Tag: President Muhammadu Buhari

With the final tallies of these elections largely determined, it seems the political status quo at the presidency will be maintained after May 2019 when President Muhammadu Buhari will begin his second term. I will next week share my ideas on what the president must do to run an all-inclusive government. But for now I want to share some personal moments with my readers.

Two members of my family were involved tangentially and frontally in these elections.  These are Akin Osuntokun and Fela Durotoye respectively. I have personal aversion for politics although I have strong political views which I have often expressed as diplomatically as I can.  I also grew up in an intensely political family. Some of my readers old enough may think I am referring to the pre-independence and post-colonial politics in Nigeria. It goes beyond that because my great grandfather, Dada, was a generalissimo in the Ekitiparapo army of the 1870s to 1880s. War of course is politics by other means. When the war ended, my great grandfather, a prince of Ajase- Ipo ancestry supported BalogunIshola  Fabunmi who even though a prince too tried to use force to overthrow the then reigning king of Okemesi. When the abortive coup failed, Fabunmi and my great-grandfather had to leave Okemesi. Fabunmi later became king of Imesi-Ile, the original homestead of Okemesi people while my great-grandfather remained in exile in Igbajo. Our family houses were burnt.

History repeated itself in 1966 when after the January coup d’état, our family houses were again burnt by enemies of Chief Oduola  Osuntokun  my brother, who was a minister in the Awolowo and Akintola governments.It was then I vowed never to be involved in politics.

It is a long history which I do not want to inflict on my readers since this is already in my autobiography since 2005.

Now to the current politics. FelaDurotoye is a son I am very proud of. His case is that of morning shows the day as childhood shows manhood. Fela’s father, Professor Tokunbo Durotoye was more than a cousin to me; he was my elder brother whose love for me was as total and as intense as mine for him. When he passed on prematurely after having reached the status of professor of physiology, I tried my best to support his young children of whom Fela was the youngest and most precocious and in character a chip of the old block. When he was a child, without having lived in Okemesi, he spoke the dialect to the admiration of those who had lived there all their lives. He showed how much in touch he was with the local reality of his native town. When he graduated, I went to Ife to throw a cocktail party for him and when he got his first salary he shared it to all of us saying he heard that he was expected to do this. Fela’s mother, Adeline Bisi Durotoye was a professor of Geology unfortunately she died a few years ago. She was my classmate at the University of Ibadan. She was a great and gentle soul who loved everybody with the love of Christ. She came from the ruling house of Onimole in Lagos.

When Fela told me he was contesting for president, I tried to dissuade him and sent him to have discussions with people versed in the difficult terrain of Nigerian politics. I also spoke to my brother, Professor Olu Durotoye, Fela’s uncle who agreed with me about the whole thing being a wild goose chase. But Fela is old enough and he had my prayers. I am happy he made his mark and the future belongs to him and his generation and if people in heaven can see what goes on here, Fela’s parents will be immensely proud of him as we all are.

Akin Osuntokun in my very eyes has become a seasoned politician. Needless to say we have our political differences arising out of our age and political experiences. Akin has a great gift of the pen which he sometimes deploys with killing effect. He is more of a scholar in politics than a real politician. He is too brutal with his opinion and language. He reminds me of Chief Awolowo who in 1979 said if he was elected president he would abolish the ministry of information and tourism because there was no infrastructure to support it and that only somebody who had enjoyed so much luxury in the west and wants to have a taste of hell would come to Nigeria as a tourist! He added he would immediately ban importation of used clothes and dried Stork fish from Norway. He argued, usually with facts, that using clothes that had been worn by others was degrading and that eating dried stork (panla or oporoko) fish which was fed to slaves being carried across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere duringthe transatlantic slave trade brought back unhappy memories of the humiliation of our black brethren. He was right on both counts but our Igbo compatriots said he deliberately targeted those two items because he hated them. Chief Awolowo must have been shocked by the interpretation of his political opponents. Akin Osuntokun writes with academic license which as a politician he should have been avoiding. I have seen some of his well-reasoned writings and interviews and I tell myself that my nephew should go back to the university to study diplomacy. Privately, I have been urging him to go for a PhD in any area of political science which he should be able to finish within three years and instead of going back to politics he should join a university anywhere in the world and he will be able to mellow his rhetoric and argue as an academic rather than as a politician.

Akin has an uncanny understanding of Nigerian politics and he has inherited from his illustrious father the mastery of the English language even more than many of us who have spent all our lives in academia. I try to moderate his written interventions but in recent times his verbal interventions have not always been what I would have advised or wanted. I guess what now guides my political discourse is the Yoruba adage of “Eniti Sango ba toju e wole a mope oba Ko so nikoso”. I was incarcerated for months by the Abacha regime. Needless to say it was not a pleasant experience and I won’t want my enemy not to talk of my blood relation to experience such wickedness and humiliation. When Obasanjo set up the Chukwudifu Oputa panel  in 1999,  I went before it to give testimony of what the great Nnamdi Azikiwe would have called “man’s inhumanity to man”. But nothing came out of it. The whole thing was a charade signifying nothing and did not assuage our feelings and neither was any one held to account because General Abacha did not personally and directly maltreat those of us in detention in his name.

In this election, I supported General Muhammadu Buhari just I have supported his political career and electoral contest in the last four elections for many reasons bordering on his personal integrity and my personal knowledge of him. I first met him, I think in 1980 or thereabouts. He was a student in United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, specializing in command and general strategic studies. Obasanjo had just handed over power to civilians in 1979 and Buhari was minister of petroleum resources in Obasanjo’s military government. Dr Olusola Saraki, father of Bukola Saraki was a senator in the Second Republic. He was chairman of senate committee on petroleum resources and had alleged that N2.8 billion was missing from the account of NNPC.  Buhari was so peeved that he wanted to abandon his programme to return home to defend his honour. Before returning home, he came to consult with Major General (Dr) Olufemi Adefope who was staying in my house in Potomac Maryland USA with his wife and was receiving medical attention. Mrs Dotun Adefope was my wife, Biodun’s aunt. It took all the medical persuasive effort of Adefope to prevail on Buhari and calm him down that he was not personally involved in keeping NNPC’s book in order. He was later cleared. He made a strong impression on me on that occasion. The second time was in 1983 in Professor Jibril Aminu’s house when Aminu was vice chancellor of University of Maiduguri and I was dean, faculty of arts. General Buhari had ordered the 23rd Armoured Brigade under the then Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Dogonyaro to pursue from Bagaacross Lake Chad, Chadian troops who had invaded Nigeria. Buhari was then GOC 3rd armoured corps division of the Nigerian army in Jos. He was allegedly reprimanded by civilian authority in Lagos for not getting approval for his action. The third time I met him  was when in 1984  as head of state, he and General Tunde Idiagbon, his deputy, hosted my brother, Professor Kayode Osuntokun and his family to a lunch in Dodan Baracks for my brother’s  national merit award  in medicine. The fourth time was in 1992 or thereabouts when as ambassador of Nigeria to the Federal Republic of Germany, I met him in Frankfurt and later went to pay courtesies to him in Hamburg. He opened up to me about how Babangida detained him and his patriotic wishes for the country. His simplicity in all these occasions was simply overwhelming. His greatest shortcoming is that his human and social horizons are severely limited. If he sees me today he will not be able to recognize me which is a terrible fault in any person in politics. But all put together he can be a battle axe to fix the problems of this benighted country if he opens up his circle of advisers and if he recruits the best people from across the country right away not  waiting until he is sworn in for another term. I hope somebody like Ken Nnamani will be made Secretary to the Government of the Federation to assuage the feeling of isolation of people of the Southeast.