By Husseini Abdu, Steve
Aluko, Nasiru Kura, Adagbo Onoja and Auwal Musa
His family, nuclear
and extended, must be shattered. His immediate family would certainly still be
in a shock from the reality that a vivacious father and husband is suddenly no
more, with all the economic and socio-cultural implications of such
dislocation.
We grieve along with
them, especially Bimpe, his wife and our friend from her days at the Obafemi
Awolowo University, Ife, which was where we operated from as NANS leaders more
than even Bayero University, Kano, that was the Secretariat of NANS in the
early 1990s. His friends in both the bench and the bar, his fellow worshipers
in his church and his neighbours must have lost a truly dear one in Bamidele
Francis Aturu, aka BF who died on July 9th, 2014.
For the five of us
writing this collectively, however, we mourn BF politically. Politically here
is not in the sense that we were comrades. That is part of it but it is in the very
specific sense that BF was the personification of the culture of immanent
critique. We argue that it is that culture that he imbibed from God knows where
that makes him the BF whose death we all feel very sharply today.
It summarises him.
And this claim finds the strongest demonstration in his leadership of the
defunct Patriotic Youth Movement of Nigeria, (PYMN) between 1992 and 1994. The
PYMN, as many people do know, was the ‘masquerade’ behind NANS but not in the
sense in which Nigerian governments thought of it as the radicalising external
influence. It was also a platform of students but of tried and tested cadres of
the radical nationalist movement in Nigeria from the late 1970s to mid 1990s.
His leadership of
this organisation coincided with the junta commotion in the aftermath of the
June 12, 1993 elections. The commotion shook the student movement in the sense
that, notwithstanding the radical commitment, many took positions that stressed
some spirits of that radical commitment. This was not just in the
ethnic/cultural or regional sense, much as that was part of the problem. It was
also the more serious push from the promoters of ‘action’ or ‘permanent
revolution’ in response to the crisis on the ground even when the potentials as
well as the limitations of some of such actions had not been exhaustively
debated.
It is difficult to
imagine what it would have been like in the student movement if a BF were not
on the chair, supported powerfully by the late Chima Ubani, late Olaitan Oyerinde
and Ogaga Ifowodo. Tendency splits and crisis did come to the pro-democracy
movement eventually on account of June 12 but we say it here without overrating
any individuals that BF, along with the above named comrades, saved the
democratic movement in Nigeria the embarrassment of such split occurring much
earlier in the student movement.
He saved it because,
for BF, an issue was not right or wrong because it conformed to the grains of
one dogma or another. It was right or wrong based on how he saw it in the
context of the larger issue of the struggle for the expansion of the democratic
space, that is democratic space in the more profound sense of emancipation, not
in terms of mechanical, ritualistic democracy.
This attitude was not
typical of members of a group marked by substantial fallback on one school of
Marxism or another. He must have, therefore, acquired the disposition during
his First degree in Physics before enrolling for an LLB programme at the
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife as a response to the withholding of his
NYSC discharge certificate in the aftermath of his refusal to shake the hands
of a military governor who would have presented him an NYSC award certificate
rating him a star corper in the 1987/88 service year in Niger State.
The decision to
enrol for a degree in law equally brought out the dynamism in BF. Someone else
who was not that dynamic or determined might have resigned to fate, finding
justification in destiny or pleading poverty. As it turned out, it was as a
lawyer that he came into himself fully. We say so in the sense that, with law,
he could proceed with being a Socialist even when the society had not achieved
Socialism.
This is what we make of the following features of his life: the fact
that he used the law to fight injustice against the weak wherever such
occurred. His clients here included the trade unions, students, badly treated
workers and any under privileged person or persons. It is perhaps wrong to use
the word client in the sense that they did pay for his services.
He did it for free.
Two, he was the constant star in the survival of the family of many fallen
comrades, most notably the wife and children of late Chima Ubani and Anselm
Akele. It was not because he made money from law that he was doing so but
because he saw himself as a Socialist. And he didn’t think that Socialism is
only when the revolution was achieved but as a day to day duty of anyone who
professed it. Dr Abubakar Momoh has given a moving testimony of BF’s
intervention in his own case in a way that strengthens the point we are making
here.
The point must be
made though that this ‘Socialism’ predated his becoming a lawyer. In late 1997,
Steve Aluko, aka Maradona, one of the authors of this tribute had gone to
inform BF that he wanted to get married. He actually went with the lady in
question. Right there and then, however, BF wondered how Maradona could contemplate
marriage when he was scheduled to be killed by Abacha’s goons?
Did he want to
create misery by leaving behind a widow? And he was serious. But the couple
pressed on. To their greatest surprise, BF turned out to be the pillar of the
entire thing at the end of the day, In fact, he and Comrade Omolade Adunbi,
another student activist then, were the few people on the ground at the wedding
ground in Ibadan on April 4th, 1998.
It was a risky
ground because the interpretation of the SSS was that there was no marriage but
a pretext for a rally. The situation was so bad that the pastor scheduled to
join the couple locked the church and ran away. SSS operatives had obviously
told him that Maradona was a confirmed ‘trouble maker’ who should be avoided.
BF was fully on the ground to the very end. Today, the marriage is blessed with
three children. Meanwhile, the Maradona story itself in the history of radical
student unionism in Nigeria is a blockbuster waiting to be written and
published.
There is a sense in
which BF and Maradona presented part of the tension in the movement towards its
collapse in the mid 1990s. Probably as a result of the prolonged privations the
Nigerian State had subjected Maradona to as a student activist, he became born
again, adding Christian religious activism to his radical activism. BF was one
of those who were very disappointed. As usual, he said so and the two of them
argued over that.
If BF felt about anything, he must voice it out. You could
say he had no protocol when it came to that. In time, however, BF too became a
born again Christian and would vigorously take on anyone who challenged him on
that as happened between him and Comrade Adagbo Onoja in an exchange of texts
in October 2013.
Sometimes, he
carried this self-referentiality too far. Once upon a time, the congress of the
student movement at Ife decided that the Vice-Chancellor was doing certain
things that amounted to a joke carried too far in their own estimation. And
that, among other things, the Vice-Chancellor should be kidnapped and driven
round the campus in a wheel barrow.
That was when Ebun
Adegboruwa aka Big Sam was the student union president, meaning 1992/3. It
amounted to foolhardiness to go against congress when student unionism was it
in Nigeria but BF did. He didn’t just argue against the position, his own
arguments sailed through, the students backed down and the VC did not have to
be kidnapped. The logic of this story is that he could go against the ‘rabble’
but most time that he did, he always had an argument that could not be
dismissed offhandedly.
Four out of the five
writers of this tribute were all in Political Science Department of Bayero
University, Kano, when NANS Secretariat was in the university. But most core
activities of the Secretariat took place at OAU, Ile-Ife. There were funny and
serious reasons for this. One, OAU was one of the very, very few campuses in
the entire Nigeria that had no cultism at that time. So, it was safe. Two, Hussein
Abdu loved the plantain component of OAU catering regime while Adagbo Onoja
admired the ‘forest’ called OAU. Nasiru Kura had an incurable desire to always
be near Lagos.
But, in all cases,
BF was a common denominator in our perpetual attraction to Ife. He was the one
you talked about the struggle no end. He never gave excuses. None of us can
recall BF saying he would not be around one weekend or so either because he
wanted to read or wanted to go to Lagos for any social commitment or to go see
parents.
Nothing like that ever! It was with him that we would discuss in great
details the issues that were not for rally politics. The other such person was
Chima Ubani but Chima was always surrounded by the crowd. We would end up in
late Olaitan Oyerinde’s place but that would most be likely to collect the
draft of some propaganda stuff because he was the resident in that realm.
But BF’s personal and political relations with the quartet
preceded the movement of NANS Secretariat into BUK. Auwal Musa aka Rafsanjani
was the leading Islamic theologian of the Muslim Student Society, (MSS) before
he became a radical student activist. In the NANS EXCO of 1991/92, he was the
Assistant Secretary-General during which he hosted a meeting of one of the
aborted NANS Convention in BUK.
The university authority was aghast and they rusticated him. There
were local campus initiatives against the action in BUK such as push from
Kaduna comrades as well as that by the local ASUU members but it was the threat
mobilised from Lagos that got the BUK authorities to back off and annul the
punishment subsequently.
It happened that BF was the arrow head of the multiple
threats from Lagos. Yet, if Rafsanjani’s rustication had stood, the student
movement in BUK would have suffered a deadly blow because it would have been a
ready evidence for those who were waiting to say it didn’t pay to be an
activist or to move from being an ideologue of the MSS to that of NANS.
Subsequently
when Rafsanjani founded the Abuja based Civil Society Legislative Advocacy
Centre, (CISLAC), BF remained a permanent resource person whether the function
was in Abuja, Kaduna, Port Harcourt, Lagos or Jos but without ever collecting
any payment. In fact, BF became the think-tank for the civil society, drafting
much of their constitutional advocacy agenda.
And
sometimes last year when naval personnel pounced on Rafsanjani and gave him the
beating of his life for challenging them against manhandling some hapless
citizens on the pretext of environmental best practices, it was BF again who
challenged them. It was only the intervention of the Chief of Naval Staff that
stopped the naval violence from becoming one of the most sensational litigation
against such acts of recklessness.
Our evidences in
support of our major claim regarding BF’s persona, politics and overall life
have been substantially restricted to the student movement and the associated
realms. It is because that was the arena we knew him best and are collectively
most keen. We also feel that, at a time when Nigeria is suffering from a
terrible crisis of leadership from the local to the regional to the national
level, BF’s leadership when he was a student is what the country needs to know
about most. We do not have the power to wake BF from death but we have the power
to give insights into that aspect of his life. If anything said here impacts
positively on any living comrade, we would have achieved our objective.
In the same context
of poverty of leadership, we must never tire in putting on record and/or publicising
all the good things he did. By so doing, we would be conscientising our people
in relation to the models of people Nigerians should watch out for as far as
protectors of their genuine interests are concerned. This makes the compilation
of and translation of tributes to BF into the three dominant Nigerian languages
an imperative.
Finally, we may ask
this seemingly pointless question as to why so many comrades are dying. The
tribe of the genuine comrades in Nigeria is so small a population that losing
one person in every twenty years would still be such a big blow. Yet, the tribe
has lost them: Chima Ubani, Anselm Akele, Joseph Mammam, Jibril Bala, Chris Abashi,
Tom Adanbara, Olaitan Oyerinde, Festus Iyayi, Tajudeen Abdulraheem, Christie
Adanbara, Claude Ake, Omafume Onoge and now, BF, the casual, agitated,
restless, outspoken, natural, determined and deeply public spirited human
rightist, democrat, student unionist, labour lawyer and politician.
Perhaps, God knows
the best. Adieu, BF.
Steve Aluko aka
Maradona, Executive Director, CLO
Nasiru Kura, NANS
President, 1992/3
Adagbo Onoja, NANS
Sec-Gen, 1992/3, University of Warwick, UK
Auwal Musa aka
Rafsanjani, Executive Director, CISLAC, Abuja
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