The Tuesday, February 8, 2011 front-page picture of the Daily Independent evoked memories of the anti-Abacha/ democratic struggle in Nigeria: [Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi (left); Action Congress of Nigeria Senatorial candidate, Ondo North, Olu Agunloye (middle); and Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, shortly after Soyinka’s visit to the Governor in Ado-Ekiti.]
“Is Soyinka now partly fulfilled?” I muttered.
Unlike the orthodox foreword to a book, which introduces the book, examines it and then commends it to readers, Prof. Wole Soyinka’s foreword to Out of the Shadows: Exile and the Struggle for Freedom & Democracy in Nigeria is, in the main, an engagement with the author, Dr Kayode Fayemi, now an ex-governor of Ekiti State. While acknowledging that “Much otherwise elusive material is here for anyone who wishes to make an in-depth, comprehensive study of those years,” the Nobel laureate then shot somewhat baldly, “Fayemi’s account of the episode of the G-4 – in the minds of those nonentities, this obviously translated as the Great Four – could have benefitted, I believe, with mini-portraits of all four.” Soyinka then proceeded to make an example of the four by providing a portrait of the “central figure, the Scarlet Lady.”
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But it seems the ‘off-camera’ activist, now a former head of a federating state in Nigeria, anticipated such amendments to his narration when he notes in his preface to the book: “In spite of the care that I have taken, I know that reflections are often fraught with memory lapses and benefit of hindsight, affected by past and present preferences and constrained by the particularities of time and circumstance. Others involved in some of these events will, no doubt, recall them differently. While it is not my place to say that they are wrong, this is my own story, and my hope is that it will encourage others to tell theirs.”
The Nobel prize winner raised a poser in the foreword, a subject that had attracted the attention of this reviewer shortly after the inauguration of the Fourth Republic: “As Dr. Fayemi himself will acknowledge, one ceaseless complaint against the democratic movement is that its protagonists carried out this struggle at immense personal sacrifices of varying dimensions only to hand over future responsibilities – a word I prefer to ‘harvest’ – of that struggle to proven reprobates and political opportunists… A critical review of this policy of withdrawal will undoubtedly be triggered in the minds of all those who were involved, and now relive that struggle through this narrative.”
Is Dr. Fayemi, now a former Ekiti State Governor, a product of this “critical review”? It would seem he bought the argument of Soyinka that “by the avoidance of contests for political positions, we have indeed left the field to brigands, parasites and unworthy custodians of power and authority, including even collaborators, that is, those who have not only made such struggles necessary in the first place, but contributed to our personal woes, and even stained their hands with the blood of our fallen comrades!”
That would appear to be the most instructive comment of the Nobel laureate in the foreword – it is really most affecting.
And so, as I looked at the front-page picture referred to earlier, my emotions were aroused. As a comprehensive reviewer of Soyinka’s memoirs, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, I knew the cost of the struggle against Abacha – to the dramatist in particular; I had the knowledge of Kayode Fayemi as a trustworthy collaborator and lieutenant of Soyinka in the struggle, and such reference to him by the playwright-activist as “the fusslessly methodical organizer who had made a detailed study of military mentality… who from writing doctorals on military domination had become an agent for its reversal.”
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It was a moment of poignancy for me: “Is Soyinka now partly fulfilled? Is he now happy, that one of his most trusted collaborators in the democratic struggle is now the head of a federating state in Nigeria? Will he be going to his grave partly fulfilled that it was not all a lost war, that half a century of liberation struggle had not all been in vain?”
Perhaps the gains would have been much more had the democratic movement heeded the warning of Kayode Fayemi: “Politically, I was not an enthusiast of General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s transition programme. Indeed, I felt that the path, pace, players and patterns of our emerging electoral arrangement smacked more of neo-militarism than democracy… In this respect, I organized a meeting of the leading democracy activists and political leaders in Bromley, Kent, United Kingdom in August 1988 and urged upon the leaders and colleagues a national unity government that could enable us to fashion out a new constitution acceptable to all, instead of an immediate resort to elections as some in the movement obviously preferred. As it turned out, we could not convince our colleagues eager to partake in Abdulsalami Abubakar’s poisoned chalice to buy our argument.”
But standing on the sidelines, it may now be argued, would have been worse for the nation. Now that some of the veterans of the anti-Abacha struggle are, directly or indirectly, heads of some federating states, the present challenge would be the need for the democracy groups to form a united front in order to achieve the proposition of Fayemi at the August 1998 Conference, even in the face of the on-going onslaught by the reactionary forces. Clearly, as far as we still have such a Leviathan central government, controlling such humongous resources and power, the struggle for a just and egalitarian society, which forced the likes of Dr Fayemi to the front line, will, at best, remain a dream.
Out of the Shadows: Exile and the Struggle for Freedom & Democracy in Nigeria is as much the history of organised exile opposition movement against Nigeria’s dictatorships as an autobiography of John Kayode Fayemi. JKF is an academic with fascinating erudition and a streak of perspicacity, perhaps clairvoyance. For instance, in early September, 1993, Mr Alao Aka Bashorun of the NBA fame, who was prescient enough to see through the ‘hidden agenda’ of IBB, had apprised JKF of the imminent plans to install M.K.O. Abiola as the President by elements of the military led by Generals Sani Abacha and Oladipo Diya. Evidently, JKF was not taken in by the duplicity of Abacha and his cohorts in the promise to hand over to Abiola, and the cover story of Nigeria Now, published just before the Abacha coup said it all: “The irony of it is great, though that a man who won the right to power by popular democratic means should wait on extra-democratic forces to consummate that right. The trouble is, the people may be predictable, electoral orientation and inclinations even more so. But the art has not been discovered to hold a man with a gun to his words. This is the tragedy of Abiola’s strategy.” (Emphasis supplied)
As it happens, Sani Abacha and his accomplices could not be held to their words. Indeed, that misplaced trust in ‘a man with a gun’ became the Achilles’ heel of M.K.O. Abiola.
When attention is paid to the correspondence of the social(ist) agitator, JKF can also be said to be a wordsmith or an administrator of words. Fayemi shares the attributes of highly organized men: documentation and preservation of documents. In terms of responsibilities – and there’s no attempt here to indulge in (unwarranted/ unsolicited) blandishment nor detract from the sacrifices of others, which the author himself acknowledged in the book – it’s no exaggeration to suggest that Fayemi was/became the epicentre, pivot and fulcrum of anti-military activities in exile.
And it is very easy to dismiss the sacrifices of those men who stood against IBB and Abacha. But when we reckon with the losses of the nation under Abacha and what they could have amounted to if he was not opposed, it becomes crystal clear that the nation owes these men a debt of profuse gratitude. Perhaps unknown to many, Kayode Fayemi could easily have been consumed by that struggle. He could have become one of the fallen heroes, with a slant – his would have been a weepy story of reversals. At a time when some prominent Nigerian politicians were running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, Fayemi chose to enter the lion’s den – albeit relatively by default…
It was time to break the monopoly of the ruling junta on airwaves, right under its nose – in Nigeria. “Having obtained the transmitters, the challenge now was how to transport them to West Africa and set them up for use. Myself, General Akinrinade and Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti inside Nigeria, worked on all of these delicate details to avoid leakage, and we did this completely outside of the NNF, NADECO and CD groups, our own individual organizations. This was not an issue on which a democratic vote could be taken in any case.” Fayemi volunteered to take the transmitters to Cotonou for testing before “our contacts took on the task of transporting the equipment home.”
To be continued
