What would Bala have said?
It is quite interesting that great men are not usually fully appreciated in their lifetime. But once they cross over to the ancestral realm, they don the hallo of angels or even godlets. Fela is a classical example. Many people who would not suffer their ears to listen to any Fela number are now permanently […]
It is quite interesting that great men are not usually fully appreciated in their lifetime. But once they cross over to the ancestral realm, they don the hallo of angels or even godlets. Fela is a classical example. Many people who would not suffer their ears to listen to any Fela number are now permanently hooked to him online; in their old age, they have finally discovered that the Afrobeat inventor makes sense.
When the radical historian, Dr. Yesufu Bala Usman, was around, he was at once respected for his progressive ideological convictions as he was suspected — or even despised— by government and the conservative establishment of Northern Nigeria. That is understandable because in traditional thinking, a blue-blooded academic had no business criticising the establishment of which his lineage had taken advantage for centuries.
As a public intellectual, Usman belonged to that dying breed of academics with unbreachable intellectual muscle and solid personal integrity. He was not scared of opposing views. He made the national stage his podium. He was at home in ABU, UNN, Ife, UI or wherever he was required to partake in an intellectual feast.
When the Federal University of Kashere, Gombe State, conferred a post-humous doctorate (honoris causa) on him a couple of weeks ago, my mind went back to the man himself and how he would have reacted to being honoured by the young institution. This was a man who didn’t like being called “Doctor” as many people fondly addressed him. He was simply Bala.
I was not one of his students; rather, I made his acquaintance and, eventually, friendship through his former student and later colleague at the Ahmadu Bello University, Mallam Sanusi Abubakar, himself of the Royal house of Kano. Of course from a distance, every student activist in the 70s knew of Bala Usman and his other progressive colleagues scattered all over Nigerian universities. But to know the man closely was to tap from his erudition, pro-people philosophy and humility.
At that time, our friend, Sanusi, was editing Nigeria’s first education newspaper, Education Today, with Aliyu Dasuki, Sully Abu and I on the company’s board. Bala would breeze in now and again to avail us of his perspective on crucial issues that affected education. He was so frustrated that the military regime seemed bent on removing history from the national curriculum and warned that we were toying with the very existence of the country itself.
He was an incredibly simple man. Wearing a simple shirt and a pair of trousers, he would join us at our lunch joint in Matori area, behind the Guardian newspapers, where the ‘Owo Twins’ tickled our palates with pounded yam and every imaginable tribe of meat, appropriately washed down with beverage of choice. He didn’t like spoiling a good outing with arguments over the bill. “Pay by the round”, he always counselled in his very deliberate manner of speaking. So, to avoid confusion, Bisi Ogunbadejo suggested we adopt the Bala system going forward.
Although he shunned the professorial title, Bala was the kind of intellectual that truly ‘professed something’. His reputation preceded him everywhere. He made intellection fashionable. During the liberation struggle of the 70s and 80s he was an important voice on the side of the oppressed teaming up with like minds to support anti-imperialist struggles being waged across the underdeveloped world from Africa through Asia to the Middle East and Latin America.
Usman’s most significant contribution to Nigeria’s political development may well be his co-authorship, with Dr. Segun Osoba of the University of Ife, of the Minority Report on the Draft Constitution released in 1976.
I find myself asking, what would Bala have said about the way we are going about politics and governance today?
The answer is all over the Minority Report. Bala Usman and Segun Osoba both advocated the appointment of a prime minister for the sole purpose of diffusing power from the executive president. They want Nigeria to be run as a proper federation, not a tribal conclave. They support the justiciability of socio-economic rights so that those rights become enforceable and governments become more responsive to their duties. In their considered view, Nigeria’s secularity is key to amity: “The Federal Republic of Nigeria is a secular republic and the state shall not be associated with any religion but shall actively protect the fundamental right of all citizens to hold and practice the religious beliefs of their choice”.
Bala Usman’s political analysis was prescient. In his work, ‘For the Liberation of Nigeria’, 1979, he wrote: “It seems quite clear that, if their Constitution (1979) is adopted, far from moving towards national cohesion and democracy Nigeria will become torn with ethnic and religious disunity and sectionalism. Far from providing a basis and framework for the development of national cohesion and democracy, there will be an intensification of the present grossly uneven pattern of underdevelopment, greater capitalist and bureaucratic greed, individualism and chaos”
His soulmate, Osoba, agrees and looks into the horizon to recommend a path to social harmony: “What the masses of our people want, as most humanity in the modern era, is NOT a coalition of mini unviable states whose human and material resources are at the arbitrary disposal of their separate ethnic and regional notables. Our people need a country, Nigeria, operating at full capacity and unshackled by the thieving activities of a good-for-nothing ruling class whose only operating agenda is looting the national treasury.”
My invocation: May the Year 2020 lead us closer to the Nigeria of our dreams.