Only days, not hours, after I had finished writing the piece published in this column last week did the memory of it come back to me: the closest and most intense engagement that I and other members of the Nigerian socialist movement, specifically academic Leftists, ever had, as a collective body, with collaboration with a military regime in this country. At first, my recollection of the episode was vague and hazy; for this reason, I quickly put it out if my mind. But somehow, it refused to go away and with the persistence of the memory came greater and more detailed recollection of the event, complete with all the personalities, all the debates and exchanges that took place. And when, finally, this almost automatic, self-generating act of recollection had achieved its clearest and fullest profile in my mind, I wondered why, all these decades, I had almost completely forgotten about it. Not to keep the reader mystified any longer about what this is all about, let me briefly give an account of what exactly it is that I am writing about here.
It was sometime in late January 1976. I was then teaching at UI, not at the University of Ife, the institution at which I would eventually experience perhaps the most fulfilling period of my life as a professional academic. I was a member of the Anti-Poverty Movement of Nigeria (APMON), serving both as a member of its central committee and Editor of its journal, “The People’s Cause”, with Eddie Madunagu as the General Secretary of the organization. Almost incontrovertibly, January 1976 was Nigeria’s finest hour to date as “the giant of Africa”, a country greatly admired on the African country and given considerable respect in the international comity of nations. The cause of this was mostly but not exclusively due to the famous “Africa Has Come of Age” speech given by Murtala Ramat Muhammad at an OAU Extraordinary Summit on January 11, 1976. As the historical records have it, that was the speech in which Muhammad threw Nigeria’s weight and backing behind Agostino Neto’s MPLA among the three Angolan anti-colonial movements. Moreover, Mohammad did this with an open and devastating attack on American efforts to arm-twist African countries to indirectly back the puppet anti-colonial group, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, by remaining “neutral” while America and the racist, apartheid regime in South Africa armed, funded and promoted the cause of Savimbi and UNITA. The waves of excitement and inspiration caused by that uncompromising anti-imperialist speech washed over the shores of all the continents, most especially on our continent.
Back home from that OAU meeting, Muhammad was overwhelmed by the hero’s welcome that he received, especially from hundreds of thousands of workers and students. Of course, before the OAU speech, he had already achieved a “living legend” status by his anti-corruption crusade, especially in light of the fact that he started the crusade by attacking two institutional bastions of corruption that up till then had seemed invincible to any and all anti-corruption struggles – the leadership, respectively, of the military and the civil service. The enemies of Muhammad and the regime chafed under the assault, at first silently but ultimately volubly and openly, more or less coming close to insinuations that the regime was ripe for overthrow. But the massive popular support of workers and students shielded the regime from the counter-revolutionary plots of the military and civil service scions – at least for some time. All the same, as important as Muhammad’s anti-corruption assaults on the military and the civil service were, it was his fiery and uncompromising anti-imperialism that converted students, in their hundreds of thousands, to a veneration of Muhammad himself and massive militant support for his regime. And it was on the cusp of this diehard student support, indeed students’ hero worshipping of Mohammed, that the event about which I am writing in this piece took place.
It was early in February 1976 that word came to us from Supreme Headquarters that the regime was planning to send the most developed and reliable leaders of student organizations to Angola for ideological orientation. By “us” here I am referring to the most active and well known radical lecturers and their organizations. In effect, we were told: send about 20 among the most developed, mature and reliable of your student activists to us and we will send them to Angola for training and orientation as the first batch of many subsequent contingents. Even with the distance of time and circumstances from those heady days of the brief rule of Murtala Muhammad, I still recall the tremendous excitement, the quickening of radical temper and nerve, that this caused among the majority of those of us to whom the message was sent. No administration in Nigeria, civil or military, had ever come close to this embrace of radical, anti-imperialist organizations of students and we were simply stunned by the proposal. To many among us, this was the ultimate proof of the revolutionary intentions and credentials of the Murtala Muhammad regime and we had no choice but to cooperate with the regime in the actualization of the proposal.
But some of us, clearly in the minority, called for caution, if not outright rejection of the proposal. APMON, the organization to which Eddie Madunagu and myself belonged, was the most vocal of these critical or cautionary interlocutors in the deep, wide and fractious debates among campus socialists and their organizations that ensued. I have remarked earlier that at the time, I was still teaching at UI prior to leaving Ibadan for Ife in late 1977. The relevance of this observation lies in the fact that the late Comrade Ola Oni and his group, also based in UI, were the most enthusiastic supporters of this Angolan-Nigerian student project proposed by the regime. I am not sure of this now, but I think it may have been Ola Oni and his group that in fact suggested the project to the Muhammad regime in the first place, though when the message came to us, it was presented as a long-term, long-range ideological objective of the Murtala Muhammad regime. For those who are curious about the intricacies of the debate that the proposal generated among us, let me explain that we in APMON based our position of caution on the reasoning that it was tactically unwise and perhaps even dangerous, to expose the most developed, reliable and mature activists leaders among our students to a military regime that we knew to be deeply divided internally and ideologically, a regime some of whose key members were known to be virulent anti-socialists and reactionaries.
For the rest of what remains to be narrated of that event in this retrospective account, it suffices for me to state that those of us who advised caution, being so hopelessly in the minority, lost to the majority of keen and ardent supporters of the proposal. In time, a group of about 20 student leaders from diverse university campuses in the country were selected and were dispatched to Lagos, en route to Luanda, Angola. And then something “mysterious” happened: the chosen ones arrived in Lagos; they were lodged in cheap, dingy two-star hotels; thereafter an endless wait began during which they were periodically met by officials from Dodan Barracks who implored the student leaders to be patient, assuring them that everything was on course and they would soon be on their way to Angola. By now the reader should have guessed the end of the story: the journey to Angola for the student leaders never took place. One by one, the students eventually went to their various campuses, the Angolan trip a mirage that in time disappeared into a forgotten footnote on the history of the regime and the period. Well, forget Angola: no project of ideological orientation for activist student leaders within Nigeria itself ever took place either.
This was of course due in part to the fact that within four months of this event, Mohammed was assassinated, the first political and ideological consequence of this tragic event being the accession to power of Olusegun Obasanjo, an instinctual but also a calculating reactionary to the core. On assuming power, Obasanjo embarked on a systematic reversal and/or dismantling of all the radical, anti-imperialist projects and policies of Murtala Mohammed. Indeed by 1978 at the time of the infamous “Ali Must Go” demonstrations on our campuses, Obasanjo had strayed so far from Mohammad’s project of revolutionary ideological orientation for our students that he had given orders for security agents to infiltrate organizations of students with the purpose of spying on them so as to break them up and expel those he considered the most “dangerous”; and he had shown a readiness, if and when necessary, to send solders in battle gear to invade the campuses and shoot to kill. But the problem, the essential contradiction, went far beyond Obasanjo’s opportunism and right-wing megalomania. The Angolan project of ideological orientation for Nigerian student activists was itself the most telling expression of this fact. How so?
We will never know if Muhammad would have evolved away from his admittedly left-leaning but indisputable Bonapartism had he not been assassinated less than one year in office as military ruler. Succinctly explained, Bonapartism is authoritarian rule with a very broad popular appeal or even mandate, usually by a strongman with ties to the military. Long before he became Head of State after the overthrow of the regime of Yakubu Gowon, Muhammad had given every indication that he was waiting in the wings for the right and opportune moment to take the reins of power. He was immensely confident of the power of his personal charisma and boldness. True, when he became Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, he shared power with Generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Theophilus Danjuma with both of whom he constituted something of a triumvirate, not something usually associated with Bonapartism. But there was not the slightest doubt that within that putative triumvirate, Muhammad had near absolute power, the power of a Bonapartist who knew quite well that neither Obasanjo nor Danjuma had the grip on the popular imagination that he had. Indeed, it was his Bonapartist tendencies that his enemies seized upon, magnified and began to deploy in their plots for his downfall after his summary dismissal – allegedly without “due process” – of over 10,000 civil servants for corruption. Moreover, beyond the undoubted genuineness and fervor of his anti-imperialist ideas and policies, he had no consistent and coherent anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist program to speak of and popularize. Indeed, at the same time that he was sowing fear and dread among the Western powers and multinational corporations, he was cementing a move toward wholesale privatization of public enterprises and assets. The Angolan-Nigerian ideological orientation proposal was part and parcel of this confusing and confused mix of Muhammad’s Bonapartism and populism.
A forgotten and perhaps also forgettable chapter in the history of military rule in our country? No! Forgotten but not forgettable!
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
