She was the First Lady of First Ladies, famously described by her husband of fifty years as “a precious jewel of inestimable value”. She was the faithful and loyal wife to our Greatest President that Never Was; matriarch of a political dynasty and tradition of political struggle that will endure so long as Nigeria remains a single corporate multi-national political community. On Thursday 25th November, Hannah Idowu Didieolu (HID) Awolowo was consigned to Mother Earth in their beloved Ikenne – the town where she was born, grew up, married her husband, and from where she saw him through the triumphs and travails of their illustrious political partnership. Their commodious Efunyela home in Ikenne was the shelter from many a storm; the abode of peace in their often turbulent lives. Interred in the very sarcophagus that bears the remains of her beloved husband.
Theirs was a marriage made in heaven. It was a strange tale from the beginning. The young man was born in Ikenne on 6 March 1909. He lost his father when he was but a mere boy of seven. From that age he learned how to eke out a living for himself. He saw himself through primary school, which was on and off. And then to Wesley College, Ibadan, which he never completed. A friend had told him about a dashing young beauty who had just finished up school in Lagos and was back to Ikenne. He wrote to her proposing marriage. An only child, Hannah Idowu Didieolu Adelana was born on 25 November 1915. Her parents did not approve of the marriage proposal. After all, in that tightly knit community, reputations spread very easily. The young man had the lacklustre reputation of being rather unruly and “rascally”. His dry, unemotional love letters seemed to have won over the damsel at last. Their wedding picture of 26 December 1937 had neither of the couple smiling. Perhaps presaging the serious import of their high and noble destiny and the cruel buffetings that fate would deal out to them in the course of their lives together.
Obafemi Awolowo and his precious jewel were the most influential political couple in the history of Nigeria. No biographer could successfully write the story of one without the other. If she was the Jewel, Obafemi Awolowo was easily the Crown – he was the real issue in Nigerian politics, according to General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.
The key milestones in their lives are well-known. The story of Obafemi Awolowo is the stuff of legends. An English colonial officer described him as hailing “from the poorest of the poor”. He had no parallel among the men and women of his generation. Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, first Premier of the Northern Region, was born an aristocrat. When he attended the prestigious Government College Katsina, regarded by many as “the Eton of the North”, he was accompanied with horses and servants. They stayed at his beck and call, ministering to his every need. Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who attended the same college, was born of humbler parentage. But he grew up in the palace of the Emir of Bauchi. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s parents were among the Ndigbo middling classes who rose through the ranks of the bourgeoning Nigerian railway system of the colonial era. Nnamdi Azikiwe later stowed away aboard a ship to America, where he amassed a chain of degrees from Lincoln, Storer, Howard and Columbia Universities.
Young Obafemi Awolowo was virtually an abandoned street urchin who knew hunger, want and all forms of deprivation. He was also starved of the emotional prop of parental love. There is no record of any elder or relation who helped pay his school fees either at primary or secondary level. Perhaps because of these childhood hardships, he developed a tough and hardy streak. Even as a first year student at Wesley College, Ibadan, he came into headlong conflict with the prefects who saw nothing wrong with bullying the junior ones. Awolowo would not have any of that. He was once taken to the front of the school and publicly humiliated before being sent packing. The story goes that he stood boldly in front of the whole school and announced that “none of you will ever become as great as me!”
He tried his hands at many trades: short-hand speed typist, clerk, newspaper cub reporter, produce buyer, moneylender, transporter and trade unionist. He once went completely bankrupt, watching as the bailiffs confiscated all his home, personal effects and their much-cherished Chevrolet. He and his wife and child were literally homeless. Awolowo was broken but unbowed. He resolved that he would make a success of his life, come what may.
He saw very early on that education was the key to his eventual emancipation. He began home study, enrolling as an external student of the University of London. Having earned the Bachelor of Commerce degree (equivalent to today’s B.Sc. Business Administration), he resolved to qualify as a lawyer. H spent years 1944-1947 toiling away at his legal studies in London, where he was called to the English Bar as a member of the Inner Temple. He considered this period to have been among his most productive years. In 1947 he formed the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, an association aimed at promoting Yoruba culture. He also wrote Path to Nigerian Freedom, which Margery Perham, the Oxford don and authority on colonial administration, described as a work of exceptional insight and intellectual courage. Throughout these years, HID was thriving as a trader in Ibadan. She was into textile and other products. She sent money regularly to her husband for his upkeep. She also looked after the children and saw them through some of the most crucial years of their upbringing.
Obafemi Awolowo was a man of great vision and foresight. He had very early on determined that he was going to be somebody. He was, in many ways, a born leader. But he knew that leadership is a trust that must be earned; a process that must be developed through conscious self-effort and iron discipline. He also knew that a politician must have a mouthpiece and a means of influencing public opinion and engaging in public debate. The Nigerian Tribune was born in 1949. It remains the longest surviving newspaper in Nigeria. In a matter of a few years, Awolowo amassed a no-small fortune as a lawyer and jurisconsult.
In 1951 he and his associates established the Action Group as a political party with social democratic tendencies. Much has been made of the fact that Awolowo allegedly initiated tribal politics in Nigeria by upstaging Nnamdi Azikiwe in the West. The latter then had to flee to the East where he on his part upstaged Professor Eyo Ita who was by ethnic affiliation a member of the Eastern minority. Awolowo never believed that you could be a serious politician if you did not start by being a person of influence in your own natal community. He saw nothing wrong in being a Yoruba man first and being a Nigerian second and an African third. He believed the hackneyed expression that charity must begin at home, even if it would not have to end there. With the judgement on the basis of today’s standards, some people saw things differently.
Between 1952 and 1959 Awolowo was elected Leader of Government Business and Minister of Local Government before becoming Premier of the Western Region. In all these years HID stubbornly refused to give up her trading, in spite of her husband’s remonstrations. Even he was Premier they lived in their own home in Ibadan. It is instructive that throughout his long and illustrious career in public life, Awolowo and his family never for once occupied a government property. The only government property he ever stayed in was the high-security prisons in Lagos and Calabar after his conviction for treasonable felony in September 1963.
Awolowo’s career took a dive when he made the fateful decision to move to the centre as Leader of the Opposition in Parliament in 1956. He soon went into difficulties with his formerly trusted associate and successor Ladoke Akintola. Violence and conflict descended upon the West. Akintola allied himself with the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) who colluded to install him as a puppet king in the West. As the Yoruba were never people to respect puppet kings, violence broke out. Awolowo and his associates were arrested and tried for allegedly attempting to overthrow the Balewa government in collusion with Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. While he was in prison he received news that his first son and heir apparent Segun Awolowo, had perished in a mysterious car accident at the tender age of 27. He was the first African to graduate with a doctorate in international law from Cambridge University. Amidst the lachrymose outpourings by HID over Segun’s demise, Awolowo kept a stoic silence, mumbling that the human soul is indestructible.
The ensuing couple of years were to mark Nigeria’s darkest years. In January 1966 Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and predominantly Igbo co-conspirators stage a coup in which the Sardauna of Sokoto and Premier of the North, Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and key northern officers were brutally assassinated. Ladoke Akintola suffered a similar fate. It was the age of blood, fire and iron. In July of the same year predominantly northern officers staged a counter-coup that was equally bloody in its vengefulness. The country was at the verge of disintegration. The lot fell on the frail soldiers of young Yakubu Gowon, age 31, to salvage what remained of our tottering federal republic. He was wise enough to immediately order the release of the country’s most famous political prisoner. From the airport in Ikenne, a young major volunteered to drive Awolowo to his home in Ikenne. That young officer was none other than Murtala Ramat Mohammed, who was himself to ascend the High Magistracy of our republic in another period.
Obafemi Awolowo agreed to join the Gowon administration as Federal Commissioner of Finance and Deputy Chairman of the Federal Executive Council. He was in this capacity the Vice-President of Nigeria. From what Gowon tells us, Awolowo served with distinction. He piloted the national economy and public finances through the years of upheaval and civil war. Nigeria executed the civil war and ensured a speed post-bellum rehabilitation and reconstruction without incurring any debt from the outside world. Yakubu Gowon is not known for hyperbole. He once commented that if anyone knows a man of the order of Obafemi Awolowo, he would like to meet such a person. Throughout the years, Yakubu Gowon was Awolowo’s political godson, although he decided to resign from the government when Gowon postponed the return to civil rule in 1973.
Awolowo tried to run for the big prize in 1979 and in 1983 under the well organized and highly disciplined Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Alas, his sworn enemies denied him the opportunity. If Awolowo had been elected President in 1979 the trajectory of this country would have been different. He would have straightened our public finances, restructured the economy and set our country on the path to being a first-rate technological-industrial state. Unfortunately, the goonies took over. He retired from politics after the 1983 elections. He prophesied that the ship of state was heading “towards a rock”. Nobody understood what he said. When the Babangida administration came into power in August 1985, Nigeria’s descent into the despicable quagmire of a beggarly fourth world banana republic was assured. Awolowo passed away in 1987, a sad and broken man.
Nothing can be said in this column that has not already been said about this avatar. He was the most brilliant and visionary politician our country has ever known. He was a man of great learning and intellect. And he put his learning and soul-force at the service of his people. His western region was far ahead of the others in terms of development, modernization and social progress. Awolowo was a staunch advocate of democracy, human rights and federalism. Whether in jail or in freedom, the ink in his pen never ceased to flow. He wrote prodigiously about government, politics, economics and the law. He kept meticulous records about his experiences in politics and his years of confinement in prison.
I only saw Awolowo once during my years as an undergraduate of Ahmadu Bello University. He came as Chancellor during Convocation. He impressed me with his awesome gravitas and stateliness. He spoke in a soft but firm voice. He had self-command. But I also saw that he was never “the Enemy of the North”, despite the invidious propaganda that had been spread about him by the Fulani ruling class who feared and hated him so venomously.
Awolowo believed in Nigeria’s manifest destiny and call to greatness. He believed that the state should be the champion and catalyst of development. He had passion for agriculture and rural development, for education and for industrialization. When the Times of London obituarist described him as a statesman who could have been Prime Minister of Britain, they were only speaking the honest truth. There is hardly any leader in the continent of Africa, barring Kwame Nkrumah, who ranks at par with Awolowo. His former Personal Assistant, my friend the poet Odia Ofeimun, recently declared that Awolowo was greater than the legendary Nelson Mandela. In matters of intellect, there could never even be a remote comparison between the two. Obafemi Awolowo was a consummate genius at home with the most intricate jurisprudential disquisitions as he was at home with economic science, philosophy of mind and the higher mathematics. He subscribed to the neo-Kantian concept of “mental magnitude” as his approach to personal intellectual as well as public reason. But I would not rush to say who is the greater of the two. Historians of art have had this unending debate as to who was the greater artist between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Both were great in their own way. My answer would be that Awolowo and Nelson Mandela were both great in their own way.
But Awolowo had his own share of foibles as did Madiba. He could be relentlessly unbending. He believed everybody was susceptible to cold logic like he was. A colonial officer complained, “If only Awolowo would agree to share a glass of sherry with us”. He often came across as being intellectually arrogant. I am not sure he could stand people who came near him in intellect or gravitas. Some of my own Middle Belt peoples who were with him at the beginning – the likes of Reverend David Lot, Patrick Dokotri and Joseph Tarkar – left him in droves. There is a feeling among some Awoists who believe they know it all and others are nothing but peasants. They forget that the denizens of the ancient Savannah have also their share of geniuses and men who can stand their ground before kings and queens anywhere in the world.
The legacy of Awolowo can only endure if those who believe in his ideals take the plunge into the struggles of politics to reclaim our lost centre. Those who arrogate to themselves the absolute monopoly of the Awo political heritage have little or nothing to do with what the great man stood for. Most are self-seeking tribal jingoists who have little or nothing to do with Awo’s cosmopolitan intellectualism and social democratic progressivism. He was a towering intellect who believed in the power of ideas to change our world. A democrat to the bitter end, he believed we should call no man master. He also believed that nothing but the best is good enough for Nigeria and Africa. I would not go so far as to advocate his deification as once suggested by the late Ooni of Ife Oba Sijuwade Olubuse. He had said that the Yoruba should consider adding Awolowo to the 401 pantheon of gods – in the company of Sango, Obatala, Oranmiyan and all the other orisas. That would be an interesting thought.
Obadiah Mailafia
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