By Jide Osuntokun
Until the biggest masquerade dances the festival is not over. This is how the Yoruba people defer to people on account of age and experience. Americans say the show is not over until the fat lady sings. Anybody familiar with American night clubs will be familiar with fat ladies singing jazz in dimly lit club houses. Apparently when the show is about to end is when the best act is put on in the person of the best singer who is invariably a fat lady as a result of too much booze. I have been reading the many eulogies paid to General Alani Akinrinade, most of them by younger colleagues in the press and some by his military and political associates. Most of them have been excellent and well deserved.
I want to join others in singing the praise of this deep and profoundly thoughtful General by mentioning a few instances of my observation of him.
I first met him when he was a captain in the army in the house of a mutual friend Kehinde Alade. Kehinde joined the saints triumphant rather early in life. I met the then Captain Akinrinade, I believe in 1963 or 1964. I was in my first year in the University of Ibadan. In those days young students of the University of Ibadan always drifted to Lagos on weekends. Kehinde Alade lived in a house in Oyewunmi Close in Surulere. The place was full of mosquitoes. Right from about 6 p.m. Kehinde and I will sit on his bed with the mosquito net drawn down and gist for as long as possible before dozing off to sleep. Even with the mosquito net down, the crazy mosquitoes would still try to inject their poison into one’s body if it was near the net. It was in these circumstances that Captain Akinrinade would pop in and ask Kehinde to follow him to one party or the other. I never for once went out with them probably because I was too much of an Ibadan man and not a “Lagos lizard” as the Yoruba will say. Kehinde Alade was a younger brother to the famous architect Fola Alade who designed most of the famous architectural landmarks in Nigeria including the federal secretariat, National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, military barracks to house the multitudes of soldiers after the Nigerian civil war. Chief Fola Alade, now very old, was my brother Kayode Osuntokun’s friend and our two families, that is, the Alades and the Osuntokuns became one. Around the time I am writing about, I had a brother, Captain Edward Abiodun Osuntokun of the NAEME (Nigerian Army Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) living in Ann Barack’s but I preferred to stay with Kehinde to enjoy absolute freedom. Unfortunately my army officer brother died prematurely due to botched appendix operation by apparently unqualified Pakistani army doctors on secondment to the Nigerian Army. This was a painful period for our family. This brought me closer to the Nigerian Army particularly to the then Colonel Adeyinka Adebayo, who though senior to my brother, was his close friend.
We did not know that the army would ever take over the government of the country. The army however struck in January 1966 when Alani Akinrinade was a Major. The killings of political leaders also decimated the higher echelons of the army in the persons of Brigadier Adesujo Ademulegun, Brigadier Zakiriyau Maimalari, Colonel Ralph Shodehinde, Lt-colonel Abogo Largema, Col. Kur Muhammad, Lt-colonel James Pam, Lt-colonel Arthur Unegbe and in the counter coup of July 1966, Major-General Johnson Aguiyi Ironsi and Lieutenant-colonel Adekunle Fajuyi were killed; several Igbo officers who could not escape to the East fell to rebellious troops. Colonel Adebayo was out of the country on a course in England and Brigadier Olufemi Ogundipe the next man to Ironsi was rendered hors de combat after northern troops refused to obey his command.
At the time the civil war broke out, the number of Yoruba officers in the army could be counted in tens. The situation was worse in the number of troops or fighting men. The officer class was dominated by Igbo and Hausa/ Fulani and Kanuris. This was because the civilian government formed in 1954 in which the mainly Igbo NCNC and the NPC formed a coalition government deliberately pressed many young Igbo and Hausa boys from secondary schools in their region into the officer corps of the Nigerian army. I have a feeling that Akinrinade would not have joined the army if he had not gone to Offa Grammar School in the North. When the war broke out, the three divisions facing the rebellion in Biafra were commanded by Colonel Muhammad Shuwa in the northern operational area, Colonel Murtala Muhammad in the western sector and Colonel Benjamin Adekunle in the south. Major Akinrinade was one of the battalion commanders that swept the Biafran troops out of the Midwest. His opposition to repeated disastrous attempts to make a frontal attack on the concentrated Biafran troops in Onitsha from Asaba got him into trouble with Colonel Murtala Muhammad and he had to be deployed to Benjamin Adekunle’s Marine command division. This was the division hurriedly recruited and largely trained in action but bore the brunt of the fight against the Biafrans. Akinrinade and colleagues fought bravely under the mercurial but absolutely brilliant and fearless Adekunle until exhaustion set in and Adekunle had to be replaced by Col. Olusegun Obasanjo who finally received the surrender of the Biafran forces. From all indications by his colleagues, Akinrinade was an extraordinarily brilliant soldier.
After the civil war, he rose rapidly and never participated in any putsch until he left the army as a Lieutenant General at the age of 42. He had served as G.O.C 1st division of the army which in conventionally regarded as the teeth of the army. He rose to the position of Chief of Army Staff and became the first Chief of Defence Staff under the civilian government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. He left prematurely because he felt he was not trusted and he apparently did not like being kicked upwards from his position as Chief of Army Staff to Chief of Defence Staff apparently because of ethnic and religious reasons. From all colleagues of Akinrinade spoken to by this writer, they all said he is the best army officer the country has ever produced. It will be interesting to find out what his teachers at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst England thought of young Akinrinade.
Since leaving the military, Akinrinade served as minister of agriculture in the Babangida regime leaving when the ovation was loudest and when he felt he couldn’t remain in the government because of the way events were unfolding. I remember the late Navy Captain Michael Akhigbe dragging me and Brigadier Ola Oni to Akinrinade’s house in Ikoyi to prevail on him to support deregulation of the cocoa trade and abolishing the cocoa board. The cocoa board had been set up by the colonial government to guarantee cocoa price for the farmer. When there was a boom in price the excess was saved against a future when there was a collapse in cocoa price. Because of the money held by the board, the cocoa price to the farmer continued to be maintained without the farmers suffering sudden reduction in income. Michael Akhigbe as governor of the then cocoa-producing Ondo State felt the board had no place in a deregulated economy. Apparently Akinrinade felt otherwise. We followed Akhigbe, our well-meaning governor and a personal friend of mine to remonstrate with Akinrinade knowing if he was persuaded, he will influence Babangida who held him in great respect.
The upshot of the story was that the cocoa board was dissolved.
I also remembered a much larger delegation Akhigbe arranged for us to tell Babangida that Ondo State was not happy for having nobody in his government. Babangida had apparently told Akhigbe he was going to appoint an elderly retired civil servant from the west as Secretary to his government. Akhigbe said that was not what Ondo deserved. Eventually Babangida appointed Olu Falae to the satisfaction of everyone involved. May God bless Michael Akhigbe’s soul. Whatever he did, he committed all his energy and courage.
General Akinrinade‘s courage came to the fore when Babangida left the stage and his Khalifa Sani Abacha took over. In spite of the danger of being in opposition to Abacha, Akinrinade became a rallying point of the opposition particularly of the Yoruba to Abacha after Moshood Abiola was denied the presidency which he had clearly won. Akinrinade supported Abiola not because of ethnic solidarity but out of principle that the vote of the people should decide who to rule them. He suffered for his belief and narrowly escaped being killed by assassins sent after him by Abacha. His house in Ikeja was fire-bombed and his farm in his home town of Yakoyo where he had invested his life savings and borrowed funds was destroyed. He escaped into exile in the United States and only returned after the military left the scene. Since 1999, he has not been satisfied with the quality of governance in the country. Even with Obasanjo in power, he felt the structure of government would militate against performance by anybody in government. He committed his resources, intellect and organizational ability along with Bolaji Akinyemi and others like myself in forming an all embracing “Agbajo Yoruba Agbaye” a world-wide non political group to protect the interest of the Yoruba in Nigeria. He got all the governors in Yoruba land to support it with funding. The whole thing was planned in detail. Anthem, flag, constitution etc were made but perhaps because of personality clash, we didn’t get very far after the first outing in Ibadan in which Justice Kayode Esho took the chair and gave words of encouragement. We got moral and financial encouragement from the late Ooni of Ife, Oba Sijuade Olubushe 11. Perhaps it is the curse of the Yoruba to always split like paramecium. Alani Akinrinade is as beautiful inside as outside; one sometimes wonders what led this man who would have done well in a university setting into the Nigerian Army.
Leave a Reply