Category: Columnists

Permit my literary licence.

The one was not the father of the other anymore than the other was the son of the one as the juxtaposition of their names in the headline would appear to suggest.

But Baba(rinde) Omojola and (David) Omo Omoruyi, were towering influences on Nigeria’s political life and development, and their deaths recently within a week of each other, both aged 75 years, have justly attracted national attention, despite the volatility that is the hallmark of public affairs in Nigeria.

The circumstances of their passing could not have been more different.

Baba Omojola died in harness. He had travelled from his Lagos base to the Ondo State capital, Akure, to make a presentation before the Okurounmu Committee charged with laying the groundwork for what its promoter President Goodluck Jonathan has at various times called a National Conference, a National Dialogue. and National Conversation, and may yet call by a different name altogether

He had presented the Committee with the draft of a people’s Constitution that he had taken a leading part in fashioning, under the platform of PRONACO, of which one of principal conveners was the departed and much-lamented statesman, Chief Anthony Enahoro.

That was Omojola’s last public act. On returning to his hotel room, he slumped. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital. Something tells me that he departed the way he would have chosen – active, engaged in a cause dear to his heart, and in the service of the public.

It was in Chief Enahoro’s company I first met Omojola, in 1993, in the aftermath of the annulment of the 1993 presidential election, though I had heard much about him, as must have any Nigerian who takes more than a passing interest in public affairs.

Physically, he was rather smallish and slight, a far less imposing figure than I had imagined. He did not have the commanding presence of our host. But what he lacked in that department was more than compensated by his sparkling conversation, his lively and energetic spirit, his insights on a wide range of issues domestic and foreign, and a wry sense of humour.

On many occasions, it was that small frame that saved him from the menacing forces of “national security.” Agents would barge into his home or his office, asking for Baba Omojola, hoping to find a figure so imposing that its owner deserved nothing less than the appellation “Baba.”

He would reply calmly that he did not even know Omojola, let alone his father, and they would move on in search of Baba Omojola. After a while, the agents finally nailed their man. They hauled him to detention in Kuje Prison, in Abuja Federal Capital Territory, in the wake of massive protests against the continued tenure of military president Ibrahim Babangida, who had dribbled the nation into a standstill in a craven bid to perpetuate his rule

As a student at the London School of Economics, Omojola had come under the spell of the legendary political theorist and socialist activist, Harold Laski. There he had honed his intellectual skills and left-wing activism. His brilliance marked him out for an academic career, but he chose o devote his great learning and his life to national development and the cause of the working people.

Returning home after further studies in Eastern Europe, he served as a close aide and adviser to Michael Imoudu, and it is to him that we owe a biography of the man they called Labour Leader Number One. In his work as an independent economic consultant, the focus was on national development issues. Whenever matters touching on the welfare of the broad masses of the people were being discussed, there you found Omojola.

It was therefore natural that he would be one of the leaders of the protests that rocked the Nigeria three years ago following the cutting of a phantom subsidy on petroleum products. By his reckoning, Nigerians were paying obscenely high prices for those products even before the government claimed that it had been providing hefty subsidies.

The last time I saw Baba Omojola was at the Blue Roof Hall of Lagos Television Service, in Agidingbi, on June 12, 2012, at a ceremony to mark the 19th anniversary of the infamous annulment of the presidential election that heralded perhaps the most powerful intimations since the nationalist era the possibility of building a nation from the riot of nations inhabiting the geographic space called Nigeria.

He was feisty as ever, even if less sprightly. Time and tireless engagement had taken their toll. But his intellectual acumen was not in doubt. As sole discussant, he did justice to a recondite paper on electoral reform presented by Professor Lanre Fagbohun, of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Lagos.

Unlike Baba Omojola who died in harness, Professor Omo Omoruyi died long after he had done his work and that work had been undone by his estranged friend and patron, Ibrahim Babangida, the military president.

Omoruyi belonged in a team of university professors, mainly political scientists, which Babangida recruited to serve as a kind of a Brains Trust for his office, which went by the grandiloquent name of “The Presidency.” When they were not turning Nigeria into a laboratory for crack-brained political experiments, they were fabricating elaborate rationalisations for the twists and turns of the programme that Babangida advertised as a transition to democratic rule.

It was of course nothing of the sort, as the intellectuals-in-residence knew or ought to have known. Anyone who was not deluded or practically unconscious could see that the whole thing was an elaborate swindle.

Omoruyi ‘s brief was to establish and run a Centre for Democratic Studies to prepare aspirants to political office as well as political parties for a future without military coups and without all the pathologies that brought previous attempts at civilised governance to grief.

He plunged into the task with enthusiasm and energy, and became one of the more prominent and visible figures among the transition engineers. The programme survived one manufactured crisis after another until it reached its culmination, the June 12, 1993 presidential election.

Despite all the obstacles that Babangida confected and threw in its path, the election took place. It was clean and peaceful. And it produced a clear winner. Omoruyi celebrated that outcome, proud that he had contributed significantly to securing it. Instead of celebrating the result, Babangida annulled the election, in the process driving Nigeria to the edge of ruin.

From the upheavals that followed the annulment, Omoruyi realised that he was no longer safe in Abuja. He fled to Benin City, only to be shot months later and left for dead outside his home by gunmen who have not been identified to this day. With help from friends in the diplomatic community, he was flown to the United States for treatment. Thereafter he took up a one-year fellowship at Harvard, and later settled in Boston, Mass.

I believe it was then he was diagnosed with cancer. With aggressive treatment, the disease went into remission. He returned to Nigeria, reconciled with Babangida, served briefly as a strategist for Vice President Abubakar Atiku, and subsequently as head of Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole’s re-ëlection campaign. By then, his cancer had returned, and he was in desperate need of funds to return to the United States for further treatment.

His appeal to his one-time patron, former associates and friends fell on deaf ears for the most part. In pained frustration, he lamented publicly that he had been “used and dumped.” It was Oshiomhole who came to his rescue.

It was hard not to be moved to pity for Omoruyi. As director-general of the CDS, he had at his disposal a huge budget into which he could have dipped to ensure his financial security. In that era, remember, the term “accountability” rarely figured in governance. The man at the top, it was said, expected those who served at the altar to eat to their fill, so long as they did not stain their uniform or clothing in the process.

Omoruyi seemed to have risen above the rampant thieving of that era. If he had corruptly enriched himself, the officials whose duplicity he documented for posterity in his book, “The Tale of June 12: The Betrayal of the Democratic Rights of Nigerians (1993)” would have exposed him without hesitation.

Baba Omojola, as I have noted, died in harness. Omo Omoruyi died in near destitution, long after his work had been done and undone, his body ravaged by cancer. The one, a pillar of the Nigerian Left, lived and thrived not merely outside government but in spite of it; the other functioned mainly within the power structure.

But both, in their own ways, served the public to the best of their great abilities.

Nigeria’s public sphere is the poorer for their passing