Segun Okeowo: Salute to my Comrade President

Heavily bearded – Castro-type, and foreboding-looking, he carried the hopes and aspirations of fellow students for the democratization of tertiary education as inviolate commandments. But he wasn’t a fire-spitting ideological demagogue. Soft spoken but as stubborn as a mountain goat, he marshalled his points with cold logic and brutal statistics  to the violent annoyance of […]

Heavily bearded – Castro-type, and foreboding-looking, he carried the hopes and aspirations of fellow students for the democratization of tertiary education as inviolate commandments. But he wasn’t a fire-spitting ideological demagogue. Soft spoken but as stubborn as a mountain goat, he marshalled his points with cold logic and brutal statistics  to the violent annoyance of the military usurpers misruling the country.
Olusegun Eniolorunda Okeowo was a great field marshal of students’ unionism whose name has been etched in gold in the annals of unionism in Nigeria.
The “Ali-Must-Go” crisis of 1977/78 has gone down in history as the most earth-shaking student protest ever staged by Nigerian students. Before that time the trophy was held by the 1960-62 protest against the attempt by the `Balewa government to sign the infamous Anglo-Nigeria Defense Pact with the former colonialists. Then came the 70s. In pursuit of their demand for better access to quality education, Nigerian students brought the nation to a complete standstill. Airports were closed, market women and school children poured unto the streets all over the federation, having been mobilized by various cells of NUNS all over the federation. If the military government was so blinkered that it couldn’t see the light, there was nothing else for the students to do but turn on the heat. And they did in an unprecedented manner.
Col. Ahmadu Ali, the Federal Commissioner for Education, was the symbol of the military’s arrogance and insensitivity. Thus the ensuing litany of protests came to bear his name. The unlettered, who teamed up with the students to shut the country down for days and weeks, simply tagged it “Ali-Mun-Go”. And that tag took on a life of its own.
The military knew only one way of dealing with protest: clampdown. Okeowo and several other student leaders were hunted down and the nationwide protests violently quenched. The authorities went further to instruct all universities in the country (there were no private universities then) not to admit any of the rusticated student leaders. Okeowo would have been reduced to going back to the classroom whence he came as an NCE teacher but Fate intervened in the form of many progressive elements  at the University of Ife (thank you, Kongi, Onwumechili, BJ, Ogunbiyi, Kole Omotosho, Prof. Bisi Afolayan, etc) who rallied round to support our quest to readmit Okeowo to complete his degree studies in Ife after rustication from the University of Lagos.

Okeowo was thus my president before I became his, even though we always called each other “Monsieur Le President”. Okeowo made our activist days memorable, harnessing our boundless energy towards the realization of a worthy cause. It is now almost 40 years since Ali-Mun-Go, and most of the issues we fought for in those days are still with us. The unfinished war is what we have now left for our children to inherit. Amazingly, the dramatic personae on the government side are still neck-deep in the tragicomedy of Nigeria: Obasanjo, Ahmadu Ali, and their ‘age mates’ like the redoubtable Edwin Clark. Now, several of the anti-education brigade have their own private universities!
Okeowo was a president of presidents, leader of leaders. As John Quincy Adams famously said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader”.
We certainly thought we could turn the earth on its axis. We thought it was our duty to do our youthful duty by our country by ensuring that the rulers conducted the affairs of state in a way that would benefit the majority of the people. Those “Ali-Mun-Go” days and other protests and reincarnation of the banned `NUNS in the shape of a brand new NANS; those follow-up summits and semi-summits at which we killed the state-sponsored attempt to cause friction between polytechnic and university students … as Okeowo and I often recalled anytime we chewed the cud of remembrance together, those were the best years of our lives.
We crammed and regurgitated as students those powerful words of the founder of the Bohemian Balkanology, Konstantin Josef Jireček:
We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much, for so long, with so little,
we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.”
Okeowo could have become despondent and cynical. Instead he devoted his life entirely to his teaching profession. Even when political appointment stared him in the face as one of his former foot soldiers in Unilag, Gbenga Daniel, had become governor of Ogun State, Okeowo insisted on serving in the education sector – in the teaching service commission.  
I mourn Okeowo as one must mourn a true leader of men and women. Three years ago at his 70th birthday in Simawa his ancestral homestead, we gathered to mark his graduation into the septuagenarian club. We joked that he would live to be 90. He replied that he would be satisfied with 85. So we agreed that that was a good deal; 15 years more. Death, the ultimate mocker, must have been eavesdropping.
When my phone rang last Tuesday morning, I took one look at the caller’s name: Segun Okeowo. Ah, time to catch up with the generalissimo as usual.
“Monsieur Le President”, I hailed.
Instead of his sedate voice, it was a youthful voice that bellowed out: “E kaaro sir”.
What was happening? Had the GSM service providers gone bunkers again?
“It’s me, sir. Kayode”.
“So, it’s you using your dad’s phone? Give the phone to your dad”.
Then he lost control and wailed: “He died about one hour ago, sir”.

And the world spinned round and is still spinning … somehow we must find the serenity to accept a situation we cannot change.
Thank you, my president, comrade and trench-mate. Fare thee well. Eat not the millipede nor the earthworm as you journey into eternity. Whether there is A Luta in heaven or not, when the saints go marching in, we sure will see you among the number.