Tag: Akinrinade

On January 2, 1984, shortly after the coup that brought the first Buhari administration, Akinrinade was shot and almost killed in broad daylight in Lagos. His assailants were never apprehended. As the title of Brigadier Hillary Njoku war memoir recalls, this is indeed a tragedy without heroes. But heroes or no heroes, a country must learn from its own history if it is not to be condemned to repeat itself or commit the same errors.

After the historic annulment of the landmark June 12 1993 election, Akinrinade felt that this was the last straw. He turned his back on the institution which has nurtured him and brought him much national prominence and visibility. The military institution responded in kind by humiliating him, hauling him into detention and finally hounding him to exile. His house was firebombed and his archives destroyed.

As we can see, the mutual disenchantment had been long brewing. By his own admission, Akinrinade began a long period of reading and reflection after disengaging from the Babangida administration in 1989. Many have questioned the wisdom and propriety of the general serving in the administration of a former subordinate whose hidden agenda he was not privy. Report suggested that the Minna-born armoured corps general was infinitely courteous and unfailingly polite to his erstwhile military superior.

In retrospect, it was obvious that long before the annulment, General Akinrinade had come to the private conclusion that something was drastically wrong with a country in which the military institution,  as coerced by a dominant faction, could become an army of occupation and supreme law-giver lording it over a country it is supposed to protect over external aggression and subjecting the captive populace to whimsical cruelties and political savagery.

The annulment and the subsequent incarceration of the presumed winner of the presidential election, Basorun MKO Abiola, seemed to have crystallized issues for General Akinrinade. A country that could be subjected to such a tortured transition programme which was famously described by an American political scientist as the most sustained exercise in political chicanery ever visited on a people, a country in which the electoral will of fourteen million Nigerian voters can be violently voided by a military cabal only for them to unleash a reign of terror on the already traumatized populace, is an armistice camp and no longer a nation-state.

Having disowned the institution that brought him to limelight, Akinrinade began another career late in life as freedom fighter and free thinker. It was to take him to exile and the gate of virtual economic ruination. As Chinua Achebe would say, it is akin to becoming left-handed in old age. Although there have been token concessions to futile militarism particularly during the NADECO years, this was no longer a battle that can be fought with military weapons but with an intellectual arsenal. From a military warrior, Akinrinade has transformed into a cerebral warrior.

He has coped very well, given his abiding reputation for diligence, integrity and scrupulous fair-mindedness in everything he does. With his mantra of restructuring, devolution of power from an overbearing centre, he has shaken the political establishment of the nation to its very foundation. But it is far from a done deal.

Some of the general’s actions and pronouncements bear the imprint and imprimatur of a political novice in the hard and cynical world of Nigerian politics. Sometimes, he reminds one of a political innocent abroad who is only accustomed to conventional warfare and not unconventional political warfare with its borderless hostilities and grim hostage-trading.

In response to Usman Bugaje’s probing preface to the book, the general rued the fact that he could probably not survive conventional politics as a result of a certain naivete. By his own admission, he has twice been wrong-footed into attending the wrong national conferences which have turned out a damp squib rather than a forum for a genuine discussion of the country’s multifarious woes.

The former infantry officer has equally been outfoxed and outwitted by political affiliates and associates in his principled attempt to pursue issue-based politics rather than emotive demagoguery. After NADECO had joined a transition programme whose constitutional provenance it did not know, the general watched from the sidelines as the “come and chop” signboard went up and the mantra of restructuring died a quiet death even among influential AD members who had been co-opted into the second Obasanjo administration.

This time around the general is taking an increasingly vehement umbrage at the loud silence of the APC government which has ignored the clause of restructuring which subsists in its own manifesto. What this may mean is that if it ever comes at all restructuring may not come through regular party politics and will certainly not be a tea party. In the history of structural reconfiguration of the country, no civilian regime with the possible exception of the First Republic has had the courage, legitimacy and historical presence of mind to embark on a restructuring exercise.

With political paralysis preventing the radical structural surgery needed to halt Nigeria’s slide into terminal catastrophe and with the 1999 military constitution acting as a gag on urgent reforms and productive politics, the prognosis is very dire indeed. The prospect of peaceful disintegration is not even on the card.

In a revealing moment in the book, the general wondered aloud whether the clean decoupling such as happened in the Velvet Revolution which saw to the neat break up of the old Czechoslovakian Republic would ever be possible in Nigeria. The point is that the Czechs and the Slovaks already boasted of authentic and organic societies despite forcible incorporation into the Hapsburg Empire as one nation. It was therefore easy for them to separate.  In Nigeria on the other hand, the colonial invaders smashed up the indigenous tradition and system of governance they met, leaving in their wake institutional chaos barely papered over by inauthentic modernity. Within the context of such institutional chaos and societal anomie, the precipitate disintegration of Nigeria is likely to replicate the tragedy of Sudan on a more apocalyptic scale.

But we cannot continue to blame the western imperialists for our woes. You cannot give what you don’t have. What British colonialists bequeathed to Nigeria was the paradigm handed over to them by their own ancestors. Get the nation to congeal and coalesce around a master-nationality and let them get on with it. The subsequent history of Nigeria has shown that within the context of nationalities that retain their political vitality and cultural independence despite the liquidation of their indigenous system, this is a recipe for permanent instability and it will never work.

General Akinrinade and many others of his sterling ilk owe the nation an obligation to think through this conundrum. For example, is there a connection between drastic national economic decline and the resurgence of ethnic nationalism and strident clamour for restructuring? Why is it that in periods of inclusive growth and rising national prosperity all is normally quiet on the restructuring front? Put in another way, is this restructuring business an elite red herring for factional exclusion from the sharing of vanishing national cake or why is it that the Nigerian people are generally lukewarm and indifferent to the clamour for restructuring?

The disarticulation of the Nigerian populace from the clamour for devolution and fiscal federalism and the disinclination of the political elite to mobilize the Nigerian masses for the struggle for genuine restructuring have led to the whole thing becoming an elite talk shop whether as seen in the National Assembly, the so called National Conferences and even within the political parties.

Given this elite loss of mental and political concentration, the initiative has been seized by rogue groups led by anti-elite elements as seen in the Boko Haram  insurgency, the Niger Delta militia and various self-determination militias springing up in the South of the nation. If they manage to overrun the elite establishment, then we will no longer be talking of peaceful restructuring.

Rather than being a nuisance or a troublemaker, it can now be seen why the efforts of General Akinrinade and others like him are pivotal to this recovery and recuperation of elite initiative in Nigeria. Blessed is the nation that listens to its deep thinkers for they are gifted pathfinders who show the way forward in moments of national distress and disorientation.

In conclusion, let me praise the efforts of Soji Akinrinade, Chief Femi Akinrinade and the May Five publishing group, particularly my former colleagues and fellow columnists at Newswatch, Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed. Had Dele Giwa been alive, he would have turned seventy this year. This is also his story. If we are to take an audit of those who have been wasted at the shrine of Nigeria in the last five decades, it is going to be a very sad tale, a museum of atrocity indeed. But we must move on.

As for the general, it has been quite an extraordinary life both on the battle field and the battle field of ideas. Looking back at the commencement of his career fresh from Sandhurst, this is not how he thought it would have ended. But it is not how a person begins that matters but how he ends up. The loss of the military is the gain of the entire Nigerian society. This is the odyssey of a thinking soldier and how a man who started out as a career infantry officer has ended up as a cerebral warrior, a military intellectual and a soldier-statesman as well as beloved doyen of his people.

General Akinrinade has shelved fighting with weapons for fighting with ideas. As I have said somewhere during the Abacha scourge, long after the guns have been silent, the supersonic boom of ideas, the thunderous artillery of thinking, will continue to echo. Please join me in saluting this illustrious son of Nigeria, scion of Yoruba nobility, extraordinary warrior, military philosopher, moral exemplar and avatar of the Yoruba code of Omoluabi. I thank you all.

In his review of ‘My Dialogue with Nigeria,’ a book written by former Army Chief Gen. Alani Akinrinade in Lagos, eminent scholar Prof. Adebayo Williams contends that the restructuring of the polity will halt the disadvantages of the lopsided federalism.

It gives me great pleasure to review the rich collection of thoughts or what I have chosen to call the pre-memoirs of General Julius Alani Ipoola Akinrinade.
When I was informed that I had been drafted to review this important book, I had no choice but to review my own programme to fit to the calendar of events. This was not just a military draft, it was also a village summons and sometimes you dread the village summons, with its power of remote control and menacing metaphysics, much more than a military summon.
Let me begin by congratulating the retired general for finally and grudgingly acceding to the long standing request of many of his admirers to put something on paper. This unique opportunity affords his numerous admirers and critics to take him on concerning some salient features of his robust and remarkable interventions in the polity and vigorous contributions to the debates about the destiny of the nation. General ignorance is no excuse for the ignorance of generals.
General Alani Akinrinade is one of Nigeria’s most illustrious citizens ever: a great career soldier who rose to the very pinnacle of his profession, distinguished warrior, consummate strategist, military philosopher, officer-gentleman, democratic freedom fighter, omoluabi per excellence, Nigerian nationalist and Yoruba patriot. To achieve only one of these distinctions in a lifetime would be enough for most people but Akinrinade carries them all with self-effacing aplomb, particularly the onerous responsibility of being a thinking soldier in post-colonial Africa.
Given the way some military dictators and thugs in uniform have disgraced and desecrated the soldiering profession in post-colonial Africa, the very notion of a thinking soldier might seem a violent oxymoron or a contradiction in terms. But this is far from being so, particularly in Nigeria. Nigeria has produced a sizeable crop of thinking soldiers who remain largely unsung for reasons of professional modesty. Akinrinade is top of the pile.
At any rate at the most sublime level of soldiery, many of the greatest military leaders the world has seen have also been great thinkers. Examples abound: Alexander the great, Fabius Maximus aka Cunctator of the Roman Empire, the great Chinese generals of medieval antiquity, Charles de Gaulle, William Tecumseh Sherman, Douglas MacArthur, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Bernard Montgomery and a host of others.
These men not only revolutionised military strategy in their societies but also profoundly affected their political template. It is to be hoped that when Akinrinade’s thoughts on the colonial military institution and the post-colonial crisis of the Nigeria nation-state are further refined and distilled into a book, he will join this global gallery of military avatars.
This book is coming at a particularly volatile historical conjuncture for Nigeria, with much national anxiety about the state of governance and the structure of the so called federating units. The national optimism and feeling of hope and buoyancy brought about by regime change has now been replaced by a feeling of gloom and despondency. There is a resurgence of ethnic animosities, with religious disaffection and regional animosities compounded by the reality of presidential ailment.
The triumphalist chest-beating after the historic regime-change of 2015 has evaporated giving way to the creeping awareness that regime-change itself may well be part of a complicated game of history the end of which no one can predict. We are discovering to our peril that elections do not resolve national questions but may actually complicate and exacerbate them. Coming to think of it, the nation is more divided today than it was in 2015. We surely live in interesting times.
But let us look at this from a different angle. This is a unique occasion leavened by historical ironies. Fifty years ago, it would have been impossible for somebody with a military background to write or publish a book like this. One is not even sure whether a civilian would dare it. In 1977, a ranking general, a privileged and preferred insider, a celebrated war hero, an exceptional officer destined to become the nation’s top soldier could not have afforded to be caught mouthing restructuring and the possible disintegration of the nation if certain structural anomalies are not corrected.
Such an officer, however highly placed and widely adored, would have become instant anathema to the military institution and a source of professional embarrassment to the Army High Command. If he escaped riotous court-martial for treasonable exertion, he would definitely have been sectioned to go and preach restructuring to fellow destructured and demented inmates of a military asylum.
Not even Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the finest and most intellectually gifted advocate of genuine federalism that the nation has thrown up, was openly canvassing restructuring and devolution of power at this perilous period. Having withdrawn from General Yakubu Gowon’s cabinet, Awolowo retreated to his Ikenne redoubt to plot his way to power after the disengagement of the military.
Ironically, the most prominent debate of the period was about diarchy, or military-civilian cohabitation, championed by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe. Awolowo shunned the debate, leaving Zik to slug it out with the likes of Allah De, the great departed columnist, whom the Owelle dubbed the dean of satirical journalism in Nigeria.
With the benefit of hindsight, the reason for this national quietude about the structural configuration of the country should be obvious. There was a gung-ho military patriotism in the air. Despite the tragedy of the civil war and the coup that toppled General Gowon, the military as a national and nationalist institution was rampart and resurgent. It was perhaps the finest period of the nation with Nigeria punching its weight on the international scene.
The post-war boom and economic buoyancy added to the feel-good factor. Culturally and intellectually, the nation was experiencing a renaissance. Fifty years down the line, all that had disappeared and dissipated into thin air leaving in its wake a fractured and fractious nation with a hundred and ninety million people tottering on the brink of political, economic and spiritual bankruptcy.
The story of that dismal downturn and calamitous national decline is also the story of General Akinrinade’s slow-motion transition and transformation from a military kingpin to an institutional dissenter, a career officer to a questioning officer and a former Army Chief of Staff to a pro-democracy activist hounded and hunted out of a country he had served with distinction in war and peace time.
Despite the obviously traumatic turn-around, there will still be a few of Akinrinade’s colleagues who are not sold on this Pauline conversion. For them, the sight of a three-star general among prodemocracy rabble and riffraff is an assault on military sensibility and decorum. When he joined the army didn’t he know he was joining a stiffly hierarchical, unitarist and highly centralised organisation with no time for devolution of power in and out of the military?
Does it not amount to professional suicide for any military institution to decentralise its command structure or the structure of the country it has forcibly taken over? Why doesn’t this man simply enjoy the perks and perquisites of his former office or go back to his Yakoyo farmstead to enjoy blissful retirement? Akinrinade’s retort would be that it is not because he loves the military that he owes so much less but that he values his beloved country more.
Those who know the general very well will confirm that till date the Sandhurst-trained Infantry officer retains a lingering affection for military tradition and its abiding code and etiquette. It is with a proud nostalgia and boyish admiration that Akinrinade narrates how as the most senior cadet officer, he would take other junior cadet officers through the mile-long grassland that separates Staff College from Sandhurst to have lunch with the then Major Yakubu Gowon. Gowon in turn fully reciprocated the affection and admiration of the promising younger officer.
This book explains much of the puzzle and what we propose as the Akinrinade conundrum. The title itself is revealing. My Dialogue With Nigeria is a robust concession and a tipping of the military cap to democratic spirit and restitution. The typical general does not engage in dialogue. He deals in diktats and peremptory instructions. It is the bounden duty of those so directed to comply. It is obvious that Akinrinade is having none of this authoritarian military ethos. He sets forth his argument with much patience, humility and an endearing self-depreciation.
This is a book that has been eagerly awaited for almost three decades. Many other military chieftains, notably General Olusegun Obasanjo, General David Jemibewon, General James Oluleye, General Alexander Madiebo, Brigadier Hilary Njoku, Majors Oyewole and Ademoyega and a host of others have published their memoirs. As a pivotal figure during the civil war, particularly as the top commander in the run up of events leading to the collapse of Biafra, many are of the opinion that these accounts cannot be complete without listening to General Akinrinade’s accounts.
The pressure on the Yakoya-born general seemed to have increased after the publication of the memoir of his friend and course mate, General Godwin Alabi-Isama. Alabi-Isama’s hefty tome remains a landmark in the annals of military literature in Nigeria, a tour de force: relentlessly documented, impressively annotated and brilliantly put together. In a rare glimpse of Akinrinade’s nobility of character, he reveals in his book that he had advised Alabi-Isama to tone down the anger and vitriol in his own book in order not to ruin a good effort with his barely assuaged bile.
In the event, many people will be disappointed in this book since it is not the racy, breathless account they have been waiting for. This is not a regular biography, but a biographic introduction crisply written by the editor, Soji Akinrinade, and spiced with interviews, lectures and other memorabilia. But what it loses in racy pace and narrative fluidity, it gains in expository power, the density of thought and well-marshaled arguments. We must await a more detailed memoir with bated breath.
It is useful at this point to note that by his own admission in this book, Akinrinade did not start out as a radical officer. According to him: The army does not allow for radicals or radical behaviour. People may hold radical views but the system does not allow you to go beyond certain norms, certain rules and regulations” pp19-20.
The truth of the matter is that military radical or radical militarism is a contradiction in term, an oxymoronic formulation, except as a badge of professional suicide or ritual self-sacrifice. The army is essentially a conservative institution primed for the conservation and preservation of the state as it is and not as it ought to be. No matter its provenance, the military institution is founded on the notion that order and the stability of the ruling class is superior to justice and equality.
This is usually the status quo in all military establishments except in armies thrown up by transformative revolutions such as the Chinese, the Cuban and the old Soviet armed forces or transformative wars of nation liberation against colonial invaders such the Vietnamese, Indonesian and the modern Turkish army which emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire as the Western colonial powers gobbled up its prized possessions in the Middle East.
Yet, despite his disavowal of radicalism, Akinrinade’s career was marked by a series of dissents and downright refusal to obey constituted military authority which would have proved disastrous for many officers less lucky. His evasive answers and obvious lack of commitment to commit his under-strength brigade to join the then Colonel Murtala Mohammed in his Light Brigade suicidal dash across the Niger River had a ring of irony to it. Mohammed himself was disobeying superior orders from the Headquarters.
Later as a sup to the tempestuous and fire-eating Mohammed, Akinrinade, a gifted military strategist, had suggested to Mohammed a less turbulent crossing upriver through Idah in a move that would have linked the Division with General Mohammed Shuwa’s troops but Mohammed vowed never to have anything to do with his former course mate whom he angrily dismissed as a “renegade”. Several decades later, Shuwa would be killed in a different kind of war. He was killed with his pistol blazing while defending himself against members of the Boko Haram sect that invaded his home.
This is a story shot through with intrigues and deadly plots, of a hitherto professional army that lost its way in the jungle of partisan politics and professional perfidy. It is not an edifying tale to retell. Akinrinade himself would eventually become a victim of one of the deadly plots when he was summarily kicked upstairs as Chief of Defence Staff barely six months into assumption of duty as Chief of Army Staff. He was to serve for another six months before voluntarily throwing in the towel.
It should be recalled—and this is not in this book—that Akinrinade had thought that he had left the army for good after the last Supreme Military Council meeting of General Olusegun Obasanjo’s regime. But he was recalled to take charge of the army while holidaying in Kenya with a group of friends. His only request to have his old course mate, the recently deceased General Emmanuel Abisoye, retained with him was summarily turned down by those who had an axe to grind with the Ogori-born general.
On January 2, 1984, shortly after the coup that brought the first Buhari administration, Akinrinade was shot and almost killed in broad daylight in Lagos. His assailants were never apprehended. As the title of Brigadier Hillary Njoku war memoir recalls, this is indeed a tragedy without heroes. But heroes or no heroes, a country must learn from its own history if it is not to be condemned to repeat itself or commit the same errors.
After the historic annulment of the landmark June 12 1993 election, Akinrinade felt that this was the last straw. He turned his back on the institution which has nurtured him and brought him much national prominence and visibility. The military institution responded in kind by humiliating him, hauling him into detention and finally hounding him to exile. His house was firebombed and his archives destroyed.
As we can see, the mutual disenchantment had been long brewing. By his own admission, Akinrinade began a long period of reading and reflection after disengaging from the Babangida administration in 1989. Many have questioned the wisdom and propriety of the general serving in the administration of a former subordinate whose hidden agenda he was not privy. Report suggested that the Minna-born armoured corps general was infinitely courteous and unfailingly polite to his erstwhile military superior.
In retrospect, it was obvious that long before the annulment, General Akinrinade had come to the private conclusion that something was drastically wrong with a country in which the military institution, as coerced by a dominant faction, could become an army of occupation and supreme law-giver lording it over a country it is supposed to protect over external aggression and subjecting the captive populace to whimsical cruelties and political savagery.
The annulment and the subsequent incarceration of the presumed winner of the presidential election, Basorun MKO Abiola, seemed to have crystallized issues for General Akinrinade. A country that could be subjected to such a tortured transition programme which was famously described by an American political scientist as the most sustained exercise in political chicanery ever visited on a people, a country in which the electoral will of fourteen million Nigerian voters can be violently voided by a military cabal only for them to unleash a reign of terror on the already traumatized populace, is an armistice camp and no longer a nation-state.
Having disowned the institution that brought him to limelight, Akinrinade began another career late in life as freedom fighter and free thinker. It was to take him to exile and the gate of virtual economic ruination. As Chinua Achebe would say, it is akin to becoming left-handed in old age. Although there have been token concessions to futile militarism particularly during the NADECO years, this was no longer a battle that can be fought with military weapons but with an intellectual arsenal. From a military warrior, Akinrinade has transformed into a cerebral warrior.
He has coped very well, given his abiding reputation for diligence, integrity and scrupulous fair-mindedness in everything he does. With his mantra of restructuring, devolution of power from an overbearing centre, he has shaken the political establishment of the nation to its very foundation. But it is far from a done deal.
Some of the general’s actions and pronouncements bear the imprint and imprimatur of a political novice in the hard and cynical world of Nigerian politics. Sometimes, he reminds one of a political innocent abroad who is only accustomed to conventional warfare and not unconventional political warfare with its borderless hostilities and grim hostage-trading.
In response to Usman Bugaje’s probing preface to the book, the general rued the fact that he could probably not survive conventional politics as a result of a certain naivete. By his own admission, he has twice been wrong-footed into attending the wrong national conferences which have turned out a damp squib rather than a forum for a genuine discussion of the country’s multifarious woes.
The former infantry officer has equally been outfoxed and outwitted by political affiliates and associates in his principled attempt to pursue issue-based politics rather than emotive demagoguery. After NADECO had joined a transition programme whose constitution provenance it did not know, the general watched from the sidelines as the “come and chop” signboard went up and the mantra of restructuring died a quiet death even among influential AD members who had been co-opted into the second Obasanjo administration.
This time around the general is taking an increasingly vehement umbrage at the loud silence of the APC government which has ignored the clause of restructuring which subsists in its own manifesto. What this may mean is that if it ever comes at all restructuring may not come through regular party politics and will certainly not be a tea party. In the history of structural reconfiguration of the country, no civilian regime with the possible exception of the First Republic has had the courage, legitimacy and historical presence of mind to embark on a restructuring exercise.
With political paralysis preventing the radical structural surgery needed to halt Nigeria’s slide into terminal catastrophe and with the 1999 military constitution acting as a gag on urgent reforms and productive politics, the prognosis is very dire indeed. The prospect of peaceful disintegration is not even on the card.
In a revealing moment in the book, the general wondered aloud whether the clean decoupling such as happened in the Velvet Revolution which saw to the neat break up of the old Czechoslovakian Republic would ever be possible in Nigeria. The point is that the Czechs and the Slovaks already boasted of authentic and organic societies despite forcible incorporation into the Hapsburg Empire as one nation. It was therefore easy for them to separate. In Nigeria on the other hand, the colonial invaders smashed up the indigenous tradition and system of governance they met, leaving in their wake institutional chaos barely papered over by inauthentic modernity. Within the context of such institutional chaos and societal anomie, the precipitate disintegration of Nigeria is likely to replicate the tragedy of Sudan on a more apocalyptic scale.
But we cannot continue to blame the western imperialists for our woes. You cannot give what you don’t have. What British colonialists bequeathed to Nigeria was the paradigm handed over to them by their own ancestors. Get the nation to congeal and coalesce around a master-nationality and let them get on with it. The subsequent history of Nigeria has shown that within the context of nationalities that retain their political vitality and cultural independence despite the liquidation of their indigenous system, this is a recipe for permanent instability and it will never work.
General Akinrinade and many others of his sterling ilk owe the nation an obligation to think through this conundrum. For example, is there a connection between drastic national economic decline and the resurgence of ethnic nationalism and strident clamour for restructuring? Why is it that in periods of inclusive growth and rising national prosperity all is normally quiet on the restructuring front? Put in another way, is this restructuring business an elite red herring for factional exclusion from the sharing of vanishing national cake or why is it that the Nigerian people are generally lukewarm and indifferent to the clamour for restructuring?
The disarticulation of the Nigerian populace from the clamour for devolution and fiscal federalism and the disinclination of the political elite to mobilize the Nigerian masses for the struggle for genuine restructuring have led to the whole thing becoming an elite talk shop whether as seen in the National Assembly, the so called National Conferences and even within the political parties.
Given this elite loss of mental and political concentration, the initiative has been seized by rogue groups led by anti-elite elements as seen in the Boko Haram insurgency, the Niger Delta militia and various self-determination militias springing up in the South of the nation. If they manage to overrun the elite establishment, then we will no longer be talking of peaceful restructuring.
Rather than being a nuisance or a troublemaker, it can now be seen why the efforts of General Akinrinade and others like him are pivotal to this recovery and recuperation of elite initiative in Nigeria. Blessed is the nation that listens to its deep thinkers for they are gifted pathfinders who show the way forward in moments of national distress and disorientation.
In conclusion, let me praise the efforts of Soji Akinrinade, Chief Femi Akinrinade and the May Five publishing group, particularly my former colleagues and fellow columnists at Newswatch, Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed. Had Dele Giwa been alive, he would have turned seventy this year. This is also his story. If we are to take an audit of those who have been wasted at the shrine of Nigeria in the last five decades, it is going to be a very sad tale, a museum of atrocity indeed. But we must move on.
As for the general, it has been quite an extraordinary life both on the battle field and the battle field of ideas. Looking back at the commencement of his career fresh from Sandhurst, this is not how he thought it would have ended. But it is not how a person begins that matters but how he ends up. The loss of the military is the gain of the entire Nigerian society. This is the odyssey of a thinking soldier and how a man who started out as a career infantry officer has ended up as a cerebral warrior, a military intellectual and a soldier-statesman as well as beloved doyen of his people.
General Akinrinade has shelved fighting with weapons for fighting with ideas. As I have said somewhere during the Abacha scourge, long after the guns have been silent, the supersonic boom of ideas, the thunderous artillery of thinking, will continue to echo. Please join me in saluting this illustrious son of Nigeria, scion of Yoruba nobility, extraordinary warrior, military philosopher, moral exemplar and avatar of the Yoruba code of Omoluabi. I thank you all.