Category: Tatalo Alamu

As progressive forces and democratic voices began to suffer one reverse after the other in the wake of General Abacha’s seizure of power, particularly after the detention of M.K.O Abiola and the hounding of so many into exiles,  a few of us began to think of ways of keeping hope and the struggle alive without directly involving the political class. The Nigerian political class has been a curse to the nation.

As we continued to mull the idea over several sessions and several telephone calls, one name kept popping up as the person most likely to be of use and most likely to be financially sympathetic to our cause if were to need urgent financial assistance. It was Chief Alfred Rewane, the late industrialist and tireless financier of progressive causes since the fifties. He was a great and trusted ally of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and reputed to be one of the financial wizards behind the Action Group’s remarkable solvency during the First Republic.

We decided to approach the old man at a date to be agreed upon. We left the matter at that, probably due to other things requiring our urgent attention somewhere else. I was at this time closely and crucially involved in the attempts to get politicians of all hues together for an All Politicians Summit to chart a new course for the country.

On Saturday 7th of November, 1995, I had decided to pay a customary courtesy call on an older friend, mentor and one of the most principled and indefatigable apostles of the late Chief Awolowo, Chief Wumi Adegbonmire, in his bookshop at Ile-Ife. Strategically located on the main approach to the town from Ibadan, the bookshop doubled as office, reception centre for the politically traumatized and an engine room for future commotions.

The ever combat-ready politico, a.k.a Omo Ekun, (Son of Tiger) was a master of political and literary hostilities. You could spend hours with the old man trading ideas and political tackles. It was at the point when you appear to tire out that the old man would begin to warm up for a fresh round of intellectual offensive. He was a man of bearish strength both physically and cerebrally. He would tell you that the Yoruba are always at their best when it comes to leisurely paced long-distanced hostilities.

“Wo aburo, ija idera ni’ja Yoruba” (“Look my younger brother, the Yoruba are masters of leisurely warfare”), he would interject with hilarious irreverence and then switch into flawless English with joyous foreboding. “Look, you know that this thing can go on for the next thirty years”.

A man with a prodigious capacity for political affray, Omo Ekun once sternly admonished yours sincerely that it was not the mark of a serious and committed politician to be going about in the traditional three piece Yoruba agbada dress.  “How can you be going about in flowing Agbada?” the great man exploded. “ What if a civil war breaks out? They will just round you up in the big for nothing nonsense and throw you on the ground”.

For good measure the political pugilist gave the example of a recently decamped youthful SDP senator who was widely acknowledged as a strong pillar of progressive cause but who suddenly and dramatically switched sides. “You see,” Omo Ekun began with a testy grin, “whenever I saw that boy with his flowing agbada smiling his wretched smile, I knew that he was up to no good. See the way he has ditched us for that military thug”.

Apart from his love of politics of the radically progressive hue which began as a youthful affliction and endured till old age, Chief Adegbonmire was also a bibliophile and a master of the damning historical detail. As he massaged his tangled beard with a scornful grimace, political anecdotes tumbled out with wicked punctuality.

One of my favourite anecdotes was the one involving Chief Obafemi Awolowo and one of his favoured and most fervent younger disciples. According to the chief: “You see whenever the young man began his usual Aluta nonsense, substituting hard analytical thinking with empty and barren sloganeering, Chief Awolowo would size him up with a laughing frown and then suddenly thunder: ‘hold it, hold it there! Collect your thoughts. Marshal your argument. All this political effervescence will get you nowhere!’ And it finally got him into trouble”.

He put them all to sword: great royalties, plutocrats, captains of industries and military barons.  He once told me of how he subjected a leading Yoruba oba widely acknowledged to have played a dishonourable role during the June 12 saga to a withering verbal assault right in his palace before walking out for good measure. When he was stalking a big beast, his face would light up with towering mischief. “That one is an illiterate moron”, he once observed of one of Nigeria’s most celebrated generals.

A gifted prose writer himself and a notable columnist in his prime, he had an ear for the finer nuances of the language and its eccentric possibilities. He was particularly merciless with hacks and dabblers in the trade. A typical day at his bookshop began with Omo Ekun gathering all the major dailies and subjecting each write up to astringent parsing. With a red biro, he would underline every grammatical infraction and all stylistic infelicities before pushing them away with a frown.

When I greeted him that morning and he replied with a grunt without looking up, one had thought that he was involved in his usual labour of slaying grammatical fools. But when some moments passed and he still didn’t look up or even acknowledge the presence of his younger friend, one thought it was time to bait him out of his hostile lethargy.

“Chief, could it be that the military people have finally rendered you hors de combat?”, I asked tentatively trying to lure him out with one of his favourite expressions. The chief finally looked up and it was a cloudy and frightening visage to behold.

“It is not funny. They got Alfred”, the great warrior and veteran of numerous civil commotions moaned as he tossed one of the dailies at one.

“Who is Alfred?” one queried in frantic disarray.

“Chief Alfred Rewane has been killed!” the chief said as he got up and began pacing the entire length of the bookshop.

“No, no ,no, this cannot be true!” I screamed even as the bold headlines announcing the gruesome murder of the great philanthropist and one of the noblest Nigerians that ever lived confronted one with the unimpeachable evidence. The chief ignored my ranting.

“This bears all the hallmark of state execution”, the chief noted calmly as he removed his reading glasses and began wiping the cloudy mist with a white handkerchief. It was now my turn to start pacing the length and breadth of the entire bookshop as intimations of mortality lumbered up my spine. Things were getting truly nasty. Once again, the lights were going out of Nigeria and might not return for another decade. If an octogenarian could be so brutally dispatched in his bedroom by the agents of Satan, then let the younger ones take heed.

His executors were said to have spoken perfect and flawless Itsekiri and had managed to hoodwink and browbeat the security at the gate by donning the uniform of one of his companies. They had been let in on the pretext that they had an urgent message for the old man. It was a message of death. He was shot at close range, and as the bullet blasted his bronchial cavity, the chief lurched forward as if to embrace his terminator.

“My son, you have killed me?” the great man was to have moaned with a quizzical frown.

At this point, fear began to mix with a feeling of deep guilt. I was overwhelmed by a sense of personal responsibility about the death of this illustrious Itsekiri nobleman. Although we never formally met, and I had only managed to catch glimpses of him from a distance, he was a powerful presence in the life of many aspiring progressive activists who he never met. Older colleagues hawked tales about his outlandish generosity and kindness. Even the stern and austere Chief Awolowo was known to treat him with joyous and boyish affection.

That morning as one began to take in the full import of the assassination of the great patriot, a sense of guilt gave way to panic and raw apprehension. Walls were beginning to develop outsize ears indeed. It was as if somebody somewhere had been listening in to our earlier conversation about approaching the great man. The person had decided to get him before we could get to him. Nigeria had entered into one of its darkest phases. Either way, things would never be the same again.

It was the chief that roused me from my disoriented walkabout.

“This is the beginning of a chain of events the end of which no one can foresee. I see this country foaming in a river of blood. I have already told my children where I should be buried. If fighting for a better, just and more egalitarian Nigeria means certain death, so be it. I will take their bullet in the chest and not in the back like a coward. The handshake has now gone beyond the elbows.”, the old man noted wistfully and began packing his papers.

Two weeks later, I began my journey to exile.

• From Underground in My Fatherland (c) 2017.

As it has been famously noted, it is not the land that has no heroes that is unhappy. It is the land that is in need of heroes. Yet as it is often the case, it is not the shortage of heroes that is the problem. It is the absence of a solid parameter for defining heroism. In any nation convulsed by clashing values, one group’s hero is another group’s villain; one section’s freedom fighter is another section’s terrorist. Consequently, it should be obvious that a nation without national memory cannot have a shared destiny.

The crisis of memory is part of the foundational crisis of Nigeria and its aborted nationhood. This past week, the tragic crisis of national memory played out as a group of distinguished Nigerians gathered in Asaba to commemorate what is known as the Asaba Massacre which took place when loyal federal troops arrived to repossess the ancient city nestling on the bank of River Niger. It had been overrun as Biafran troops made a breathless dash across the Niger in a brilliant and relentless strike which was finally repulsed at Ore.

It was said that when federal troops arrived in Asaba, they gathered many of its denizens together as if for a party before subjecting them to a historic slaughter. Only a few lucky ones lived to tell the tale. It was a most senseless carnage; a chilling and premeditated mass-murder which freezes the nerves even fifty years later. War is indeed hell, as William Tecumseh Sherman, the American Civil War commander, famously rued.

Yet while the commemoration of this tragic chapter in Nigeria was going on, it was obvious that few of the illustrious people gathered also remembered that there are documented cases of ethnic atrocities also committed by Biafran troops in Benin and Asaba as well. But these were uncoordinated and ad-hoc incidents of elimination which could not compare with the severity as savagery of the Asaba massacre. Just like the revenge killings that accompanied the second coup of 1966 , the savage response was wildly out of proportion in comparison with the original infraction. But as it has been observed, war is often not about who is right but who is left.

In an irony of ironies, the man who caused it all and who hailed from the nearby village of Okpanam was resting in a quiet grave in a federal cemetery in Kaduna where he lived with his parents before joining the Nigerian Army. By all accounts, Major Chukwumah Kaduna Nzeogwu was a brilliant and outstanding officer; a pan-Nigerian nationalist and patriot who was moved to precipitate action by the plight of the Nigerian people.

But the blatantly partisan nature of the coup he led in the north, the ethnic and selective pattern of its killings and the unwarranted ferocity, left a blotch on his name and career forever. The savage reprisal, which was a response to the decapitation of the northern military and political leadership, plunged Nigeria to a civil war which led to the death of an estimated two million people.

Yet even in war, a few sane voices remained. When Nzeogwu was killed in battle, General Yakubu Gowon, the Nigerian Head of State, in an act of exemplary statesmanship and quality leadership, ordered that his remains be taken to Kaduna to be given full military honour and a fitting burial. In a moving tribute which this writer recorded as a youngster, Gowon described his fallen colleague as a “misguided idealist” who meant well for his country. For Gowon, it must have been a tough and exacting task. But this is the route to national memory.

Grim irony, however, continues to stalk the nation. This past week, the tame and temperate General Gowon got his own historic comeuppance, when Professor Omigbodun, a daughter of the martyred Colonel Victor Banjo, launched a plaintive appeal to the former head of state to return some personal items belonging to her father taken from their residence on the express order of General Gowon.

The late Banjo, executed by his friend, Col Emeka Ojukwu, was the nearest thing to a Yoruba military avatar and a literary genius to boot. Irascible and supercilious, he had reportedly swaggered into the office of General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, a burly no-nonsense soldier who had no time for dogonturenchi. Ironsi promptly had him arrested and locked up. Those who witnessed his subsequent execution reported that the colonel was defiant to the end, insisting after each volley that he was not dead yet until a fifth round finally silenced him.

They are not dead yet, all these victims of our unhappy history. The Asaba victims, Col Banjo, General Zakariah Maimalari who was dispatched by his Brigade Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, General Samuel Ademulegun who was assassinated in bed by the crack Major, Tim Onwuategu and all those whose remains litter unmarked graves. Nigeria has a problem with memory. As the Brits and Spaniards are discovering many centuries after, there are memories that stand in the way of complete national integration. The sooner we deal with these the better.

This morning we bring you another dark episode from our history excerpted from a forthcoming book. Underground in My Fatherland.  It is about the murder of Chief Alfred Rewane.

(Remembering the gentle giant of Action Group)

Once again dark clouds are gathering over the Nigerian polity. There is a growing feeling of disillusionment and disenchantment among the most articulate sections of the polity. When there is recession, there can be no recess or rest for the writer. This morning, this column, in solidarity with the distressed, terminates its leave to pay tribute to a great Nigerian patriot, a timeless hero of his Yoruba people and a political prodigy of mass mobilization in Nigeria’s post-colonial politics.

Obafemi Awolowo was a moral, political and economic genius. But blessed is the gifted leader who is able to attract a visionary followership to advance the cause. This was Awo’s singular luck, in and out of circulation, and in and out of jail. Michael Adekunle Ajasin, the gentle giant of old Ondo Province, was an avatar among these avatars; a classic instance of visionary followership, unwavering devotion to a noble cause and apostolic discipleship.

The very last of the Mohicans are still with us, the Adebanjos, the Fasorantis, the Jakandes, the Fasanmis, the Okes and the Akintoyes. But their ranks are thinning fast. Looking back, there was something magical and absolutely mesmerizing about the life and times of late Pa Ajasin. His formal political career blossomed from the turn of the fifties with the Action Group party reportedly launched in his modest sitting room in Owo. It endured a thirteen year hiatus as the nation came under the hammer of military dictatorship only for the army to return four years after to send the political class packing.

In and out of formal politics, the late avatar continued to function as leader of his people ultimately emerging as the undisputed leader of the Yoruba upon the demise of his beloved leader, Obafemi Awolowo, thus putting a lie to the military pretension of decreeing partisan politics out of existence. You can as well ban oxygen from the atmosphere.

In a celebrated swipe at this brand of military messianism, Chief Awolowo was once asked by the famous columnist, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, whether he would return to politics upon its formal unbanning by the military government. “ Gbolabo, you can only return to a position you have left”, the Ikenne sage retorted with gnomic contempt.

There was an elective affinity between the two grand old men of Yoruba politics forged in political adversity and sustained collaboration. Both shared the caustic wit and remarkable verbal felicity of the Yoruba people. But while Awo was supremely self-confident, proactively disdainful, with a hint of abrasive candour and fully earned self-belief, Ajasin was reticent, retreating, quietly uncompromising and unobtrusively implacable. The bottom line is that both men took no hostages.

Despite his quiet exterior and head-masterly demeanour, Ajasin would always be found in the thick of the battle like a happy warrior.  He was a man without cant or wishy-washy equivocations. There was something about him which hinted of extraordinary stamina for long distance feuding and a capacity to be embroiled in political hostilities at several levels, local, sub-local, regional and national all at the same time. The gentle giant was a heavyweight political pugilist.

Despite the fact that he was fractionally older than his leader, there was no suggestion of rancour, tension or unhealthy political disagreement between them. Once Ajasin accepted Awo as political leader, there was no looking back. Spartan and abstemious in life style, honourable and noble in personal outlook, Ajasin never wavered in his political and ideological commitment. Despite the fact that the blueprint for the Action Group free education scheme bore his heavy imprimatur, the old man could never be seen claiming credit or basking in intellectual self-adulation.

It all seems like yesterday but it was exactly twenty years ago when the old man took his final bow from the turbulent world of Nigerian politics. For the Yoruba people, it was a moment of angst and deep political anxiety. With the June 12 mandate seemingly unrealizable, with the presumed winner, MKO Abiola, deeply embedded in Abacha’s Gulag, with the supporters scattered to the winds and with General Abacha on rampage, seemingly unstoppable in his quest to transmute into civilian despotism, a deep cloud of gloomy despondency had settled on Yoruba land.

In a small dingy church in faraway and autumnal East London, the remaining band of NADECO faithful gathered for a memorial service for the departed statesman. It was perhaps the lowest ebb of the struggle. Yours sincerely had penned an emotional and moving obituary of the great man to be delivered in church but was too disconsolate to read it. Hon Wale Oshun gave it a brilliant shot.

The preceding few months had been particularly distressing. Hobbled by illness and age-related infirmities, Chief Ajasin had been subjected to serial harassment and psychological trauma by a military miscreant who seemed to have been posted to the state with the express order to put finishing touches to the old man. Not content with mere psych-ops, the brute finally invaded the house to lecture the great man on the virtues of patriotism and civic responsibility. He had forgotten that when you are sent on a slave mission you must execute same with the honour and nobility of a free born.

But history must vindicate the just, if not directly and expressly but in the most dramatic and profound of manner. Long after mercenaries have met their disgraceful end and the bell of infamy has been silenced, the trumpet of true heroism will continue to resonate. This much was evident this last Tuesday at the commencement of a two-day seminar to mark the twentieth anniversary of the call to higher glory of Chief Ajasin.

As speaker after speaker and product after product competed to eulogize and extoll the exemplary virtues of this great man, it was clear that he was in a class of his own even among his colleagues and contemporaries. Apart from politics, this was a lifetime devoted to teaching and imparting knowledge to many generations as well as serving as their iconic mentor.

Of the very last batch of students he taught before finally retiring in 1975, one had become a professor of Medicine and the Vice Chancellor of one of the nation’s most prestigious universities. His Chief Typist in 1978 when he was serving as local government chairman had risen through the ranks to become a crack professor of Education in a leading university.

Perhaps the icing on the cake was the guest lecture delivered by Professor Banji Akintoye, a luminary of Historical Studies and senator of the Second Republic of Nigeria. In a virtuoso performance which belies his age, Akintoye hailed Ajasin as a leader of exemplary qualities and a quintessential man of the people who strove with others to lift his Yoruba people from semi-feudal rurality to modernity in a single generation.

Despite the setbacks and deliberate destabilization, the gains of that accelerated modernization continues to haunt modern Nigeria and to frame the topography of its brutal politics. What remains is to rue and lament the decline of visionary followership in Nigerian politics and its dreadful impact on quality representation, leadership recruitment process and the progress of the nation. In the First Republic, there were committed Awoists, militant Zikists and implacable Gamjites. But not anymore. In the current delirium of treachery and perfidy, any leader who sleeps with eyes closed has signed a pact with political suicide.

Perhaps this decline in quality followership can also be linked to the decline of quality leadership. The trail leads back to the Second Republic. Despite the fact that the Unity Party of Nigeria was a romantic reincarnation of the fabled Action Group, the fabric had begun to fray at the edges. The UPN witnessed more leadership tussles and upheavals than the Action Group. There were even ominous hints that a rogue faction was making overtures to the north in a bid to jettison the politically implacable and ideologically adamant Awo.

Chief Ajasin himself was at the centre of the political storm, with his suzerainty challenged by his deputy, Akin Omoboriowo, a charismatic and hitherto implacable Awoist. In a celebrated intervention, a group of Ekiti notables led by Ade Adegite, a brilliant maverick and professor of Chemistry at Unilag, advanced the thesis that in politics there were no permanent friends but permanent interests. In other words, politics is all about who gets what and at what time and hence could no longer be reduced to the antics of a gerontocratic conclave dishing out absurd preferment or the whims of an eccentric leader distributing premature patronage.

After the rout of his party by the NPN rigging armada and shortly before the military coup which terminated the Second Republic, Chief Awolowo, at a party convention held in Abeokuta, propounded the theory of a future synthesis in which the best of the conservatives and the progressives would come together in a new political union.

It was a brilliant prognosis but at best a simple Hegelian reading of a far more complex and complicated dynamics. The fact is that even at that point in time, the military incursion into politics has opened up the class project and the militarization and monetization of Nigerian politics in a way that would force a tectonic shift of values. Emergency contractors, military millionaires and sundry carpetbaggers began muscling out the ancient political class with the soldiers completing the rank-shifting in a relentless pincer movement.

It would not have mattered if this heist had led to the emergence of a truly nationalist political class. But it was the triumph of a rogue social mobility and political homogenizing in aberration and would lead directly to the June 12 debacle, the Abacha phenomenon, the military constitution of 1999, the Obasanjo Settlement and the current mortal and moral handicap of the Fourth Republic.

But every social phenomenon has its time and sell-by date. If the admiration and adulation of Chief Adekunle Ajasin in the hall last Monday were to be believed, and if the current national unease and clamour for restructuring and return to regionalism were to be factored into the equation, it should be clear to those who care to read the rustling leaves that the good people of Nigeria are yearning for a return of ideologically committed leadership, quality politics and visionary followership. Chief Ajasin will be quietly chuckling in his grave. May the soul of the great man rest in perfect peace.

Have good fists and a sharp tongue, and you will travel well and very far in a troubled land. Olusoga Gabriel Onagoruwa who joined his ancestors last week had both. It is just as well that the late legal titan was a formidable and feared boxer in his youth. Compact and physically robust, relentlessly pressing forward, he was built like an all-purpose Soviet-era tank. It was said that nothing gave him greater satisfaction than when taking down much bigger adversaries.

Legend had it that when the young boy arrived at his Odogbolu homestead after spending his entire youth in Port Harcourt with his travelling parents, he could hardly speak a word of Yoruba. The local toughies were not disposed to yielding ground or pride of place on the football field to a strange “Ibo” boy who had arrived from nowhere to disturb the peace of the community. Some memorable fist-cuffs established the pecking order in his favour.

Throughout his life, Olu Onagoruwa fought hard for whatever he believed in. He was not a fighter for personal prizes or public adulation but a pugilist for social parity. He was a man for the people but was not a man of the people. He could hardly be found rousing the rabble or working up the masses into a stone-throwing frenzy. This was perhaps why he never contemplated taking to the political soapbox throughout his rich and distinguished career. He belonged to a different theatre of public engagement.

But even on his chosen turf, he was forced by circumstances to fight and slug it out till the very end. It was a hard and bitter slug which must have left its bitter marks on a proud, defiant and unyielding man. Even after his solid prize-fighter physique had been hobbled by a massive stroke, his battling spirit refused to give up. He was not the kind of person to yield to physical disabilities.

This fighting spirit and the instincts of a great boxer stood him well as he went after military despotism and its façade of benign patriotism with a ferocity and vengeful zest almost bordering on the suicidal. In land mark case after land mark case, he tore the veil off the hollow pretences of military rule in Nigeria laying bare its emptiness and whimsical cruelties.

It was a brave and daring thing to do, particularly in an epoch when military rule was yet to exhaust its political and historical possibilities. A legal Spartacus has come to the land. Together with his friend, Gani Fawehinmi, they fought the military to a standstill in a series of legal duels which signposted the slow and steady advancement of fundamental freedom and the rights of citizens in a post-colonial nation. Nigerians must forever remain grateful to this duo.

For a long time and like Siamese twins, they appeared inseparable. Yet no two individuals could have been more dissimilar in temperament and disposition. While Olu Onagoruwa was cool, methodical and forensically implacable, Gani was given to temperamental denunciations of injustice and fiery legal calisthenics. While Onagoruwa had an instinct for the jugular, Gani overwhelmed his prey through sheer terroristic hectoring.

It remains one of the greatest ironies of modern Nigerian history that a friendship forged in heroic commonality against military despotism would also eventually founder on the rock of a fundamental tactical disagreement about how to proceed in the dark and final phase of military rule. What could not have been obvious to either man was that Abacha represented the last desperate throw of dice by the military oligarchy.

It was here that the temperamental and strategic polarities between the two great friends began to have telling effects on their politics and fabled friendship. While Gani, fiery and temperamental but with his instincts in the right place would have no truck with military despots, Onagoruwa, cool, nuanced, methodical and analytically proactive favoured a strategic engagement which would get the nation out of the dangerous cul de sac into which it had been pushed by the soldiers.

The objective truth lies between the two positions. Only those who want to play God would claim to know the real truth before the great owl begins its flight——which is always after the event. But since what is happening at present under a democratic dispensation is nothing but an engrossing replay of the same historical scenario under different circumstances and different historical personages, it may be wise to reflect deeply and profit from this epic clash of legal avatars.

In retrospect, it is only by an extreme suspension of disbelief and an unhealthy combination of political pragmatism with sub-ethnic solidarity that could have brought a man with a mind as acute as Onagoruwa to come to the conclusion that an army that has come to the final phase of self-demystification could be nudged in right direction, or to do the right thing for the nation it has brutalized and violently violated.

Judging by his antecedents as an anti-democratic enforcer and by his body language as a combative no-nonsense core soldier, it was obvious that General Abacha was not interested in de-annulling any election for that matter. Like virtually all the inner conspirators against civilian rule in the military, he could not even contemplate the prospects of an Abiola as his Commander- in- Chief. Rather, he was willing to press on until something gave.

Olu Onagoruwa was obviously assisted in reaching a guarded collaboration with the military by two objective factors. First, the fact that General Donaldson Oladipo Diya, his Odogbolu kinsman and confidante, was a prime mover in the plot. Second, his abiding distrust and barely disguised contempt for Abiola in particular and the political class in general.

Yet it was obvious to those who can read the balance of power that the ground had begun to shift under the legal titan and his military kinsman no sooner than they settled in office and Abacha began to consolidate his stranglehold on the military and security apparatuses. The dramatic dismissal of Mohammed Chris Alli , a.k.a June12 general, a man with lofty pan-Nigerian ideals but without a viable military constituency, and the appointment of Auwalu Yadudu as Special Adviser ought to have brought intimations of mortality to the general and the boxer from Odogbolu.

By the time Onagoruwa resigned after disowning and denouncing decrees purportedly emanating from his office without his knowledge and input, it was a proverbial case of too little too late. Thereafter even with Onagoruwa out of office and with Diya in office but not in power, it was obvious that both men were existing at the pleasure of a sadistic state in its last throes.

Eventually they took down Onagoruwa’s promising lawyer son right in front of his house and after a botched attempt to sabotage his plane, Diya himself was hauled in on the allegation of coup plotting and promptly sentenced to death. He was to be executed the same day General Abacha gave up the ghost. It was a miraculous reprieve from the jaws of death. But the damage had already been done.

By the time he died last week, Onagoruwa had almost become a forgotten figure of history. It was as if he belonged to another age and another society entirely. Hobbled by a massive stroke, embittered by his historical lot and disappointed that the state could not oblige him in his quest to bring the killers of his beloved son to justice it was obvious that he was a tired, sad and disappointed man.

To compound his woes, the Yoruba nation, after the Abacha scourge, gave its thumb up to the old political class that the great lawyer defied and held in contempt. But he was having none of that. Proud and defiant to the bitter end, Onagoruwa never sought a re-approachment with them nor did they cultivate him as a valuable asset gone rogue either.

This sad tale of an absconding falcon and the disappointed falconers raises several issues of conflict management and resolution between an embattled nationality in a roiling multi-ethnic nation and some of its most gifted children as well as the larger issue of mitigating the losses of an ethnic group in a protracted state of traumatic transition.

It is clear that Onagoruwa has suffered from multiple jeopardies. A person’s contribution to the well-being of his society cannot be determined by a single error of judgement but by the accumulated heft of his heroic exertions on behalf of and at the behest of his nation or nationality. In the course of a long and distinguished career, Olu Onagoruwa had endured private, public and professional tribulations.

For a long time, and like Gani and many others, he was marked down by his conservative colleagues for his radical posturing and embarrassing pronouncements. Subsequently, he was denied the opportunity of wearing the silk which ought to have been his right as a result of his seminal brilliance. By the time it came, they made sure they had completely worn him down and the title had become irrelevant to his personal standing and gravitas.

Operating outside the political system and to the far left of the political institutions in their society, openly contemptuous of the shameless racket their own legal profession had become, the likes of Olu Onagoruwa, Gani Fawehinmi, Aka-Bashorun, Tunji Braithwaite etc were legal and political orphans. In post-colonial societies just as it is the case in western societies, the orphans in politics and the professions are made to pay prohibitive penalties.

A case of restitution and complete rehabilitation can now be made on behalf of Olusoga Gabriel Onagoruwa. The Yoruba will do well to minimize the loss of some of its most talented children accruing to the nationality in the orrery of horrors and errors that the Nigerian post-colonial state has become and the inevitable periodic ethnic uprising against the torture chamber.

Having fought military rule all his life, it is a pity that the Odogbolu avatar succumbed to military wiles and state deception in the very final phase of military rule. Others were luckier. In the case of MKO Abiola, luck and intuition propelled him in the right direction and the right place at the last minute. In the case of Awo, having served the military at a critical phase, he knew exactly when to take off, thanks to superior awareness and personal discipline.

Like many others who spent their earlier life labouring for the freedom of their people only to falter in the last minute, Onagoruwa could not read the rustling tea leaves correctly when it mattered most. But his monumental achievements cannot be reduced to one grave error of judgement. As the boxer takes his leave and as the uprising continues, we bid this great son of Nigeria and Africa a rousing exit from the post-colonial ring.