Category: Columnists

Every crusader, every committed protagonist, I suspect, is haunted at one time or another by this thought: When the battle is over, when the cause he served with great dedication and conviction has been won — or lost as the case may be— will his contributions be reciprocated when he falls on hard times, or will he be driven to lament, as Professor David Omo Omoruyi did the other day, that he had been “used and dumped”?

Omoruyi’s political roots go back to the Constituent Assembly that shaped Nigeria’s 1979 Constitution, where he took a leading part in moving the body to insert in the document a clause that would have, in effect, eliminated Chief Obafemi Awolowo from the presidential race.

There was great jubilation in the Constituent Assembly the day that amendment was passed, and Omoruyi was not in the least reticent in claiming a share of the credit. He later entered party politics, on the platform of the National People’s Party. His bid for elective office failed.

But he is probably best known as the director-general of the Centre for Democratic Studies, one of the many institutions the former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, set up to execute a transition programme that the political scientist Richard Joseph has called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”

Omoruyi can justly claim to be the “father” – in an intellectual sense, that is— of the institution. He had outlined the mandate of such a body in a speech he wrote for Babangida’s delivery as Guest of Honour during the 1989 Guardian Lecture. He and Babangida had been contemporaries in the inaugural Senior Executive Course (1978/79) at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, in Kuru, near Jos, Plateau State.

The two had forged a thriving friendship, and when Babangida seized power in 1985, he had drafted Omoruyi, then a professor at the University of Benin, into the conclave of political scientists that would wield such enormous influence during the transition and ultimately give political science a bad name.

Omoruyi, I recall, was a prominent presence at the Lecture, and could hardly conceal his delight at hearing his thoughts presented by the President, no less, before the Nigerian policy elite, at what was then perhaps the most significant event on Nigeria’s intellectual calendar.

It was a combative speech. Babangida used the forum to berate those he called “victims of the dogma of varieties of Marxist/Socialist orientation alternating cynically between half-truths and the sparing use of truth.” How many of them, he sniggered, could translate “ideology” into the indigenous languages? How many of these agitators operating from Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Enugu and Benin – curiously, he omitted Ile Ife — know their communities?

As if to warn that such an option was not entirely foreclosed, he invoked a former colonial governor who once threatened to “deport” the “urban agitators” of that era to their villages so they could learn from their roots.

From my vantage position on the dais of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs – I was the master of ceremonies — I could see the radical Ife historian, Dr Segun Osoba, literally squirm in his seat as Babangida took his war against “extremists” to a new level.

So, it came as no surprise when, shortly after the Lecture, Babangida announced that the Federal Government was setting up a Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, with Omoruyi as its director-general. Somewhere along the line, it morphed into Centre for Democratic Studies (CDS).

It went to work in earnest, along the way making accommodation for the turns, the labyrinthine trajectory of the transition programme. Omoruyi doubled as a strategist, advising on policy and writing speeches. By his account, the CDS trained more than 400,000 members of Nigeria’s political class, through a “unique” political education programme it pioneered.

The capstone of the transition was of course the Presidential election of June 12, 1993 which, for reasons he still has not been able to explain 19 years later, Babangida decided to annul.

The CDS had invited and accredited international observers for the election. They had all certified it free and fair and credible. Based on their reports and the reports of the CDS’s field officers, Omoruyi stood resolutely by what was already widely known – that the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Chief Moshood Abiola, had won decisively.

In vain, and with a growing sense of personal danger, did Omoruyi urge Babangida again and again to accept and abide by the election result. In the encircling gloom, he fled Abuja to his home in Benin City, where unidentified gunmen with murder on their minds attacked him.

He survived the attack, and was evacuated to the United States for treatment. On recovering, he took fellowships at Harvard and Lincoln, and wrote his revealing book, “The Tale of June 12:

The Betrayal of the Democratic Rights of Nigerians (1993).” It was during his sojourn that he was diagnosed with cancer.

The book is unsparing of those Omoruyi called “enemies” of June 12, but it is especially so of Babangida. The entire transition was a ruse. Everything Babangida said in his June 21 1993 broadcast justifying the annulment was false through and through, Babangida knew it.

Arthur Nzeribe and his Association for a Better Nigeria were Babangida’s proxies. The bizarre rulings of the Abuja courts on the election were given with the full knowledge and endorsement of the military president and the Federal Ministry of Justice.

As the scheme unraveled, Omoruyi wrote, Babangida was “more concerned with saving his life and the lives of his family members than with his office and, by extension, the country. There was absolutely no doubt that he was prepared to sacrifice anything, including the transition programme and the country, so long as he saved his life.”

Weighed down by the mental strain the crisis was taking on him, Babangida had said during one anguished moment: “I wish I can see a psychiatrist to examine me. I think something is wrong with me”

And so on and so forth.

After the book’s publication, Omoruyi seemed to have reconciled with Babangida. Omoruyi celebrated the rapprochement, which his son was instrumental in bringing about. If Babangida’s quixotic bid to return to power had not collapsed before it began, Omoruyi would most likely have been in his corner again.

All had been forgiven even if not forgotten, it seemed.

Then, Omoruyi’s cancer returned. Lacking the resources to travel abroad to seek the aggressive medical intervention it demanded, he turned to Babangida for help. Despite his famed large-heartedness, Babangida was not forthcoming. Neither were those friends on whose help Omoruyi thought he could stake a claim. In the end, it was Governor Adams Oshiomhole of his home state, Edo, who came to the rescue.

This sense of abandonment was what provoked Omoruyi’s pained lament that he had been “used and dumped.”

I think he did himself a great injustice by that statement.

They thought they were using him, as they had used and wasted so many of the intellectual courtiers of the era. They did not reckon that he has a mind of his own. Only those who have no minds of their own, those who cannot speak truth to power, get used and dumped.

The reader must judge for himself or herself whether Omoruyi should have returned to Babangida’s camp after what he went through, and after the excoriation of the former military president that perfuses “The Tale of June 12.” Whatever the judgment, we must in this season of goodwill wish him a speedy recovery.

It will certainly be said of David Omo Omoruyi that he served Nigeria devotedly with his learning and organisational ability at a crucial time in the nation’s history and, at great risk to his life, stood firm on principle when he found – rather late in the day, some might say – that those who recruited him into what he believed was a noble enterprise had all along been actuated by base motives.