Talking Points
---- Show me your hero and I will tell you who you are.
---- You know a country by the kind of people it remembers.
---- Nigeria’s unity is not negotiable because you cannot negotiate what does not (yet) exist.
----- Nigeria: Political re-structuring is not enough.
----- Adekunle Fajuyi was the first major Nigerian figure to achieve the proverbial handshake across the Niger.
----- Adekunle Fajuyi is Omoluabi in the true Yoruba sense of the word
----- Fajuyi died as a soldier. He lives on as an Idea.
My
participation in today’s event is prologued by a pleasant serendipity.
When in March this year I received a telephone call from Engineer
Francis Ojo, that wizard of nuts and bolts who also thrives as
analytical thinker, passionate nationalist, political polemicist, and
intrepid author of sizzling prose, I thought he had eavesdropped my
conversation with a fellow Nigerian three days earlier about
Lieutenant-Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, the first military governor of
Western Nigeria, and what a forgetful, ungrateful nation had done to the
remembrance of his exceptional gallantry and inspiring integrity. But
my earlier chat took place in the United States, while Mr. Ojo’s call
came, three days later, from England. Therefore, there was no way our
engineer could have overheard this chat across the vast Atlantic (no
matter the degree of his engineering wizardry!). So I was immeasurably
pleased to know that there were many of us in different parts of the
world who just couldn’t forget this remarkable soldier-leader, and are
bent on making sure that the country for which he sacrificed his life
does not.
And when Mr. Ojo told me that the ubiquitous Yinka Odumakin was
there with him (in faraway London) as he asked if I could deliver this
year’s Fajuyi Lecture, I said to myself ‘Aaah, Yinka; there comes my
July Nemesis again!’ For it was in July 2008 that Odumakin ambushed me
for the MKO Abiola Lecture; four years later and in the same month
(along with the irrepressible Pastor Tunde Bakare: bless his soul!) the
Save Nigeria Group (SNG) Lecture; now, after another four years, and
yet another July, the Fajuyi Lecture. What shall we expect in the
seventh month of year 2020; and 2024?
But this year and this month have chosen themselves as those to
remember. For, this month, this day, half a century ago, Nigeria
experienced its second coup de tat and first counter-coup. A batch of
gun-wielding mutineers, bent on evening out the ethnic scores of the
gory murders perpetrated by Nigeria’s first coup, stormed the Western
Region government house, Ibadan. Their prime target/quarry? General
Aguiyi Ironsi, the then Head of State on a visit to the Western Region
capital. But Adekunle Fajuyi, quintessential Omoluabi, refused either to
surrender or abandon his guest. The gallant soldier went down with his
Commander-in-Chief. In addition to this and several other acts of
chivalry, Fajuyi’s six-month tenure as military governor marked him out
as a man endowed with tremendous moral strength and exemplary
leadership. What principles of Omoluabism undergirded Fajuyi’s thought
and action? Why is this gallant soldier hardly ever remembered save in
his ethnic base? What does this say about Nigeria’s imperfect union, the
character of her values, the nature of her memory, the politics of her
remembrance? These are some of the questions this lecture intends to
address.
Of Heroism, Memory, and the Crises of Remembrance
In Galileo, one of his most thought-provoking plays, Bertolt Brecht,
the prodigiously inventive German playwright, poet, polemicist, and
humanist, jolts our rational faculty with his now famous confounding
adage: ‘Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes’. Like most of his
epigrammatic interventions, this one too functions like a double-edged
sword, pitilessly sharp on both edges, sounding both as a settled truism
and contestable verity. The more we try to unravel this saying, the
more it riddles itself into further complication:
1) Why should the land be ‘unhappy’ because it is ‘in need’ of
heroes? Could it be that that land has no heroes because it is so
uniformly mediocre, so inveterately ordinary, so universally depraved
that it is incapable of producing that caliber of persons who tower
above time, place, and circumstance, whose temper constitutes the
template for enviable conduct, whose significance, therefore, is deeply
felt, widely acknowledged, and vitally desirable? A land with a
positive answer to this beguiling question could be said of be afflicted
with what I have decided to call the Hero Deficit Complex (HDC), a land
with a missing ace in its grid of values.
2) Is the land ‘in need’ of heroes because it cannot function
optimally (even minimally) without the tutelage and overarching
dominance of this club of superior humans? This poser resolves itself
into other questions: when does the hero transmogrify into a crutch for a
disabled society; the pillar for their falling edifice? How ‘equal’ can
a people be who draw their strength, sustenance, even raison detre,
from those that are more equal? Can the hero really stand so tall
without the genuflection of the hero-worshippers? To put it another way,
the inevitability quotient of the hero invariably creates its own Hero
Dependency Complex (HDC)
Let’s simplify our submission so far into two direct declarative
sentences: That land is unhappy which is incapable of producing heroes;
that land is also unhappy which is always or forever dependent upon
heroes.
Despite these two premises - or because of them – the concept and
practice of heroism persists in every human society, and countless
societal institutions have collaborated in ensuring its persistence. And
as Wale Adebanwi has persuasively demonstrated (Adebanwi 2008), in Yorubaland,
heroism, and ancestor worship are mutually reinforcing, mutually
perpetuating phenomena. And in this regard, the dividing line between
god and man, the celestial and the terrestrial, the sacred and the
profane is remarkably thin, as most supernatural Yoruba notables migrate
between the two states of being with existential ease: Ogun was a
hunter/farmer before his elevation to the divinity in charge of iron and
metallurgy; Sango moved from mortal royalty to divine ascendance; while
Osun, Oya progressed from our workaday corporeal existence to goddessly
transcendence. But the journey from human to divine is never a common,
routine transition. It has to be earned through the achievement of
monumental feats and the cultivation of superhuman accretions. And, in
many cases, the extraordinary quality of the life lived must be
complemented by the unique nature of the death experienced. For the
person marked out for deification must be somebody capable of commanding
both adoration and emulation (our vertical gaze) without demanding
them; a Titan worth every syllable in the panegyric which extols his
worth.
Living heroes are powerful; those dead are doubly so, because
though dead, they are never gone. On the contrary, they are believed to
have merely transited to the realm of ancestorhood, that zone of
reverential omniscience and respectability, of unvarnished verities and
settled wisdom, beyond the giddy hustles and petty bickerings of
sublunary existence. Which is why in an apparent mix of necromancy and
cultic invocation, the present is constantly in dialogue with the past;
the verbal structure of societal communication is characterized by a
tense and aspect protocol that defies the logic of quotidian time. Greek
memory glows with the Golden Age of Pericles; the Russians are
gratefully aware that the epithet ‘great’ in ‘Peter the Great’ is true
and valid to its last letter; the English know when to invoke a Chaucer
or a Churchill; hardly one day passes in Turkey without some reverential
mention of Ataturk; at Rushmore, the United States hew out of a granite
rock four faces of those she considered the most pivotal of its
Presidents in 0ver 200 years; the brave island of Cuba, Fidel Castro is
a stanza in every song. In a most conspicuous spot in Ljubljana, the
beautiful capital of Slovenia is a huge statue of France Preseren,
patriot and patron saint of Slovenian verse whose lyric throbs in the
air each time the Slovenian anthem is sung. And coming closer home, how
can we sing Africa’s Freedom song without giving the wind the names of
Nehanda, Samoure Toureh, Lumumba, Nkrumah, Mandela, Mandela, Mandela,
Mandela?
Not all ancestors are heroes. Nor are all heroes ancestors. A
hardly surprising observation, considering the fact that while
ancestorhood is assumed/ascribed more or less like a milestone station
in a rite of passage, something akin to an inherited status, heroism is
earned/achieved invariably through arduous trials and extraordinary
accomplishments. But these two brands of beings are obligated to one
recalcitrant phenomenon: Memory, the antidote to oblivion, that
lingering resonance of the music of fame. Memory is a large meandering
river; History is its fountainhead; names are its index markers;
memorabilia and other icons of forget-me-nots are the boulders in its
fluid and fabulous fare. Remembrance is its active and vital current.
For, Memory without Remembrance is like tinder without a match; a tiger
without its leap. To remember is to spring into life, to call dormant
thoughts, passive ideas, somnolent sensations into active service; to
bring the past to bear on the present and fling a bridge between it and
the future.
Human life is fickle, finite; it is Memory which roots it to a
certain stability and significance through its (Memory’s) dominion in
the collective consciousness and the deep structure of the syntax of
being. It is Remembrance which constantly calls it forth and up to the
surface, making sure it does not end up like that priceless garment
which spends all its life in the locked-up wardrobe. Memory is action
potential; Remembrance is action actual. To a great extent, Memory
approximates the state of Being; Remembrance the process of Becoming.
Memory is the giant eagle at the bottom of the Iroko; Remembrance
is the wing which gets it to its coveted place on the tallest branch.
If Memory is the temple, Remembrance is the priest who airs its ardent
supplications.
Because Memory is so silent and Remembrance such a rare virtue, we
strive to cheat Oblivion with statues, plaques, sculptures, paintings,
myths, and tendentious facts. We inscribe eloquent epitaphs on the grave
of the silent dead and humour their hubris with defiant elegies. But
statues tumble; epitaphs fade; elegies go stale. Like their human
subjects, reputations wax and wane, wane and wax. Social death
frequently completes the rout begun by biological death. Some
reputations glow like burnished gold across the ages; others rust like
pitiable lead. Memory management has become a lucrative business in
contemporary times (consider the frantic traffic in commemorations,
dedications, citations and sundry souvenirs, and the ease with which the
art of biography writing has degenerated into the scheme of hagiography
peddling in contemporary Nigeria), but remembrance is much more
difficult to control much less manipulate. So while memory is residual,
non-obtrusive, remembrance is more deliberative, more energetic, much
more amenable to personal drive and the will to recall.
But in the last analysis, there comes a point at which a hard and
fast distinction between these two faculties becomes academic, even
frustratingly pedantic. For the two can hardly do without each other.
Remembrance needs a memory bank to draw upon; while memory can hardly do
without the currency and disseminating agency of memory. To put it in
the simplest terms, there cannot remembrance without memory; at the same
time, memory without remembrance is like a ton of gold locked away in a
dark, un-accessed vault. One of our problems in Nigeria is the low
premium we place on memory, and our dangerous inability – and
unwillingness – to remember. Col Adekunle Fajuyi, the eminent subject of
this lecture, is a prime victim of this malaise. But more on that
later. . . .
Show me your hero....
You know a country by the kind of people it chooses to celebrate and
valorize; you also know it by the kind it seeks to denounce and
denigrate. Additionally, you know a country by the caliber of people it
seeks to remember, and the type it is anxious to forget. Show me your
hero and I will tell you who you are. Because in Nigeria our memory is
so scanty and skewed, we do not only remember differently; much more
frightfully, we remember defectively. Our public spaces are filled with
images of patent criminals; our musicians pollute the wind with praise
songs for sundry scoundrels with obscenely deep pockets; countless
associations mushroom (especially in our institutions of higher
learning) peddling all manner of ‘prizes and awards’ to moneyed crooks
on a shamefully cash-and-carry basis. The Federal Republic of Nigeria
sanctions this gross devaluation of worth/integrity by the way it doles
out its ‘national honours’ to recipients many of whom are notorious
treasury looters, election riggers and suchlike political jobbers,
economic saboteurs such as the ‘round-trip’ pilgrims of the banking
sector and the phantom oil-subsidy mafia, the ‘exporters, importers, and
manufacturer’s representatives’ of a nation without factories. . . . .
.A bizarre logic rules the purpose of the Nigerian national honours
roll: the more heinous your crime against the nation, the higher the
rank of your award, the more glittering your medal, the firmer the
presidential handshake . . . .
So, those widely known to the people as abominable villains are
decorated as national heroes. Those who should be rotting away in jail
for crimes against the people are treated like ardent patriots and
showered with accolades. A damned natural process, you would be right to
say, in a vicious kleptocracy parading the mask of a decent democracy.
Nigeria is a country with no set of positive values, a place where
virtue is punished and vice is rewarded, a nation with a dwindling
reservoir of positive models and mentors.
The foregoing issues were not far from the top of my mind
throughout the composition of the poems in Early Birds, my three-volume
book of poems for Junior Secondary. When in 2001 Chief Joop Brekhout,
then owner of Spectrum Books, Ibadan, floated the idea about the
necessity of appropriate poems to cater to the literary and cultural
needs of students in the Junior secondary cadre, and his editorial team
embraced the suggestion with contagious enthusiasm, hardly did they know
they were tapping into a fervent desire I had nursed for years – to
enter into dialogue with the minds of young folks through the medium of
poetry, and get them to know that juvenile verse has a purpose and
province richer, more socially engaging than those offered by the
‘Twinkle twinkle little star’ variety. The poems in the three volumes
covered all the essential topics and themes of poems for young readers,
but they never came without a bit of ‘civics lesson’, for I have always
believed that it is part of the function of poetry to show young people
the world and where they stand in that world. For, for the poem to be
holistically beautiful, it also has to be useful.
So, in addition to so many matters of cultural and social
significance, I made sure each volume ended with poems on notable
Africans: Tai Solarin, Mabel Segun, Gabriel Okara, Chinua Achebe, Wole
Soyinka, Nelson Mandela, men and women of grace and gravitas whose lives
and ideas I consider both admirable and emulatable. When the
manuscripts were in, a member of the editorial board wondered what such
‘heavy’ names were doing in books for children. My response: my intended
readers are old enough to discern their heroes and choose their models,
and I saw no sin in creating poems which pointed them in the right
direction. Besides, no poem is innocent, not even the most naïve of
nursery rhymes. Humpty Dumpty may spring a humbug, depending on how it
is read, and by whom and to whom. I have always believed that singing
and learning are not mutually exclusive activities in matters relating
with lyrical verse.
Nigeria’s Heroes’ square is crowded with anti-heroes, and Nigerians
need to know there are many, many positive alternatives to the crooks
and scoundrels who dominate the country’s socio-economic and political
space and poison the well of its values. Call it ‘Catching them young’
or showing them the way, this literary evangelism is powered by my
belief that the songs we sing in our childhood days end up shaping the
way we think in our adult years.
Fajuyi, Omo Ayiye, Omoluabi
Were Nigeria a country with a solvent memory bank and an faculty of
active remembrance, Adekunle Fajuyi would have his statue in prominent
public spaces all over the country, and the story of his gallantry told
and retold from generation to generation. For when those mutineers
assailed the government house in Ibadan on the night of July 29, 1966,
and demanded the head of his guest, General Aguiyi-Ironsi, Nigeria’s
head of state, Fajuyi, in the true spirit of Omoluabism, refused to
betray his Commander-in-Chief who was also his guest. He stood his
ground. He barred the exit of honour from his household with his own
body, with his own life. It is worth noting that even in those urgent
and mortal moments, Fajuyi had a choice. He could have cut and run. He
could have reached for the typical Nigerian option by trading the
security of his guest for his own safety and possibly some plum position
in the new government that was sure to emerge from the coup. Had he
struck this deal and surrendered his guest, he would have triggered a
development with far-reaching personal, ethnic, and national
repercussions. Perhaps that decision would also have changed the course
of Nigerian history and its ethno-regional complexion as we know them
today. But he stood his ground. He chose the path of honour. Over my
dead body, he said, and the mutineers took him for his word. It takes
one akoni (somebody with exceptional courage and valour) to
recognize those virtues in another. This is how Akoni Wole Soyinka
remembers the fallen hero:
Honour late restored, early ventured to a trial
Of Death’s devising. Flare too rare
Too brief chivalric steel
Redeem us living, springs the lock of Time’s denial
(Idanre and Other Poems, p.54)
Noteworthy in this piece of verse is the way the key words re-arrange
themselves into a new collocation of attribution: the soldier-leader
with ‘rare’ ‘flare’ and ‘chivalric steel’ who ‘redeem[ed]’ us by
getting our ‘honour’ ‘restored’ but who, unfortunately, fell prey to
‘Death’s devising’. These are words which pay homage to the gravitas of
Fajuyi’s historic assignment as well as the resonance of his noble
personality. The latter parts of the poem deepen our admiration for a
truly remarkable leader who conquered fear and the ‘dearth of wills’;
this latent tree from which ‘soared a miracle of boughs’. Fajuyi died
like a man; now he lives like an Idea.
The events of the night of July 29 have generated different
narratives, and the Fajuyi phenomenon has lengthened into a yarn over
the past 50 years, with all manner of fictive recreations and mythic
accretions, partisan inflation and revisionist adumbrations. Just as
well: the hard copy of martyrdom hardly ever comes without the malleable
software of myth and fabulation. But for a closer look at the man
without/beyond the myth, we must pay more than a cursory attention to
those few but profoundly revealing pages in The Man Died, detailing Wole
Soyinka’s one-on-one encounters with Fajuyi the soldier and Fajuyi the
man… ..
Fajuyi and Soyinka: two men of exceptional import, without a doubt:
courageous, clear-headed, visionary, humane; one the first military
governor of the old Western Region, the other Africa’s leading dramatist
and one of the pillars of its political conscience. In just 18 pages
(pp. 144-162), we learn so much about the mind and character of this 44-
year soldier with the historic task of pacifying the Wild, Wild West
and cleaning up the bloody mayhem precipitated by months of rampant
anomie occasioned by the blatant rigging of the October 1965 elections
by the tyrannical Nigerian National Democratic Party, NNDP (frightfully
and derisively referred to as ‘Demo’).
In these few pages, we see Fajuyi’s consternation and anger at
depraved public officials who want to hang on to office by all means
even ‘when their usefulness is over’ (p. 148), and ‘The honourable
course is to resign’ (p.147). An achingly sad example is the discredited
former Chief Justice of the then Western Region who came begging to
retain his position:
But do you know what the man did? He went on his knees, there, right
there, an old man like that, a whole Chief Justice, he went down on his
knees and began begging me. I was angry. I shouted on him to get up but
he wouldn’t; he kept on saying, ‘I beg you sir’. So I walked out. When I
felt he should have recovered himself I sent the guard to go and tell
him to leave (p.147).
Evident, even audible here is the moral outrage of a leader with a
cleansing mission, a deeply conscientious crusader strongly appalled by
evil. And this moral crusader knew all too well that the crusade had to
start with himself. Days later, when Soyinka told him somewhat
accusingly ‘I saw you arriving at a function in a Rolls Royce. . .’,
Fajuyi’s response was forthright, even apologetic:
Ah, I know what you are about to say, and I’ll admit that I didn’t
like it either. But there was nothing I could do at the time. We were
nearly late and those security men had already allocated the car for me.
I was more or less pushed into it. But I agree with you entirely. It’s
disgraceful that we soldiers should take over the ostentation of those
useless politicians. (p. 153). (My emphasis)
Thereupon the Governor scaled down his automobile choice to a
Mercedes. And even then, he promised to paint that car in military
colours. And he did! Still more from the gallant soldier:
As for the rest of the cars I’ll put them up for sale. The Cadillacs,
the Rolls, all the submarines. The government could use the revenue.
(p. 253).
After reading this, you just cannot doubt that a virtue called
Accountability once had a prominent place in Nigerian governance. Fajuyi
agonized over the incipient streak of materialism among his colleagues,
as evident in some of the top officers’ scramble for Crown Lands. He
was soon tagged ‘radical’ and a certain chill, even distrust, descended
on the warm relationship between him and his somewhat pro-establishment
Commander-in-Chief. When Soyinka asked for his opinion about Ironsi’s
decision to rotate the governors, Fajuyi responded with an astounding
mix of premonition and prophecy:
To tell the truth I am not too happy about it. I would like to finish
what we’ve begun. I mean, we’ve hardly started! Still, I always remind
myself of what I criticize in others – nobody ever wants to leave. I am
beginning to fear that the army itself may not know when it is time to
go (p.159). (My emphasis)
To think that the fear so clairvoyantly expressed by Fajuyi here in
1966 came to be so painfully justified about a quarter-century later in
the diabolic despotism of the billionaire Generals and military
politicians! There goes Lt. Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, veritable Officer and
Gentleman, a soldier who sought the company of intellectuals and in
whose company they felt at home and at ease. Earnest, forthright,
sensitive, and mentally and emotionally astute, Fajuyi combined the
moral energy of a reformer with the sizzling idealism of a committed
intellectual. He possessed anger and compassion, chivalry and
vulnerability in the right proportions.
Though invested with a tempting combination of military power and
political authority, he did not wield the sword like a blind samurai; he
never forgot the right ways of being human. There goes a warrior beyond
the common run of contemporary Nigerian soldiery. For when you compare
the likes of Fajuyi with the scheming, thieving, avaricious, and utterly
dishonourable soldiers of fortune who puff around in our military
uniforms today, you are compelled to ask: where are all the good men
gone? Professor Bolaji Akinyemi (2001) intended no hyperbole, therefore,
when he extoled Adekunle Fajuyi as ‘the only hero the Nigerian army had
ever produced’.
From July 29 to June 12 – and Beyond
But why does the pendulum of this gem of a soldier-leader swing
between deification and oblivion? Why does it take so much stress, so
much strain to commemorate this hero whose remembrance we all should
find as natural as the way we breathe? Again, the political economy of
Memory and the fiendish vicissitude of Remembrance. The outpouring of
feelings and tributes which accompanied Fajuyi’s assassination in 1966
and burial in January the year after thinned out after a few months as
the country moved on to other crises: the pogrom on the Igbo, the rise
of Biafra, the civil war, the inconclusive end of the war with its
hypocritical ’No Victor, No Vanquished’ slogan, and the apparently
endless cycle of coups and counter-coups with all kinds of military
adventurers at the helm. A long, gruesome campaign for democracy forced
the military to organize the presidential polls of June 12, 1993.
Against all odds, and quite contrary to the wildest expectations of the
military, that election produced a clear winner. The crown was about to
land on the head of that winner when General Ibrahim Babangida’s
military junta stopped the music and threw the country into a tailspin.
The undeclared winner of that election, Chief M.K.O. Abiola,
insisted on his mandate. Disgraced out of power, General Babangida
passed on the baton to a feckless Interim Government which soon
collapsed under the weight of its own illegitimacy. Then came General
Sani Abacha, maximum dictator, kleptocrat, and murderer who killed those
democracy advocates he could lay his hands on and hounded the others
into painful exile. Rather than see the annulment of the June 12
election as a rape of democracy and assault on our national will, many
Nigerians soon naturalized it as a Yoruba problem. M.K.O. Abiola’s
nation-wide mandate was driven into a tribal enclave. But NADECO and a
body of other Civil Rights groups pressed on for the demand for
democracy. Unfortunately, Chief Abiola never saw democracy when it came
at last, having collapsed and died after that mysterious cup of tea
offered him in captivity, during (we must never forget) General
Abdulsalaam Abubakar’s tenure as Head of State.
The June 12 ‘debacle’ (a word deployed and made irresistibly popular
by Nigeria’s foremost journalist, Olatunji Dare) brought to the fore
once again, the Yoruba Factor in Nigerian politics. Under frequent
assault by Abacha’s killer squads, left on their own by other Nigerian
‘nations’, the Yoruba started examining their own room in the Nigerian
house. Slogans such as ‘Confederation is the answer’ flared up on
prominent pages of newspapers (The last time that statement appeared
with that kind of spectacular prominence was 1983, in the aftermath of
the grossly rigged federal elections); ‘The National Question’,
‘Sovereign National Conference’, ‘True Federalism,’, ‘Self
Determination’, etc. Not a few people started contemplating the idea of
‘Oduduwa Republic’. But most telling was the way the evocation of Yoruba
‘heroes’ came to be endowed with a prominent role in this ritual of
ethnic self-validation and the retrieval of communal self-worth. Abiola,
martyr of democracy, found a worthy predecessor in Adekunle Fajuyi:
both being icons of gallantry and extraordinary sacrifice whose light
shone beyond their ethnic base; Chief Obafemi Awolowo, unarguably the
architect of Yoruba modernism whose place/stature in Yoruba mythology is
only next to that of Oduduwa, the group’s primogenitorial avatar. At
work here is what Wale Adebanwi has aptly delineated as the ‘political
and cultural uses of memory’ (p.433); that is, the power of collective
memory, through the instrumentality of remembrance, to bolster the
communal psyche, salve and restore a wounded pride.
Yes, indeed, we know a country by the kind of people it chooses to
remember; we also know it by the kind of people it fails, or chooses,
not to remember. If Nigeria were a country with a sense of history, Col.
Adekunle Fajuyi would be a prominent member of those ‘heroes past’ it
crows so lustily about in its national anthem. But this ‘gathering of
the tribes’ (Soyinka’s phenomenally prophetic phrasing in A Dance of the
Forests, a play that was intended, most ironically, as a celebration of
the country’s independence in 1960, but which ended up as a chilling
disquisition on its imperfect union!) still totters on from error to
error, with the possibility of genuine nationhood as a distant hope. The
virus of this pathology of being has compromised the necessary health
of becoming, as tribal (I am using that epithet in full cognizance of
its pejorative anthropological accretions!) considerations continue to
trump national imperatives, and a dreadful vice on the national stage
may be an enviable virtue at the tribal level. The likes of Adekunle
Fajuyi are not recognized as national heroes because there is as yet no
‘nation’ to be a hero in or of.
This is why the National Question in Nigeria is perennially in search
of a National Answer as ethno-regional loyalties ossify into deafening
walls, and each group is fixated on its own survival most times at the
risk of the national collective. No country can ever achieve nationhood
when its component parts are as incorrigibly heterogeneous and so
mutually antagonistic as Nigeria now is and has always been. This is why
those who blissfully aver that ‘Nigeria’s unity is not negotiable’
should quickly reconsider the dangerously complacent certitude in their
avowal. This was one of the cheesy slogans which propelled the rhetoric
of the Nigerian civil war, and it rode to victory in a crass, largely
un-interrogated cavalry. But that was in another century, another
millennium, another ideological ferment, long before Benedict Anderson’s
idea of the Nation as an ‘imagined’ community, and the nation itself as
a shiftable, shifting arrangement/artifice with its own unfair share of
the profound indeterminacy that is so indigenous to the
postmodernist/poststructuralist condition. Besides, those who talk so
glibly about ‘Nigeria’s unity’ are under the perilous impression that
there is a ‘unity’ to ‘negotiate’, in the first place. But a closer look
tells us that we are still a thousand miles and a thousand moons from
that unity, and that we need to work really hard and honestly for it to
come within our grasp. General Alani Akinrinade said this (and much
more) when he declared with authoritative candour in last Sunday’s
Guardian: ’There is nothing like unity in this country’ (p.15). Closely
related to this viewpoint are Professor Banji Akintoye’s numerous
writings about the National Question, particularly his recent
interventions in The Nation (July 14, July 21). Let’s tilt our ears in
the learned griot’s direction:
There is no country on earth that is beyond being dismembered or
dissolved. Throughout human history, countries have arisen, flourished,
and then lost some parts, or broken apart. (The Nation, p. 19)
Some of the eminent scholar’s views on this matter are decidedly
controversial, and many readers might be constrained to see Professor
Akintoye’s statements from the prism of his passionate Yoruba
nationalism, but the intellectual sagacity and sheer un-ignorable force
behind the historical antecedents which inform his submissions make
them so compelling for those interested in a genuine discussion of
Nigeria’s National Question. Time to hold the bull by the horns; you do
not solve a problem by wishing it away, or by denying its conspicuous
existence.
As yet, Nigeria has no ‘unity’ to negotiate or not to negotiate.
Which is why President Muhammadu Buhari must not only read the reports
of the 2015 National Confab; he owes himself and the country a critical
duty to read, digest, deliberate on, and identify its implementable
parts- beyond all partisan and ethno-regional considerations. To wave
off the lingering call for a re-structuring of this country is to risk
the possibility of suicide through denial. Fredrick Lugard’s expedient
contraption has been aching in every joint since 1914. If the house has
not fallen according to Karl Maeier’s apocalyptic prognostication, it is
simply because Nigeria has been extraordinarily lucky. The Avenging
Angels of the Niger Delta, the resurgent Biafra agitators, the
increasingly violent clashes between nomadic herdsmen and native
populations, and other ethno-regional and religious eruptions in
different parts of Nigeria are all pointers to the cracks in the walls
of the house that Lugard built for the glory of the British Empire. The
component parts have never met on any genuinely democratic platform to
negotiate the terms of their co-existence. We cannot afford not to do
something about this imperfect union. To refuse to re-structure is to
prepare to de-structure.
But there is a vital need to scrutinize the word ‘restructure’ and
interrogate its promiscuous connotations in our current political
lexicon. For that term has become a mantra, a miracle code, and sound
bite in the mouths of political opportunists, and some vengeful
incantation in the arsenal of those temporarily out of power – but
trying to scheme their way back to it. In other words, the Nigerian
union is perfect if you are in the saddle, and out of joint only when
you are out of control. Besides, the ‘re-structuring’ we need must go
beyond the surface structure of the polity and reach far into the deep
structure of the economy. For it is absolutely impossible to establish
any political stability on the foundation of the present consumptive,
prebendal, and pathologically unproductive economy with its suicidal
dependency on oil. Is anyone talking about the moral structure of a
country with a few bloated billionaires and millions of impoverished,
disarticulated people? The way things stand today, every corner of
Nigeria is a potential den of hungry Avengers.
The Yoruba strand of the National Question narrative deserves a
thorough, hard-nosed, and visionary appraisal. Those who call for a
relative autonomy that would allow Nigeria’s federating units
appreciable room to develop their own way have their fingers right on
top of the problem. For that, indeed, is the substance, soul and spirit
of true federalism. But we need to find a way of doing this without
allowing it to degenerate into a good-we vs bad-they; civilized-we vs
primitive-they; advanced-we vs backward-they Manichaeism that ends up
trumpeting the false superiority of one ethnic group and the assumed
inferiority of the other(s). In other words, we must make sure that our
‘Yoruba Agenda’ does not bottom out as ‘Yoruba Exceptionalism’ with its
attendant triumphalist provincialism and hubristic extremisms. For the
separate ‘Yoruba Nation’ that is being canvased in certain quarters can
never hope to be a nation of Angels. In other words, there is hardly any
virtue or vice in the larger Nigerian body politic that is not in the
Yoruba part of it. Much like other ethnic ‘nations’ in Nigeria’s
‘multi-national’ arrangement, the Yoruba have their own fair share of
virtuous nation-builders and vicious nation-wreckers, consummate
democrats and unrepentant ballot-riggers, conscientious citizens and
conscienceless cesspools of corruption.
Furthermore, we must never underestimate the inevitable perils of
homogeneity, the debilitating sameness in the cultural and
socio-political gene pool that often breeds one-party states and their
attendant despotic life presidencies, the kind of sameness that
precipitated Somalia’s implosion prior to its eventual explosion.
Forgive my skepticism as you consider this poser: if we cannot make
Nigeria work together, is there any guarantee that we could make it work
apart/in parts? The poet who sings an ode to diversity and difference
couldn’t have chosen her/his Muse more judiciously. The avid Snooper
Tatalo Alamu sums it all up so cogently with this characteristically
brilliant remarks:
President Buhari needs not to be afraid of restructuring, but he
should be wary of those who use the slogan of restructuring to preach
hate and the summary dismemberment of the country. He should also be
mindful of those who scream against restructuring as a strategy of
keeping the nation in fossilized underdevelopment and Stone Age
depredations simply to perpetuate an unjust system and its entrenched
privileges. (The Nation, p.3)
Without a shred of doubt, there is so much in the life and legacy of
Adekunle Fajuyi, the great man whose memory we celebrate, that speaks to
the inward-rooted, outward-looking philosophy, the plural, tolerant,
accommodating Omoluabism that is the core and guiding principle
of Yoruba culture and science of being; that amplitude of spirit, that
unstinting magnanimity that has always lifted our gaze beyond the
parapets of jingoism and ethnic chauvinism. These are the virtues that
have seen us through the turbulent upheavals of the past; they are the
sure path to our ability to survive - and thrive - in the future. We are
celebrating a Yoruba man who chose to go down with his guest and
Commander-in-Chief who was Igbo, a true leader who saw office as
service, who regarded the entire country as his political and moral
constituency. A man so proud to be Yoruba yet so proud to be something
more than, something beyond, that. We remember him well when and if we
keep his enlightened, ecumenical spirit in focus, this man who placed
such vital premium on loyalty and integrity, this man who taught us all a
new way of being human.
The Road to Lalupon (seven hearty cheers to the authors of that title
and its touchingly polysemic evocation!) is still long and snared, its
palm trees pock-marked by the bullets of the mutineers of an unstable
polity, the green leaves still droop with the blood of akoni ogun
(brave warrior); the wind is still astir with the mad music of the gun.
And there are still big questions begging for answers: is Lalupon a
little comma in the sentence of our national discourse? Is it a terminus
or a starting point; a cardinal spot or mere stop-over on our mapless
search for nationhood? Is it a theatre or a temple, a well-paved path or
a thorn-benighted crossroads? Whatever the answer may be, from Ado
Ekiti to Lalupon is, no doubt, a fateful distance. From the heroic
sacrifice of a long-gone Akikanju to the monstrous sacrilege of
contemporary moral cretins, a long insufferably disturbing stretch. Once
there was a soldier; now we are saddled with cannibalistically corrupt
mercenaries in military uniform. The incomparable Fajuyi must be wincing
in his grave today.
Yes, indeed, you know a country by the kind of people it remembers;
you also know a country by the kind of people it chooses not to
remember. Remembrance is an enabling companion of Memory; and also its
handmaiden. So there goes Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, the soldier-leader for
whom valour was a prime virtue, brave in battle, brave beyond it;
paragon and parable. First true Nigerian to attempt that proverbial
handshake across the Niger – with his own life. But so far, Nigeria has
shunned that handshake, forcing that generous, idealistic hand to coil
back to its startled pocket. Yes, were Nigeria a nation, the likes of
Fajuyi would have their statues in every state capital in the country.
But Nigeria is not yet a nation, not even a country if by that we mean
an organized, coherent entity with mutually respecting parts bound by a
set of identifiable (positive) values. Omoluabi Adekunle Fajuyi lived
for that dream. It was for its sake he gave his life. His dream
challenges our despair; his idealism upbraids the crass ordinariness of
our leap of faith. We owe this great man a memory unencumbered by petty
politics; a remembrance beyond the strictures of tongue and tribe.
I thank the Think Tank of the Association of Yoruba
Professionals (Egbe Majeobaje), Egbe Majeagbagbe) for inviting me to
deliver this lecture; for making sure we do not forget.
I thank you all for listening.
Ibadan, Nigeria Niyi Osundare
July 26, 2016
*I gratefully acknowledge Professor Wale Adebanwi’s assistance
with the provision of research sources for this lecture much as I
appreciate his seminal ideas on the cardinal issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment