PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Balewa

ndajika@yahoo.com

These must indeed be harrowing times for the family of our first Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa who was killed in the first military coup in the country on January 15, 1966. First, was the headline news in August about the alleged kidnap of one Dr. Jhalil Tafawa Balewa, self-acclaimed National Coordinator of Jonathan na Kowa,( roughly Hausa equivalent for “Jonathan for all”), one of the myriads of fly by night outfits that have been campaigning for President Goodluck Jonathan’s bid for the presidency on his own steam next year.

“Jhalil Abubakar Balewa, son of the First Republic Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa,” said The Nation of August 30 in its own story of the drama, “yesterday relived how he escaped from the kidnappers’ den on Saturday. He was abducted in Abuja on Friday.” He escaped from his captors on his own, he said, because they let down their guard a short while after they’d arrived at their den. 

It soon turned out that the newspaper, like all the others that ran the story, swallowed Jhalil’s melodrama all too easily, probably because of his surname. Shortly after he told his story, the police told a different version. Far from escaping on his own, said the police, they had to engage the kidnappers in a shoot-out before they could rescue him. This raised questions about the credibility of his claim that he was kidnapped, to begin with.

It  now became his word against that of the police. The difficult choice for the public must, I suspect, have been resolved in favour of the police when, soon enough, the family of the late prime minister, denounced Jhalil as an impostor.

The family had denounced the man less than two years ago when Leadership published a story on him in which he made exactly the same claim. This was in the newspaper’s edition of December 21, 2008.  Nine days after he had obliged an invitation for a meeting with the family it issued a statement denouncing him as an impostor. Balewa, it said, “didn’t sire a child outside wedlock.” His children, the statement said, were “Yakubu (Baba), Abubakar 1 (Bala), Mhuktar, Abubakar 2 (Saddiq), Umar, Usman, Ahmed, Haruna, and no other.”

Exactly one year later an American domiciled website, AllAfrica.com, published a claim by one, Tunde Alatise, that Jhalil was a fugitive from American law for Medicaid and Medicare fraud. Jhalil’s real name, he said, was Jalil Khadiri who lived in Fayettville, Georgia, but was originally from Ibadan, Oyo State. Not only was Jhalil on the run, Alatise said, he had eloped with his ex-wife who, on her own part, had been deported from the U.S. after serving one-a-half-year jail for shoplifting, impersonation and immigration offenses.   

If the Balewa family thought that all this had ended its nightmare, the return of Jhalil last month must have revived it. Less than two years after their first nightmare, he apparently jumped aboard the Jonathan presidency gravy train using the magical Balewa name. And the press swallowed his claim of Balewa paternity hook, line and sinker.

The controversy over his claim had hardly died down when another, perhaps worse, nightmare, confronted the family. It came in the shape of a recent interview with The Nation by Chief Mathew Mbu, a minister in Balewa’s cabinet and pioneer Nigerian High Commissioner in the U.K.

Balewa, Mbu said, may have died from asthmatic attack days after the ’66 coup, contrary to the story all these 44 years that the man was shot to death by his military captors on the very day of the coup, along with his flamboyant Minister of Finance, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh.

Predictably Mbu’s claim has provoked strong reactions for and against. O’seun Ogunseitan, The Nation’s reporter who started it all with his Mbuh interview, seems to share his respondent’s claim, at least in part. “Nigeria’s first Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa,” he said in The Nation on Sunday of September 19, “was not killed on coup day, January 15, 1966, contrary to widely-held belief on the country’s first coup.”

His evidence was hardly incontrovertible; of the two eye-witness accounts the newspaper published in the course of its investigation, one by Pa Lawal Taibu Atanda Olarewaju (73), said the body of the prime minister he saw propped up against a tree half way between Lagos and Abeokuta had no bullet wounds. The other by Captain Chris Israel Okigbo (68) who was not only an eyewitness but was, in the newspaper’s words, “among the ground soldiers that assisted in executing the coup,” said Balewa was shot. “Everybody who fell in the January coup was shot. Abubakar was shot. They were abducted and shot,” he said.

Perhaps Ogunseitan has been swayed by the position of the first journalist to break news of the discovery of Balewa’s body, Chief Olusegun Osoba, two-time governor of Ogun State, then a resourceful young reporter with the then authoritative Daily Times. Osoba has stood by his report of 44 years ago that the body of Balewa he saw had no sign of violence, in sharp contrast to that of Okotie-Eboh which was covered in blood and had already in decomposed.

Ogunseitan and Segun are not the only ones who believe Mbu. Last Friday, September 24, Vanguard weighed in with an editorial which seems to support the gentleman. “If,” the newspaper said, “the Mbu version is true, it challenges the accounts of January 1966. What else would it challenge? There would be many, depending on who is analysing the story. Mbu is not a frivolous man...If Mbu is wrong what is the correct version?” (Emphasis mine).

The Vanguard’s comment is very profound because it raises questions about the timing and the motive of Mbu’s remark. Why did he wait for four decades before revealing what he had apparently always believed? Could it have something to do with the serious challenge posed by the region Balewa comes from to his support of Jonathan’s bid to remain in office in the face of the zoning provision in his own party?

Whatever it is that Mbu’s dubious revelation may “challenge”, the one indisputable fact, as stated by Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, the most forceful opponent of Mbu’s story, is that the coup makers killed Balewa.

It is, of course, important to know how he was killed and when. The answers, as Vanguard said, could provide answers to many of the problems we face today. Unfortunately we may never find any incontrovertible answers. The bottom line, however, was that he was killed.

This makes it more important to know why. Osoba, who seems to support Mbu, gave a plausible lead in an interview with Sunday Vangurd (September 26). “My suspicion,” he said, “is that after the reign of government was handed to Ironsi, if Tafawa Balewa had been alive then, the government of the day would have wasted him because if Tafawa Balewa were alive, the handing over by the ministers would have been null and void because he was head of government.”

Anyone who needed further proof that, one way or the other, the coup makers were responsible for Balewa’s death, need go no further back than the Silver Anniversary of The Guardian on October a couple or so years ago.

On that occasion, Mr Chinua Achebe, the most celebrated African novelist, gave the most conclusive evidence, in my view at least, of why Balewa may have been killed.

“The Prime Minister and two regional Premiers,” he said, “were killed by the coup makers. In the bitter suspicious atmosphere of the time, a naively idealistic coup proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted WITH PLAUSIBILITY as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control from the Hausa Fulani North.” (Emphasis mine).

Like Mbu, Achebe is not a frivolous fellow. But even more importantly, he was a near-casualty in the counter-coup of July 1966 and had to flee for his life because the novel he published days before the first coup, A Man of The People, gave anyone who read it the impression, wrongly I believe, that he was privy to the coup.

Balewa has been dead for over 44 years now. I don’t know what useful purpose is served by splitting our heads in raising questions that we will probably never find any useful answers to. The good man deserves to be left alone to rest in his grave and his family deserve to be left alone to grieve their eternal loss.