Tribute to M. Magaji

And history was remade as sad history with the death in Abuja of Mallam Magaji Dambatta, the last of the NEPU Eight, last Wednesday.The NEPU Eight founded more than a party: they gave birth to an idea that hook the society by empowering people to say ‘No’.  Without doubt, the effort that gave the barefoot […]

And history was remade as sad history with the death in Abuja of Mallam Magaji Dambatta, the last of the NEPU Eight, last Wednesday.
The NEPU Eight founded more than a party: they gave birth to an idea that hook the society by empowering people to say ‘No’.  Without doubt, the effort that gave the barefoot the power and confidence to confront and fight the symbiotic partnership between British colonial enterprise and its handmaiden of native despotism at a time techniques of coercion had become fully institutionalised, and the machinery of repression had been skilfully ‘Islamised’ was no mean achievement. It certainly required more than average intelligence or ordinary acuteness of vision to be able to crack and see through the veneer of religious respectability thrown over a scheme of exploitation, flout it and brave the painful censure reserved for those cheeky enough to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Mallam Magaji, then only 19 years, was in the vanguard of those who taught and provided leadership to this pioneering group of self-sacrificers.
For the next 64 years, he was many things in life. He first worked as an untrained journalistic journeyman, learning on the job in Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s stable of newspapers. He cut his journalistic teeth on the Hertfordshire Express in Hitchin in the UK and the Daily Express news service in London, and later at the Nigerian Citizen. He served on the boards of many print and electronic media organisations, including the New Nigerian Newspapers and the Daily Times of Nigeria, where he was chairman for three years. During the First Republic, his name and that of Alhaji Ahmed Joda were synonymous with the efficient information machinery of the Northern Region.
In the life of this loving patriarch, his relationship with two people stood out— his brother Mustapha Dambatta and his mother, Hajiya Salamatu. No one who knew Mallam Magaji would have avoided coming to know Alhaji Mustapha Dambatta even without having met him. Mallam always talked of his late younger brother with so much passion—admiration, respect and love combined—and always with the pain of resignation to the inevitable and of how much, more than 20 years after his tragic death, he was still desperately missing him.
The mother was in fact the only person in the family to whom he formally introduced us ghost writers. Once, after a session, he led us to her section of the house, introduced each of us and told her what we were doing. With a twinkle in her eye, she relished speaking ever so glowingly of her Magaji, cutting the picture of a very satisfied mother with a possessiveness and immoderacy of praise that was excusable for a doting mother in her dotage.
“Gashi yanzu baya aikin gwamnati, amma ko’ina nemanshi ake yi. Ina ne ba’a san Magaji ba? Ni yanzu so nake ya huta haka nan,” she said. [And though he is no longer in public service, he is still the besought of all. He is celebrated and far-famed. He has paid his dues and I would rather he now took a rest.]
As she spoke, Mallam, then at 78, stood by the side with a boyish grin, taking it much like the child that he was to her. For, whatever he had become in life, she was Mother to whom all possible praise and gratitude were due, and before whom all hint of his own elderliness was reduced to grey-haired boyhood; and all the public greatness that came with his being an elder dissolved into momentary inconsequence.
But for us that greatness was all too real and always depended upon. When President Goodluck Jonathan made known his plan to hold a national conference, I called Mallam Magaji from outside the country and respectfully suggested that, whether he would officially be a part of it or not, he should consider arranging to provide the kind of leadership he gave Northern delegates to the Obasanjo constitutional conference.
“Thank you very much, M. Adamu for the counsel and reminder [hannunka mai sanda]. Kindly get a blueprint ready for me by the time you come back.” Yes, Sir.
By the time I returned, names of the people on state teams had become known, and even though Mallam Magaji was not on the Kano team, and even though I didn’t like it that Professor Awwalu Hamisu Yadudu was not on it either, I was nevertheless happy with its composition; and I have very good reasons. The three members of the Kano team are: Alhaji Sule Yahaya Hamma, Dr Junaidu Mohammed and Hajiya A’isha Isma’il
Alhaji Sule Hamma, the leader of the Kano team, is someone I have known at close and active corners for the last 25 years. It is an understatement to say Sule Hamma is an intelligent person. It is not for nothing that they used to say: “O ye men, who have an axe to grind with Sule, despair!” He is one of the most unruffled and calmest of negotiators one can get in this country—perhaps the best negotiator I have come across anywhere. As a planner, by the time he sat at the round table, he would have everything in proper perspective. And you, his opponents, may God help you.
And Dr Junaidu Mohammed is one of the most well-informed and most well-connected commentators who, under all circumstances, is never without his consequences-damning regional patriotic zeal. He is the foremost Northern intellectual storm-trooper who, when it becomes necessary, is not averse to pugnacious combativeness.  He has the brain and he has the brawn: combining aggressive intellectual militancy and effective cosmopolitan street wisdom; and he will always tell it—and show it—like it is. Kano could save the day but it needed to be coaxed.
And when the complete confab list was finally released, Mallam Magaji was there as a representative of socio-cultural and ethnic groups, and Professor Yadudu was also there as a representative of the North-west zone. Immediately I saw Yadudu’s name there, I tore up my unfinished blueprint because it would no longer be needed. Against the opposition, in any constitutional matter, Professor Yadudu, current defender of constitution framers’ intent, will have been equal to the task and, even alone, will have held out his own. A scholar of unusual competence, he is perhaps the nation’s most unpretentious leading legal mind who could easily argue the entire pro-government and anti-Northern legal establishment in the country to a full stop—and, at the national conference that was precisely what he did. It was this distinguished group that Mallam led to what Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed termed an inconclusive victory at the just-concluded national conference. It was something he did with dignity and grace.
In between the choice and chance, Mallam Magaji could only try to do his best. That he did, and it was a best that was appreciated by the people of Kano and by a grateful nation that he had served so well in a variety of capacities and under varying circumstances. And after doing and being everything as best he could, he died 83 years young—yes, young; because to the very end you couldn’t remember him looking or acting old.
For versatile Mallam Magaji, everything was his metier—a Jack of all strategic trades and a master of them all, the tinker, tailor, soldier, spy of our nonfictional world. He was a pioneer journalist and an engaging publicist for the Federal cause; a conscientious public servant and an effective administrator; a contrarian politician and a respected statesman; a farmer and a community man; and, above all, a man of integrity who would be much missed.
Though Mallam Magaji was no fatalistic determinist, a fact amply demonstrated by this early embrace of radical, revolutionary politics to challenge and change the status quo; he was, nonetheless, a firm believer in the overpowering power of fate. As is evident from a reading of The Pull of Fate, his autobiography, he had at every stage believed himself to have been merely a particularly lucky pawn in the drama of life directed by the invisible Hand of a benevolent, all-powerful God.
His life was one of positive surrender to the divine will in which he saw the good happening to him beyond his power to determine or control, and the evil from which he was always saved beyond his capacity to avoid. But he didn’t believe it was all arbitrary; and if it was, it was an arbitrariness that was a step ahead of Einstein’s cast of the cosmic dice and superior to the blind watchmaker’s turn of the micro screw. He believed in destiny but he believed it was the duty of everyone to create his own destiny.
He was the elder on whose shoulder all those able to reach him might—and did—shed tears of grief and complaint—and be assured of getting a listening ear, a soothing rebuke or comforting counsel; and it was always quality time whatever the case. He was an excellent conversationalist and an even better listener—an embarrassingly good one indeed. Sometimes, he would ask me a question in journalism, religion or current affairs the answer to which I was sure he knew more than I did, but he would be all ears listening to my response with the rapt attention and open-mouthed curiosity of an ignoramus; because his idea was always to encourage you to bring out what was down there.
That was the essential Magaji Dambatta, patriot, nationalist and committed regionalist, who spent his early years trying to free the North from oppression through NEPU; and, with the help of foundations and forums, he spent his last days trying to help it rediscover its purpose within a united, peaceful Nigeria. May his soul rest in peace.