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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Bala Usman – the Scholar Who Told Truth to Power
Last Saturday will probably go down as one of the saddest days in the contemporary history of Zaria, for it was a day in which one of its leading sons, Professor Ishaya Audu, was interred and another, Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman, died.
Both were not originally from Zaria but they both made it their home, one as the first indigenous Vice-Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, the other as the university’s most popular, and arguably its most influential, historian.
Ishaya Audu died on August 29 in far away United States in circumstances that was a very sad reflection of the country’s value system. Here was a gentleman who had served his country diligently, faithfully and honestly, first as the personal physician of Sir Ahmadu Bello, Premier of the North, then as the first indigenous and, with 9 years in office, the longest serving Vice Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, and then as a cabinet minister, diplomat and health administrator. Yet when he fell ill and it became necessary to take him abroad for medical treatement because our politicians have been criminally negligent of our medical infrastructure, he simply could not afford it. Such was the extent of his penury that his old banger and a few other possessions were, according to a reliable source, put on sale to raise the money. Not surprisingly, given the state of the items, there were simply no takers. In the end it took the intervention of some good-spirited government officials to raise the money to send him abroad. By which time it seemed, in retrospect at least, that it was too late to save his life.
Death will of course come when it will come and Ishaya Audu would probably still have died the very second he died even if he had the best medical attention in good time. But since there is as yet no art or science to tell the future with certainty, there was simply no excuse for allowing someone who has served his country so diligently, faithfully and honestly to suffer the negligence that must have contributed to his death. One could therefore reasonably say that the circumstance of his death was one more telling evidence that Nigeria remains a country that punishes diligence, good faith and honesty and amply rewards laziness, bad faith and dishonesty in public service.
By the time Ishaya Audu left A.B.U. as Vice-Chancellor in 1975, I could not have been more than a statistic to him. When I got admission into the university’s School of Basic Studies in January 1971, he had already served for several years. As an undergraduate one and a half years later, and until I graduated in 1975, I never met, let alone know him, as an individual.
The first time I met him one-on-one was early in 1992 when the defunct Citizen, which I managed, decided to do a cover story on the apparent decision by General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s longest serving head of state ousted in the coup of July 1975, to join the political fray in military president, General Ibrahim Babangida’s rather convoluted transition programme. I anchored the story and interviewed several of Gowon’s relations and confidants in the course of researching the story. Ishaya Audu was among those I interviewed. This was at his clinic on the outer northern fringes of Samaru, the location of ABU Zaria.
By then, he had, of course, served as minister in President Shehu Shagari’s cabinet and also as our permanent representative at the United Nations. And like so many who had served during the First Republic, he had been unfairly detained in prison for months by the regime of General Muhammadu Buhari which seemed to have presumed every public officer guilty of venality until proved otherwise.
What particularly struck me when I meet him was the somewhat decrepit state of his clinic. For a former personal physician to the most powerful politician in Nigeria in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a former Vice-Chancellor of the largest university in Africa and a former foreign minister, etc, I thought he deserved a clinic in a better location than the outskirts of a suburb of Zaria and one with a more impressive premises. But the modest person that he was, he seemed to be very much at home in his rather extremely modest clinic.
If I knew Ishaya Audu only from a distance, the opposite was the case with Yusufu Bala Usman who died the same day his former Vice-Chancellor was buried. By 1971 Bala was already a, if not the, leading light in the radical circle of the university which some of us joined. There were others like Peter Waterman, an expatriate teacher in the SBS, Patrick Wilmot, the Carribean lecturer in Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Social Science (FASS) and Dr. Mahmud Modibbo Tukur in the History department of the faculty.
As I said in a tribute to Mahmud one year after his death in November 1988, Bala was the one to beat as the most popular radical on the campus. “In those heady university days”, I said in Today (November 26 – December 2, 1989). “Yusufu Bala Usman was everybody’s favourite. As students we held Bala in awe. He seemed such a voracious reader, a brilliant scholar and speaker and we believed he was the veritable scourge of the much dreaded capitalist roaders, feudal hegemonists, comprador bourgeoisie and such other popular labelees, if you pardon the coinage.”
In those days an intense war raged in the FASS between the radical left led by Bala and the conservative right led by the Irish dean of the faculty, Father James O’Connell. It was a war in which Bala and Company made all the noises, but O’Connell and his group held and manipulated power and influence well beyond the confines of the campus.
While Bala was my favourite socialist radical as an undergraduate, he slipped in to second place after Mahmud several years after I graduated. My interaction with Mahmud after graduation, along with his record as probably the best national president the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) ever had, not to mention his record of even-handedness among all shades of opinion when he became dean of FASS, were to convince me that he was a more practical and a more level-headed left-wing radical than Bala.
But even as my second favourite radical, Bala remained for me the symbol of true scholarship. There could be no greater manifestation of this that the circumstances of his death last Saturday. According to Dr. Abubakar Saddique Mohammed, erstwhile head of ABU’s Political Science Department, overwork must have contributed in no small measure to the ill-health that led to his death. He would often work from 8am to 7pm without food, and not even his wife’s complaints would tear him away from his books, Siddique said.
Predictably, overworking himself took its toll and he finally broke down on Saturday. This was not the first time he would break down, but this one proved fatal. When the doctors checked him up he had alarmingly low blood pressure and had to be supported to walk to the ambulance that took him to the hospital. In the hospital, he kept asking for his books even though he was hardly in a state to read anything. Shortly after his admission, he gave up the ghost.
In an article titled “Intellectuals Role: Truth to Power?” in the Wall Street Journal of October 12, 1983, the American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jnr., one time Albert Schweitzer professor of humanities at City University, New York, and a winner of Pulitzer Prizes in history and biography, argued that the relationship of the scholar to power should be a compromise between, on the one hand, the belief that scholarship should shun power, and, on the other, the belief that its role is to vindicate power. It was, he admitted, a tough compromise to strike for the simple reason that the objects of scholarship and politics are contradictory; whereas a scholar seeks the truth, a man of affairs seeks power. However, whether a scholar believes in striking such a compromise or not, he must, said Schlesinger Jnr., always tell truth to power.
History, he said is “full of intellectuals who have abased and disgraced themselves in their sycophancy before power.” In saying so, he could hardly have had Nigeria in mind, but his observation could not have been more accurate as a description of the conduct of many a Nigerian intellectual. More often than not Nigerian intellectuals in the corridors of power would rather act as the attack dogs of those in power than tell truth to power. In this, Bala was among the exceptional few who always told truth to power.
Not only that, when in 1979 he came down from the Ivory Tower to serve as the Secretary to the left-wing Peoples Redemption Party government of the old Kaduna State, Bala showed that it was possible to keep faith with one’s radical convictions inspite of the entrapments of power. The government lasted less than two years before it was hounded out by the National Party of Nigeria dominated House of Assembly, but in that brief period it changed the face of politics in at least the North. First, it abolished the poll-tax and in so doing forced the governments in the other NPN states in the North to do the same, kicking and screaming, as it were. Second, it exposed and reversed many land transactions which deprived millions of peasants of land to farm and live on. Third, it questioned the rationale of World Bank agricultural projects in which the bulk of the aid for the projects returned to the donors as high consultancy fees and high costs of imported implements.
Back to his forte after the brief stint in government, Bala kept faith with his long-held belief that class, and not religion, region or tribe, was the only basis for forging a united Nigeria in which there was justice and prosperity for all. The clearest manifestation of how he kept faith with the Nigerian masses was the monograph he co-authored five years ago with Dr. Alkassum Abba of ABU’s History Department, titled, The Misrepresentation of Nigeria: The Facts and The figures. The monograph was published by Ceddert, the Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training, Zaria, which he headed.
“The Centre,” he said in the preface to the monograph, “has come to realize that one of the basic political problems facing the people of Nigeria, as they attempt to build and sustain a democratic system of government, is the deliberate and systematic misrepresentation of the nature and the process of the formation of their country and its politics and economics and the origin and the inter-relationships of its people.”
For more than one year after its publication, the monograph became the centre of the debate on Nigeria’s future in academic and media circles. For saying that a viable Nigeria cannot be built on the notion of ethnic nationalities as advocated by scholars and polemicists like Wole Soyinka, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Bola Ige, G.G. Darah and Peter Ekeh, Bala became the chief villain of southern scholars and the southern media. His villainy was the more serious in the eyes of his traducers because he dismissed advocates of Resource Control as cheap opportunists.
His argument was simple and, as I saw it, unassailable. “All the things from which we derive the basic mineral and agricultural resources,” he said, in one of his most wide ranging and definitive newspaper interviews in the Weekly Trust of May 11 – 17, 2001 “are not made by anybody’s grandfather or great grandfather or by any tribal group or any individual; they are made by God and are part of nature. What happens is that people come and inhabit some area at some particular time. When they inhabit these areas government arises which claims sovereign rights and a system of law develops.”
Therefore ownership of land and its resources other than on the basis of the democratic sovereign nation-state, he argued, was a recipe for injustice and therefore for anarchy. Ownership on the basis of tribe or, even individual, for that matter, was “ungodly” he said. “Anybody who says that does not even believe in God because they believe their ancestors created the land, but they didn’t. They found it there.”
One may debate the merit of this position as many of his critics did but few could successfully question his intellectual integrity in arriving at the position. Among the few who tried was Peter Ekeh, who became a professor of political science in University of Ibadan in 1980. Ekeh, writing from his professorial chair in an American University where he had moved to in the late 90s, put up probably the most vigorous and vicious attack on Bala in his lengthy article, “The Mischief of History: Bala Usman’s unmaking of history” in The Guardian of May 7, 2001. He accused Bala of being not only an apologist of President Obasanjo’s government in its resistance to the idea of Resource Control but also of being an advocate of the colonial notion that Africa had no history before the whiteman conquered the continent.
Anyone who knew Bala, knew that it was a most unkind and a most untrue thing to say of the radical historian. As Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, pointed out in his intervention in the Weekly Trust of January 22 – 28, 2001, quoting extensively from Ekeh’s inaugural lecture as professor, it is champions of ethnic Resource Control like Ekeh, and not Bala, who have betrayed their progressive past and become reactionary turn-coats.
Space would not allow one to do justice to the debate that Bala and Alkasum Abba’s monograph sparked over the issue not only of Resource Control but also of the reactionary advocacy of scholars and politicians like Wole Soyinka and Chief Anthony Enahoro for a federation of ethnic nationalities. Suffice it to say that whatever anyone may say about the merit of Bala’s interpretation of history or the merit of his political economy, even those who sought to question the integrity of his scholarship could not deny that few scholars can match him for his intellectual rigour. Fewer still could match him in keeping faith with the masses for whom he was an indefatigable champion.
Bala died last Saturday leaving behind a rich legacy of scholarship that included raising a whole generation of historians and the authorship of For the Liberation of Nigeria, a collection of his lectures and essays between 1966 and 1978, as well as the editorship of Political Repression in Nigeria which was a collection of essays and documents on (1) “The Black Maria” death of 50 men in Lagos in March 1980, (2) the murder of Bala Muhammed, the radical political adviser of the PRP government of Abubakar Rimi in Kano in July 1981 and (3) the Bakalori Dam massacre of peasants by the police in April 1980.
Bala also famously co-authored the Minority Report of the Constitutional Drafting Committee of 1976, along with the late Professor Olusegun Osoba of the University of Ife. Many of their criticisms of the main report, including their predictions about the danger of granting immunity to the president, his deputy and to governors and their deputies, and their warnings about the danger of creating executive behemoths who will trample over the opposition and the wishes of the people, have since proved accurate. Bala was also the main inspiration and guide to Dr. Idris Sha’aba Jimada in writing his recent book on the historical link between the Nupe and the Yoruba titled, The Nupe and the Origins and Evolution of the Yoruba, c 1275 to 1897.
Last, but by no means the least, Bala served on the 14-man panel of scholars chaired by Tekena Tamuno, former Vice-Chancellor of Ibadan University and professor emeritus of history, which supervised the writing and publishing of the 10-volume Nigeria Since Independence: The First Twenty Five Years.” Bala himself edited Volume I on “The Society” and co-edited Volume II on “The Economy” with M.O. Kayode.
This is a legacy any scholar worth the name would be justly proud of.
May the Almighty Allah forgive his transgressions and may He reward his search for truth and his battles on behalf of the masses with al-janna firdaus.
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