Former Governor of Niger State, Dr Babangida Alliyu (left); Senator Ben Obi; chieftain of NADECO, Chief Amos Akingba; former Minister of Defense, Lt. Gen. Alani Akinrinade (rtd); Erelu Abiola Dosumu and former Nigeria envoy to Netherlands, Dr. Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosumu
By Tony Afejuku
As I write this, I look forward to the day, the beautiful day, the historic day and historic time and historic prospect which we shall hail with fitness and firm firmness of joyful coo of patriotic liberty of NADECO and of poetry as conceived by the originators and all sincere joiners of the movement.
Now, why am I still dwelling on the subject I sincerely meant not to hurl furthermore into the magnificent river of our public opinion after the hint I gave last Friday? Several communications, verbal and written, I got have compelled me to say one or two or three or four things I deliberately allowed my reticence to keep in check. But rather than the full consciousness of my pen to do so, I am yielding, for now, the column to two readers from across the Atlantic. Before I do so, however, let me divulge this pertinent information.
It was the late Chief Michael Imoudu, our country’s universally acknowledged foremost Labour Leader, who asked MKO Abiola to go to Comrade Jonathan Ihonde to request him to plead his case and cause before Chief Tony Enahoro (and other patriots awaiting the historic opportunity we are still waiting to hail).
The late Festus Iyayi also played his own dazzlingly revolutionary part as an underground patriot of the movement. The late Abubakar Rimi and Balarabe Musa (both of the Aminu Kano school of politics) were top guns who similarly played their parts of positive dialectical patriotism in the Nigerian project and vision as conceived by the original NADECO.
As is well known, both of them were respective governors of Kano and Kaduna States under Aminu Kano’s People Redemption Party (PRP). Zamani Lekwot, an ex-military governor of Rivers State, Commodore Dan Suleiman, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, the late General MusaYar’Adua, Mr. Fred Agbeyegbe and several others were lights of the movement. And I must underscore this point: M.K.O. Abiola became an authentic comrade who sacrificed his life for the NADECO cause – meaning that created situations can always alienate one from a reactionary pattern of life and turn him or her in the richest moments of his or her life to be a patriotic rebel and revolutionary. MKO Abiola’s open rejection by his former fellow reactionaries turned him into a comrade and rebel positively in the house of patriotic thunder.
Let me now open the minds of some NADECOists still on voluntarily patriotic exile.
“Good day, my dear Brother. Your piece on NADECO resuscitates memories of past opportunities and possibilities. NADECO was, as you correctly observed, a movement. But it was a movement of a special type peopled mostly by several left-wing leaning political activists. The intent in certain constituencies was for NADECO to metamorphose into a political party housing the Awoists and the talakawas of Aminu Kano, etc., into a new progressive entity. As is known in Political Science, a political party is a party when it survives its leader. Unfortunately, after the demise of Chief Obafemi Awolowo on May 9, 1987 (you and I stopped at Ikenne to pay our last respects to him on our way to Ibadan to watch Flash Flamingoes versus Leventis), his political party began to disintegrate systematically.
“Pro-democracy” is an elastic conglomerate of competing for ideological prisms. I recall meeting with Chief Tony Enahoro and Mr. Mike Ehimah in his hotel in Hull (now Gatineau) across the River Ottawa from the city of Ottawa. I accepted the invitation to accompany him to the Canadian House of Commons where he addressed members of Parliament on the atrocities of the Abacha regime. Several NADECO stalwarts, including Senators Cornelius Adebayo and Femi Ojudu, sought refuge in Canada during this period.
“That NADECO was conceived as a movement to restore the victory of MKO at the June 1993 Presidential Elections fostered an internal contradiction of political philosophies. Thus, NADECO was born prematurely by the need to honour the results of June 12 and not to propagate the ideals of left-wing or progressive politics epitomized by Awolowo. This, in my view, explained why Chief Tony Enahoro got involved in NADECO.
Viewed from this perspective, therefore, NADECO was a consortium of anti-military and pro-democracy activists. Chief Enahoro’s decision to establish the Movement for National Reform (MNR) was a product of the internal ideological contradictions in NADECO.”
These are pleasant words on NADECO that any investigator or researcher on the movement will or may find intelligently and persuasively instructive. They are theoretically and critically honey words – “sweet to the taste” and good for the well-being of all who want this country to always be blessed with the odour of all genuine activists and patriots like wine that sparkles.
Professor Igho Natufe’s words as quoted at length above are those of one underground NADECO patriot and good weigher of the movement’s weighable divinable morning and midnight dreams. And be it known that Professor Igho Natufe is a first-rate Political Scientist and a staunch Awoist. He has been underground in exile for centuries. Pardon my hyperbole. We share the same outlook about your country my country our country. But I have always insisted that I will never go on exile.
The words of another NADECO exile are particularly intriguing.
I say it again: The words of another NADECO exile are particularly intriguing. Who is the NADECO exile who can be said to be both under-ground and open-ground at the same time? He is Ahoada, Rivers-born Dr. Lloyd Ukwu, who is Executive Director of NADECO USA. You may be both right and wrong if you refer to him as a rebel’s rebel. Let me quote at least one of his curious posts to me:
“I greet you sir. I just stumbled upon your article which was well written, but it still needs a bit more information to help you out in your investigation or research or in the case of your next article. I was NADECO’s USA’s General Counsel here in Washington D.C. from 1995-1999. In fact, I registered it here in Washington D.C. I worked with Chief Anthony Enahoro, traveled with him extensively to Canada and London to make presentations on behalf of NADECO USA to make a case for the suspension, not expulsion, of NADECO from the Commonwealth and several other covert trips to Haiti and Ghana and other countries. I was Chief Enahoro’s lone voice in the USA to accompany him to Ottawa for the celebrated meeting between NADECO and Lloyd Axeworthy who was the Canadian Foreign Minister at that time. As you (probably know), Canada was our number one zone. Chief Anthony Enahoro was the Head, NADECO Abroad while Chief Ralph Obioha was Head, NADECO USA. In the United Kingdom, we had Chief Ralph Uwechue, now late and in Canada we had Chief Cornelius Adebayo. We had others like General Akinrinade, Prof. (Wole) Soyinka who was not part of NADECO, Dr. Wahab Dosumu, Senator Bola Tinubu, Senator Ewebiyi, Dr. Sylvester Monye and several others. A lot of us who drove NADECO were forgotten. In fact, I donated part of my well furnished office to NADECO for five years including all phone bills and a fully functional secretariat. Today, I am back in the trenches after squandered twenty years of failed democracy.”
“The National Democratic Coalition (USA) is Nigeria’s premier and foremost pro-democracy group based in Washington D.C. It was registered in 1995 by a group of Nigerians who needed a platform to fight the military regime of General Sani Abacha. The group has recently resumed its advocacy aimed, this time, at challenging the illegal, dangerous and repressive Buhari Administration. NADECO USA is currently planning a conference titled “Nigeria at the Crossroads: Restructuring or Peaceful Dissolution of Nigeria….”
“I am writing to you to seek audience to discuss what role you, as an esteemed journalist, can play by attending and supporting the conference.”
The envisaged international conference on your country my country our country, barring the unforeseen, is ‘scheduled for March 4 – 6, 2022 in Washington D.C. and is designed to bring Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities under one roof for three days to deliberate on how to save Nigeria from the precipice.’”
I have no doubt in my mind that Dr. Lloyd Ukwu’s intriguingly audacious quotation can be completely misinterpreted. We can see in it the pain of a NADECO patriot who was bewilderingly forgotten and forsaken by his fellow way-farers, but who nevertheless did not forswear to denounce or deny or disavow the movement. He and other under-ground and open-ground patriots are bewilderingly committed, no matter what, to the bewildering choices of supreme patriotic value that they have made. My investigation (outside some of Dr. Ukwu’s revelations which I am deliberately not capturing here) has revealed to me that all over the globe NADECO is thriving. You better believe me. To say what I have just said does not mean that NADECO patriots don’t have their challenges and drawbacks. I will not reveal what these are.
All the same, thinking about these challenges or drawbacks recreate in me the phrase “Five fingers of a leprous hand” which the late Chief Bola Ige, I think, coined and employed in describing the coalition of political parties of like and unlike minds under the Abacha regime. The late Bola Ige’s metaphor may be apt or may not be apt if anyone wants to apply it today to our under-ground and open-ground political workaholics. But I know for sure that the NADECO patriots – whether under-ground or open-ground – are not lazy or stupid or un-strategic professionals and scholars. This is not a petty or frivolous point. They have made significant encroachments on many Fulani and Northern bodies and people of genuine sensibilities or of patriotic power whose whole consciousness mirrors the consciousness of your country my country our country that must be steered in the direction that is the destined direction of Nigeria that must be blemished no more. On this score, I won’t say more than this; I won’t reveal more than this – at least for now.
Any doubter of my patriotic engagements is free to embark on his/her own investigation and research. I won’t reveal and will never reveal the provenance of everything known or unknown about NADECO’s under-ground and open-ground patriots who are super-patriotically committed to everything super-good, super-just, super-humane, super-right, super-moral, super-un-absurd and super-un-primitive about your country my country our country. Our NADECO super-patriots are super-fabulous super-patriots. They are everywhere in our land. New and un-new members itch and are itching to be Super-men and Super-heroes to save Nigeria that must be saved from the perils of thunderously and perilously perilous thunder.
I have been particularly interested in why some NADECO members had to go on exile – on forced exile.
I have also interrogated some NADECO members who decided to go underground from the time of the movement’s inception up to now. The responses I got, as profoundly pleasurable and pleasurably profound as they were, could be called disputable points.
A particularly interesting NADECO under-ground patriot based in the eastern region of our country clearly informed me that he would like to still stay under-ground because of the “butchers in power,” to put his phrase mildly.
A man and NADECO patriot of clear and beautifully shaped and formed thought, who has just buried his mother, invited me to travel across the Niger to come and partake in what would be to be more than a mixture of thought and of vision of NADECO that would provide fabulous stimulus to my imagination and creative endeavours and delights.
Somehow, pending when I am to make the cherished visit across the Niger sometime early next year, I gleaned something akin to what Pieter Willem Botha of South Africa said in 1988 or so, to wit; “Black people cannot rule themselves because they don’t have the brain and mental capacity to govern society. Give them guns, they would kill themselves; Give them power, they will steal all the Government money; Give them Independence and Democracy, they will use it to promote Tribalism, Ethnicity, Bigotry, Hatred, Killings and wars.” Rightly or wrongly our experience in this land may have justified this quote of a white colonialist – of a white South African Boer to boot.
The NADECO under-ground patriot I am referring to said what he said to me in similar terms, although not exactly as contained in Botha’s quote. This image of the tragedy of the Black man is what the original NADECO patriots were and are (still) determined to re-define in your country my country our country.
The living members of the original NADECO patriots who have chosen to remain underground are not oblivious of the power butchers in influential and authoritative power who are always determined to come after all the opposition members they dread in different forms.
As I have been reliably informed, some NADECOists who ran to exile did so because the late General Sani Abacha came after them because they rejected his overtures which included financial inducements to forego their patriotic agitations for MKO Abiola’s installation as president.
Some NADECOists allegedly fell for the black-goggled maximum ruler’s financial inducements but bluntly or diplomatically refused to play ball thereafter. Some NADECOists were allegedly serial collectors of the black-goggled General’s over-refined dollars and pounds inducements.
After their serial collections, they refused to sell to Abacha what Abacha expected them to sell to him. When Abacha could no more tolerate their betrayals he concluded that enough was enough. All those who recused themselves from his sinister embrace and circle after licking his invitingly tempting butter were to be rounded up.
In the name of the law of the butcher, whose generosity had been taken for granted and abused, he unleashed his goons and guns on them. But the smart NADECO butter-lickers jumped the gun and beat Abacha and his goons and guns. They raced to exile with borrowed and un-borrowed feet. How and why did Abacha dare to call them betrayers when he and his fellow right-wingers of butchers had betrayed the Nigerian electorate and people who wanted MKO Abiola’s presidency which the right-wingers in and out of military uniform denied him? Of course, the agbada and babaringa right-wingers who goaded the triumphant political turncoats in army uniform to do what they did were the real masterminds who created the situations that are still plaguing us today.
The NADECO under-ground patriots are still waiting patiently for the historic opportunity that will enable black people the world over to utter the great cry and song of patriots, the real patriots of Nigeria, “In the big spirit of our broad democratic tongue, mind, heart, eyes, nostrils, ears and skin” (Tony Afejuku, “Our journalists are our last hope,” The Guardian, Friday, 30 July 2021). Our NADECO under-ground patriots are committed as ever to our patriotic and super-patriotic cause. They will keep on liaising with the open-ground patriots to create for your country my country our country the “living and dialectical unity of so many opposites,” as Jean-Paul Sartre would put it.
The super-patriots under-ground and open-ground, as I hinted already last Friday, have made great inroads upon the North’s patriotic political pulse, property and power properly. The underground leftists in particular across the country must keep on working on their knowledge of complex resistance to the right-wing power butchers’ mode of operation. Once the power butchers discover the true nature of their committedly patriotic sacrifice and how it will be consummated, their historic opportunity will never come – or it will be “drained to the very dregs” before it eventually surfaces. This is not and must not be their destiny. There is ample creativity in silence underground.
On the 15 of November this year, I saw the Channels interview Mr. Ayo Opadokun, NADECO’s Secretary-General, granted Mr. Ladi Akeredolu-Ale, his interviewer and Channels’ anchor. As an open-ground patriot of NADECO, Mr. Opadokun spoke too much. In fact, he over-spoke – or even misspoke. When, for example, he referred to some judges who allegedly have two billion naira in their bank accounts in the present dispensation because they are hawkers of judgments my mind embarked on a flash-back flight to the First Republic. Did we not have back then at least a judge whose hands, legs, mind, heart and brain were tied and sent as a consequence an innocent political opposition leader (and his ardent followers and fellow crusaders) to jail because he was strongly opposed to right-wing politics? Mr. Ayo Opadokun should watch well and control well his tongue – as an open-ground NADECO patriot and prime top echelon. What will be his honest, truthful, rightly blunt answer if the power butchers say they are not doing anything different from what was done aeons ago?
Now let me say one or two things about the spiritual dimension to NADECO’s politics – as gleaned from my investigation still ongoing.
To be continued and concluded.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.
