The roll call of attendees at Lateef Jakande’s birthday party was an apparition of the Yoruba elite. Weak, wizened but worthy, the first civilian governor of Lagos looked fairer in the 90th. No past governor, or political bigwig who attended the event spoke without awe. He is a man of legacy.
Perhaps the person who captured his acts with dramatic presence is his present successor, the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu. Microphone in hand and almost leaning over the sitting grandee like a grandson, Governor Sanwo-Olu said “I was 14 years old when you became governor of Lagos.” He presented himself as a model beneficiary of Jakande’s genius.
Few people live to see their legacy as superfine as that of the Lagos chief executive who mounted the chair he left behind. Governor Sanwo-Olu is the democratic bloodline to the throne just as a monarch swims the natural bloodline of the biological fathers. He is gradually coming into his own as he repairs the brokenness of the past few years: roads restoration, discipline, traffic, et al. Governor Sanwo-Olu must be contemplating Jakande as one of his exemplary ancestors.
So are many today looking at the man of modest lifestyle, infrastructural disruption, educational beacon and welfarist populism. But Jakande was not only about his transformational doings as governor. Before he was governor, he was a journalist. No mean one at that. He was, however, an Awoist, a man who exemplified the Yoruba sage and soldiered with him in crypts and sunlight. He wrote and edited and was even custodian of his ideals as the steward of The Nigerian Tribune. When Awo was jailed, Jakande suffered with him in his temptation behind bars.
So, today, it is that aspect of Jakande that fascinates this essayist. It is a narrative subsumed in the avalanche of accolades on his nonagenarian birth mark. What is the quality of Jakande’s courage? We saw it as he soldiered as a young man beside and behind Awo. He recorded with flair and perspicacity the toils and agonies of Awo’s trials. We saw him as governor fight for programmes mocked by his adversaries. His cancellation of the school shift system was revolutionary in the city. Yours truly attended an afternoon school.
He mushroomed the city with schools to bring every ward to learn in the morning. His NPN critics called them cowsheds. He soldiered on. He built the largest number of housing units ever in Nigerian history by any government, whether federal or state, within four years. He opened what we know as the Lekki Corridor today. He was a seer as an environmentalist, pioneering a day off to clean the city. We cannot forget another act of prescience: he began the Metroline Project, to plumb the city with rail transport to ease a metropolis of bourgeoning population. Buhari scuppered it but later apologised.
His profile overspread the nation. He was called the action governor. In Yorubaland, and among the progressives, he was called Baba kekere. He was austere in manners. He abhorred the magnificence of office. He lived in his modest home, rode his Toyota Crown, was not drawn to the vanity of travels abroad, or the extravagancies of official boasts or swagger, was never a fop even for ceremonies. He loved his confectionary, Tom Tom, as if he needed something sweet that also reminded him of the bitterness of human suffering. Baba kekere means literally the little father. It, in earnest, meant the heir to Awo, the father of Yorubaland and politics.
How was it that Jakande never rose to take the crown as the leader of the Yoruba? One, it was a question of charisma. He was a doer, not a charmer. He was no orator, not an absorbing conversationalist, though a deep thinker and practical man. He was not an impresario in political gatherings. He was an organiser, but not a broker. Hence when he pushed the candidacy of Femi Agbalajobi, his name made Agbalajobi a top contender but he was eventually toppled. However, the big challenge came after Abiola’s June 12 mandate tested the Yoruba mettle. Jakande joined the Abacha regime, just as Olu Onagoruwa and Ebenezer Babatope. They joined not arbitrarily, but as a way of putting the June 12 men in government as a transition ploy until the dream was realised. Whether it was an act of hopeless gamble or naivety by Abiola and his men has become a question for historians and political scientists. In his autobiography of reportorial rigour and voyage in Nigerian history, Chief Olusegun Osoba recalled in his book: Battlelines, that even Abiola saw the June 12 struggle as already a financial pressure and thought it necessary as a respite that his followers joined the junta.
But Abacha did not flinch. Abiola eventually mobilised and the sweep of Yorubaland and other progressive redoubts in the country decided on a battle-to-the-death against Abacha. When Jakande and others in government were asked to leave the junta, they refused. Here lies the question? How could a man called the heir stand on the other side instead of in the vanguard? Was it an act of discretion or a sellout?
The issue then was that Jakande, Babatope and Onagoruwa thought they were under watch, and if they tried to show any sign of disloyalty, they would be razed to death. The story of Ibru, who almost died from the Junta’s attack, was a case in point. But the counter story was that quite a few others who were not in government were being chased all over the country, including Enahoro, Soyinka, Tinubu, Osoba, et al. Some appointees escaped out of the country.
So, was it because they thought they were under special watch, more acute than the others? The late Gani Fawehinmi fumed often that his bosom friend Onagoruwa was cohabiting with the goggled despot. Together they had asun (special delicacy) and pounded yam and travelled out of town on many weekends.
Some said suicide was the option. But not so for others who risked all and slipped through the famous NADECO route? Was it because they lacked cunning? Courage without cunning is futile. Maybe they had too much cunning and so couldn’t dare. Jakande has paid since for his choice or dilemma. He has never been embraced in the inner sanctum of the Yoruba. His echo may have been heard. His name was hardly invoked, and when he was invoked, he was never beckoned. He never once was a steersman of the southwest breezes. He has remained in the quiescent fringes of the rumble of Yoruba politics since 1999.
In Yorubaland, politicians always pray not to commit what the Bible designates as sin unto death. In other parts of Nigeria, Jakande would have risen into a myth-like status. In the Southwest, however, his clay feet loom large. It is because the Yoruba are an ideological race. Onagoruwa in death was not washed of the sin. Neither is Babatope, whose voice once had the virility of a town crier. Jakande seems to enjoy some grace. Maybe a part of the Yoruba heart heard Mahatma Ghandi’s words: “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” Part of this is his work in Lagos. But it is a genius of development, not of character. Today people see him the way historian Thucydides writes of the great Pericles: “We have not left our power without witness, but have shown it with mighty proofs.”
But it is because his genius did not translate to courage in the tough hour of his people that he did not soar from Baba kekere to baba. That is the flipside of the great LKJ.
Sylva for oil man
As the President contemplates his cabinet, a few sensitive positions call for scrutiny. One of them is minister of petroleum. Since Kachukwu is not in the reckoning, a name that pops into mind is that of the former governor of Bayelsa State, the spry and lanky fellow, Chief Timipre Sylva.
His politics as a Buhari partisan and his resume with oil and politics qualify him aplenty. He has been in the epicentre of the oil producing region. He is also the most senior Buharist from the Ijaw nation. He was a Buharist before the word was coined when the former general was in the doldrums of presidential ambition, and few looked his way. Sylva gambled with him then.
His appointment will show Buhari as one who rewards loyalty, a point some critics are apt to point out. As special assistant to former oil minister Daukoru, he was a go-to man in planning and conducting the most transparent oil bid-round adjudged to be the best ever in Nigeria, generating over a billion dollars in revenue for the government.
During his time, they ended the chaos in the supply and imports of products by establishing the PPPRA. As governor, he conceptualised the Amnesty Programme, the signature achievement of the Yar’adua administration. He is the oil man of the cabinet. So let the man who has successfully patrolled the terrain be made petrol man.