Long before I met Chief Ayo Adebanjo whose 90th birthday celebration was a major event on the nation’s political and social calendar several weeks ago, I felt as if I had always known him. Wherever you turned on the political landscape, wherever you found Chief Obafemi Awolowo, he was there, and not just as a fringe actor.
He was there in the politics of the old Western Nigeria, in the region’s ruling party, the Action Group, at the Treason Trials, and in the Unity Party of Nigeria.
He has been a constant presence in Afenifere, and he was there in NADECO, the coalition of opposition forces that fought military rule and Abacha’s terror machine to a standstill. He belongs in the leadership of politically engaged Nigerians demanding a comprehensive re-design of the national architecture.
Built like a battle tank, Adebanjo is a formidable presence. He never pulls his punches. If he were a professional boxer, he would ever press forward, like Joe Frazier. No shaking, no retreat, no surrender.
My first direct encounter with him took place sometime in 1990, at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, on Victoria Island, Lagos. The occasion was the launch of Ebenezer Babatope’s book, Not His Will: The Awolowo Obasanjo Wager, before an array of Awo’s disciples. The book was Babatope’s answer to Obasanjo’s Not My Will, in which Obasanjo declared, with not a little triumphalism, that the national leadership Awo sought in vain had come to him almost without a conscious struggle.
Babatope charged in his book that as the military head of state who supervised the 1979 general election from which Shehu Shagari emerged president, Obasanjo had by acts and omissions stymied the quest of the UPN’s presidential candidate.
Not proven, I said in the review I was invited to present. Obasanjo was certainly not enamoured of Awo’s candidature, and had said that much in Not My Will. He had voted for Shagari, believing, that Shagari would make a better president than Awo. But the evidence that Obasanjo had blocked Awo’s path to the presidency was inconclusive, I said.
I had hardly come down from the platform when Adebanjo walked up to me.
“Dare, you are wrong,” he said severely. “You are very wrong. Obasanjo plotted against Awo’s election. We know he did.”
He must have come to the venue from the court, or from his law office at Western House, or was heading to some engagement, for he was wearing a suit. In subsequent encounters, I have never seen him thus attired, only traditional clothing, formal or casual, always matched by his emblematic AWO cap.
Adebanjo never held it against me, and neither did Babatope, I must say to their credit, that I had not performed to the expectation of the assembled Awoists.
Throughout the “June 12” struggle, he never fell for Babangida’s subversive generosity and was wholly undaunted by Sani Abacha’s terror machine. Within hours of the state-sponsored murder of fellow NADECO chieftain and financier, Chief Alfred Rewane, in his Ikeja home, Adebanjo was on the scene, defiant as ever, calling things as he saw them, totally unmindful of consequences.
If he should fall that very day, he said, it would not be said of him that he died prematurely. But as long as he lived, he would never flinch from championing justice, democracy, the rule of law, and a more equitable federation, he declared. As his life shows so eloquently, he was not grandstanding.
Those who thronged the ceremonies marking his birthday anniversary were in a way affirming that he has stayed true to his vow, a profile in dedication and commitment.
Adebayo Adedeji, scholar, author, administrator, diplomat, distinguished public and international civil servant, died last week, aged 87. He had been out of circulation on account of illness.
The media took judicious notice of his accomplishments — professor of public administration, at the University of Ife; Federal Minister of Economic Development and Reconstruction in the aftermath of the civil war; a major architect of the National Youth Service Corps; key negotiator of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Treaty, and executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), among other distinctions.
At these and many other fora, Adedeji performed with his quiet distinction. He was soft-spoken and would have been unobtrusive as well, but for the tobacco pipe that accompanied him everywhere he went. It may well have been a prop as was rumoured, for few recall seeing him taking a puff. It nevertheless accentuated his dignified, donnish look.
Adedeji, it should be stated for the record, was the second African to serve as the ECA’s executive secretary, not the first, as some media outlets have reported. The first was Robert K. Gardiner, the distinguished Ghanaian socio-economist, previously director of Extramural Studies at the University College, Ibadan, as it then was. I should also add that Dr Gardiner was also the first African to present the BBC’s Reith Lecture.
Though Adedeji operated for several decades at the highest level of policy-making and execution in Nigeria and on the international stage, with abundant opportunities for self-aggrandizement, he was untainted by the merest whiff of scandal.
He insisted that policy should be informed by rigorous scholarship and the force of data. This stance brought him into conflict with the administration of military president Ibrahim Babangida, which expected him to parrot, as if they were Holy Writ, the structural adjustment policies the IMF/World Bank had clamped on Nigeria.
The scholar in Adedeji would not oblige.
They said in Nigeria that there was no alternative to SAP, variations of which The South Commission, chaired by former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere said in retrospect were often founded on “unduly optimistic assumptions . . . a doctrinaire belief in the efficacy of market forces. . . excessive dogmatism and lack of commonsense. . .”
Adedeji took a leading part in formulating and articulating a muscular and well-received African Alternative Framework to SAP. In that task, he could not have settled on a more formidable collaborator and proselytizer than the brilliant Marxist economist, Professor Bade Onimode, of radiant memory.
If Adedeji had been home-based and his office did not confer immunity on him, he would most certainly have been detained or jailed along with dozens of prominent Nigerians who wanted to organise debates on alternatives to SAP.
Even so, he had a taste of their wrath. They launched a media campaign to discredit him. His term was up at ECA, and renewal should have been routine, more so since his performance had been outstanding, and he needed just one more year to qualify for a pension. As punishment for his anti-SAP stance, the Babangida Administration refused to recommend renewal. It took all the influence General Olusegun Obasanjo could muster as statesman-at-large to ensure that Adedeji stayed on to qualify for a pension.
At the urging of some influential persons, who still believed against all the evidence that Babangida meant to hand over to an elected president he entered the presidential race. The foray never really got off the ground. He had no regrets that it was short-lived. But he must have been grieved that the ambitious Africa Centre for Development and Strategic Studies into which he ploughed his resources did not flourish. The funding he was expecting did not materialise.
Adedeji played his part and played it to high national and international acclaim.
