Stitching the world together
During my primary school days in the 1970s when the world was gripped by many crises and conflicts including the Cold War, Vietnam War, Middle East conflict and many African wars of decolonization, United Nations featured in the news more than it does today. Every day on my grandmother’s radio set, BBC’s Hausa Service made […]
During my primary school days in the 1970s when the world was gripped by many crises and conflicts including the Cold War, Vietnam War, Middle East conflict and many African wars of decolonization, United Nations featured in the news more than it does today. Every day on my grandmother’s radio set, BBC’s Hausa Service made many references to Majalisar Dinkin Duniya, the Hausa name it gave to the UN. It literally means place where the world is stitched together, so on my way to primary school, I imagined the UN to be a collection of tailors who were busy with their Singer tailoring machines!
Last week, there was excitement in Nigeria at the election of Professor Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as President of the 74th Session of the General Assembly, which begins in September. It is a high honour because Bande becomes only the second Nigerian ever to hold this position. President of the UN General Assembly has the protocol trappings of a Head of State; he presides over the annual as well as special and emergency sessions of the General Assembly.
Since the 1960s, the UN General Assembly has been the scene of much drama, including the occasion in 1960 when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table during a session. Cuban President Fidel Castro once delivered a five-hour speech at the General Assembly, the longest on record. Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] leader Yasser Arafat addressed the Assembly in 1974 with a revolver in his hip. Ugandan President Idi Amin, as Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity [OAU], once delivered a bombastic speech full of bluster at the Assembly. And in 2009, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi flung a copy of the UN Charter to the ground while addressing the Assembly. Imagine the amount of patience required to preside over such as Assembly. They have found the right person in Prof Tijjani Bande; no wonder he was unanimously elected by acclamation.
If the UN is indeed a collection of tailors who measure, cut and stitch, then they have found the right man with the patience, the wisdom, the knowledge and the energy to be the Chief Tailor. I say so because I have known him since the late 1960s. His father, the late Alhaji Muhammadu Bande Besse, was my headmaster at Jega Sabongari Primary School. He was an excellent teacher, very driving, cool and collected, a little bit impatient, who often dazzled the morning assembly with jokes and riddles, and who drove extra-curricular activities with the same rigour that he drove classes.
Whenever the Bell Prefect rang the bell for the breakfast hour, my classmates shouted “Tara!” [It means 9 o’clock, the breakfast hour]. At the School Assembly one day, the Headmaster forbade the shouting of Tara. The very next day, when the bell rang, we shouted “Tara!” Unknown to us, the headmaster was just by the door. He walked into our class, told everyone to sit down and bring out our books. We sat with forlorn looks as we watched other pupils headed home for the break. After 30 minutes he let us go, but we had learnt our lesson the hard way.
Tijjani, as he was called at home or Mamman, as his friends called him, was in a different primary school in those years. I got to know him better when he was at Government Secondary School, Farfaru in the mid-1970s because he used to come into town at weekends and we often sat on stones and discussed for hours. I got to know him even better when he was at the Bayero University, Kano [it was called ABC/ABU then], where he bagged a degree in Political Science. He did his NYSC at Government Teachers’ College, Ahoada, Rivers State, where he taught English and History.
In 1980, Bande became a Graduate Assistant at the University of Sokoto, where I was a student. I remember that he resumed in July but even before the new session started, he was off to Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts in the US where in one year he bagged an M.A. Political Science. He then retuned to Unisok [now called Usman Danfodio University, UDUS] and taught for one year before he took off again, this time for the University of Toronto in Canada, where he did a Ph. D in Political Science.
Unlike his stay in Boston, Nigeria had fallen on hard times in the 1980s and Bande had a most excrutiating time in Toronto, with the university often failing to send his allowances for many months. Communication was also very poor in those days. In December 1987, my old headmaster Alhaji Bande sent for me and asked if I had any news of Tijjani. Luckily, a day earlier, UDUS’ Head of Political Science Dr. Umaru Hussaini told me that he received Tijjani’s letter, that he completed his program and was returning home soon.
Back at UDUS, Bande quickly became one of its academic mainstays. He taught History of Political Thought, African Political Thought, Problems of Political Philosophy, Political Economy of Africa, Politics of Development, Comparative Federalism, Modern Political Thought, Decolonization and African Liberation, Political Sociology and Introduction to Politics in Africa. Last time I saw his CV, he had nearly 50 publications in learned journals on subjects ranging from “The Apology and Crito: A Critique” to “Of Sovereignty, Obligation and Peace: An interpretation of Aspects of Hobbes’ Political Philosophy.” Bande’s personal library is one of the richest I have ever known. Several times in the 1990s when there was no internet, I sought his help when I was stuck on a political subject and he went to the Sokoto motor park and sent down several books.
At UDUS, he rose from Graduate Assistant to a professor in 1998. Along the way, he was Head of Political Science, Dean of Social Sciences and Management; chairman and member of numerous university committees; Resource Person at the Centre for Democratic Studies (CDS), Abuja and Senior Research Fellow at the National Council on Inter-Governmental Relations (NCIR), Abuja, both on sabbatical; Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic and finally Vice Chancellor of UDUS, 2004-09. Before this last one, Bande spent 5 years at Tangier, Morocco as Director-General, African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development [CAFRAD], the top academy for African civil servants. And then for 5 years, he was Director General of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies [NIPSS], Kuru.
Tijjani Bande is deeply philosophical, perhaps because one of his teachers at Toronto was one of the Western world’s top philosophers. He often approached a casual conversion with rich philosophical insight. He also has a rich store of native wisdom. In 1990, four of us went to Bodinga in Sokoto State to try to address our friend’s marital tango. Just short of our target, we stopped and selected Bande to do the talking. He was reluctant, but minutes later, to our amazement, he addressed our in-laws in a speech laden with wisdom, local adages, rich experiences and an adroit mixture of pleas and threats.
More relevant to his current assignment, Prof Bande has abundant patience. At the university, in addition to teaching, he supervised scores of Ph.D., M Sc and MPA candidates and more than 100 B Sc students. In my days as a teacher I saw many supervisors drive away students they were supervising or even flung their theses through the window, but Bande always sat patiently with students and very patiently pointed out their errors.
Bande was also very patient with his mechanic, a man called Damboyi. The mechanic once took weeks and a lot of money to repair Bande’s Volkswagen Beetle. When Mamman finally collected the car and made to drive away, two tyres suddenly fell off. He calmly walked out and stopped a taxi. He will need all that patience at the UN General Assembly when speakers, who are often Heads of State, bang shoes on the table, deliver marathon speeches or fling the UN Charter to the ground.