By Sabella Ogbobode Abidde,
As a scholar, I have always wanted to edit or co-edit a book on the Big Ten of Nigerian nationalists, focusing on their lives, times, and generational impact from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
An august list would include greats such as Aminu Kano, Herbert Macaulay, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Alvan Ikoku, Anthony Enahoro, Ahmadu Bello, Egbert Udo Udoma, Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo, Eyo Ita, and Nnamdi Azikiwe. Two or more scholarly volumes would be ready before I bid farewell to my academic career.
But for now, this column briefly sheds light on a philosopher and mystic, who was also a political and economic giant: Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
His impact is multigenerational and wondrously woven into the fabric of Nigeria’s history, culture, and society.
Publicly available records indicate that the Nigerian nationalist movement began in the 1920s (Awolowo was born in 1909), so he had forebearers in the movement.
He later became one of the movement’s central figures, and by independence in October 1960, he had perhaps become the dominant personality shaping Nigeria’s political development and economic growth.
Awolowo was also a federalist. The first Premier of the Western region of Nigeria. The founder of the Yoruba nationalist group Egbe Omo Oduduwa.
He was the leader of the Action Group (AG), a political party and an opposition leader in the federal parliament, from 1959 to 1963.
A noted lawyer, author, journalist, and the founder and publisher of the Nigerian Tribune newspaper.
And in later years, under the first military regime, he served as the federal commissioner for finance and as vice chairman of the Federal Executive Council during the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War, 1967-1970.
Much later, Awolowo founded the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) and became the party’s presidential candidate in 1979 and 1983.
The consensus was that, on both occasions – especially in 1979 – the electoral body, acting at the behest of the then military regime, put its foot and thumb on the ballot-counting machines to the detriment of Awolowo.
In other words, those who voted didn’t count; the military counted and secured the votes for their preferred candidate.
Those officially sanctioned electoral irregularities, many Nigerians have asserted, partially account for why Nigeria has remained politically and economically miserable and socially chaotic in the years since.
And in the years since his passing, many of the so-called Awoists — men and women who claimed to be adherents and practitioners of his precepts — have fallen by the wayside.
They failed! By 1997, one rarely finds a school of politicians parading themselves as students of or members of the Awolowo Cathedral.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, many politicians lack the impudence to call themselves Awoists.
The irony is that in the northern part of Nigeria, one can rarely find a pool of politicians who, today, adhere to the teachings and practices of Mallam Aminu Kano. And in the east, there are no more followers of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe.
Many politicians, from the east to the west, from the north to the south, and from the middle belt to the south-south, have done away with ethics, morality, ideology, or remaining faithful to their political parties.
Most no longer care about party manifestos or going to the State House, National Assembly, or the Presidency with the people’s burden on their hearts or shoulders.
In public or in private, participants in the Nigerian political and economic space think nothing about integrity, posterity, nation-building, or national interest. It is mostly about self-interest now.
That is what Nigeria has become! Many of the good, effective, efficient, visionary, and purposeful Nigerians are in hiding, while the audaciously corrupt are masters of the game, leaders at various levels of governance.
And we expect to change for the better? Heck no! It is a painful three-ring circus at all three levels.
I do not for once contend that the Federal Republic of Nigeria is a lost cause, a lost experiment, a lost entity, or a forsaken project. No! It can be saved; it can be brought back from the edge of the cliff.
And I also do not for once think that Nigeria should be partitioned into three or four separate countries.
Oh, no! I believe that sustained, first-rate, courageous, and visionary leadership can turn the Nigerian ship around. It is doable. This is not a hopeless country. It is not!
Many of the institutions Awolowo built are still going strong. Many of his policies have been proven right and correct. Many of his teachings have been found to be the appropriate panaceas for Nigeria.
And many of the physical infrastructure projects he built lasted for more than four decades.
And so, imagine where Nigeria would be today on the development scale – on the same level as Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, China, and Australia? Or the oil-rich Middle East countries.
Not having Chief Obafemi Awolowo as the president of this federation set her back three to four decades.
Examined dispassionately, his economic and political achievements have yet to be rivaled for several decades after his premiership of the western region, and neither has his commissionership (now minister) of the finance portfolio.
He was good, he was great, and he was miles above his contemporaries in the development of their various regions and in their generational legacies.
Without Awolowo’s policies, much of southern Nigeria – especially the western region — would perhaps be one of the least developed in today’s Nigeria.
Directly and indirectly, Awolowo was the man who made it possible for millions of Nigerians and their offspring to dream of and have a better life.
He promised, he delivered; he built and encouraged others, such as Michael Adekunle Ajasin (Ondo State), Lateef Kayode Jakande (Lagos State), Bola Ige (Oyo State), and Olabisi Onabanjo (Ogun State), to be builders.
If General Yakubu Dan-Yumma Gowon was the most consequential military leader Nigeria has ever had, Chief Obafemi Jeremiah Oyeniyi Awolowo, was the single most consequential leader and public figure beginning with his premiership in 1954.
Above all else, he was a family man, a good man, a good Nigerian, and a Pan-Africanist. He was better than most and far better than we thought. That’s Awo for you, a man who’s woven into our consciousness.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo would have been 117 this year, but he died at 78 in 1987 at his home in Ikenne, Ogun State. Chief Hannah Idowu Dideolu Awolowo, affectionally called HID, was Awolowo’s “jewel of inestimable value.” He had said of her: “I do not hesitate to confess that I owe my success in life to three factors: the Grace of God, a Spartan self-discipline, and a good wife. Our home is to all of us, a true haven; a place of happiness, and of imperturbable seclusion from the buffetings of life.” HID was born in Ikenne, in1915 and passed in 2015 in the same locality. She was 99. It was a union and a marriage that lasted for five glorious decades.
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