One of the optics of the presidential sojourn last week was missed by the public and media, especially against the background of the June 12 remembrances. It was not his presence in Benue State, but in Kaduna State. It was the handshake between a president and a comrade. The day provided supernova episodes.
Benue was anything but. Benue was ennui. With death and blood as backcloth, there was no other garment but sackcloth. Mourning is not what you wear, but what wears you down. President Bola Tinubu touched down in the state, and he walked to a hospital of those lucky not to be mourned but mourning as their home steers us to tears.
Cries mingle with rage and revenge. Fear of the future is creepy with ambushes. Who is behind the slaughter? Why are they still breathing? Where did they come from? Who is sponsoring the carnage? Is it hegemony, genocide or revenge, or all? Is it ideological or an act of blind hatred? Or is it a mere show of barbarism by a horde of bigots? Or is the surge of bloodthirsty goons following what Poet Samuel Coleridge calls “purposeless malignity,” in his critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? What was the offence of the fellows at Yelewata, a name previously unknown to the cartography of slaughter? But blood chose to be the first to write its name and outline on map of the world and blur the pages of history? Time cradled it in its humble shadows until slaughter impaled it into a public glare.
That was the backdrop to the president’s query to his service chiefs: Why has no one been arrested? It was a moment of rage. The bandits still lurk. The symbolism of the president’s visit is expected to ginger up the legitimate gunners against the goons in the forests.
But sunshine fell the next day in Kaduna when President Tinubu warmed into Kaduna. His host, Uba Sani, the chief executive of Kaduna State, is often called Comrade by President Tinubu. A few days earlier, the president had conferred a June 12 honour on Governor Sani. Both were in the trenches.
President Tinubu knew the face of tyranny. As a June 12 gladiator, he personified the gallantry, the hunger, fears and defiance of the fight for freedom. Abacha’s honchos trailed him in London and the US, after they failed to eliminate him in Lagos. He dreamed democracy and he dared the gun.
They hounded and pounded him but failed to make him surrender. With M.K.O. Abiola locked away, he became a stout face of the struggle. He fought as a senator under the transition programme of Ibrahim Babangida. I was the managing editor of the Concord Newspapers owned by Abiola, and I met Tinubu a number of times and reported some of his positions.
He kept the faith. Suddenly, he was out of sight, in detention, and at one time, the military men wanted to free Senator Abu Ibrahim, but Ibrahim would not leave the jail so long as Tinubu was still being held. The goons left Ibrahim with his friend.
Eventually Tinubu left the country, and carried the battle to Europe and the United States, using his resources. In one of the parties held for him when he was bowing out as governor at the Muson Centre, Babafemi Ojudu – no senator then – pronounced in clear language: “When we talk of NADECO Abroad, Tinubu was the leader of the NADECO ABROAD. He was NADECO ABROAD.”
He organized men and brought his resources to the fray. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, at a party in Tinubu’s honour at Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi’s house related a story he was to repeat at one of the Tinubu colloquiums.
He said Tinubu wanted to import rice from South Korea so he could amass the proceeds for the June 12 fight. He wanted Soyinka to sign as a guarantor so as to bestow credibility on the contract. In his dramatic way, Soyinka said he signed his name and wrote Nobel laureate under.
Governor Sani was a fighter of the stay-at-home order. He was with Gani Fawehinmi and others who fought here.
He fought in the South and in the North. He was arrested, and some had wondered why he, a northerner, would delve into a Yoruba struggle when he could enjoy the comfort of a feudal patriarchy.
Sani would none of that. He fought and he saw neither North nor South. He saw Nigeria. He was arrested quite a few times and suffered beatings and torture.
Uba Sani was a warrior with the Campaign for Democracy. He studied engineering and business administration in Kaduna and the University of Calabar, where he bagged his master’s degree, a hint of his liberal and metropolitan spirit.
In the wee hours, Abacha’s goons stormed his home and whisked him in his underwear into a van and zoomed off.
No one knew who took him or where they were taking him. He might have disappeared, and in fact, he feared they might make him disappear that night.
The van took him to a dingy jail of criminals, and there he remained underground, no contact with friends, relatives or members of the struggle until the Abacha regime fell. That was his saving grace.
The president once praised him as a man who stood here at home to fight the bear – my words.
So, when they met last week, memories conjoined.
They both fought for this democracy, and Governor Sani’s efforts in the past two years is a way of telling the President this is evidence of why they escaped underground and almost went underground.
The peace in Birnin Gwari and its cattle market are dividends of June 12 struggle. Some say, with a joy of exaggeration, that you could drive through that local government area at night with your eyes closed. The cattle market had disappeared for about a decade. The President recalled his visit to the place during the electoral campaigns in 2022, and it was as though they moved a battalion to the place.
The skills acquisition centre has been one of the highlights of Sani’s rhetoric. He believes Kaduna should rise again as the hub of the North.
It was one of the first thing he did. He also launched 100 CNG buses. It is a nod from an engineer governor.
A lot could not come for mention during the trip. For this essayist, his great deed was financial management.
He inherited a state with a pocket full of holes from a predecessor who is clutching at straws to defend his stewardship. Yet, within the two years, it has risen from the darkness and able to showcase quite a suite of achievements.
The president is in a fight to save the economy at the centre and a comrade in his arms in Kaduna State, an uncle and his nephew in a kinship to defeat a common foe: poverty. No two figures compel us in one photo moment as their meeting last week in a sunny state.
Credit:The Nation