Muhammadu Dikko Yusufu (1931 -2015)

It is instructive that Yusufu, who gained prominence as a police officer, is not known for the negative traits that are often associated with the service and those who retired from it in Nigeria. While he served, he projected a personality that had a positive impact on the activities of police personnel and the public’s […]

It is instructive that Yusufu, who gained prominence as a police officer, is not known for the negative traits that are often associated with the service and those who retired from it in Nigeria. While he served, he projected a personality that had a positive impact on the activities of police personnel and the public’s perception of them.
During his years as the Inspector General between 1975 and 1979, it softened the image of the force which many had come to see as an extension of the state’s instrument of suppression and not for fighting crime and maintaining law and order.  He intensified interaction of the police with the civil society and the academia, raising the citizens’ confidence in the force to a higher degree.
But even more than his role as a policeman, Yusufu will be remembered for the role he played in the struggle for return to democracy during the military era of General Sani Abacha.
Yusufu demonstrated the principle that a public officer’s loyalty is to the state, and how this can tower over and above other considerations. As a retired senior police officer who had served a good part of his adult life in the force, he set aside the tendency to protect the establishment at the expense of the rights of the citizen; instead Yusufu chose to identify with the processes that would entrench democracy and governance, and threw himself into the cause such that it was not surprising he became one of the arrowheads of the struggle to end military rule.
It was to Yusufu’s credit that he was the only one of the multitude of politicians of the General Abacha era who literally stuck out his neck to confront the military, and dared to float a political party, the Grassroots Democratic Movement (GDM), and emerged its presidential candidate to challenge Abacha’s self-succession plan. With Abacha’s death, another military administration launched a transition to civil rule timetable that culminated in the elections that enthroned democracy in May 1999.
Later, when the beneficiary of those elections, President Olusegun Obasanjo, toyed with the idea of amending the Constitution to seek a third term in office, Yusufu was again up in arms to take part in the campaign that eventually scuttled it.
Though born into an aristocratic background, Yusufu was more eager to identify with the masses and was usually found on the political left. In him many said they had found a meeting point between the establishment and the progressive movement. It was a blend Yusufu managed exceptionally well.
MD Yusufu died at a critical juncture in Nigeria’s movement towards the consolidation of democratic principles which he idealised and fought for. He died just as Nigerians were awaiting the results of the 2015 presidential elections in which General Muhammadu Buhari was eventually declared winner.
Even as the surprise of the outcome of the elections tempered the grief that came with the announcement of Yusufu’s passing, there was no doubt that his transition has left an indelible mark in the lives of many who remember him as a committed policeman, patriotic Nigerian and champion of democracy and unusual and dogged fighter on behalf of the masses.
Muhammadu Dikko Yusufu was an officer, a gentleman that the nation-and his family too-will dearly miss.