the promptings and manoeuvres of
Hajiya? Apart from Steve Nwosu, no
one else has been as harassed as Hajiya in my governmentality career; Engineer Mohammed Abba Gana, a great
source of soul lifting critical and normative cannons, whether it is on rising
China or varieties of capitalism or global energy analysis underground
transport network engineering, the perils of market forces, leadership
recruitment as panacea to Nigeria’s instability and even on literature,
particularly Shakespeare; Cheers here to Abba
(aka Abbyjjak whom I don’t know
who gave him the permission to be taller than me already), Ene and Ada, my children
and Ene J. Ogboji, their mother; And, finally, Joe Akatu and Ada Atama, the
two Idoma language lyricists whose creativity is the most edifying source of
Idoma self-understanding for me, particularly of the alime essentialism. Unaffected by Christian influence or western
education, the late Joe Akatu’s repertoire of the Idoma imaginary is
unsurpassable. Listening to them is a permanent must for me, not necessarily as
a contestation of the CNNisation and Cocacolanisation of modernity.
Looking at this rather
long list, two things stare me in the face. One is how, like the Olufia in Idoma mythology which learnt
and spoke the language of every kindred in the bird kingdom in appreciation for
being brought up by all, I must master and speak the language of diversity. Two
is the challenge of putting something that enables me as an individual to
respond to privations in our system even while we step up the struggle to build
that society in which no child anywhere in Nigeria would need any particular
individual to be what s/he would like to make of his or her life. How best I
can develop this capacity must task even the best theorists of ‘economy of
affection’
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