Sanusi Abubakar goes to ‘After Africa’
One of Professor Ali Alamin Mazrui’s contributions to Pan-Africanism was to coin the name “After-Africa’’. It gives Africa a concreteness in the secular vagueness of “the hereafter’’ or the “great beyond’’. His defence was that in African cosmology “Ancestors’’ play an important and ever-present role in our affairs. President Robert Mugabe is reported to have […]
One of Professor Ali Alamin Mazrui’s contributions to Pan-Africanism was to coin the name “After-Africa’’. It gives Africa a concreteness in the secular vagueness of “the hereafter’’ or the “great beyond’’. His defence was that in African cosmology “Ancestors’’ play an important and ever-present role in our affairs. President Robert Mugabe is reported to have recently said that he would always be playing his part in African politics because after his death he would still be expected to play the mandatory role of an Ancestor. Mallam Mohammed Sanusi Abubakar agreed with Mugabe on that notion with the call by liberation movements of “Aluta Continua!’’ the Struggle Continues.
It was an enormous shock hearing from a voice choking with grief that “Sanusi’’ – our favourite shortcut for his identity – had died. With a typical sense of mischief this special friend had chosen the last day of the last month of 2016 to travel to ‘’After-Africa’’. I had last shouted at a phone text from his daughter, Ajou, in a hospital in India – that he was soon to be discharged from hospital following a successful medical treatment. It was when I stood by the raw soil on his grave after other mourners departed following the end of a religious ritual that it hit me that the last image of him at a birthday celebration for Chief Wole Olaoye’s wife was now lay under that profile of freshly raw soil. I would never hear his wit and brotherhood again.
Sanusi was endowed with a brilliant and voracious mind that constantly hunted for information ranging from the scientific, technological, socio-political to literary matters. Trained as a development economist, he brought extraordinary power and speed in analysing information. That gave him an uncanny ability to see through people’s strengths and weaknesses. A typical example was a warning to Dr Yusuf Bala Usman, his late cousin and academic colleague at Ahmadu Bello University, to note a weakness he had quickly discerned in a young politician being honoured as a beacon of radical political leadership in Nigeria. Those who criticised his analysis as hasty and probably ethnically-rooted, would regret ignoring his note of dissonance. He warned about ideological rigidity and know-it-best stance by Alhaji Balarabe Musa, then the Governor of Kaduna State in whose short-lived administration Sanusi served as Director of Economic Planning.
Under the towering physical and intellectual leadership of Bala Usman, he joined Lawal Batagarwa (a lecturer in Mathematics), Dr. Yahaya Argungu (an agriculturalist, and now a Senator), Mallam Mohammed Saddique Abubakar, and threw vigorous youthful energy into the hope of building Socialism in Kaduna State amid a predominantly feudalist Northern Nigeria.
They draw their inspiration from the radical anti-colonial and anti-feudal politics of Mallam Aminu Kano. As researchers in Bayero University have shown, British colonial officials had combined forces with “Traditional Rulers’’ of the Sokoto Caliphate, to closely monitor political activities of Aminu Kano and brutally intimidate his supporters. They also rigged elections to prevent his party, the Northern Elements Progressive Union, NEPU, from capturing the regional legislature and rule in a federal alliance with parties in Western and Eastern Regions.
Like Aminu Kano, this radical vanguard had brought into politics that ascetic passion and productive chemistry of children from privileged ruling classes rebelling against injustice illustrated in Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedung, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere, Agustinho Neto, Amilcar Cabral, Osama Bin Laden and that recently departed revolutionary, Fidel Castro. That rebellion was also fuelled by anger against foreign exploitation, domination and contempt by foreign powers.
Despite the contemporary example of armed liberation by fellow Muslims in Algeria, Mallam Aminu Kano had opted for constitutional political and electoral struggle to win power for ending abject poverty; and overthrow brutal impunity of existing local rulers and their foreign Godfather. This option denied his youthful rebel followers the raw experience of talking and talking and talking to villagers and urban folks from diverse social conditions and convincing them to sign up to fight for change. Amilcar Cabral, Neto, Samora Machel and Che Guevara wrote about this long march of talking to win supporters for the dangerous and often fatal armed struggle for freedom.
In 1979, general elections by the Obasanjo/Yar’Adua military regime enabled the vanguard to work under the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) and win governorships in Kano and Kaduna States. In the 1983 elections and subsequent military rulers hostile to “radical’’ politicians, the PRP was severely weakened by campaign rules which required millions of campaign funds.
In contrast, the PRP vanguard was visibly harassed. Bala Usman was dismissed from his job even though reinstated by a short-lived military regime. The financial attack on universities by the 1986 devaluation of the Naira – as dictated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – wrecked access to new books and journals from across Africa, other Nigerian academics, Euro-America, Asia, the Caribbean and South America. The very prolific Dr Yusuf Bala Usman could not sustain publications of his works and those of his team.
Sanusi Abubakar was part of a 1995/6 research team at Ahmadu Bello University funded by UNDP. It revealed that all across North West zone of Nigeria the talakawa/masses had lost total faith in concern for their welfare by their leaders at all levels of government and business. The report would explain the hysterical support for Buhari in the 2007 and 2011 elections. UNDP officials and their superiors in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin read the report. Sanusi went away laughing last at those who called them “sons of bastards’’ for sending out warnings.
Prof. Oculi wrote this piece from Abuja.