Iyayi: A Valued Tree Slashed Down

As a foremost revolutionary, social crusader for justice and equity, Iyayi functioned as an uncommon model in self sacrifice for noble ideals and a carrier of the burden of the oppressed masses in society. Not only has he articulated this commitment  all through his life in diverse media—in public lectures and debates, within the struggle […]

As a foremost revolutionary, social crusader for justice and equity, Iyayi functioned as an uncommon model in self sacrifice for noble ideals and a carrier of the burden of the oppressed masses in society. Not only has he articulated this commitment  all through his life in diverse media—in public lectures and debates, within the struggle vanguard of the  academic labour force as a former Chairman and past President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities and an active ally of the central labour organization, the Nigerian Labour Congress. This is not to mention the inspiration he offers enduringly and ceaselessly to student bodies across the country and as a leading voice of the radical left in Nigeria. He also expresses passion in his work as a fiction writer whose novels have engaged numerous minds in the creative domain of the country. This loaded opening will form the locus of the tribute (or tributes) that this particular column opens.
It is impossible for me to write about Iyayi without recourse to the history of the emergence and growth of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) from a mere summer vacation flight ticket clearing house for laid- back Nigerian academics of the seventies to a radical, un-ignorable academic labour force in Nigeria—wit particular reference to the explosion of the academic organization to an indomitable radical movement from the early eighties. This last phase of the Union was marshalled from the take-off leadership drive of Biodun Jeyifo in combination with the late Mahmud Tukur, with  five or six  major centres as the vortex of the cauldron—ABU, Ife, Ilorin, Benin, Calabar and Jos. This was the aegis of uncouth military dictatorship, especially the Buhari-Idiagbon and Ibrahim Babangida (dis) continuum. This was an age in which, perhaps, only ASUU could offer any kind of resistance or alternative vision to caval governance. This radical movement of the union, which also received critical support from the Nigeria Labour Congress (especially under the leadership of Hassan Sunmonu ) which ASUU also reciprocally offered modest intellectual and theoretic support in honing its own organization into a believable central labour union by the workers of the country) carried its struggle almost inside the ajar-red mouth of roaring lions at the helm of power and those of us in the central/acme  and branch leadership paid dearly for daring to dare.
Festus Iyayi, Chairman at the Benin ‘trench’ was the simply fierce and fiercely simple co-ordinator of the roaring vanguard. Soft spoken, when picking up his presentations, bursting into an explosive and  raging lead of slight stammer with eyes of fire and rippling brow until his audience begin to rise involuntarily to his revolutionary conscientizing verbiage. If ever there was a genuinely persuaded voice of vision and defender of the common good for the academic world and against the predatory reign of state violence, without any concern for his own skin and the near-mortal consequence of protest action, it was, without doubt, Festus Iyayi. He was a nemesis of tyrannical power within the university system and violent streets of our badly run State houses. Inside Benin, and under the iron fist of Alele-Williams, the much-acclaimed first female Vice-Chancellor of Nigeria, an emblem which she carried like the scorpion scourge, Iyayi was a major name that must not be mentioned in the corridors of power. Unrelenting, non-violent like his novel under the name Violence, yet demonized by power until the roof of his house was removed and his property, including his young family was thrown into the thunderous and merciless rain, Iyayi remained the undaunted leader of the struggle vanguard  at Uniben. Unable to stand his popularity and the power of the truth he spoke and defended on behalf of the downtrodden, Iyayi was thrown out of the University by the authorities in Benin, and was openly rejected by the power at the centre, when against all the manipulations of the State which sponsored candidates against him, he became the National President of ASUU.
This was a case in which a man that was illegally removed from his job in Benin became the chosen leader of the entire body of the academic labour force of Nigeria. Of course, the state will not do business with him, and eventually, to avoid a stalemate and to carry on the struggle for the rights of the academia and the improvement of the parlous state of the Nigerian educational system at the tertiary level, Attahiru Jega, the de jure Vice president, became the Acting President on the negotiation table between the union and the State. The leadership of Iyayi was still not negotiable in the perception and minds of the rank and file of the Union, until it was time (was it?) to elect a new President, and naturally, Attahiru Jega became the President. But as it is now public knowledge, Iyayi’s commitment to the growth of the union, the defence of the common man in the street and the articulation of the needs and aspiration against the axyphiating mechanics of power was inviolable, undiminished and unsuppressed.
Most people did not come to grips with the fact, or simply did not know, that Iyayi, the vibrant teacher and scholar of Business Administration and the unstoppable trade unionist, Marxist dialectician and political activist was also a fine story-teller and a profound creative writer until he began to win prizes with his fiction, at national and international territories. Until his novel Heroes won the Commonwealth Prize for Prose, most Nigerians did not know that he was also deploying the creative imagination instrument for rigorous dialectical engagement o f the antagonistic relation and consciousness between the have nots and the opulently and obscene rich in society. His most engaging novel, to my mind, Heroes, explored the events of the Nigerian Civil War from the perspective of the deprived fighting class, the soldiers, who did not cause the war but who became the victims and preys of war caused by the ruling elite. The novel explored the dysfunctional and dim-witted leadership that provoked the war  in the first instance and anticipates a time in our social history when the masses will be sufficiently enlightened and creative to form a formidable force to dislodge the capitalist hegemony that continue to feed fat on the labour, resources and energies of the majority in society.
Did I start with the paradox and contradiction in our social economy that slashed down invaluable trees like Festus Iyayi while the perpetrators of predation and ignoble rule gallop in cynical and obscene opulence with drunken convoys on our badly built and unmaintained roads?
Surely, the fine penetrating voice of vision, the gritty resolve and steely dynamism to right the wrongs visited on the Nigerian masses, which Festus Iyayi lived and died for, will wet the soil of redemption on our land so that Iyayi shall not die in vain. I and all of us who struggled In hideous and dark trenches with him, especially in the eighties and nineties, shall sorely and certainly miss Festus. Good night, comrade.