Odia Ofeimun, poet and former president, Association of Nigerian Authors, spoke with SYLVESTER ASOYA on the transition of Pa Abraham Adesanya, the leadership crisis in Nigeria and the nationality questionQ: What kind of leader was Pa Abraham Adesanya?

A: I think it will be proper to call him a transitional leader. He was in the grip of two movements. The leader who came before him, Adekunle Ajasin was quite a chip off the old block. Ajasin belonged to a certain settled culture of leadership. As they were returning from their various studies abroad, having acquired their degree, they were lucky to have a leader amongst them who knew precisely what he wanted and who understood the modes of development that will help his people. He also managed to get all the other leaders to agree with him. Obafemi Awolowo was a very clear-eyed worker for development. He knew precisely what kind of development that was needed and he was lucky that many of those who were around him shared his view on the matter. He realised that colonialism had bundled together a number of nationalities. The colonialists insulted them by calling them tribes but Awolowo said they were not tribes, they were nations that needed to be treated with the respect that every such group in the world deserves. Awolowo believed that it was only by respecting their individualities and ensuring that none ever oppresses the other that they will be able to create a proper nation-state. Therefore, each nationality, according to Awolowo, needed to do whatever that was necessary to arrive at the level of development that would make it difficult for the colonialists and other likely colonialists in the future to oppress them. And what the people needed to do was to develop their own languages, know their history properly by taking a good record of their past, develop their cultures in general: their music, their sciences and whatever.

Awolowo’s aim was that all the ethnic groups in Nigeria should have all the knowledge in their own indigenous languages transferred into English and the knowledge in English transferred to their indigenous languages. If all the nationalities in Nigeria were equalised on that basis, then you will have no problem linking them together. But he knew that what you did within the zone of one nationality will not be enough to cover the entire country. So, he had a second leg to the development argument, which is to say that the whole country should be brought into a common culture and the fastest means of doing that is ensuring that they all shared a common educational value. Which was why he kept saying that unless you had free education for everybody, we were not really pursuing development. This is the truth. The uneducated are not great participants in development. In order to achieve the first, Awolowo created an ethnic organisation and in order to achieve the second, he created a political party. They called that political party Afenifere. Afenifere was not Egbe Omo Oduduwa. Egbe Omo Oduduwa was the ethnic organisation. Afenifere was not an ethnic organisation, it was just a Yoruba name for a political party that covered everybody. But those who took over after Ajasin died were plagued with this business of running an ethnic organisation as if it was a political party. Yet, they did not want to apply the codes of the political party they were all members of. The Action Group was a political party that was based in a region of which the majority was Yoruba. But the leader kept insisting and his party agreed with him at that time that it must be strongly distinguished from the earlier ethnic organisation, the Egbe Omo Oduduwa. Egbe Omo Oduduwa was not a political party, but it was the basis upon which a political party was founded. So it was not the political party. The political party which was called Afenifere was led by a man who was well known, it had a man who was well known, it had a constitution which was very well applied across its members and so the distinction between being an ethnic organisation and a political was clear.

But I said Adesanya was a transition leader because a new situation arose which required ethnic solidarity; when they felt that the rest of the country was deliberately, either insulting or oppressing or marginalising the Yoruba. So they created an Afenifere which was trying to do the job of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa without being a political party. For instance, they required that the organisation serve as a vehicle for the expression of Yoruba position. But it was a name for an organisation that was doing a different job from the old Afenifere.

Q: But there is a belief, especially among critics, that Pa Adesanya polarised Afenifere. That his leadership came with factions …..

A: He was not the one who factionalised Afenifere. Blaming it on individuals is actually one of the miserable ways in which Yoruba leaders insult themselves. The truth is that conceptually, what they were doing was wrong-headed. You could not run an ethnic organisation like a political party in a multi-national state like Nigeria. They needed a methodological organisation which could express a Yoruba vision without necessarily offending the centrality of a political party idea. A political party idea requires that you disregard ethnic angle because if you were going to campaign across ethnic lines, to other groups, and you called whatever you were doing a vision, or agenda, you will not go anywhere because it will be an insult to an Igbo man to be asked to come and join a Yoruba party. But they simply could not work it out. It was the poverty of their conceptualisation that landed them in a mess. It was a bloody mess because it was difficult to convince any Yoruba man that what they were doing was playing Egbe Omo Oduduwa and pretending to be doing Afenifere; these were two organisations. Egbe Omo Oduduwa was not Afenifere; Afenifere was not Egbe Omo Oduduwa. Afenifere was simply the Action Group with a clear leader, a constitution of its own and goals that it meant to pursue across ethnic lines whereas Egbe Omo Odudwa had a Yoruba-based constituency and its vision was thoroughly circumscribed by the necessity to deal with the Yoruba heritage.

Q: How exactly did Chief Obafemi Awolowo emerge as a leader?

A: Awolowo emerged as a leader by being a very self-conscious being who understood his environment and believed that the true leader does not submit to the frivolities and proclivities of his environment but controls them. And he set out, organising himself, turning himself into a mobilisational machine as it were and ensuring that his environment would eventually agree with him. He knew they would not always agree with him. Afterall, he was from one of the smallest localities in Yoruba land, he did not belong to any big family, he was not from a rich background but he knew that if he understood the world well enough and could provide solutions to the problems, he would eventually emerge. But putting it the other way, it wasn’t just a matter of emerging as a leader, but he was prepared to cause the changes that he meant to implement. A people forget that when he called the first meeting of Action Group, only his workers, the people he had employed, went. That is to say that nobody went. But the people who were working with him became the first leaders of the Action Group. When that first meeting held, it came out with a programme. The moment other Yoruba leaders saw the programme, they realised this was something new. This was a leader who knew precisely what needed to be done. And the next meeting, they flocked there. This time it was obvious that they all knew where they were going.

But Awolowo was also clever. He did not immediately become the leader. He made it a collegiate system where all of them sat down and decided. Of course, they had those leaders who were highly regarded. Although he disagreed with these big men of the society, he realised that if you wanted to build a solid organisational platform, you needed all of them, all the shakers and movers to make things happen. And he was humble enough to go to them and sell the need for a platform that could make change possible. Luckily, it was a period when the Yoruba people were not sold to the frivolity that has become the norm in Yoruba land today. They were leaders who wanted to achieve things in their individual lives. Those who pursued education wanted education of particular type, the businessmen wanted to be actual businessmen and not middlemen to businessmen from abroad. They were conscious of themselves as nationalists who needed to do great things in their individual lives. They wanted to be active developers of their societies. And they knew themselves, they knew what they wanted. This was why Awolowo was able to work out a proper arrangement. But those who came later were largely lawyers and people in the service and hospitality professions. The culture of the society also started changing. That is to say, rather than people who wanted to do things, you were having to do things with people who were neither up there or down below. Now, they were dealing with a new culture. But with each successive generation, Awolowo managed to broaden the language of the political party to accommodate new classes. He constantly reworked the language of the party to accommodate more and more people. First, he wished to go beyond the Yoruba fold and he did, he wished to go beyond the mould of those who merely worked for themselves, because one of the great things about that class I must say, is they began by saying: “what shall we do to help our society develop?” They asked that question and answered it before they fitted themselves within it from the standpoint of individual prosperity. They had to answer the question: what are we going to do for our people? It was from within what they wanted to do for their people that they located their own ambitions. But others who came later located their ambitions first before they worked out what they needed for their people. That was where the problem arose. By the time it got to Adesanya, you needed somebody with a capacity for intellectual footwork of a nature that could deal with the ethnic questions without abandoning the welfare issues that the Action Group has centralised in Nigerian politics. They could not fashion it. And the reason they could not fashion it was because they could not manage the transition from being an ethnic organisation to being a national welfarist political party. If they had managed that transition, the so-called fight between Bola Ige and whoever else there was would never have arisen. Bola Ige kept raising the question but he was largely misunderstood because it was felt that he merely wanted to pursue his own ambition. But Ige was the one who was right conceptually. He realised the necessity to build an ethnic organisation but go beyond it because if you don’t go beyond it, within the national argument you will be a non-starter.

Sometimes, Ige appeared to over-represent the ethnic prong of that argument and it was then used against him by members of the group who just wanted to have him displaced. But those who were trying to displace Bola Ige had no sense of that welfare socialist argument which was the basis of Awolowo’s self sustenance as a political leader. In fact, it is largely because today, all of them who claim to be following Awolowo have inadequate language for dealing with Awolowo’s welfare position, that is why they are in trouble.

Q: From your analysis so far, is it possible for there to be another Awolowo?

A: Why do people want an Awolowo? Every great leader is great because he creates a format for his or her own irrelevance. A great leader makes sure that those who follow him acquire the means for him to be completely irrelevant. You give to your people the values that will sustain them in confronting the problems of their lives. And when they have all learnt those values and acquired the skills, a leader can afford to be just one of the many people in the society who may still be respected but who, having given so much power to the masses can be rest assured that whatever the circumstances that arise, his people will triumph. Awolowo did that by giving everybody education. When people say that Awolowo did not prepare a successor, they don’t understand what social development is all about. By giving education to everybody and ensuring that you have classes of people who can function rationally in various professions, he had created the basis for a transition. What was lacking was that within the cockpit of the leadership, those who should have learnt certain skills were displacing themselves.

To be honest, let’s start with the struggle within the Unity Party of Nigeria between Bola Ige and Jakande. Everybody pretended that it was not a struggle but everybody knew that it was there and it had to be there. Jakande was a pure organisation man, he knew how to put things in the right place, he was not what you would call a very modern leader but he is a leader who understands how to make things work. Bola Ige was a different kind of leader. He was the one who organised the old Oyo State and part of Ondo State for Awolowo as the movement towards political parties in 1977/78 began. He was the ideology man as distinct from Jakande who was the organisation man. Ige knew everything clearly. If any questions arose and Bola Ige was not present, Awolowo was always worried because he knew that at the level of values and ideological clarity, Bola Ige had an answer to any question in a way that most people did not have it. He was always ahead of the group and people who are always ahead earn a lot of envy and disparaging comments when troubles arise. The fact that a man can see ahead of others does not mean that he has solution to every problem. The trouble was that the two positions could not be fused. You could put the organisation man and the ideological man together but Awolowo represented both positions.

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