Celebrating Segun Osoba @ 80

Trust Comrade Osoba to spoil a party! He refused to cut his birthday cake. He explained he had never celebrated his birthday, nor cut a cake in his life; and he would not change at eighty. There is nothing in a birthday, he explained, it’s just another day in your life, which will end in […]

Trust Comrade Osoba to spoil a party! He refused to cut his birthday cake. He explained he had never celebrated his birthday, nor cut a cake in his life; and he would not change at eighty. There is nothing in a birthday, he explained, it’s just another day in your life, which will end in death. We cut the cake and ate it anyway, but could not dare sing happy birthday. Comrade Osoba is best known for the minority report he and Dr Bala Usman wrote as part of the 49 “wise men” of the Constitution Drafting Committee charged by General Murtala Mohammed to write a new constitution for Nigeria in 1975/76. I recall that as students, we had tried to launch the minority Constitution in Sabon Gari, Zaria, but we were tear-gassed and beaten up by the police. I already knew my teacher Bala Usman and decided after the beating and tear gas that I needed to know Comrade Osoba.
Segun Osoba was a 1959 graduate of the University of Ibadan and obtained a UNESCO fellowship to do his doctorate at the Moscow Sate University. He taught at Ife from 1967 to the 1990s and was one of the first to popularize Marxist methodology making Ife one of the first hubs of radical student unionism but also reaching out to students and young lecturers in other universities. As Femi Falana explained at the event, most of his “students” like him were not usually registered for his formal courses but young people bored to death by their own teachers who audit Osoba’s classes and public debates for critical analysis and inspiration. Those of us who benefitted from his mentorship have enormous respect for his knowledge, humility, total devotion to scholarship and above all his contempt for Nigeria’s successive decadent ruling classes. The decadence of the ruling classes was based essentially on their focus on using power for individual profit thereby setting the process of the development of mega corruption.
The keynote address at the workshop was given by Professor Toye Olorode who reviewed the great difficulties the Nigerian progressive movement has had in creating opportunities to transform Nigeria for the better. The revolutionary path has not worked because of the difficulties of establishing an effective vanguard party to galvanise the struggle and create traction for change. The revolutionaries who decided to take the short court of joining bourgeois politics ended up as turn coats who betrayed our ideals he lamented. Olorode appreciated the fact that Osoba always opposed the short cut path to revolutionary change and devoted his life to improving ideological clarity.
Segun Osoba is respected as a sharp historian and social scientist who carried out profound analysis of changing social structure and classes in Nigeria. Rather than mouth the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as reproduced in Marxist theory, he studies the real social structure in Nigerian society and provides context to emergent class forces. He did not mouth Marxism by rote, he understood the methodology and used it to analyse his society. He always inspired his students to believe that intellectual work has a purpose, to improve the lives and livelihoods of the masses. He has a good sense of humour and in his days in Ife often held court in the staff club exposing, castigating and ridiculing Nigeria’s decadent ruling class.  
My good friend and co-columnist in Daily Trust, Issa Aremu, caused a stir by delivering a tribute on behalf of the Joe Ajaero-faction of the NLC. He castigated former NLC President Abdulwaheed Omar and retired General Secretary John Odah of working together to break all known NLC rules and rigging them out in the recent rescheduled elections. NLC lawyer, Femi Falana, who did not take sides in the factional crisis, felt however that, since the rules in question were about nomination procedures, the faction should not have waited until they were defeated in the elections before suddenly “discovering” that the rules were not followed. If they had won the election, would they have walked out?
In his response to friends and comrades, Comrade Segun Osoba drew attention to the legacy of substandard education, corrupt civil service and oppressive security apparatus that the British left for Nigeria. The Nigerian power elite that took over from the British were too focused on primitive accumulation and in fighting and only worsened the political culture they inherited from the British. It is therefore not surprising that we currently have an excessive level of superstitious belief among Nigerians. One example he gave was that in 2011, many of those who voted for Goodluck Jonathan did so with the superstitious belief that by so doing, Goodluck will spread to Nigerian voters. Today, most Nigerians are shell shocked by the terrible choice they made in 2011 he explained. For Dr Osoba, excessive belief in the spiritual is blocking the critical faculties of Nigerians and making the promotion of progressive politics very difficult. Many of the comrades at the meeting are ageing but it was good to see so many friends, who had to struggle virtually all their lives, to create a better Nigeria and leave their country better than they found it. There are fewer such people among the younger generation and in a sense this is the real challenge of contemporary Nigeria. Too many among the young are focused on the very narrow domain of crass materialism. They lack the idealism and passion that is so important in motivating society for progressive change.