General TY Danjuma, former Chief of Army Staff, former Minister of Defence, and most recently chair of Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidential Advisory Council, lived up to his reputation for blunt talk this past June when he was turbaned Jarmai Zazzau, in Zaria.
In Hausa, the title, conferred by the Emir, Alhaji Shehu Idris, translates into “The Brave One”.
For Danjuma, it was a second homecoming.
Several months earlier, he had his first homecoming when he was conferred with an honorary doctorate by Ahmadu Bello University, the successor institution to the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, where he had studied for his ‘A’ levels before opting to join the army instead of pursuing a degree in history.
On that occasion, he donated N2 billion to the university’s Endowment Fund, probably the largest single donation ever made by a Nigerian to an academic institution in Nigeria.
Almost every person of consequence in the North was in attendance at the second homecoming, the installation, which was to have culminated in a durbar. But Danjuma had demurred, citing the prevailing security concerns and the misery he saw all around him.
Instead, he parlayed the occasion into a platform for one of the most forthright speeches in recent times on the state of the nation. The bluntness was vintage Danjuma.
Nigerian society and economy were in tatters, due among other factors to leadership failure, he said. The masses of the people, he went on, were “chained down in dehumanising and grinding poverty” while the nation continued to maintain “a few islands of false prosperity in a turbulent ocean of penury and squalor.”
Peace and harmony were unattainable in such a setting, he warned.
He told his fellow Northern elders that they were talking too much and doing too little. They needed to think more, pray more, plan more, work harder, relate better, and talk less, because battles were better fought and won through wisdom and strategy than through “inflammable pronouncements and political tantrums.”
More poignantly, he warned that, by failing to adequately educate their young men and women, they were handicapping them in the competition for opportunities in a globalised world where knowledge itself had become the prime resource.
General Danjuma told them they had failed to rise to that level of patriotic statesmanship where they could deploy their wisdom and experience to give the country a clear sense of purpose and direction. “When elders become decadent, the youth are bound to become delinquent.”
I personally cannot recall an occasion during which such an assemblage of persons of great consequence were treated to such blunt, forthright talk.
Yet, what ran through the speech was not self-righteousness nor condemnation, nor yet resignation, but a challenge, a summons to collective action to help pull a failing nation back from the brink.
“I still believe that Nigeria can be reawakened and rebuilt to achieve greatness,” he said. “If we renew our minds and reconcile with one another, if we coordinate our determined efforts, we can make northern Nigeria self-reliant and self-sufficient, while enhancing the unity and prosperity of all Nigeria, but first we must be at peace.”
The part that moved me most was where Danjuma called on his fellow Northerners and Nigerians in general to try to recapture “the spirit of Zaria.”
I know something of that spirit.
I had had my secondary school education in St Paul’s Secondary School (now Kufena College), in Wusasa, Zaria from 1958 through 1962. Some four decades before then, Wusasa had been the center of the Anglican Church’s missionary activity in the far North. It was home to St Bartholomew’s School, of which General Yakubu Gowon, the late Professor Ishaya Audu, Danjuma himself and a host of distinguished Northerners were products.
St Bartholomew’s Church, where General Yakubu Gowon’s father, Pa Yohanna, served as a catechist, is reputed to be the oldest church in that part of Nigeria, dates back to 1929.The first ordained priest in Northern Nigeria, the Rev Henry Miller, father of the ace musician, Bala Miller, came from Zaria and lived in the walled city.
By the way, it was from the younger Miller, lanky and lithe, visiting from swinging Lagos, that I first saw a demonstration of how to do the Twist, in Zaria, in 1962, in the home of Daniel Gowon, an official at St Luke’s Hospital, Wusasa, reputedly the first missionary hospital north of the Niger.
St Paul’ s roll included students from all parts of Nigeria, with surnames like Abdulkadir, Abui, Adagba, Adebayo, Achimugu, Ahmed, Akaas, Akeju, Aken’Ova, Alausa, Alheri, Anyaegbu, Babatunde, Bature, Beckley, Carew, Coker, Dandaura, Dauji, Donli, Efobi, Egunyomi, Ekong, Fajana, Fakai, Gana, George, Gbadero, Gowon, Hassan, Halim, Ibitoye, Ibrahim, Ikwue, Igweonu, Jebak, Jiya, Kitchener, Kyari, Kogbe, Legbo, Mabadeje, Mbaeru, Mayuku, Mosugu, Nwakalo, Nnaji, Nunu, Odiwo, Okoye, Oloruntoba, Olusegun, Ohiomokhare, Obakponovwe, Olumodeji, Runsewe, Shiawoya, Soyebi, Spencer, Sule, Taidi, Uchegbu, Thomas, Udoh, Vincent, Wey, Yisa, Yusuf, and Zakari.
Muslim students were excused from Christian worship.
Some two miles or so away, between Wusasa and Tudun Wada, lay the famous Government (now Barewa) College. Right within the city walls lay the Provincial Secondary School. Zaria was also home to the Nigerian Military School.
All four institutions competed in athletics, soccer, hockey and cricket with keen rivalry and good sportsmanship.
Further down the road from Barewa was the School of Pharmacy. Farther still, in Kongo, across from Tudun Wada, was the Institute of Administration, where civil servants of all cadres were groomed.
On the other side of St Paul’s, across from Kufena Rock, in Samaru, lay the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, later Ahmadu Bello University, that awarded University of London degrees in engineering and diplomas of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Also in Samaru was the School of Agriculture, with a pan-Nigerian student body, and St Peter’s College, for the training of primary school teachers, later relocated to Kaduna. St Enda’s College, a teacher-training school set up by the Catholic Church, Advanced Teachers College, and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Training Centre would come later.
Tudun Wada was the home of the North Regional Literature Agency (NORLA), which promoted literacy in English and indigenous languages and nurtured it with supporting reading material. It was also home to Gaskiya Corporation, publishers of The Nigerian Citizen, now defunct, and Gaskiya Tafi Kwabo, probably the oldest indigenous-language in newspaper in Nigeria in continuous publication, and by far the most influential.
Gakiya Corporation was in turn home to Abubakar Imam, the legendary editor and literary scholar, the subject of Haroun Adamu’s fascinating doctoral thesis for Ahmadu Bello University, and home also to the famous columnist and political journalist Bisi Onabanjo (Aiyekooto) during a stint as editor of The Citizen.
Down south, in what used to be called southern Zaria, missionary activity was just as strong, and as unconstrained. The Sudan Interior Mission, the Sudan United Mission, the Catholic Church and Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA) ran schools that received grant-in-aid from the Regional Government in Kaduna for the education and training of young men and women.
I must not forget the only manufacturing plant in town, the cigarettes factory of the Nigerian Tobacco Company which provided direct and indirect employment to a host of residents, and the bustling railway station, a staging post for passenger and freight transportation
Expatriates in the educational and the commercial establishments commingled with residents from all over Nigeria – persons of many tongues and creeds — lived together in peace and harmony and mutual acceptance, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and shared ideals.
That conflation was what Danjuma, with a touch of poetry, called “the spirit of Zaria.”
Most if not all of those institutions and establishments that made Zaria a beacon are still there in one form or another, but the spirit that once animated them is long gone.
To recapture that spirit, as Danjuma enjoined his Northern brethren and Nigerians in general, is going to be a formidable task. But therein lies the path to true nationhood.
