Opinion
Was Bola Ige’s murder avoidable?
Could Chief Ajibola Ige, former governor of old Oyo State, ex-Attorney General of the Federation and foremost apostle of Yoruba’s recent ancestor, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, have escaped the gruesome death that took his life on December 23, 2001 if he had chosen the sobriquet “Demosthenes,” rather than “Cicero”? Ige’s gruesome murder and the unfortunate circumstances surrounding it have attracted mottled commentaries in the last 20 years.
This was the crux of the intellectual spat that respected professor of Political Science, my Master’s class teacher at the University of Ibadan and former Minister of Education, Tunde Adeniran and I engaged in after the death of Ige. Writing an elegy to the murdered wordsmith, orator and elder statesman, a piece I entitled Between Ige, Cicero and Demosthenes, in my Sunday Tribune column offering of March 10, 2002, I had concluded that probably, the name “Cicero” had spiritually attracted to Ige his fatal end.
Perhaps, if Ige had adopted the sobriquet “Demosthenes,” a Greek philosopher whose end was not as fatal as that of his Roman compatriot, Cicero, Ige probably would not have met such a ghastly fate in the hands of his traducers. I had strongly but passionately argued that the name, Cicero forebode a disastrous ending and Ige would have done well to avoid it. Adeniran, in a chapter he entitled “Bola Ige’s complex political philosophy,” in the book entitled, Bola Ige: The Passage of a Modern Cicero, while appreciating the arguments, he disagreed with the unscience of my postulation and sought to divorce a fatalistic connect between the sobriquet and fate of the assassinated minister.
My argument was that, granted that Marcus Tillius Cicero – Ige corrected us that the name’s pronunciation was Kikero and not Si-se-ro – and Demosthenes were both imbued with great oratorical prowess and were the greatest of their time in Rome and Greece respectively. Ige’s path with Cicero crossed in that, like him, Cicero held several political offices and became governor of Cilicia, wrote the first and second Phillipic and was equally assassinated on December 7, 43 BC, Demosthenes, whose life was wrapped up in same vocations like Ige’s, was also an orator whose life was devoted to law practice, philosophy and politics and who also wrote three Phillipics. The third Phillipic, which he entitled, On the Peace (346 BC) had as its thrust a call for a cessation of the war of Yoke and Macedon. Though attempts were made to execute Demosthenes, he fled and thereafter swallowed poison to avoid his approaching captors. Ige too was a brilliant writer who sermonized in treaties and on campaign rostrums.
Cicero, Roman statesman, lawyer and scholar, was known for upholding republican principles during the final civil war years which led to the destruction of the Roman Republic. He was a great Roman orator and writer whose writings on rhetoric, philosophy and other political treatises stood out. Like Ige, as a lawyer, Cicero’s appearances in court recorded profound legal firsts. His brilliant defence of Publius Quinctius and Sextus Roscius, the latter having been charged in a fabricated crime of parricide, stood him out. Cicero was an associate of the political trio of Julius Caesar, Crassus and Pompey who were called the First Triumvirate. He was sorely hated by the three Roman leaders, Octavian, Lepidus, and Anthony, who eventually ordered his execution. Of the three, it was Anthony who disdained him most.
Condemned to death, alongside his son, brother and nephew, Cicero fled to the Italian town of Caieta. There, Laenas pulled out Cicero’s head from a litter where he was hiding, dismembered it from his body and cut off his hand as well. While Ige was brutally gunned down at Similia Court, Bodija, Ibadan that dark December night at the age of 71, Cicero met his own gruesome death at the age of 63. Anthony was so delighted at the news of Cicero’s assassination that he gave Laenas, who brought the news to him, 250,000 denarii for the death of “the man who had been his greatest and most aggressive personal enemy.” He kept Cicero’s head and hand on a rostrum before the table where he had his meals, for a very long time.
It is not difficult to come to grips with the fatal reality that, 20 years after the death of this Nigeria’s affable Minister of Justice, the Nigerian state has literally left his coagulated blood as an advertisement of its inhumanity and an encouragement to would-be mindless murderers that Nigeria is at home with their nefarious activity. From empirical evidence of the last two decades-plus democratic “governmenting” in Nigeria, successive governments’ conspiratorial silence, lackadaisical attitude to bloodshed or even pure naivety about the destructive spiritual implication of shed blood, have become legendary.
Aside entering the pantheon of history as about the only country whose Minister of Justice was unjustly killed like a chicken and whose death is yet unraveled, the peremptory back-off of the state from finding out who actually pulled the trigger has not only raised dusts of suspicion, it has baffled the comity of civilized states. This heightened allegations that the state was actually the yet unknown gunman who pulled the trigger and that its motive was to stop an Ige who was on the verge of committing the perceived hara-kiri of tendering his letter of resignation from the federal cabinet to regroup his politically fractious South Western base.
Though Ige was labeled by his vast array of supporters as the Cicero, his humanism was the most outstanding of his philosophy. Humanism is a philosophical and ethical school that underscores the value and agency of human beings in the use of reason and their ingenuity, as against blindly deploying tradition and authority in the improvement of their individual or collective lives. Ige’s humanistic philosophy was a huge clone of the seminal thoughts of German philosopher, Martin Heidegger and that of Soren Kiekergaard. Like them, he believed that existence and humanity were more material and vital than any other consideration.
For years writing his weekly homily, Uncle Bola’s Column in the Tribune newspaper, Ige preached the invaluable essence of existence and human values. In very scurrilous pen drippings, he frowned on disorderly administration of society wherever he found one and sought to take the world through a path earlier trodden by his political leader, Chief Awolowo. He could not stand mediocrity and did not suffer fools gladly. Those who knew him spoke of his perfectionism and his finicky abidance by the dictates of truth. When he eventually became the governor of the old Oyo State, Ige struggled to match his years of political discourses with action, skirting a practical path that would serve as a showcase of what he stood for and espoused in newspaper discourses.
For this writer, an encounter with Ige that remains unforgettable was one that was readily a poster for Ige’s readiness to vacate his Olympian societal height and acknowledge that he, like every human being, was fallible after all. While his Uncle Bola’s Column starred on Page 7 of the Tribune, this writer sought refuge in aping his public sphere dissection of issues of contemporary society on Page 3 of same newspaper in a column named Festus Adedayo’s Flickers. And so, Ige and others became ministers in the Obasanjo government that would yet be his death.
Soon, a great uproar erupted on the perceived humongous furniture allowance allocated to the Obasanjo ministers. In my column, I excoriated such an inflated governmental largesse and dragged the ministers and indeed the Obasanjo government by the nape of their agbada for what I felt was an unmitigated wastage of public funds. Same week, on the political page of the Tribune, the Political Editor had also taken umbrage at such ministerial financial rascality. Minister Ige apparently read both pieces and on his Page 7 the next week, he sought to put a lie to all the vilifications of the government over the issue. What pained him most, he wrote, was that “one Festus Adedayo” of “our own newspaper” also joined the fray by “adding salt and pepper” to the issue. He then went ahead to quote what the “one Festus Adedayo” purportedly wrote, which was, and which turned out erroneously, a lift of the Political Editor’s words, verbatim.
Reading through Chief Ige’s gaffe, I was excited that I had him by his balls. To me, it was an ample opportunity to test Ige’s abidance by the same homily he preached to society. Being one assigned the task of proof-reading his column for years, I also wanted to take a pound of flesh from him for the back-of-the-tongue Ige always gave me at every misreading of his beautiful cursive handwriting which, on a few occasions, translated into errors in his column, errors that the finicky Ige couldn’t stomach. The manuscript of his column arrived Saturday afternoon. “Did that fellow go to school at all?” he would thunder whenever he spotted errors in his column.
Every attempt I made in discussions with my Tribune colleagues on the need for me to re-joind Ige’s gaffe led to cold rebuffs and sympathy for me. They all concluded that attacking Almighty Ige was tantamount to blindly walking into the unemployment market. How could a common reporter like me vilify Ige or show to the world that he was fallible, in an Awolowo newspaper? Indeed, the editor of the Sunday Tribune at the time also felt that I wanted to bite a bullet. He however acceded to my right to commit journalistic suicide; so far as my blood spillage would not splash on anyone else but myself. So the second week, I literally took the great Cicero to the cleaners in my column, condemning Ige’s condemnation of me and even almost imputing senility on the great Cicero, in a newspaper where he was held almost like a god.
But after that bravado, to parody the lingo of this generation, my liver failed me. I prepared for the worst. When I arrived office on Monday, I was told that the Minister had called to speak with me. I saw the last flame of my bravado spiral out into thin air. The stark reality of my audacity dawned on me and I almost turned jelly as the possibility of being asked to leave my job loomed. I told myself that shortly, the Minister would descend on me with his fabled and famous waspish tongue.
Same day, Ige called the central Newsroom analogue line, 02-2311675 and I was literally pulled by the trousers to pick the phone’s prong. “This is Bola Ige… Is that Festus?” he had asked. Waffling, I affirmed that I was the one speaking. And then, the bombshell, “I am really very sorry. Please, accept my apologies…”
It’s about 22 years now since that encounter and I cannot recollect plausibly my reply to this pleasantly shocking statement from Chief, the Honourable Minister (apologies to T.M. Aluko). A few days after, duty took me to Ikenne, Ogun State, Chief Awolowo’s country home, for an Awo family event and, lo and behold, the Minister arrived and went straight to the living room to discuss with Chief (Mrs.) HID Awolowo and other dignitaries. All of a sudden, Mr Folu Olamiti, the newspaper’s then Managing Editor, came looking for me. The Minister had asked if I was at the occasion and wanted to meet me. So I folded myself, prostrated before the legendary man whose name I had heard of from my primary school days. Ige held me by the shoulders and repeated his apologies. In the next installment of his column, the minister had written, “I apologise to Festus Adedayo, who I wrongly castigated.”
Bola Ige was not abashed about his Yoruba-ness and flaunted its superseding epistemology and culture above others. He constructed an idealist theory about a welfarist and humanist society that would cater for the weak against the strong, one where survival-of-the-fittest had no place. A video of Ige delivering a speech recently surfaced from God-knows-where and has suddenly gone viral. Therein, Ige’s idealism, something of the mould of the suffering animals in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, was revealed. In Orwell’s, animals sang, “Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland//Beasts of every land and clime//Hearken to my joyful tidings Of the golden future time//Soon or late the day is coming//Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown//And the fruitful fields of England Shall be trod by beasts alone…”
“By the grace of God, by 2000AD, freedom will come the way of Yorubaland. I am sure that the God of Oduduwa, the God of Oranminyan, the God of Obafemi Awolowo and the God of Adekunle Ajasin will take us to the new land where disgrace, suffering and cheating will be a thing of the past for Yoruba people,” Ige said in impeccable Yoruba in the video. He disparaged those who thought the idea of an Eldorado for Yoruba people was a mirage and likened their resentment to the mythic grumbling of gnomes. Valiant hunters in Yorubaland who reportedly encountered these mythic beings in forests told awe-inspiring stories of their weird composition. Ige however nationalized the “disgrace, suffering and cheating” being encountered as a Nigeria-wide thing with the Yoruba wise saying of “arun to ns’ogoji ni ns’odunrun, ohun to ba s’Aboyade, gbogbo oloya lo nse.”
Though he spoke Hausa fluently, Ige was persuaded about the strength and superiority of his roots and sought to wedge together every fractious part of the Yoruba nationhood. In the video, Ige unwittingly showed the Western region what it lost by the disagreement between Chief Awolowo and SLA Akintola. Just imagine a Western Region where Awo and Akintola worked together. The rest of Nigeria might never have kept pace with their race.
In the same video, Ige regaled his audience with Akintola’s profound ribaldry. Trying to discredit the alliance between NCNC and AG called UPGA, SLA called it OBUGA (it exploded), during a campaign in Ige’s Esa-Oke hometown. In his tiny feminine voice, SLA had pointed to a house which he said belonged to “Ige-Chukwu,” a scorn at the Igbo and Yoruba alliance. Akintola, said Ige, again at a campaign forum in Akure, still trying to discredit top stalwarts of AG, had told his UNDP members that he had just returned from Owo, the home of Chief Adekunle Ajasin. “Anyone who wants his children to bury them should please raise their hands up,” he pleaded. When they did, he played on Ajasin’s name which literally meant “Dog-buried” and said that when he went to Owo, rather than see a person buried by his children, he saw one who dog buried!
Perhaps aware of how Chief Awolowo met him, underscoring his youthfulness and brilliance, Ige never forsook the assemblage of young, brilliant persons. He had an unrepentant obsession for them, with whom he surrounded himself.
Many posthumous analysts of the foot Ige took wrongly that ultimately led to his death believed that his decision to leave his Western flank for the federal, and work with Olusegun Obasanjo, perceived as the enemy of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and Yoruba leader, Awolowo was the crucifix on which he was hoisted, preparatory for the final nail on his coffin. Same Obasanjo was the reason the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) sought to punish Ige and his deputy, S. M. Afolabi, at the party’s Jos convention, on allegation of illicit fraternization with him.
In a later press interview where his government was accused of failure in provision of electricity, Obasanjo called Ige a minister of power “who knew not his left from his right hand.” With this, the analysis that Obasanjo wanted to calibrate the Ige enigma by offering him ministerial appointment got a semblance of truth.
Ige was a very brilliant political strategist and a firm believer in democratic ethos. Those who knew his antecedents, especially his revolutionary consciousness, were alarmed by the grave implication of an Ige’s resignation from the Obasanjo cabinet. He had opted to leave so as to solder his disintegrating political base, in preparation for the 2003 re-election. For a sitting Nigerian president who did not win even his Otta farm ward in the 1999 elections, another landslide disclamation of Obasanjo would have upset the power apparatchik that sponsored his election and stood to lose if he was kicked out. Thus, permutations that the Nigerian government or its lackeys killed Ige to guard against this apple cart upsetting were rife. So who was the government or its sidekick that pulled the trigger? No stronger motive for his assassination has since impeached this seemingly flawless skirt.
It is in the interest of government to unravel the knot of Ige’s assassination, 20 years after. Ige’s and thousands of unjustly spilled blood are crying for vengeance. Right from the time of creation till now, the corrosive spiritual implication of unjustly shed blood has always been evident. The blood of the biblical Abel, for instance, was on its prowl and never rested until it got justice. Perhaps, the socio-political bedlam and leadership miasma that Nigeria currently finds herself are a reflection of the numerous unjustly spilled blood in the land seeking vengeance. No sane society allows such spillage of blood to pass without a wink while perpetrators of the dastardly acts strut about the landscape like some stray penguins.
Dr. Festus Adedayo, journalist, lawyer and public affairs analyst, writes from Ibadan
On Monday and Tuesday last week, workers and political operatives within the precincts of the new Senate building in the National Assembly complex, Abuja, were treated to a replica of the Theatre of the Absurd. This type of drama originated in Europe and later spread to America in the 1950s. It was influenced by existential philosophy and Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
In that work, Camus captured the fundamental human needs and compared the absurdity of man’s life with the situation a figure of Greek mythology, Sisyphus found himself, where he was condemned to repeat forever the task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, and repeatedly sees the same roll down the hill as he approaches the top.
He, thereafter, juxtaposed life’s absurdities with what he called the “unreasonable silence” of the universe to human needs and concluded that rather than adopt suicide, in frustration, “revolt” was required.
82-year-old Dr. Muhammed Adamu Fika, former Clerk to the National Assembly and former Chairman, of the National Assembly Service Commission (NASC), who calls himself the “smaller Adamu Fika,” must have come across the Camus essay in deciding to lead an emergency meeting of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries of the National Assembly on November 18. The emergency meeting, which was jointly held with members of the Association of Retired Staff of the National Assembly was meant to salvage the pathetic plights of the National Assembly retirees.
Eighty-two-year-old Fika can hardly gather the pace to navigate round the corners of the National Assembly, but he insisted on making the trip to enable him to preside over the meeting as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries. As his retiree colleagues, many of whom are far younger, saw him struggling to walk the required distance from the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Library, originally fixed as venue to the new Senate building, they had to provide some shoulders to lean on. At one stage, an office chair was converted to a wheelchair to ensure the elderly Fika got to certain locations. It was a sad tale, especially if you look at the essence of Fika’s trip to the National Assembly. He was there to preside over a meeting to press home the need for the payment of the entitlements of National Assembly retirees. An alarm had earlier been sounded on the different Whatsapp platforms of the retired workers of the National Assembly to the effect their members were dying in numbers. It was revealed that no fewer than 20 retired workers had died awaiting the payment of their entitlements in the recent past. Another set of retirees numbering 12 were said to have been bedridden in different hospitals across the land. That alarm was more than enough to prompt Fika and his retiree colleagues to an emergency meeting. But the sight of an elderly man, fighting a just cause on an improvised wheelchair was more than absurd.
Payment of the entitlements got stalled after former President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023, which mandated the National Pensions Commission (PENCOM) to hand over assets of the staff of the National Assembly in its custody after the passage of the National Assembly pension law.
In the beginning, there were no signs that things would go south on the implementation of the Act. Three months after the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act came into effect, PENCOM had written the management to convey its decision to hand off the pension assets of the staff of the National Assembly, while requesting the National Assembly management to provide it with account details to remit the accrued funds. The 10th Senate and the House of Representatives also provided hope for the retirees by providing a take-off grant to the tune of N2.5 billion in the 2024 budget. However, the NASS management could not comply with the request from PENCOM because the Pensions Board had not been inaugurated. Months after months, the retirees waited. Those who were already enjoying their benefits when PENCOM was administering had the payments terminated, while the waiting game ensued.
In trying to fast-track the implementation of the Act, Fika, as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries had forwarded a letter to the President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas, intimating them of the council’s recommendations for positions in the National Assembly Service Pensions Board.
Fika said in the letter, dated February 27, 2024, that “Considering the pathetic health conditions of our retired colleagues, Your Excellency will agree with me that the establishment of the National Assembly Pensions Board is overdue five (5) months after Mr. President’s assent.” He said that his letter was premised on the provisions of Sections 2 and 17(3) of the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023, which indicate that the presiding officers of the National Assembly shall make the appointments subject to recommendations of the Council of Clerks and Secretaries. But some persons are insinuating that the undue delay might have been instigated by two strange bedfellows-politics and money. Where the two are involved, simply things hardly follow a straight course. However, nothing justifies the nearly 20-month delay in inaugurating the Pensions Board.
At the end of the emergency meeting on Monday, further meetings were said to have been scheduled at the instance of the Senate President, Akpabio, his deputy, Jibril Barau and others but there were no conclusive steps, yet.
A communique released after the meeting indicated that the retirees observed that the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023 went through full legislative process in the 9th National Assembly and was assented to by President Muhammad Buhari. It further noted that the delay in implementing the Act has caused undue and untold hardship to the retirees who are unable to access their retirement benefits, adding that while a number of the retired Staff have died, many others are bedridden due to sufferings occasioned by the non-payment of their entitlements.
According to the communique, the meeting decried the pains the retired staff have been subjected to and recalled that appropriate recommendations as per the composition of the Pensions Board have been made to the Presiding Officers of the National Assembly, in line with the enabling Act.
Like every lover of Yoruba traditional music, language and culture, I have of recent been inundated with requests to lend a voice to the newest raging fire in the Fuji music genre. Since the passage of Alhaji Sikiru Ayinde Balogun, popularly known as Ayinde Barrister or Agbajelola Barusati, there have been longstanding tiffs on whom of the trio of Ayinde Omogbolahan Anifowose, KWAM 1; self-named King Saheed Osupa (K.S.O.) and Wasiu Alabi Pasuma, was the “King.”
These musicians’ recent quest for supremacy is not new. From time immemorial, supremacy battles have been part and parcel of Yoruba music. Apparently now tempered by modernity, in the olden days, the battles were fought with traditional spells, incantations and talisman aimed at deconstructing and liquidating their rivals. Mostly fought on genre basis, I submit that pre and post-independence entertainment scene would have been livelier, far more robust than it was but for the acrimonious liquidating fights of those eras.
In the Sakara music, Abibu Oluwa, a revered early precursor of this Yoruba musical genre, who reigned in the late 1920s and 1930s, had Salami Alabi Balogun, popularly known as Lefty Salami, Baba Mukaila and Yusuff Olatunji as members of his band. Oluwa praise-sang many Lagos elites of his time, especially Herbert Macaulay to whom he sang his praise in the famous track named “Macaulay Macaulay.” In it, he sang the foremost Nigerian nationalist’s alias of Ejonigboro – Snake on the Street and prayed that he would not come to shame.
Sakara also produced the likes of S. Aka Baba Wahidi, Kelani Yesufu (alias Kelly). It was sung with traditional Yoruba instruments like the solemn-sounding goje violin whose history is traced to the north, and the roundish Sakara drum, beaten with stick and whose appearance is like that of a tambourine. Sakara music is often called the Yoruba variant of western blues music because of its brooding rhythm though laced with a high dosage of philosophy.
When Oluwa died in 1964, he literally handed over to Lefty who, born on October 1913, died December 29, 1981. Lefty, a talking drummer under Oluwa, churned out over 35 records before his demise, one of which was a tribute to Lagos monarch, Oba Adele (Adele l’awa nfe – Oba Adele is the king we want) and another to the Elegushi family. I dwelt considerably on Sakara because it is believed to have had considerable influence on other genres of traditional African Yoruba music, especially Apala and Fuji, with the former sometimes indistinguishable from Sakara.
Apala music, whose exponent is said to be Haruna Ishola, originated in the late 1930s Nigeria. Delivered with musical instruments like a rattle (Sekere) thumb piano, (agidigbo) drums called Iya Ilu and Omele, a bell (agogo) and two or three talking drums, Apala and Sakara are the most complex of these genres of traditional Yoruba music, due to their infusion of philosophy, incantations and dense Yoruba language into their mix. Distinct, older and more difficult in mastery than Fuji music which is considered to be comparatively easy to sing, Ayinla Omowura, Ligali Mukaiba, Kasumu Adio, and many others were Apala leading lights of the time. The three genres have very dense Islamic background.
The latest entrant of all the three genres is Fuji. Pioneered by Ayinde Barrister no doubt, for an Apala musician biographer like me, I am confused that Omowura, as far back as early 1970s, asked listeners in need of good Fuji music to come learn from him – “Fuji t’o dara, e wa ko l’owo egbe wa…” Sorry, I digressed.
While KWAM 1 emerged with his Talazo music from the ashes of his being a music instrument arranger for Barrister’s musical organization in the early 1980s, the feud in the house after Barrister’s death erupted when narratives allegedly oozed unto the musical scene that KWAM 1 referred to himself as the creator of Fuji music. He however promptly denied the claim. For decades, Osupa and Pasuma were locked in horns over supremacy of the Fuji music genre. In August 2023, the two however seemed to have decided to thaw their feud as they shared stage with Wasiu Ayinde, at Ahmad Alawiye Folawiyo, an Islamic singer’s 50th birthday celebration in Lagos. KWAM 1 glibly acted as their senior colleague at the event.
As an indication that they are no bastards of the teething and recurrent supremacy battles that emblemize traditional Yoruba music, the three Fuji music icons seem to have gone into the trenches again. It first started with Taiye Currency, an Ibadan-based alter-ego of Pasuma picking a fight with the musician who self-styled himself Son of Anobi Muhammed’s Wife. In a viral video, Currency had disclaimed reference to Pasuma as his “father” in the music industry. In another video not long after, KWAM 1, like some kind of father figure, was shown asking Currency to apologize to Pasuma.
A few days ago, a video of Osupa went viral. Therein, he was chastising a particular hypocrite he called “Onirikimo” and “alabosi”, who is “stingy and is ready to shamelessly collect money from those under him.” Osupa also claimed that this “shameless elder” had strung a ring of corn round his waist and should be ready to be made fun of by hens. Watchers of the endless tiffs among these Fuji icons swear that KWAM 1 was the unnamed Fuji musician Osupa was casting aspersion on.
The trio of Sakara, Apala and Fuji music also witnessed such petty squabbles. While many claim that the fights were promotional gambits aimed at having their fans salivate for their hate-laced musical attacks against one another, some others claim that the rivalries were genuine. In the Apala music scene, Haruna Ishola and Kasumu Adio fought each other to the nadir, with Adio, who sang almost in the same voice and cadence as Ishola, suddenly vamoosing from the musical scene. Rumours and speculations had it then that a mysterious goat bit Adio and rendered him useless. While Ayinla Omowura also fought Fatai Olowonyo, Fatai Ayilara, among others in the Apala genre, the duo of Yusuff Olatunji and S. Aka also feuded till their last days. This is not to mention the interminable fight between Kollington Ayinla and Barrister.
If the tiff between the trio of KWAM 1, Osupa and Pasuma is about age and Yoruba traditional respect for elders, KWAM 1 would easily go away with the trophy of the best of the three. However, if philosophical depth, musical elan, research of lyrics and deployment of Yoruba language are at issue, none of the other two musicians can unbuckle Osupa’s sandals. Osupa began his musical career in 1983 as a teenager and has gone through the mills, his late father being a musician, too and Awurebe music lord, Dauda Epo Akara’s musical contemporary.
Unlike their predecessors, the three Fuji musicians are literate and should thus address their musical issues in more mature manner. Osupa even recently bagged a degree from the department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. One thing they should know is that, whether one is supreme to the other or not, their fans will readily queue behind the brand that delights them.
Two incidents happened during the 1994/95 NYSC service year, which I was part of in Birnin-Kebbi, Kebbi State, and they gave me profound culture shocks that I still remember till today. I would equally say that those incidents probably justified the Federal Government’s decision to float the scheme.
We were told that part of the reasons General Yakubu Gowon floated the NYSC was to ensure national integration, cohesion and exposure of young Nigerians to cultures of other parts of the country other than where they were born.
First was the shock of seeing a director that I was attached to in the then Government House, who had just taken a new wife, and sat among drivers, gate men and other junior staff to dine. I saw them seated round a huge iron pot of Koko, a local delicacy, exchanging one big spoon made of calabash, as each took turns to use the spoon to eat the delicacy. It was as if I was witnessing a scene where children of a big family were struggling to catch a portion of food or where people were eating Saara, as they say it in Yorubaland.
As I walked past the noisy crowd, I was transfixed seeing the newly-wedded director among the lot. He saw me standing still, as I couldn’t comprehend what he was doing there, and he got the message. ‘Taiyo, (as he used to call me) you won’t understand,’ he said as he waved to me to keep going. When we later saw, he explained that what he just did was a way of assuring the commoners that ‘we are all one,’ as they felicitated him on the new bride. But I could not fathom how the occupant of a ‘huge office’ as that of a director in a Government House , would sit among “commoners” on a tattered mat to share a single spoon and eat in public.
The other incident was quite pathetic. My friend, Tunde Omobuwa, was posted to a school in Yauri, in the southern part of the state, for his primary assignment. But he found the place boring on weekends. So, he arranged to always be with me on weekends.
One such weekend, we decided to take a stroll round the streets near the Government House. We took off from the place of my primary assignment, the Federal Information Centre; bought corn beside the office, and started ‘blowing’ the ‘mouth organ’ as we strolled. We were too engrossed in our gist and the sweetness of the corn to note that some young boys were trailing us, praying that some leftovers of the corn would drop for them to scavenge. Somehow, the two of us dropped the corn cob almost simultaneously. We were more than taken aback by a commotion that erupted at our back. Four eight or nine year-olds had descended on the supposed leftovers and broken the corn cobs into pieces. I was again transfixed as if one was hit by an electric shock. Remember that feeling when you play with electric fish?
I was moved to tears as I had never ever seen a group of children scavenging on nothing as it were. I beckoned to the kids and offered them N20, which was the highest denomination at the time, and with some smattering Hausa words told them to go buy their own corn from the same place we got ours. As they left, heading to the corn seller, I couldn’t erase that ugly sight from my mind. Was it really possible that some people scavenge on nothing this way? I was later to see incidents of children swarming around restaurants and pouncing on near empty plates.
These incidents told me clearly that the North was a different place and that the life of the boy child is not only risky and endangered but sold to stagnation and deprivation, unless you are one of the lucky few.
Having benefited from the free education policy of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) between 1979 and 1983, when the Second Republic was terminated, I knew that there is a lot the government can do in educating the children. In my secondary school days, I was the Library Prefect at one point, and so I saw an excess of books supplied by the government to our school. So, I was an example of the feasibility of free education. It was the same way the Action Group government had handled education in the years preceding Nigeria’s independence and the First Republic.
So why can’t the state governments in the North declare free and compulsory education for the young ones out there? Why should children be made to scavenge on empty corn cobs just to see if they can find pieces of seeds left over?
And why was my director giving drivers and gate men in the Government House false hope that they were all the same, instead of him to challenge them to seek to lift themselves up the social ladder?
I think there was no excuse for the North not to have adopted a free education policy, just as Chief Obafemi Awolowo did in the South-West. And if we say the North needs to look itself in the mirror, you again remember the efforts by President Goodluck Jonathan to educate the multitude of Northern children through the Almajiri Schools. That government built more than 400 of such schools, which were abandoned because it could upset the oligarchy. The oligarchs forgot the truism that the children of the poor they refuse to train today won’t let their children sleep peacefully.
But the governor of Borno State, Prof Babagana Zulum, appears to have got the message. Last week, I was thrilled to see him organise a summit to reform the Almajiri system.
The Almajiri education system is a traditional Islamic method of learning widely obtained across states in northern Nigeria. Through that system, which is tied to Islamic teaching, youths, especially boys are kept out of the formal western education system. I don’t know why the teachings by Islamic scholars cannot go alongside that of Western education as it obtains in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and other Islamic countries that are doing well economically and in the world of science, technology.
While addressing the summit, Zulum had mentioned the need to address the root causes of insecurity through the provision of education for citizens of Borno, adding that improper teaching of Islamic studies has contributed to the emergence of Boko Haram insurgents in the state.
According to him, to curtail whatever is the adverse effect of Almajiri education; the Borno State Government has established the Arabic and Sangaya Education Board to introduce a unified curriculum for Sangaya and Islamic schools. He said that the reform would include establishing Higher Islamic Colleges to cater for Almajiri children and blending the religious teachings with the secular curricula as well as skills.
He said: “The Sangaya Reform is a great development. It will give Almajiri a better chance in life, particularly the introduction of integrating western education, vocational, numeracy, and literacy skills into the centres, which are also described as Almajiri and Islamic schools.
“Distinguished guests and esteemed educationists, government’s intention was to streamline the informal and formal education systems to quality integrated Sangaya School for admission into colleges and universities.”
One would have thought that governors with radical postures like Nasir el-Rufai and others before him would have proposed this type of reform, but it is better late than never. Zulum should be supported to get something out of this.
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