My dear FF, your frequent interventions in national affairs these days are getting me worried about how you harness your energies, time and resources at this critical period in your life. I read your statements on police permit for rallies, the kerosene subsidy palaver and the latest was your letter to the Auditor General of the Federation on the missing $20 billion illegally withheld from the Federation Account by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
In your letter dated February 7, you demanded a comprehensive audit of the federation account by the Auditor General of the Federation in order to reconcile the conflicting figures of both the Central Bank of Nigeria and the NNPC. You also threatened to take appropriate legal actions against the Auditor-General if he failed to act on your letter. You and I know that this was not the first time money will be missing from the NNPC.
It started way back in 1977 when Vera Ifudu of the NTA had an exclusive interview with Senator Olusola Saraki on the findings of the Senate Committee that investigated the discovery of $2.8 billion in the account of a notable military officer in a Midland Bank branch in London.
The Senate Committee’s findings contradicted those of the Justice Ayo Irikefe Panel which absolved the military officer from any wrong doing. Dr. Tai Solarin who helped in spreading the “rumour” through his column in the Nigerian Tribune was advised by Justice Irikefe to mind his own business when he failed to substantiate his claim when he appeared before the panel. Solarin’s confession that he heard about the missing money inside a molue angered Irikefe and his colleagues.
I commend your consistency and commitment to the struggle for a just and better society, responsible leadership and good governance. However, I must warn that you have gotten to a stage in your life when you have to reflect on your activism and your participation capacity considering your age and your expanded family commitments, having attained the status of a grandfather. Just last month, I read that you lost your son-in-law, Juwon Majekodunmi, who got married to your daughter just a year ago. This may not have any direct connection to the struggle, it is just a way of telling you that there is need to re-strategise and possibly deploy and re-channel some of these energies and resources into some personal endeavours.
I am concerned about the fact that after almost 35 years of “active activism” you are not showing signs of either withdrawing from it or slowing down the tempo of your anger against the nation’s political leadership. I must acknowledge though that your serial interventions in the Nigerian project have really helped us to achieve the little sanity that we have today, I still feel that the time has come for you to watch from the terrace or the sidelines how the game would be played without your involvement. The history of your activism is replete with so many instances of your confrontations with governments and their security agencies. Some of them were as dangerous as they were lethal. The number of persecutions you have suffered in the course of ensuring that our leaders govern the people, according to their oath of office and the laws of the land, is so massive that we your friends believe that only God could have made you survive them all, at least to date.
I do not know of any government since the time of Alhaji Shehu Shagari in 1979 that you have not had dangerous encounters with. You were unsparing in your attack and condemnation of the high voltage profligacy and police brutality witnessed under the Shagari administration. You could not conceal your anger and bitterness against the outrageous electoral fraud and madness which characterised the 1983 elections nationwide. I must admit, however, that the Shagari administration was full of all kinds of evil capable of destabilising the mental constitution of even the most sober individual in Nigeria. It was a government of brigands. The brushes you had with the Buhari-Idiagbon administration were provoked by Buhari’s slide into tyranny after enjoying popular support from the people for overthrowing the Shagari’s administration. You also revolted against the Buhari administration’s decision to withdraw meal subsidy from all our universities. You protested and fumed against this oppressive policy but all to no avail. The kinds of travails you went through during the regime of Ibrahim Babangida were such that only a man of steel could have survived them. I remember very well that you, Beko and Gani were sent to Kuje Prison purposely because the government of IBB felt that was the only way to break you and your obstinacy.
Ernest Shonekan could not even sit properly because of your incessant attacks on the constitutionality of his government. As an eye witness to some of these events, I can confirm that your presence at the daily protest at Ikeja under-bridge was instrumental to the dramatic step aside decision of Ibrahim Babangida. It was a fight-to-the-finish battle with the Abacha regime as you, Gani and Beko took his government to the cleaners with your vitriolic protestations against his despotic activities.
My dear friend, I think there are some defects, structural and systemic, in our Aluta strategy. Have you not observed that all our past struggles/Alutas have only led to changes in characters and styles? Just when you think you have dealt with a Babangida and his antics, another character, possibly more evil than Babangida, for instance, an Abacha, would later surface on stage with his own style, his own evil, his own corruption, his own despotic and tyrannic tendencies and exploits and then, the struggle continues. What can we do to end the struggle? When do we have time to mind our own personal business? What profits do we derive from a national struggle that saps our youthful energies and faculties, and also threatens the peace of our old age? What is more pathetic is that some of our people, previously engaged and involved in this struggle, have been blighted by the struggles one-step forward, twenty-steps backward scenario, and have either joined them, the so-called oppressors, or have been settled to keep mute in the midst of evil, or have been disabled physically, mentally, spiritually and economically. You and I might have been favoured to still remain alive, blessed and prosperous, but does that confer on us any moral authority to berate those who have committed class suicide having seen the vanity and futility of a struggle that remains as it was in the beginning and appears to want to remain like that forever? The struggle may be your life but your life does not have to be all about struggles.
That is why the Yoruba say: ta ba dagba a ye ogun ja, meaning our involvement in ware fare is halted by old age
My dear friend, your involvement in the struggle at this age (approaching 60 years) illustrates one thing: that our generation has failed in evolving a succession plan. When I see Dr. Dipo Fasina (Jingo) still doing aluta at his age, I chuckle at our succession failure. If we started in our 20s and we have been involved in active engagement for more than three decades, what is wrong in handing over to some of our youths who have the vibrancy and the passion for activism? Is it that we don’t have confidence in them or we think they lack the capacity for revolutionary resilience? For all you know, some of these youths are not coming out because they see that some of you, the older generation, are unwilling to quit the stage for them or reluctant to carry them along because you seem to be enjoying the glamour and the publicity of activism.
Your dominance and intimidating profiles are sufficient enough to scare these youths off the stage. We need to help them build their confidence and make them know that activism is not just about noise-making but about our individual commitment to a struggle that concerns our collective survival. Activism is not, and should not be, about intense competition for economic or political space but about how to use the available space to create some utilitarian value for all the occupants of the space. I am sorry to have introduced the age dimension into an issue that recognises no limitations in whatever respects. But who will not be bothered about the wastefulness of energy, time and resources which go into the campaign for a just society, a transparent process, and an accountable system? I am worried that the response and attitude of the state or the government to all the missing funds and corruption allegations are too perfunctory, unserious and unconvincing. What is more, the same citizens whose economic interests are being protected here, are the same people that are being mobilised for the neutralisation and circumvention of the campaign and the struggle. The Stella Oduah saga readily comes to mind. I still remember vividly how people carried placards to support her action because she is from their village. When, therefore, a struggle is developing complexities and such inexplicable contradictions or paradoxes, we need to re-evaluate the strategy of the struggle in order not to endanger the process of attaining the desired objective by unwittingly encouraging the abandonment of the beneficiaries of the struggle. Every struggle needs the people, hence the regular orientation and enlightenment of the masses. There should also be justification and rationale for our action, otherwise the campaign may end up relapsing into ineffectuality. For any struggle to sustain its objective, it is important to consider inclusiveness because of the potency of number as nothing tangible can be achieved from a struggle that notates exclusions.
Femoo, I want you to tell me in all sincerity if you were not frustrated and disappointed when you were rejected by your own people in Ekiti when you contested for the governorship of the state on the platform of the National Conscience Party (NCP) in 2003. You must have been (mis)led into politics and the governorship race by the illusion (or is it impression) that your popularity and fame as an activist of untainted reputation would get you into power. Again, you would have thought that it was an opportunity for the people to compensate you for your activism over the years and for your past sacrifices to ensure good governance in Nigeria even at the point of death. Were you not shocked and bemused that the same people who refused to vote for you as the governor of Ekiti State enthroned a clown and a clueless fellow like Ayodele Fayose as the governor of a state like Ekiti which boasts of nothing less than three to four professors from every community. What do we call this? An anomaly? A paradox? Political ingratitude? An irony? A contradiction? Whatever name we give to it, there is no justification at all for an enlightened state like Ekiti to have opted for a Fayose where there is a Falana. Any system, nay, any society, where this kind of aberration is encouraged, is sliding into insanity. Though, some people claimed that you were unable to effectively fund your campaign, should that be an excuse for your rejection? Were your selfless sacrifices for the nation not sufficient to obliterate every financial disability? Were your incarcerations not enough to generate goodwill in place of financial insufficiency? Was the humiliation you were subjected to before you were made a SAN, when virtually all your juniors in the Bar had been made SAN, not an opportunity for the Ekiti people to console their son who was being persecuted for fighting an evil society?
The truth is that our people are as confused as our nation. I salute your courage, my friend, because despite this rejection, you were quick to recover and, in no time, resumed your participation in the national struggle again. You refused to be frustrated by the system and the people of your state. You refused to allow the setback you suffered in your political ambition to affect your commitment to the people of Nigeria. But I must submit that the system or society that did this to you was unfair and unjust. I am not trying to rake up any animosity between you and your people but it is important that we all learn one or two lessons from your episode so that tomorrow a Kayode Fayemi will not lose election to an ungrateful Labourer, or a poultry thief or a failed banker. Or an Aregbesola losing election to a peripatetic rogue. We must as a people begin to learn how to reward people’s diligence and selfless services to their fatherland instead of commercialising our electoral potentials/assets.
What I love about you, my dear friend, is that you have never accepted any political appointments despite having been offered on so many occasions. You, Gani Fawehinmi and Beko Ransome-Kuti declined political offices/appointments because you thought that it was a way of inducing compromise. Imagine what would have happened if you had served under Babangida, Abacha, Obasanjo or Jonathan. Your present campaign against NNPC’s missing funds and the kerosene subsidy would have been weakened by sentiments and partisanship. And once a struggle lacks credibility, it becomes very easy to discredit the campaigner.
It is disheartening, though, that you will fight against a particular bad government or system, and when it is time to appoint people into the new government, some clowns and charlatans who never participated in the struggle will come from nowhere to come and reap from where they did not sow. Such is life.
I am tempted to ask you to consider spending the rest of your life in the service of GOD by joining us in the Redemption Camp. But I am not too sure if you will not continue your struggle by descending on our redeemed pastors and their “flamboyant” lifestyles. This may be a very dangerous adventure.
God, Himself, may be forced to ask you “why you are criticising another man’s servant.” In the church, struggle is regarded as a rebellion while activism is seen as a mutiny against the “heavenly hosts”. Remember that you left the Catholic Church as a page boy when you could not condone or agree with some of their doctrines. I want to believe that you are still very bitter with the Church. God does not encourage rebellion, so, I advise you to mind your domestic business by spending more time with Funmi. Folarin, Folakemi and Foladele. My dear friend, you need some rest after a long battle with this evil society.
