Tribute to Umaru Dikko

Dikko was a colourful politician, cut in the aristocratic mould in a way that differed from the other well-known politicians. He was not like Kingsley Mbadiwe’s man of timbre and calibre given to boyish banter—who, inebriated like the other by the exuberance of his own verbosity, sought to amuse others with linguistic bombast. He was […]

Dikko was a colourful politician, cut in the aristocratic mould in a way that differed from the other well-known politicians. He was not like Kingsley Mbadiwe’s man of timbre and calibre given to boyish banter—who, inebriated like the other by the exuberance of his own verbosity, sought to amuse others with linguistic bombast.
He was no Musa Musawa who dazzled the multitudes with unbelievable and inimitable vernacular oratorical wordplay. If there was a Demosthenes for agreeable political demagogy it would be none other than him; and you never stopped marveling from where the Muse for that one came.
And Dikko was not in the class of those who could utter the like of Adegoke Adelabu’s half-educated peculiar mess [penkelemess]: he was in a class of colour all his own.
A very educated and schooled person, Dikko was a brilliant student throughout his school days with a dazzling display of brilliance which included double promotions—and always coming tops in his class in Barewa College, Zaria and in the University of London where he read mathematics when other students were reading administration to become District Officer. He graduated with first class in mathematics from University of London.
While in exile in Britain, he enrolled to study law—a decision, no doubt, informed by expectations of the litany of litigations in which he expected a fugitive like him to get mired-up in on his return home. He was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1991, at the age of 55.
He was always passionate about what he did; perhaps because there was no time he wasn’t sure of himself, or of what he wanted for himself or what he believed his people and the North wanted. He pulled no punches. He fulminated on behalf of a corporate North of his imagination-and he gave his all for it; but down there at its plebeian depths, the nation never took notice of him or his devotions to it.
Dikko was a gifted young student who was to mature into a cantankerous politician armed with the Nigerian equivalent of an Oxbridge secondary school alma mater. When he chose politics; he appeared fit for the calling: he was worldly wise, streetwise and loud; and, with a boldness tending towards pugnacity, he was a cocksure man who had as much the gift of the gab as he had gilt on the garb.
He appeared in control of his affairs and seemed to have had an unusual hold over President Shehu Shagari to whom he was brother-in-law; but not even all this would translate for him into enduring electoral popularity in politics. In one breath, he had it all but in the end he didn’t have it all.
After Shagari’s election victory, he became for him a Rasputin, a Man Friday and a Sancho Panza all rolled into one—the ultimate enforcer, as Mohammed Haruna called him. He was Rasputin for the hold he exercised over the president, Man Friday for the errands he ran and assignments he discharged; and he was faithful Sancho Panza to a president who towards the end of his presidency, appeared like Don Quixote.
It was for these reasons that, though he had no useable electoral constituency of his own to call his turf, and no electoral value to the party as such, he became the power behind the presidency. He didn’t win his Senatorial election: he was roundly trounced by little-known Ibrahim Barau of the People’s Redemption Party (PRP). Yet in government, he went on to become more powerful than all those who did.
And where he stood behind the president, he could do and undo, and did and undid matters of the highest moment and the greatest consequence.
His brashness and boldness deprived his effort of inclusivity; and it was as such that he was seen, tolerated and derided as the more disagreeable face of the Shagari administration. And many never forgave him.
His scathing and disconcerting put down to MKO Abiola’s expressed—and by all standards merited—interest in the presidency of Nigeria, for instance, came in very bad taste.
“The presidency is not for sale,” Dikko said; but what was heard, because it was said with a nod of aristocratic arrogance and such body language as suggested the idea of ‘born-to-rule,’ thereby confirming all the fears, and reinforcing that long and widely-held stereotype. For all Abiola cared, the debacle of June 12 might have started then.
Dikko didn’t mind and never shied away from playing his role as Shagari’s attack dog who barked, bit and kicked; and, like the great praise-poet, ko bai kashe lakai-lakai ba, yana bata fata. Even if he didn’t kill, he would have done irreparable damage: the body might still be living but the skin had been permanently scarred.
And as you do to others, so would you be done by. And ironically that was exactly what happened to him when he encountered hounds of the Ngbati press. Employing the power of the written word and the utility of repetition and repetitiveness in the manufacture of a Goebbelsian truth, the press of the South West cast Dikko as the great villain.
So greatly and so stridently and so regularly was the press war against Dikko launched that even some in his own National Party of Niger, NPN, began believing in the truth of his monstrosity. It would be difficult to defend the NPN or its prominent son, especially against corruption; but it was clear that Dikko was presumed guilty, and even at that, not given the chance to prove his innocence—and he was sentenced by the court of public opinion, greatly influenced by a section of the press, to the status of Nigeria’s most corrupt politician of the Second Republic.
Following the coup that toppled the Shagari regime, Dikko, along with many of his colleagues in government, fled to Britain. While his colleagues quietly went down and settled to a quiet life in exile, he didn’t. He became the spokesman of the toppled regime. Underestimating the opprobrium that his political persona attracted, and at the same time underestimating what a lone exile in faraway Britain could do to unseat an unsmiling military regime that appeared to have the support of the nation’s fighting men, Dikko declared a jihad against it. He fumed, he fulminated and he fumbled, all to a worldwide audience on satellite television.
If others saw him, so also did the soldiers—and they didn’t miss the dare; they took it. Going by the mood of the nation and perhaps playing a little to the frenzied gallery of the public approval that greeted its putsch, the Buhari administration went after him.
It proved a diplomatic nightmare and a fiasco that somehow got Dikko some sympathy; and as an episode, it reinforced Dikko’s hatred and opposition to the military, though on answering Abacha’s call, he would come across as selective in his opposition to the military as an institution.
Dikko’s greatest problem was that most people found him indigestible; and that, coupled with his brashness, made people want to believe the worst about him. And there a lot that people would find disagreeable, but he never seemed to worry.
“I sought power and I got it” was his reply and explanation to those who thought he was highhanded. And, so what if I was, was the unspoken add-on. Dikko brooked no nonsense, and, in pursuit of his goals, he didn’t give a damn what you thought of him. But on his return to the country during the Abacha regime, he proved ineffective and almost a spent force as a politician.
Whatever people thought about him, he was a passionate person, who probably had very good intentions but didn’t know how to get on with other. May his soul rest in peace.