PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Awoniyi, The Man Who Lead By Example

kudugana@yahoo.com

            It was mid morning on Monday November 19 and I was struggling to cobble together my column for the week when a call came through my mobile phone from Alhaji Ismaila Isa, a chieftain of both the Arewa Consultative Forum and the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, as well as Chairman of Bulet, a leading construction company in Abuja. Alhaji Ismaila sounded agitated. Alhaji Iro Dan Fuloti, the Dan Fulotin Katsina, he said, had called him to give him the bad news that Chief S.B. Awoniyi, the Chairman of the Executive Council of Arewa Consultative Forum, had had an accident along Abuja to Kaduna highway on his way to a meeting of the Forum the following day.

Alhaji Ismaila said he had tried to reach Colonel (rtd) Hamid Ali, the ACF Secretary-General, to inform him of the accident only to discover the phone he had with him did not have Col. Ali’s number. Hence his call to me. Could I please get the colonel urgently so that he could arrange Chief Awoniyi’s evacuation from Doka General Hospital near the scene of the accident?

            Before Alhaji Ismaila called, I had just about conquered the writer’s block that had stood between me and the last few paragraphs of the piece I was writing. With Alhaji Ismaila’s news of Chief Awoniyi’s accident, my mind simply went blank and I could think of nothing but how to reach Col. Ali, all the time wondering how serious the accident was.

            As is often the case when you have an emergency on your hands, my calls simply refused to get through. In desperation I decided to drive to the ACF headquarters from my house. Just then the next call I made miraculously got through. However, by then Col. Ali had received the news and he was, he said, already close to the Doka hospital where Chief Awoniyi was waiting to be moved to Kaduna. He had, he said, even spoken to the chief and it seemed the injuries he may have sustained were not life threatening.

            Nine days later on Wednesday, November 28, the injuries many of us thought – and certainly prayed – were not life threatening proved fatal in far away London where the chief had been moved to for treatment.

            Words alone cannot begin to describe the shock millions of Nigerians must have felt over the terrible news of his loss to the North in particular and to the country as a whole. It was Malam Mamman Daura, former editor and managing director of the New Nigerian who best described this shock when he told Leadership (December 1) that the chief’s death measured eight or nine on the political Richter Scale. For, the chief, as Malam Mamman added, was “a man for all seasons and for all regions.”

            Born in Mopa, in Kogi State on April 30, 1932, Chief Awoniyi belonged to what Professor John Paden described in his biography of the Sardauna as the “third generation” of Northern civil servants that came to be regarded as the “sons” of Sardauna because they benefited from the accelerated technical training and university degree programs which the Northern premier had initiated to bridge the gap between the North and the South. According to Paden, these were men born during the ‘30s and included people like Mr. I.J.D. Durlong, Malam Liman Ciroma, Alhaji Ahmed Joda, Alhaji Hassan Lemu, Mr. J.A. Aderibigbe, Malam Garba Ja Abdulkadir, Malam Adamu Ciroma, Malam Adamu Fika – who became inseparable from Chief Awoniyi - and of course, the chief himself.

            Of this lot, few came as close to the Sardauna as Awoniyi and, in time, none was to come as close as he did to symbolizing Northern unity and harmony in the way the Sardauna was. And through this symbolism of Northern unity and harmony which he achieved by dint of hard work, competence, self-sacrifice, wisdom and personal integrity, the chief became a bridge across the country’s regional and religious divides in a way that few Nigerians living, if any, could ever hope to become.

            Alhaji Maitama Sule, the Dan Masanin Kano and one of Nigeria’s most accomplished orators, I think it was, who best articulated the place of Chief Awoniyi in the politics of the North, and by extension that of Nigeria, when, several times during a speech, he reminded the large audience that gathered on December 11, 2004, in Lokoja, the Kogi State capital, to celebrate Awoniyi’s choice as the Chairman of the National Executive Council of the ACF, that the chief’s sobriquet in the days of the premier was “Danladi Dansardauna”.

            Chief Awoniyi himself had in a way given an insight into how he came to earn this nickname when he gave the 5^th Annual Lecture in honour of the Sardauna on November 11, 2000. As the chief told it, the premier had been booked to fly to Gusau on a Saturday with one of the three planes attached to his office. On the Friday before the trip, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Health, Dr. R.A.B. Dikko, went to the chief’s house as the premier’s undersecretary to request for a plane to evacuate Dr. Dikko’s most senior health superintendent who had collapsed during the Juma’at prayers in far away Idah. Unfortunately although there were three planes only one of the two pilots for the planes was available.

            With the assurance he received from the pilot that he could go to Idah and return in time to fly the premier to Gusau the same Saturday, he went to his boss that Friday night and told him of his intention to send the aircraft to Idah first.

            “My presentation,” said Awoniyi, “was greeted with hisses by ministers and other high level officials present. But the premier replied in Hausa in a sentence which could, in my understanding, be translated to mean ‘Go and do what you please or go and do what is right.’ I decided that he meant I should do what is right. Off went the plane to Idah very early on the Saturday morning.”

            Unfortunately for Awoniyi, the plane developed engine trouble on its way back. However, it landed safely and the pilot told him it could be fixed to take off again. In spite of the pilot’s assurance, Awoniyi decided against using the plane. And although two other aircrafts were available, the young pilot available had not converted to fly them. Chief Awoniyi was then left with no choice but to inform the premier that he would have to go to Gusau by road. This turn of event appeared to have vindicated those who believed the chief was “insolent” in giving priority to the Idah trip.

            As bad luck would have it, the health superintendent died on his way to be flown out to the UK from Kano. Chief Awoniyi duly reported this to the premier as soon as he returned from Gusau. Fortunately he was dealing with a great man with a great heart and a great mind; instead of holding what happened against the chief, the premier gave him a gift of 250 pounds and said he admired him for his courage in doing what he did.

            The premier said if he had not done what he did those who had criticized him would have been the very people who would have said, “Had the premier allowed the use of his plane to go to Idah, the man might not have died.”

            Such is the stuff legendary leaders and their able lieutenants are made of.

            As probably the most worthy successor of the great Sardauna, Chief Awoniyi came to earn the great enmity of President Olusegun Obasanjo who saw in Awoniyi one of his biggest obstacles to his bid for self perpetuation in power.

            The president tried to do this by the time-tested but diabolical strategy of divide and rule. In this the North proved the hardest nut to crack, much as he did tremendous damage to the region’s historical unity. That the North proved the hardest nut for Obasanjo was thanks in large measure to the exemplary character of Chief Awoniyi and the steadfastness with which he believed in Northern unity within the larger context of Nigerian unity.

             Such was Obasanjo’s antipathy towards Awoniyi that he pulled every stop to ensure that the chief lost his bid at the 2000 National Convention of the PDP to become its chairman using the subterfuge that it was wrong for the chairman of the party and the president to be both Yoruba and Christian. The president conveniently forgot that Awoniyi was from his beloved largely Christian Middle-Belt which he used to try and divide the North.

            Simon Kolawole, an editor and leading columnist with Thisday and himself from Mopa, put it succinctly when he said in his tribute to the chief last Sunday that he loved him for one thing if for nothing else. Chief Awoniyi, he said, “never ran away from his identity.”

            As the chief always said to his critics who saw incongruence between his leadership of the ACF and his identity as a Yoruba and Christian, “I am a Northern Yoruba Christian.”

            In an interview in Thisday (December 20, 2003), he apparently perplexed his interviewer with his views about his self-identity. The interviewer, Kola Ologbondiyan, apparently a Yoruba from his name, could not hide his bewilderment at Chief Awoniyi’s belief in his Northerness when he wrote in his introduction to the interview that “Chief Sunday Bolorunduro Awoniyi, the Aro of Mopa, recently emerged the chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) viewed in the South as a rabid Hausa-Fulani/Muslim organization.”

            “I have,” he told Ologbondiyan, “everything to be grateful for the North. The north did not do anything against me. I was a northerner and benefited from being a northerner… I joined the northern administration service and worked all over Northern Nigeria. How can I pretend that all these never happened just to satisfy some narrow ethnic viewpoint?”

            The beauty of the chief’s commitment to Northern unity and harmony, however, was that it never in any way diminished his commitment to the larger Nigerian unity. In this, his transparent sincerity in matching his commitment to regional unity with that of his commitment to national unity was in sharp contrast to Obasanjo’s lip service to national unity. For, whereas Obasajo preached against regionalism in words, he practiced it to the hilt in a most divisive way. Whereas he condemned such regional or ethnic organizations like the ACF, Afenifere and Ohaneze in broad daylight in speeches after speeches, he patronized them at night and even financed the creation of at least one of them, the Yoruba Elders Forum, all in a bid to rule Nigeria forever.

            Nigeria in general and the North in particular will greatly miss Chief Sunday Bolorunduro Awoniyi, CON, the Aro of Mopa and Chairman of ACF, if only because unlike most Nigerian leaders, this great “son” of the great Sardauna always practiced what he preached.

Re: The lesson of 888 Days in Biafra

            The newspaper headline of my column last week did not highlight the title of the book I reviewed as I did in my manuscript. As a result some readers sent me emails and texts on my phone asking for the title. Well, the title is 888 Days in Biafra.

            A few readers also drew my attention to an error in the name of one of the officers who were shot in Enugu by a firing squad shortly after the rebellion started for alleged treason against Biafra, namely Victor Banjo. The article gave his surname as Badejo. It was a printer’s devil. All the same the error is regretted.