Talakawa Summit: Another Ujamaa?

Seeking to connect Talakawa Summit with Ujamaa cannot be a farfetched exercise because all the early African discourses of society such as Aminu Kano’s Democratic Humanism, Awo’s Democratic Socialism, Kwame Nkrumah’s Conscientism, Kaunda’s Humanism or Milton Obote’s Freedom Charter and even Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya had the same origin. At least, this was how we treated them […]

Seeking to connect Talakawa Summit with Ujamaa cannot be a farfetched exercise because all the early African discourses of society such as Aminu Kano’s Democratic Humanism, Awo’s Democratic Socialism, Kwame Nkrumah’s Conscientism, Kaunda’s Humanism or Milton Obote’s Freedom Charter and even Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya had the same origin. At least, this was how we treated them in our class works on African political thought. They all came from moral reprehension against the evils of colonial capitalism even as these early African leaders did not accept Socialism per see. They, therefore, sought a third way to development, with each of them coining his own terminology as listed above.

Talakawa Summit is very interesting because it is a continuation of the ideology of one of these early African leaders, that is Aminu Kano. Apart from Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya, all these leaders have no legatees today trying to push forward what the charismatic leaders preached. Aminu Kano whose ideology of Democratic Humanism Talakawa Summit is a product of must be the only happy leader in his grave.

Looking at the Talakawa Summit brochure, its essential argument is Aminu Kano’s profound understanding of democracy which he took to be the rule of the common people, the poor, the illiterate instead of the rule of the enlightened and prosperous in the supposed interest of the common people.

The potency of Talakawa Summit is, however, to be found in the Governor Lamido’s anti-elite witticism which goes as follows, “What I am saying is that we cannot continue to stay in Lagos or Abuja, Ibadan, Kaduna and other state capitals, in the boardrooms, in the comfort of NICON NOGA, (Transcorp Hotel, Abuja) spending so much money on honoraria, tea break, lunch break, photo session claiming that we are discussing poverty in Nigeria or that we are interested in eradicating it. There are people talking there who have never seen a hoe.

They have no idea of what is called the Nigerian peasant going about his life with untreated diseases, relying only on the hoe. Or the local labourers like the bricklayer, the carpenter, the herdsmen. These are the ordinary folks we claim to be representing and we are proferring solutions to their problems even when we do not know them”.

The canons of Talakawa Summit as can be seen from Aminu Kano’s position and Lamido’s re-articulation of it automatically connects Talakawa Summit with Ujamaa in the sense that they are all about the people or the masses. While the practical core of ujamaa was the concept of villagisation, that of Talakawa Summit is the summit itself where the people speak to the reality of their own day to day existence with the political, traditional and religious leaders all seated and listening to the narrations which no civil servants or aides has to summarize or re-work.

While ujamaa emphasized brotherhood, community and solidarity, Talakawa Summit is about classical democratic participation. While ujamaa concentrated on the modernization of villages in terms of modern amenities as a way of breaking out of underdevelopment, Talakawa Summit is about the testimonies of the people becoming the basis of the planning of development itself. Finally, while ujamaa was a 1967 affair in an East African country, Talakawa Summit is the affair of a state in Nigeria in 2008. Finally, finally, while ujamaa has been declared a case of a heroic failure, Talakawa Summit is still too young for anybody to pass a conclusive verdict yet.

Adekemi, a Corper, is of Government House, Dutse