PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

DEATH AND THE CICERO

Being text of a review by MOHAMMED HARUNA of the book BOLA IGE: The Passage of a Modern Cicero, on the occasion of its formal presentation on Saturday September 13, 2003 at the Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan

The Chairman of the occasion, distinguished guests, let me begin my task by thanking Mr. Bankole Olayebi, the boss of Bookcraft, publishers of the book under review, for his invitation to me to do the review. Mr. Olayebi phoned me two Mondays ago I believe, to make his request. He introduced himself as a friend of Mr. Felix Adenaike. For that reason alone, I felt honoured. Felix, along with Peter Ajayi and Segun Osoba, collectively known as The Three Musketeers of Nigerian journalism, has been a close friend. So close that many of my colleagues often referred to me as the fourth, and the northern member, of the Musketeers, especially because I was born in this town at Mokola 52 years ago, this month.

Felix was, however, not the only reason why I accepted to review the book. I did so also for two more reasons. First, is the subject of the book itself, Chief Bola Ige – Uncle Bola to most of us at a personal level, or the Cicero of Esa-Oke to most political pundits.

As a political analyst, I have always found Uncle Bola fascinating as a subject. By common consent he possessed a brilliant and incisive mind and was as sharp with his tongue as he was with his pen. On the few occasions I had the opportunity to meet him, he always struck me as a man with a large heart.

Yet this man with a sharp mind, a sharp tongue, a sharp pen and a large heart was a consistent advocate of the superiority of the Yoruba race. Herein lies my fascination with the man. How, I have often asked myself, could a man with all these virtues and who, himself, says he is a left-wing socialists, believe in the supremacy of any race? The man himself would, of course, be the first to deny that he is a supremacist when he speaks of the superiority of the Yoruba. Most of his admirers, many of them gathered here, would agree with me... Both himself and his admirers would say his position is merely one of pride in his own race.

If that were the case objectively, no one would quarrel with that position. I am Nupe, or what the Yoruba would call Tapa, and I am proud to be one. Everyone should be proud of his race. However, pride in one’s race is one thing but to believe, as Uncle Bola did, that one’s own race is all virtue and no vice or that other races are always the villains of piece and never the heroes, all this is altogether another thing.

Even though Uncle Bola and his friends and many admirers would deny it, the evidence of his supremacist views abounded in his column in the Nigerian Tribune and in many of his press interviews. The book under review contains excerpts from one such an interview. This is the interview published in Tell of April 30, 2001. For example, in the full version of that interview, Tell had asked him if he did not see the crisis in Afenifere/Alliance for Democracy posing a threat to AD’s grip on the South-West. AD, as essentially a Yoruba party, has done so well for the Yoruba, he said, that there was not the slightest chance that they will vote for PDP which many in the South-West regarded as essentially a Hausa/Fulani party. “Yoruba people,” Uncle Bola said, “will not vote PDP to run their governments. Yoruba people are not stupid. They will ask one question: Which PDP governor in the whole Nigeria can you say is doing better than any AD governor? You tell me if you know one!”

This obviously, is to say that all AD governors, by virtues of being Yoruba, are superior to all non-AD governors. This, equally obviously, cannot be a scientifically valid assertion to make. Yet, the Tell interview was not the only occasion Uncle Bola would make such supremacist remarks. For example, on an earlier occasion he told The Sunday Vanguard (April 4, 1999) that because President Obasanjo is Yoruba, his kith and kin would make sure he does so well in office that “after him, only Yorubas should be allowed to be president of this country, till Kingdom come”.

My fascination with Uncle Bola became more intense when I became Chief Press Secretary of General Abdulsalami Abubakar between October 1998 and May 1999. During that period, I had the rare privilege of being Uncle Bola’s linkman with my boss. On several occasions I would drive him in my own car from Nicon Hilton Hotel in the early hours of the day to meet with General Abubakar. On those occasions the two of us often discussed politics on our way to and back from the Villa. Always I found him very captivating.

He also sounded to me as very confident, perhaps even over-confident, about his chances of leading the AD/APP alliance to victory over PDP if only he had won the party’s presidential ticket. Although he said he had put his surprising defeat by Chief Olu Falae for that ticket behind him, I had this sneaky felling that he really couldn’t. On one occasion, he argued, quietly validly I must say, that it was ironical that those who preferred Falae to him, because they said he (Ige) would be a hard-sell outside Yorubaland were the first to ask him to lead Falae’s campaign in other parts of the country.

Mr. Chairman, it was partly my fascination, with the complex and interesting character of Uncle Bola, a fascination intensified by my close encounter with him in early part of 1999 that partly made me accept to review the book about him in spite of the very short notice I got. However, apart from this and Felix Adenaike’s reference, there is a third and final reason, namely several of the contributors to the book, including Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, Professor Tunde Adeniran and Odia Ofeimun, all of them either acquaintances and friends, or people whose literary output I have always found interesting. I thought it was apt, given the worryingly slow pace of the prosecution of Uncle Bola’s alleged murderers, that at this time someone would put together the thoughts of these famous and not-so-famous friends and admirers of Uncle Bola about his contributions to Nigeria’s politics and the arts.

For this reason alone, Bookcraft deserves to be congratulated for its initiative in publishing what is probably the first of many books about Uncle Bola, as one of the brightest stars in the political firmament.

Not only is the timing apt, I also think a better title – BOLA IGE: The Passage of a Modern Cicero – is hard to find for the book. For, by common consent, Uncle Bola had arguably the greatest gift of the garb among his political contemporaries. The recurring theme of the contributions in the book is that Uncle Bola, like the original Cicero, had a capacity for using words to tie up an opponent or charm friends and foes alike into doing his biddings.

Anyone who has followed Uncle Bola’s career even from a distance would agree that he was deserving of his alias as the Cicero of Esa-Oke, which was coined back in the early eighties by Dr. Stanley Macebuh, then the most cerebral columnist in the country. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Cicero (full name Marcus Tullus Cicero), was “Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar and writer, who in vain, upheld Republican principles, in the civil struggles that destroyed the Republic of Rome. (He) is best remembered as the greatest Roman orator and innovator of what became known, as Ciceronian rhetoric”. His oration was grounded in a thorough knowledge of literature, philosophy, law, and history among other things. Cicero was born in 106 BC and died 63 years later.

Clearly, Uncle Bola had many things in common with this ancient Cicero. Both were politicians with excellent gift of the garb and both were lawyers, writers and philosophers. Cicero was killed because of his politics and I strongly suspect that Uncle Bola too was killed because of his politics.

In reviewing BOLA IGE, I decided, for reasons of time constraint, to focus on the contributions by Soyinka and Ogunbiyi, because they are reputedly his closest friends and they are also giants in their own fields. Others I have focused on are (1) Ofeimun because of his defense of what seemed like Uncle Bola’s political somersault late in his life; (2) Sowande, because he alone in the book substantially addressed the important controversy surrounding Uncle Bola’s membership of the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC); and (3) Mrs. Adegbola, his daughter, because of her captivating narrative about her relationship with her dad.

I have focused on these five contributors also because their articles have captured the essence of the book, which obviously is to give the reader a portrait of Uncle Bola and keep his memory alive even as those in authority seem to be hell-bent in frustrating the judicial attempts to get to the bottom of his cold-blooded murder.

As a reviewer, one would like to ask, how accurate are the portraits of the man in the book? How easily do the contributions flow to make the book an irresistible read? How significant for the politics of the country are some of the issues raised by the contributors to the book? Et Cetera.

Mr. Chairman, Soyinka as the leading contributor to the book paints the portraits of Uncle Bola as a bridge builder. “Ajibola Ige”, the Nobel Laureate says, “was a builder of bridges”. That, I think, is hardly an accurate thing to say about someone who, for the better part of his life, built his political career on the notion of Yoruba Supremacy. I have, in this respect already drawn the listeners’ attention to the evidence in much of his writings and political statements.

Perhaps, he built bridges within his primary Yoruba constituency. But even here there are many who would disagree with Soyinka. Certainly, virtually the entire leadership of Afenifere would so disagree. Such Afenifere leaders like Chief Ayo Adebanjo and even Chief Abraham Adesanya himself are, after all, on record to have directly or indirectly accused Uncle Bola of becoming the dog in the Afenifere/AD’s manger, hell-bent on destroying it because it would no longer service his political ambition.

Soyinka wonders why anyone would want to kill Ige as a man of ideas and words and not of violence. “Why”, he asked, “did they kill this man whose battlefield lay solely in the realm of ideas, of debate, in the skills of organization and ability to lead and inspire men and women, even children?” Soyinka, I believe, knows why and was most likely being merely being rhetorical, because as a man of letters, he knows more than any other person that men of ideas and words are far more dangerous than men of swords. After all, it is not for nothing that it is said that the pen is mightier than the sword. As Soyinka himself said later on in his contribution, “the route to the mind is neither the paths of bullets nor the path of the blade, but the invisible yet palpable paths of discourse”. Uncle Bola, needless to say was a first class discourser.

Personally, I believe Ige was killed because, almost too late in life, he realized that one could not build bridges using ethnic supremacy and cult-like politics as the foundation. Mathew M. Umukoro, one of the contributors to the book, thinks it is uncharitable for anyone to suggest that Ige was an ethnic jingoist simply because he was born in the North in Kaduna and therefore he should never have been rejected by the region of all places.

Uncle Bola may have been born in the North but he consistently likened its leadership to the Rwandan Tutsis, something hardly calculated to endear him to the people of the region. It is one of the big ironies of his death that it should come at a time he seemed to have realized the error of his supremacist rhetoric and publicly recanted his belief.

As a senior member of President Obasanjo’s cabinet, he also seemed to have shifted his position on key national issue like Sovereign National Conference, Resource Control and Shari’a, such that many of his friends and foes alike started to liken him to Chief Samuel Akintola, Chief Awo’s deputy until they fell apart, and for that reason, regarded in Yorubaland as a “Sokoto Yoruba”, i.e. a betrayer of the Yoruba cause to the much-hated so-called Hausa/Fulani oligarchy.

I have no doubt that Ige’s later-day shift would have made him acceptable beyond his immediate Yoruba constituency. This, however, made him a dangerous person in the eyes of his many rivals who have always looked for opportunities to humiliate him, in a way they finally did in the very palace of Ooni of Ife, barely a few months before his cold-blooded murder.

Soyinka also says Uncle Bola was a “man of unswerving Christian convictions who has served on the World Council of Churches.” Uncle Bola may have had deep Christian convictions, but the role AMORC reportedly played in his burial could only put a question mark over those convictions, depending on whether or not you believe there are contradictions in being a Christian and a member of a secret order at the same time.

Reverend Peter Adebiyi, the Bishop of Lagos Diocese of the Anglican Church, to which Uncle Bola belonged, obviously thought there are such contradictions. A little over a month after Uncle Bola’s death, the reverend father said in a press interview that the top hierarchy of the church was surprised to learn after his death that Uncle Bola belonged to AMORC. One, Justificus Enwang, writing in The Guardian of March 5, 2002, thought Reverent Adebiyi was only being hypocritical because two years before then Uncle Bola had publicly announced his membership of AMORC, an announcement which several newspapers published widely.

Bode Sowande, a playwright and a contributor to the book, agrees with Enwang. Uncle Bola, he says, never hid his membership of AMORC, and the Anglican clergy was not justified to raise dust over the issue, because, says Sowande, Uncle Bola was after all in the good company of Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Hubert Ogunde, Francis Bacon, Williams Shakespeare, the lot. For Sowande, presumably, AMORC couldn’t be an evil order if all these good people belonged to it.

Like Soyinka, Ogunbiyi and Ofeimun, as Uncle Bola’s friends and admirers, paint him in superlative terms. They said many things which were true of the Cicero, but quite a few, which were not. I am surprised, for example, that both Ogunbiyi and Ofeimun would claim that Uncle Bola’s tenure as minister of power and steel was a success. Uncle Bola, as we all know, could not deliver on his patently unwise boast to turn NEPA around literally in next to no time. Instead, he got mired in an unfortunate controversy about what happened to a 2.3 billion Naira allocation to NEPA, a controversy which was never resolved before he was moved to the ministry of justice.

Ofeimun also tried to defend Uncle Bola’s role in the crisis that engulfed Afenifere/AD as a result of his acceptance to serve in Obasanjo’s cabinet. While many in Afenifere saw this as a betrayal of the Yoruba, Uncle Bola himself justified it on the ground that Obasanjo had accepted his condition that the president implement the Afenifere agenda. This apparent attempt to walk both sides of the street could hardly have helped Uncle Bola’s image as a straight-talking politician.

However, if Ogunbiyi and Ofeimun were wrong to claim that Uncle Bola transformed NEPA, and if Ofeimum’s defense of Uncle Bola’s acceptance of a cabinet post under Obasanjo was weak, especially given Uncle Bola’s belief that Obasanjo was an incorrigible dictator -  in his interview in the Sunday Vanguard of April 4, 1999, which I have mentioned, he said though Obasanjo “has been out of the military for 20 years…. his attitude, thinking, his understanding of governance is basically military” – both were right about their friend’s unparalleled influence over the New Generation of Yoruba politicians. Ogunbiyi was also right to say that one other quality that put Uncle Bola above his contemporaries was, to use Ogunbiyi’s words, “guts, sheer raw guts”. Without doubt, Uncle Bola was one of the gutsiest politicians in the country. He spoke his mind on almost all issues and he almost always never left anyone in doubt as to where he stood on such issued.

Finally to Mrs. Adegbola, Uncle Bola’s daughter. From her moving account of her relationship with her dad – an account which, to me, is the most readable contribution in the book apart from Ogunbiyi’s and Professor Niyi Osundare’s – it is clear that Uncle Bola was very fond of his children. Her account also shows that although he was a disciplinarian, Uncle Bola would rather “reason” with his children to see things the right way than spank them. In this respect, Adegbola gives us an interesting anecdote about how she once led her old man to shed tears because she did something that forced him to spank her well and good.

On the day she committed her offence, daddy, she said, gave her twelve strokes of the cane. “I wept uncontrollably, he sweated as he beat me and then, to my shock, horror and surprise, he too began to cry! He cried because he had always promised himself that he would never beat me, that he would always ‘reason’ with me; he cried because his little girl had disappointed him. When he started crying I suddenly realized… the depth of his love for me. From then onwards, I resolved that I would always try to make him happy and proud.”

By all accounts, Mrs. Adegbola, who is here with us, kept her word to make daddy proud of her. Certainly, if Uncle Bola could read her tribute to him, he would have nothing but pride for his daughter’s remarkable ability to communicate in simple and highly readable prose.

Mr. Chairman, the notice I got to review the book we are about launch was too short for me to be able to comment sensibly on each and every contribution to the book, namely the 15 tributes paid to Uncle Bola in Section 1 of the book, the two articles on his political thoughts in Section 2, the review of two of his books in Section 3, and the creative works in poetry, prose and drama dedicated to him in Section 4. Even then I want to believe that I have said enough to shed light on the essence of the book, which I believe is to make sure that those who conspired to murder sleep on that fateful day of December 23, 2001 should themselves know no sleep.

As I said, at the beginning of this review, the timing and title of the book couldn’t be more apt. In addition, its presentation and its substance do enough justice to the highly complex person that was James Ajibola Ige, the Cicero of Esa-Oke.

Hopefully, the book will not only give those who conspired to murder Uncle Bola sleepless nights, it may inspire the judiciary to have the courage to ensure that the culprits get their well-deserved comeuppance.

Mr. Chairman, distinguished guests, thank you for bearing with me.