Tracking Taju’s political roots

'Ogbomosho people integrate into other peoples’ cultures; they allow inter-marriage, unlike Offa people. They were regarded as the "shield of Yoruba"; warriors who can defend themselves. They never became conquered.'
Tunde Asaju, 18 June 2009

'They have been very wandering about all over Nigeria. They are a very accommodating kind of people. They can just flow with all cultures. They catch one niche for themselves and take it easy. They do business not like Igbo type that is cutthroat; and want to control everything. They learn the language and speak it.'
Debrah Ogazuma, 18 June 2009

'Their success generated local resentment but they also did a lot of things for the people. The money that a local woman leader in Jos used to buy a house from a departing European miner was given to her by one of the most successful Ogbomosho businessman in Jos. He also paid school fees for local children, one of whom later became deputy senate president (1999–2007). But they never lost contact with their home. My father left Jos in 1974 and returned to Ogbomosho and became the Seun/Oba.'
Aderemi Oyewumi, 19 June 2009

'Funtua was a railway town which attracted a variety of ethnic groups. The radical Northern Elements Progressive Union, NEPU, could win in urban areas where control by emirs, district heads and village heads was weak. In 1958 Wada Nas was one of the 7 NEPU candidates elected to the Northern Legislative Assembly. He told a story of being posted to Kaita as a school teacher. Because word went around that he was a NEPU supporter, just before he arrived the district head had all the windows in his teacher’s house blocked with mud. No air came in and he had to sleep with the door open. At night a drummer was going around warning people not to have anything to do with him. He could not buy cigarettes. When he went to hire a bicycle to travel to Katsina town to buy provisions for himself, nobody would hire a bicycle to him. He had to walk 12 miles both ways once a week to buy all his needs for the week. Taju’s people could support NEPU because they were beyond the direct control of the local traditional power structure.'
Mahmud Jega, 18 June 2009

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem was born four months after Nigeria’s independence on 1 October 1960. He did not experience the brutal measures used by the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) to shut out electoral incursions into the North by Action Group and the National Convention of Nigeria and Cameroons, led by Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe respectively. The NPC was also most troubled by an internal radical socialistic challenge to the feudal-colonial administrative dictatorship by the Aminu Kano-led Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU). Britain had learnt from the Mahdist liberation in Sudan to avoid forcing the hands of a local political class that would use the appeal of Islam’s injunctions to arouse a nationalist anti-colonial liberation war. In Nigeria they found and left a defeated Fulani ruling class in power so long as they were willing to pay taxes (including providing hundreds of thousands of subjects to provide forced labour to construct railroads, roads, government building and mine tin), and produce cotton and groundnuts, as demanded by industrialists in Britain. As anti-colonial politics crept across Nigeria, British officials helped rig elections to ensure that radical elites did not inherit power in Northern Nigeria.

At the larger level, Britain had reversed their formula in Sudan by allowing only minimal Western education in predominantly Muslim and Hausa–Fulani Northern Nigeria, recruiting the bulk of the military from the non-Muslim ethnic groups in the middle zone of the country that was administered as part of the Northern Province/Region. Western education had open support in the south-west, south-east and south–south parts of the country. The familiar pattern of those recruited into the civil service coming from a region different from where the bulk of the armed forces were drawn from was also Nigeria’s inheritance from colonial social engineers.

Taju’s Yoruba people came from the south-west and, as Aliyu Ahmed from Kano put it in an interview, 'education happens to be their second religion'. When the rulers of Ilorin rejected the American Baptist missionaries’ request for land to build their base, the ruler of Ogbomosho, that bordered Ilorin, readily welcomed them. The Ogbomosho people emerged with a tradition of members of the same family amicably belonging to the Islamic and Christian religious faiths. Taju’s father sent him to a Baptist school – assumed to provide better quality education at that level – even though a government-run school was only next door from their family’s home at Funtua. That accommodation of education provided by Baptist missionaries would subsequently enable Ogbomosho to provide top personnel in Nigeria’s federal bureaucracy, including Chief Sunday Adewusi, the inspector general of the police during the Shehu Shagari administration (1979–83). Their strategic location as the 'gateway' to the North facilitated their role in commerce and migration to towns all across northern Nigeria. Chief Samuel Akintola, Chief Awolowo's deputy and who would break ranks with him in the rush of events that led to Nigeria’s civil war (1967–70), came from Ogbomosho. He was rumoured to have had a Hausa mother and a secret communications channel with Awolowo’s political opponents in Northern Nigeria, including Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the prime minister of the northern region.

Taju got brilliant scores in his secondary school examination results in all subjects including what was regarded as the difficult 'science subjects' (namely physics, mathematics and chemistry) and was admitted to Bayero University on a Kaduna State scholarship to study for a degree in engineering. He was also strongly lobbied to enrol in the Islamic Studies department. He fought back by going into a ‘lectures-attendance hunger strike’ by sitting all day long – for several weeks – at the office of the Dean until he was allowed to enrol as a social science student. He attributed this obsession to probably having grown up as a very tiny lad who wished to talk back to people taller and bigger than him. If he could not have physical power he could turn to the power of the uttered word. His verbal 'assertiveness' would become legendary and get him into much trouble during his days as a student politician.

Aliyu Ahmed, an executive assistant at the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) in Abuja recalls that Taju told an audience at Ahmadu Bello University in 2005 that the institution denied him a degree despite the fact he spent three days a week attending lectures on its campus.

He had escorted Dr Patrick Wilmot, a radical anti-apartheid lecturer who had been deported from Nigeria in 1988 without an explanation by the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida. He was one of Taju’s heroes that drew Taju away from his lecture halls at Bayero. While Wilmot was Jamaican, Taju had a home-grown hero in Dr Yusuf Bala Usman, a radical historian who had been converted by Franz Fanon’s work 'Black Skin, White Mask' into a devastating critic of colonial rule and its deception of the Hausa–Fulani aristocracy into seeing the British imperialists 'as friends'. Bala Usman taught history at Ahmadu Bello University and had the strategic social advantage of being a member of the ruling feudal class in the Katsina Emirate. Aliyu Shehu said in a Voice of America radio interview with Saka Ssali that Tajudeen and Tanimu Kurfi, the current economic advisor to President Umaru Yar’Adua, used to revel in rendering memorised whole essays by Bala Usman. That was a measure of their passionate adoration of Bala Usman’s typically eloquent, combative and brilliant oral and written 'documentary and oratory radicalism'. Bala Usman was a follower of NEPU and its successor, the Peoples Redemption Party.

TAJU AND NIGERIA’S CIVIL WAR 1969–70

The civil war, in which an estimated 3 million people died, was the explosion of the brew generated by the British colonial social engineering of Nigeria. Western-educated elites who expected to inherit power from departing British officials found an increasingly intolerable constitutional train which ensured that if northern political classes had the political savvy to block the growth of support for political parties with roots in the south-west and south-east of the country, they would hold power in Nigeria forever. A British-crafted electoral formula assured Northern politicians 50 per cent of the seats in the federal legislature, while they also had the option of competing for 50 per cent of the seats allocated to the southern region. An increasingly acrimonious political rhetoric combined with a coup-viral infection (served by American and Israeli intelligence officers to particular Nigerian military officers who served in the United Nations contingent to end the civil war and secession in Congo) would incite a military coup as the only wedge left to open the skies of power in Nigeria for aggrieved southern politicians. The military coups of January and July 1966 found the young Taju old enough to recognise elements of conflict as they raged around him.

Taju recalled (in several oral discourses in his Westlands flat in a Nairobi suburb) that his father hid frightened Igbo fugitives inside rooms in their Funtua home and also stood in front of his house to ward off those who sought to hack them to death. The anti-Igbo pogroms of July 1966 were in retaliation to the January 1966 coup, which came to be seen as mounted by Igbo officers to pave the way to their taking power away from the ruling Hausa–Fulani political class. The feudal power structure was suspected to be the culprit in that pogrom. The Yoruba in northern Nigeria, however, escaped attacks. The fact that Chief Akintola, himself a victim in the January coup, was perceived as an ally of the top leadership of the Northern Peoples Congress may have also won a degree of immunity for the Oshogbo sub-group. It is probable that Taju’s subsequent radical critique of the conservative North held within it echoes of the anti-Igbo violence and ethno-religious intolerance that Taju witnessed as a toddler.

TAJU AND THE 1993 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

Taju recalls with much elation the use of campus politics to harass President Shehu Shagari’s National Party of Nigeria (NPN) government at the federal level and to support the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) government in Kano State under Abubakar Rimi. He had a live and dramatic criticism of President Shagari which and in retrospect he found it most remarkable that he was neither interrupted in the act nor picked up later by security operatives. Shagari, a trained school teacher himself, had regarded his vehemence as the harmless bubbling of youth. Dr Bala Mohammed, a lecturer in Political Science, was another idol who conducted informal nightly seminars in his house for Taju and a group of radicals. He was a socialist ideologue with rare skills in the use of the Hausa language to reach out to peasants and the urban underclass. As a political advisor to Governor Rimi he was killed and burnt alive in 1981 when the ruling class in Kano found attempts to undermine the legitimacy of emirate power intolerable and subversive. By 1983 Shagari’s regime had rolled back the wings of democracy in Nigeria, culminating in rigging elections most states held by opposition parties with impunity and the excessive use of federal state violence.

Taju repeatedly said how grateful he was to his Ugandan teacher at Bayero University, Dr Yolamu Barongo, for dissuading him from joining Nigeria’s armed forces. Barongo instead got him to fill out a form for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. Taju was convinced that had he been involved in the armed forces he would have been executed in one of the numerous attempted military coups that became fashionable in the successive military dictatorships that ruled Nigeria from 31 December 1983 to 29 May 1999. Being at Oxford gave him opportunity to turn his energies towards the pan-African scene and join a familiar Ogbomosho people’s tradition. Oyewumi notes that Ogbomosho people have settled as far afield as Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire to the west and Cameroon in the east. His own father in 1958 visited Paris as a commercial agent of a French company with branches in Jos. On his way back he had come off the plane in Accra and visited Ogbomosho immigrants in newly independent Ghana. Cross-border and migrant traders had long been anchors of people-based pan-Africanism. It was a theme deeply etched in Taju’s ancestral wit by family tales of relations gone far and away.

The democratic train returned to Nigeria with the 1993 elections. It was less 'free and fair' than the 1979 elections. The military had 'banned' politicians with roots as far back as the 1979–83 civilian regimes from contesting elections and leading political parties. In a ploy to stop the growth of socialist and anti-feudal political parties (as the 1979 elections had given signals of), the military created two political parties: one 'a little-to-the-left' and the other 'a little-to-the-right'. It is a formula that American managers of change had used in Brazil and Indonesia to shut out radical movements. The ruling military junta in Nigeria had trained at American military academies that taught doctrines which emphasised the importance of the military elites in Africa, Asia and Latin America creatively managing social, economic and political change to undercut the appeal of communism in their countries. The ‘leftist’ Social Democratic Party (SDP) contested the 1993 elections against the ‘rightist’ National Republican Convention (NRC).

Coming within a context of the growing rejection of military and civilian groups from northern Nigeria holding top positions from 1960 to 1993 (with a brief period when General Olusegun Obasanjo inherited power from the slain Murtala Mohammed over the 1976–79 period), the SDP candidate Chief Moshood Abiola ran aided by a political wind that rallied other groups against continued Hausa–Fulani domination.

That political wind provoked a generalised wish to see control of the presidency transferred to southern Nigeria. That overarching goal made southern and northern Christian leaders and their followers settle for a southern Yoruba–Muslim candidate paired with another Muslim from a large Kanuri northern minority group who were widely perceived as excluded from the 'Hausa–Fulani hegemony'. The military managers of the 'transition' to civilian rule had made sure that Hausa–Fulani political challengers were excluded. General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, Adamu Ciroma and Umaru Shinkafi had had their victories in party primaries cancelled to pave way for the little-known Bashir Tofa to contest against Abiola. Abiola had prepared for this contest by throwing his wealth into supporting philanthropic activities all over Nigeria. His ownership of the Daily Concord, the Sunday Concord, Concord Magazine and several local-language newspapers ensured that his largesse was widely publicised. His ownership of an airline also helped his election campaign’s transport needs. Above all, he benefited from an intensive campaign by Yar’Adua which had vigorously criticised the failure of past Hausa–Fulani leaders to deliver development to their own people and the rest of the country, an attack which got its punch from Yar’Adua's being a defector from that political aristocracy.

Self-interested reports about the 1993 election include claims by Frederick Fasehun, national president of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) that 'on June 12, 1993 most Nigerians decided to speak with one voice, disregarding primordial sentiments, divergent tongues, religious inclinations and political divides to elect Bashorun Moshood Abiola'.[1] Kamal Tayo Oropo states that the 'two party system introduced at that time produced two Muslim candidates to slug it out at the polls' but ignored calculations by the power groups in the SDP seeking to appease Muslim voters in the north and appealing to a huge Yoruba ethnic vote with family traditions of harmonious religious affiliations within family households. Calls by Yoruba intellectuals and politicians (notably the widely influential Chief Bola Ige) for Yorubas to revolt against 'Hausa–Fulani apartheid in Nigeria' and to use the Hutu formula against the Tutsi in the 1994 Rwanda genocide were carried in the Sunday Tribune newspaper. It solidified Yoruba ethnic support behind Abiola.

The larger picture was a little more complex. Before the election day, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Redemption Party in the 2007 election, notes that 'Abiola was largely supported by the North, south-east and south–south.' He insists that 'the rich and powerful elite of the south-west never wanted Abiola to be president… When Abiola was campaigning for the presidency they opposed him openly.'[2] When it was clear that Abiola was winning, the military cancelled the election. It was a virtual repeat of the scenario in Algeria in 1992 when it was clear the 'Islamists' were going to win by a landslide.

Various explanations continue to be offered for the 'annulment of June 12'. The latest is by Dr Victor Omololu Olunloyo, the former governor of Oyo State in the Yoruba heartland. He claims that:

'Abiola moved too close with the military. He operated contracts with them. He transacted businesses with them and helped them to transfer money to their foreign bank accounts. He [Abiola] knows their accounts. How could they have allowed him to now come around and be their president? Somebody … who knew every secret in the military and of military men; they knew that if someone like him became their president, they would have been in soup because of their secrets'.[3]

Whatever factors were at play, the Yoruba elite disregarded the fact that Abiola’s appeal was so strong across most of northern Nigeria that he defeated Tofa in his home state of Kano. They quickly moved to accuse all 'Hausa–Fulani' (a concept which came to mean all ethnic groups in northern Nigeria) as holding the conviction that a Yoruba man would never be allowed to rule Nigeria. Balarabe Musa expressed this point thus: 'The struggle to validate the annulled election was hijacked by ethnic bigots.'

Taju joined this 'hijacked' struggle. Aliyu Ahmed reports that he was introduced to the audience at Ahmadu Bello University, which welcomed Patrick Wilmot as 'one of the brains behind Radio Kudirat', the underground radio station that broadcast counter-propaganda campaigns against General Sani Abacha’s murderous dictatorship from 1993 to his death in June 1998. This was a most dangerous affair since assassinations had become a tool of governance under Abacha. Alhaja Kudirat was Abiola’s wife who was shot in the head and died as she drove to the Canadian High Commission offices in Lagos to lobby for the release of her detained husband. The use of open political violence by officialdom had again returned to Taju’s life.

TAJU'S EMBRACE OF KENYAN POLITICS

The migratory tradition of Ogbomosho people and their 'flow' into host cultures saw them assume political posts in Ghana and other parts of Nigeria. Tajudeen expressed this by throwing himself unreservedly across an Africa-without-borders. At a reception by a Nigeria group working for international agencies in Nairobi, his joining the UN was widely treated with disbelief. What was a communist doing inside a conservative organisation? Had the collapse of the Soviet Union brought in so much cynicism and defeatism and abandonment of ‘Ship Socialism’ among even the most trenchant critics of imperialism in Africa? Taju’s fight-back came through his Pan-African Postcard writings each Thursday. It also came with his explosion of the potential for implementing pan-Africanism and the campaign against poverty and the other goals of the UN Millennium Campaign. His excitement in seeking to achieve targets of millions of people all across Africa 'standing up against poverty' was clearly a new dimension in Ogbomosho’s doctrine of flowing into other communities being combined with actively seeking to invent and build that trans-Africa community.

The 2007 elections in Kenya enveloped Taju as he built his UN-based campaign. The themes in its river of contest were familiar to Taju in light of his background in Nigeria, albeit located in a different manner. The call from 'majimboism' in Kenya appeared similar to the clamour for 'decentralisation' or 'true federalism' in Nigeria. Differences were, however, significant. Majimboism had roots in land once taken from groups in the Rift Valley by European settlers. With the end of Mau Mau, British politicians in London and settlers in Kenya harnessed land as a weapon for nurturing inter-ethnic conflict between the Kalenjin and the Kikuyu. KANU’s (Kenya African National Union) nationalist appeal could be combated by departing white settlers selling land to Kikuyu labourers and not giving land back to their ancestral owners. In failing to insist on giving priority to giving land to the landless and holding back elites from buying land from white settlers, the colonial government allowed itself the option of stoking black-on-black conflict and dressing it in new ethnic clothes all across the Rift Valley and beyond.

Reports by the Kenya Human Rights Commission show that from 1988 to 2002 KANU returned to this colonial model of conflicts over land at election time, but this time KANU was not the victim but the exploiter of violence. The KANU youth wings used violence against those expected to cast ethnic votes to political parties associated with immigrant ethnic groups with land titles acquired in the Rift Valley and beyond. It is not clear if Taju urged Kofi Annan and other mediators to propose the redistribution of large landed territory in Central Province to take pressure away from the landless and unemployed and the Rift Valley coastal and Uasin Gishu areas.

Nigeria's 'decentralisation' had been animated by elites wishing assured access to oil money through contracts awarded by state governments where their ethnic groups or political parties are in power. It had never been used to inflict violence against ethnic groups of opposition political parties. It could be argued that religious violence in urban areas like Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi and Sokoto have been used to divert attention away from the failures of ruling groups to deliver development to their own peoples.

The concept of 'apartheid' has also echoed in Nigeria. It had no link with land being expropriated by a minority group and withdrawing the citizenship of its former owners. It also had no link with forced labour by the dispossessed. It was limited to an ethnocentric attitude in which a group insists on holding top posts in government as if by birthright. Often officials were not promoted to top positions and new entrants were simply elevated to over these officials regardless of the level of experience and qualifications. In the awarding of contracts preference goes to persons whose kith and kin are in control of political power. In Nigeria this attitude to power is claimed to be so widely shared that its critics are only differentiated by being out of power. A federal injunction was inserted in the constitution to tame this fatal virus. It stipulated that all publicly funded institutions must reflect 'federal character' in their personnel. It is plausible to argue that a leading faction of Nigeria’s ruling elite created the 'June 12 1993' affair as a strategy for both shaming and frightening the faction that held onto the notion of power being monopolised by one ethnic group. That perspective would allow us to accommodate the consensus that threw up Barack Obama as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in American politics. It is a frontier that would have come readily to Taju to recommend even though tempers in Kenya would have been too volatile to consider it as rather slow.

For Taju’s action-oriented perspective, it was tempting to turn to the model of elite-led mass demonstrations that carried the momentum in the 'National Democratic Campaign Organisation (NADECO). 'Ethnic bigots' threw the 'Yoruba nation' into a fight against Abacha’s repressive machine while keeping in view open windows for a negotiated consensus to ensure that one of their own would assume the presidency of Nigeria. The difference was that the fight did not involve a grassroots struggle for land, did not involve the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of people and did not involve inter-ethnic violence and counter-violence. NADECO’s resort to a permanent occupation of the streets was terminated by the sudden and seemingly mysterious death of Abacha. It is not clear if he was assassinated. His death may, however, have been balanced by the death of Abiola while in detention, thereby placating both the Yoruba power-seekers who wanted power without Abiola at the top of Aso Rock and those in the military who wished for a president who was ignorant of their past economic crimes against the Nigerian economy.

It is not clear if Taju explored this option in the Kenyan situation before and after the post-election violence exploded. It is worth noting that anti-Hausa–Fulani violence broke out only after NADECO had achieved the negotiated goal of getting into office a person that was Yoruba in body but Nigerian and 'Hausa–Fulani lackey' with the assumption of the presidency by Olusegun Obasanjo. That violence broke out mainly in Lagos under the agency of Oodua Peoples Congress. They seemed to wish to achieve the Fanonian goal of regaining their sense of dignity by shedding the blood of the Hausa–Fulani people (meaning all those from northern Nigeria) resident in southern Nigeria (mainly Lagos and Shagamu urban areas in the south-west zone) and forcing them into flight back to their homeland. Northerners would, presumably, return with their shoulders stooped a little. Taju wrote about the paradoxical negotiated formula that brought Obasanjo to power but never mentioned the violence perpetrated by Oodua Peoples Congress. For an immigrant with new roots in Funtua (in Hausa–Fulani territory), this would be anathema. Moreover, for a man who in his early years had witnessed the horrors of a pogrom against Igbos in his own neighbourhood, violence would have been slow in coming to be recommended.

Whatever decisions Taju made, I saw him in the immediate post-election violence do so in close contact with the best trans-ethnic and international minds and hearts he could mobilise under joint efforts to find solutions. His pan-Africanism would not have been compatible with the stand-apart and ‘stay-behind-closed-doors’ stance that would have been expected of a UN employee while Kenyans struggled with pains of nation-building.

* Okello Oculi is the executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

REFERENCES

[1] The Guardian, 12 June 2009.
[2] Daily Trust, 12 June 2009, p.2.
[3] Daily Trust, June 12 2009.