LAGOS State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Fashola yesterday joined pro-democracy activists in paying his last respects to the late Pro- democracy activist, Pa Babarinde Oluwide Ajibola, popularly known in his life time as Baba Omojola, as his remains laid in state in Lagos. The Governor arrived at the Chief Onitana Street, Surulere residence of the late activist at about 10am to the warm embrace of pro-democracy groups and activists who had gathered to honour the activist. He later walked past the remains laid in a brown casket that was draped with National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) colours, as a mark of his last respect to the late activist. The governor later sat and commiserated with the family members led by Mrs. Yewande Cole Ajibola and some of the children who included Akin Ajibola, Ms Titilope Omosile Ajibola and Miss Eyinade Rosa Ajibola. Other PRONACO members present included Chief Ayo Opadokun, Reverend Tunji Adebiyi, Mrs. Alao Aka- Bashorun and Comrade Alfred Ilenre among others.
Tag: Baba omojola
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Late Economist Omojola for burial Nov 15
The remains of the renowned Economist and revolutionary activist, Adewole Babarinde Omojola Ajibola, will be buried in Lagos on Friday, November 15.
The one-week event to be graced by socialists and other human rights activists will commence on Monday, November 11, and end on Saturday, November 16 with an outing service at Indigene Faith of Africa (Ijo Orunmila Ato) Lagos.
Popularly known by his operational name, Baba Oluwide Omojola, 75 died on Saturday, October 19, 2013 in Akure, Ondo State, a day after he presented copies of the PRONACO People’s Constitution and other documents to the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue led by Dr Femi Okurounmu.
Climax of the burial programme released by the family, will be the Tributes Galore planned for Thursday, November 14 at the Indoor Sports Hall of the National Stadium, Surulere, Lagos from 10 am – 3.30pm and a Solidarity Night featuring musical rendition, cultural display, poetry, tributes and candle light procession scheduled from 8pm till dawn.
An Interdenominational Service to be coordinated by Bishop Atilade between 4 – 5.30pm and a Traditional Wake-keep by Indigene Faith of Africa (Ijo Orunmila Ato) from 5.30 – 6.30pm will also hold on Thursday.
A Public Walk with the remains of Comrade Baba Omojola which will hold from the Lagos State Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja – through Maryland – Ikorodu Road to his residence on 13, Onitana Street, Surulere, Lagos will commence by 7am on Friday, November 15.
This will be followed by Lying in State in the family house at 13, Onitana Street, Surulere, Lagos and a service by Ijo Orunmila Ato at the Indoor Sports Hall of the National Stadium, Surulere, Lagos between 10.30 – 11.30 am, on the same day.
The body will leave for internment at 1.15pm while entertainment of guests will hold between 1.30 – 7.30pm at the Indoor Sports Hall of the National Stadium in Surulere, Lagos.
Other highlights of the burial event include a Road Show from Tai Solarin Square, Yaba to Community Playing Field at Rasaq Balogun Street, near Baba Omojola’s residence in Surulere, which is scheduled for 11am on Tuesday, November 12 and a Cultural Display at the same venue between 2 – 6.30pm on the same day.
A Colloquium on Agenda for Sovereign National Conference will hold at the Indoor Sports Hall, National Stadium Surulere, Lagos from 11am – 5pm, on Wednesday, November 13.
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A farewell to Baba and Omo
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
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Progressivism, between revolution and evolution: For Baba Omojola, 1938-2013
The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in several ways; the point however, is to change it.
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” [11th thesis]The news of his death came to me from Eddie Madunagu through a terse text message that got to me at about 4 a.m. in the morning: “BJ, Baba Omojola is dead.” Incidentally, I had just gone to bed having been at work most of the night. I was tired, I was sleepy, but the news made me sit bolt upright. I had a mind to call Eddie right away, but the thoughts, the images of encounters with Baba over the decades and years flooded my mind, my psyche and I willingly submitted myself to them. For this reason, instead of calling Eddie I sent him a brief text message saying “A terrible loss. He never looked his age. He seemed deathless, he seemed indestructible!” Having sent this message to Eddie, I resumed my sad, brooding and introspective thoughts about Baba and what his life, thoughts and deeds had meant to the revolutionary struggles against injustice and inequality in our country, our continent and our world. After about an hour, I drifted to sleep and for this reason, it wasn’t until about five hours later that I was finally able to call Eddie and share with him the deep sense of loss and mourning that I think each of us felt both personally and as members of a generation of which Baba Omojola was both a beacon, a pathfinder and an organizer-extraordinaire.
Before ideology, doctrine, principle and organisation all of which mattered a great deal to him, Baba was a person who it was a privilege and a delight to meet and to know. For one thing, nature and/or genetics were very kind to him in that for almost all of his adult years, he looked considerably younger than his real age. I used to tease him and joke with him to reveal to me the secret of the “ajidewe” (magical potion or elixir of eternal youthfulness) that made him always look so much younger than his age. At a deeper level, the perpetual youthfulness that he exuded in body and spirit never left him. Indeed, it took some time for me and members of my generation who entered the movement of leftist, socialist activist politics in our country in the late 1960s to appreciate the fact that Baba was older than us, both in age and in the movement!
While we were yet to figuratively cut our milk teeth in Marxism and the workers’ and farmers’ struggles, Baba had been there with legendary figures like Pa Imoudou, Tunji Otegbeye, Eskor Toyo, Mokwugo Okoye and Raj Abdalla. He had personally and directly participated in international currents of the worldwide anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolutions that we had only read about in books. And yet in spite of this rich background of experience and education, Baba was a profoundly humble, unassuming and approachable man. He was hospitableness and generosity personified. He hosted, often at his own expense, innumerable public and private, open and secret, legal and extra-legal meetings of the Left. He was one of a few, if indeed not the only one, who could call a meeting of all the factions and tendencies of the Nigerian Left in the 70s and 80s and every group would respond positively to the call.
And yet, Baba was ardent and passionate in ideology, doctrine and organisation. Anyone who knows anything at all about Marxism and socialism in their incarnations as revolutionary movements and organizations knows that this means factionalism and divisiveness often on an extraordinarily bitter and self-defeating scale. Perhaps unknown to the Nigerian state and unknown also to the generality of Nigerians, Marxists and socialists in the country in the 60s, 70s and 80s were divided and spilt along the fault lines of this constant and perpetual factionalism of the Left in nearly all countries of the world. Baba taught all of us in the Left in Nigeria an invaluable lesson in the necessity of overcoming this historic and normative organizational disease of the Left. What do I mean by this?
Baba Omojola was a member of the Third International, the controlling formation of all Trotskyite-Marxist movements and comrades in the world. He was the Editor of a publication known as “Mass Line”, the most prominent Marxist journal in the country at the time. In the journal, Baba and his comrades stuck to the Trotskyite line and everyone on the Left knew this. But beyond mandatorily holding on to the official doctrinal line, Baba opened the pages of the journal to debates with other factions, other tendencies of the Left in the country, something to which Trotskyites in other parts of the world are not usually predisposed. The upshot of this was the fact that while ideology and doctrine definitely meant a great deal to Baba, it meant a great deal more to him to bring living, breathing, suffering and struggling human beings together whatever ideas they profess as long as they were willing to contribute to the great struggles for the betterment of society in general and the lot of the most oppressed in particular. The three major All Socialist Meetings of the 70s at which virtually all the groups and individuals on the Left in the country were represented were convened by him. [It was while I was driving back from Kano at the second of these meetings that I had an accident at Kontangora that nearly took my life in 1976] Nobody, absolutely nobody was more dedicated than Baba to creating a viable and strong political party of the Left that would contain all factions and tendencies. Look into every single attempt to found such a party in our country and you will find that Baba was there as a moving spirit. He never tired, he never relented, he never gave up on the attempt. And when that effort failed, he went into parties and organizations that were bourgeois in social location but liberal and egalitarian in ideology and orientation. If revolution did not seem to be coming as passionately as he wanted it to, he looked to evolution, to gradual, incremental steps by which the same goals could be achieved. He was a radical and progressive humanist for all seasons.
It is against this background that we must assess the popular view on the Left that in his last decades and years and especially after the nullification of the June 12, 1993 electoral victory of M.K.O. Abiola and the Social Democratic Party, Baba subordinated the class struggle to the national question. What this means is, simply, that he became an “ethno-nationalist” for whom the fate of the Yoruba “nation” within Nigeria was of more importance than the common fate of the oppressed of all the ethnic, regional and religious communities in the country. The fact that he was such a prominent figure in PRONACO definitely added much fuel to this view for among all the major progressive groups in the country, PRONACO it is which is totally and unapologetically committed to the “national question”, to the cause of parity and true federalism among all the federating ethnic nationalities in Nigeria. Beyond PRONACO, even Leftists and socialists of his generation like the late Ola Oni and Bala Usman, among so many others, are also said to have taken this route of the primacy of the national question over class struggle.
In my humble opinion, I think that the matter is a little more complicated in the case of Baba Omojola. I think to the very end, he kept all possible avenues to progress, justice and equality in our country and our continent open. We know, for instance, that in recent years PRONACO was not the only organization and forum in which he was active. He was a member of the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) and contributed to debates that informed its periodic bulletins on the state of the country and its working peoples across the length and breadth of the land.
Baba Omojola was born into and came of age in the colonial age of imperialism. He saw with great clarity that not everyone, not every group in colonial Nigeria and Africa suffered under foreign rule; he saw in fact that some of the colonized benefited from it. He saw that colonialism drew much of its force and hegemonic authority from capitalism, just as slavery had also been closely aligned to capitalism in its mercantilist phase. That’s what led him to Marxism and socialism. In the postcolonial and neocolonial Nigeria and Africa of his middle-aged years, he saw that capitalism in his homeland had evolved worldwide to a different stage and had regressed in his country and continent into a new form of cannibalistic predatoriness. Correspondingly, his Trotskyite Marxism and socialism became more heterodox, more flexible. In his last years and decades under neoliberal global capitalism in its rise and fall, he saw his country and continent taking one step forward and two or three steps backward. On the very last day of his time with us here, he was still struggling, still trying to work out how best to proceed with head unbowed and spirit undaunted. We will miss him dearly but we take great comfort in the knowledge that he was here.
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Baba Omojola: the social democrat with a culture
BabaMojola inserted himself in the efforts of youth, especially undergraduates to spread the message of social justice in different parts of the country
Baba Omojola, as he was known in the progressive circles that he helped to nurture for over fifty years in Nigeria in particular and across Africa or the African world in general, is a man being remembered prematurely, given his level of intellectual, spiritual, and cultural energy that even at 75 defied the law of diminishing returns. None of his admirers and co-workers in the vineyard of the struggle for federalism and social democracy in Nigeria ever expected to be in a position of remembering him in the past tense so soon, certainly not with the radiating and infectious energy he evinced only eight weeks ago at the celebration of his 75th birthday anniversary. With the calling of death, remember BabaMojola we must today, but with a heavy heart.
He was a man of rare talent and understanding of the role of culture in development and the place of social democracy in the development of any nation that wants to be remembered as a nation of human progress that is devoid of class prejudice and injustice. More than any other activist for social and economic justice and cultural democracy, BabaMojola fought for the cause of justice with unflinching belief in the power of example, which was most graphically illustrated by his humility and simplicity.
Baba, as he was fondly referred to by his younger associates, had some magnetic power to draw younger believers in the cause of freedom and justice for all to his person, ideas, and ideals. In the progressive circles from the 1970s till the 1990s, many young radical intellectuals often confused Comrade Baba Omojola with Comrade Ola Oni. I, for one, often in the late 1970s used to refer to Baba as the Ola Oni of Lagos and to Ola Oni as the BabaMojola of Ibadan. So close were these two public intellectuals in terms of sincerity of purpose and commitment to the building of a Nigeria with a capacity to dispense social and economic justice to all its citizens that it was not difficult for new initiates to confuse the two.
At a time that it was fashionable for scholars to flaunt their academic credentials and wear the names of the universities from which they acquired training on their faces, Baba was unmistakable in his unassuming nature. It was not necessary for him to advertise that he attended the London School of Economics where he left behind him an academic reputation that was rare even in the history of the institution. It was not necessary for Baba to impress his audience with the jargons of his two kindred disciplines: econometrics and statistics. As an activist for social democracy, he knew that horizontal communication was what is needed to preach the message of progress and justice in a country with less than 50% literacy rate. But he never lost touch with the complexity of the discourse of change from a pre-Bendal postcolonial state to a social democratic one while also showing commitment to inter-ethnic harmony and cooperation across religious and cultural divides in the Nigerian multiethnic state-nation.This disposition was most illustrative in his interaction with youths across the country.
For example in the 1970s and 1980s, BabaMojola inserted himself in the efforts of youth, especially undergraduates to spread the message of social justice in different parts of the country. He was in the 1970s a major organiser of progressive youths in northern Nigeria. In this process, he helped to nurture progressive-minded undergraduates in the Progressive Youth Movement of Nigeria (NYMN), particularly in Kano and Kaduna in the 1970s. He also assisted NYMN in publication of Struggle, a radical journal published in the Kano-Kaduna axis. Baba was not content with spreading the message of social democracy to undergraduates, he also ensured that he assisted to link new graduates with working-class organisations and struggles. Similarly, in the 1980s, BabaMojola, along with late Alao Aka-Bashorun, gave intellectual and financial assistance to facilitate publication of Forward, a workers’ journal published in Lagos, which served as the cradle of ideological growth for many of today’s progressive political thinkers and activists now in their middle age.
I became re-connected with Baba Mojola in the mid-1990s after Babangida’s annulment of the 1993 presidential election won by Chief M.K.O. Abiola. It was during his participation in NADECO at home and my own participation with NALICON and NADECO-abroad that I got to see the cultural side of Baba Mojola. As a mentor for several organisations committed to restoration of democracy and federalism in Nigeria during the Abacha reign of terror, BabaMojola was an inspiration to many of us in the struggle in the Diaspora for de-militarisation and re-federalization of Nigeria. I was privileged to work with Baba to mobilise the Yoruba diaspora in the West African sub-region to support the activities and demands of NADECO.
Still as committed as ever to the struggle for social democracy in Nigeria without any trace of dogmatism, Baba prepared several papers and inspirational talks in accessible Yoruba that we took to several Yoruba communities in Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. He provided examples to all of us involved in the Diaspora Project on how to communicate effectively with our audience via verbal, gestural, and kinesic images. His address to a Yoruba community town-hall meeting in Akuedo in Abidjan, laced with proverbs relevant to the struggle for democracy and federalism in Nigeria remains memorable till today. Baba inspired many oldish Yoruba men and women whose lingua franca was French to renew their interest in reading Yoruba. So powerful and resonant was the voice in his small frame that audience hailed him for coming to address them in a place so far from home and a from a country that has basically forgotten them.
BabaMojola left many legacies: courageous and self-sacrificing struggle for justice and national development; consistent commitment till the end to the cause of a Nigeria that can sustain democracy and its unity through a constitution that is devoid of traces of domination and exploitation of one group by another; a public and private persona that was not diminished by any trace of ethnocentrism; a non-doctrinaire acceptance of the compatibility of Yoruba nationalism and development of a social democraticethos in a united Nigeria; and an unshaking belief in a simple lifestyle that makes infinite acquisition non-essential to a life of fulfillment and self-satisfaction.
To paraphrase an Ifa verse BabaMojola gave me in Atlanta during a peace meeting organized for Yoruba leaders after the election of Alliance for Democracy’s presidential candidate at Di Rovans in 1998, ‘BabaMojola, like the primordial community lover in Ife, had added the struggle for the progress of others and his communities: the Yoruba Nation, Nigeria, and the African world to his own responsibility throughout his life and never gave up until he could no longer do so, Edumare, afunni ma siregun’ (the one that gives with unfettered generosity and without conditionalities), will also, while you rest in perfect peace, give your wife and children all they need to have a more stress-free and fuller life than yours.
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Baba Omojola (1938-2013)
HIS life could easily have followed a totally different trajectory. He certainly had the requisite intellect, talent, energy and abundant opportunities to accumulate wealth and live in personal affluence while being totally indifferent to the fate of the poor, weak and disadvantaged. But Adewole Babarinde Omojola Abiola, popularly known as Baba Oluwide Omojola, who died last Saturday, October 19, at the age of 75, steadfastly defied the lure to live according to the decadent norms of an overly acquisitive, materialistic and self-centred society.
Baba Omojola, one of Nigeria’s most committed, consistent and versatile revolutionary thinkers and activists died, as it were, on active service. Even at his advanced age, he had travelled to Akure, Ondo State, and made a presentation at the Town Hall meeting organised by the National Conference Advisory Committee just a day before death came calling. He died in pursuit of his life- long commitment to fundamental socio-economic and political change in Nigeria. In every sense, the struggle for a just, equitable and democratic society that upholds human dignity and freedom was his life.
Born in Ipetu-Ijesha, Osun State, in 1938, Baba Omojola attended Ilesa Grammar School between 1952 and 1956. Thereafter, he was admitted to the London School of Economics, where he obtained a 1st Class Degree in Economics in 1961. A man of uncommon brilliance, his academic record at the famous institution was unsurpassed for over four decades. He received further education at the Central School of Planning and Statistics in Poland, from where he graduated in 1970.
Resolute in his commitment to the emancipation of the poor and underprivileged, Baba Omojola was active throughout his life in various pro-democracy and revolutionary socialist movements in the country. Among these were the Movement for Popular Democracy in Nigeria (MPD), Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), Socialist Revolutionary Vanguard (SRV) and the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN). He was also a member of the Campaign for Democracy (CD), the National Consultative Forum (NCF) that organised the 1990 National Conference forcibly terminated by the military dictatorship of General Ibrahim Babangida; the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), which led the struggle against the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election as well as the Pro-National Conference Organisation (PRONACO).
Not unexpectedly, Baba Omojola’s radical political activism earned him the wrath of the state, particularly during the period of military rule. He was often harassed, had his residence searched for arms and in 1992 was detained for months at the Kuje Prisons near Abuja, along with Chief Gani Fawehinmi, Femi Falana (SAN), Olusegun Maiyegun, and Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti, for their opposition to the Babangida regime. These threats to his life and liberty never dimmed the ardour of his dedication to the cause of truth and justice. He never for once contemplated compromising his principles or integrity for self- preservation.
But then, Baba Omojola’s revolutionary passion and influence transcended the borders of Nigeria. He was an ardent Pan-Africanist who played a key, although largely uncelebrated role in the struggle to liberate Africa from colonial bondage. He thus worked very closely in this regard with key revolutionary figures within and beyond Africa, including Fidel Castro of Cuba, Che Guevara of Bolivia, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Algeria’s Ben Bella, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Sam Nujoma in Namibia as well as Oliver Tambo, Steve Biko, Thabo Mbeki and Winnie Mandela in South Africa, to name a few.
The demise of Baba Omojola is a monumental loss, especially at this time when there is urgent need for fundamental transformation in Nigeria. He was indeed an authentic hero of the Nigerian and African masses. We pray that his soul rest in eternal peace and that his example remains an enduring inspiration for future generations.
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Economist Baba Omojola is dead
Renowned economist, 75, Dr Baba Omojola is dead.
He died early Saturday morning after submitting his contribution to the National Dialogue Committee zonal session in Akure Ondo state.
Omojola, former United Nations (UN) economic consultant and was an active member of the Pro National Conference Organisation, PRONACO.
PRONACO secretariat in a statement by the group’s spokesperson Olawale Okunniyi confirmed Omojola’s death describing him as a revolutionary teacher and leader.
Okunniyi said Omojola “ suddenly slumped on Saturday in his hotel room in Akure, Ondo State, while preparing to leave for his base in Lagos after making a powerful presentation on behalf of PRONACO yesterday in Akure before the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Conference.”
“Baba Omojola who lodged at De Johson hotel, Akure where he suddenly collapsed was immediately rushed to First Mercy Specialist Hospital, Gbogi Road, Akure where he was later certified dead by one Dr. Akinluwa who was prompt in attending to him.
“Baba Omojola before his sudden passing this morning was at the forefront of the advocacy for the convocation of the Sovereign National Conference, SNC and was one the signatories to the communiqué of the National Political Summit held in Uyo between 2nd and 5th September 2013″.
The statement also recalled that: “The resolution of the summit specifically demanded for a Peoples National Conference for the country among others.”
“Baba Omojola at yesterday presentation before the Presidential Committee also insisted that the PRONACO draft Peoples Constitution adopted in 2007 under the leadership Chief Anthony Enahoro of blessed memory should be the working document of the proposed National Conference.
“He later formally submitted the draft peoples’ Constitution to the Chair and Secretary of the Presidential Committee before leaving the podium, Baba Omojola was co founder of PRONACO with Chief Tony Enahoro, Prof Wole Soyinka, Dr Beko Ransome Kuti among others who fought for the restoration of the present democracy in the country and the production of the draft peoples constitution produced by the Peoples National Conference of Nigerian ethnic nationalities between 2004 and 2007.
“As a revolutionary teacher and leader, Baba trained and led a horde of Political and Labour Activists who are currently leading the advocacy for a New Nigeria, where the diverse peoples of Nigeria can make and own their constitution and live a good and peaceful life.
“Baba will be remembered for his immense sacrificial contributions to political direction and development of the country; suffering numerous detentions in the hands of the Nigerian ruling class. Baba as a thorough bred and versatile Economist has to his credit numerous thesis and publications that has continued to shape the life of the country. ”, Okunniyi stated.