Where’s The Awolowo In Today’s Opposition?
By Mobolaji Sanusi
“Democracy in my humble view, is the best form of government and the rule of law man’s triumph against the arbitrary use of power.”…..Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1909-1987).
A country bereft of its history, anywhere, will unequivocably be consigned to not having any detailed understanding of its socio-cultural, political and traditional values. Until recently, Nigeria was at that crossroads where one man called Olusegun Obasanjo, for odious reasons of attempting to conceal his treacherous political past, abolished history as a subject in schools while serving as president of Nigeria.
For Obasanjo’s parochial and presidential thoughtlessness, any Nigerian that is currently of around forty years of age or slightly older, may not, except through self-efforts, have any sense of history of what our late sage and political icon, Chief Jeremiah Oyeniyi Obafemi Awolowo, meant to our great country. Awolowo remains the indisputable patriarch of progressive politics in Nigeria and died on May 9, 1987.
Awolowo never became president of this country during his lifetime, but his enduring legacies will forever make him to be acknowledged as the “best president Nigeria never had”—-apologies to the late Biafran warlord, Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu. In addition, Awolowo, for as long as there’s a country called Nigeria, will eternally be remembered as the foremost, informed and formidable one-man political opposition that this potentially great country has ever produced. In his lifetime, Awolowo, as an individual, was as formidable as his political parties that traversed the first and second republics. During the first republic, his political party, the Action Group, AG, formed on March 21,1951, was as strong as his person. More importantly, the party was deeply ingrained in the hearts of his people and a torn in the flesh of then central government.
As an effective opposition leader during that era, ignoring Awolowo was at the ruling party’s political peril. His imprisonment in the first republic signalled the nunc dimittis of that political era. That was how formidable the Awolowo opposition phenomenon was at that time.
Fast forward to the second republic. Awolowo contested under his progressively inclined Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, but lost. Until the demise of that republic and beyond, Awolowo maintained a uniquely strong and effective opposition voice against mal-governance while his UPN had the best and empirically attested political party manifesto/programme ever in the anal of Nigeria’s history.
It’s based on Awolowo’s political ideology of welfare-socialism that he pioneered his Action Group party when he served as Premier of the Western Region in the fifties. Whether in the old western region or current southwestern Nigeria or the entire country, no Nigerian, educated or not, can deny the developmental and progressive impact of Awolowo which has made his region one to be followed and envied by other parts of the country. His party’s successful implementation of: free education at all levels, free health services, full employment for all citizens, and integrated rural development are programmes that successive administrations in the country have find too utopian to reenact.
Awolowo’s oppositional prowess is selfless, analytically intellectual as well as prophetic. In 1981, he wrote a letter to President Shehu Shagari of the National Party of Nigeria, NPN, where he pointed out that the “ship of state is fast approaching a huge rock” and warned that without a change in direction, Nigeria would face “unspeakable disaster.”
His admonition was unheeded, and the catastrophic consequences of this, as they say, is history. No political party, not even in contemporary Nigeria, has been able to replicate the Awolowo uniform cardinal programme magic wand in the southwestern part of the country.
Months after despotic Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida cornered power through a military coup in August 1985, he inaugurated a Political Bureau headed by Professor Samuel Cookey. The Bureau invited several notable Nigerians, including Awolowo, expectedly, at that time. But in his courageous letter of February 28, 1986, to Professor Cookey, Awolowo discerned the Babangida abracadabra when nobody did. He spoke truth to brutal military power to wit: “l do fervently and will continue to fervently pray that l may be proved wrong. For something within me tells me, loud and clear, that what we have embarked upon is a fruitless search…. At the end of the day, when we imagine that the new order is here, we would be terribly disappointed.” Not many Nigerians took him serious at that time but the monstrously devastating end of that experience denied Nigeria the opportunity of reaping its best elections ever and threw up the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) group that threw up the likes of the current president of Nigeria, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
No opposition figure in contemporary Nigeria has the selflessness of an Awolowo or his political ideological discipline. What we have now across existing political divides are greedy political harlots masquerading as people’s advocates. They pour panegyrics on ruling figures and government of the day for appointive/pecuniary opportunities and criticize, not for collective benefits, but for personal enrichment.
Awolowo provided a formidable political oppositional base. Loathe or detest him, his political intellect and principled character and unassailable discipline are incontestable. When Awolowo spoke, the government of that era shivered. He was the political-moral leadership conscience of his epoch still yet to be reproduced in present day Nigeria. Awolowo provided alternate ideas devoid of frivolous oppositional criticism against common national challenge.
Unlike the selfless oppositional template of Awolowo, contemporary opposition wasted enormous time, energy and resources in resolving avoidable internal party conflicts and division, leaving in its wake, no ample time for any meaningful checks on the government of the day.
Examples of divisions and avaricious battles for power that are detrimental to the attainment of meaningful opposition abound in existing political parties in the country. The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, the African Democratic Congress, ADC, the Labour Party, LP, and the New Nigerian People’s Party, NNPP, are presently in avoidable political quandary emanating from leaders’ greed for power and unquenchable thirst for pecuniary acquisition.
The leadership of these political parties is short of political credibility and sometimes credentials to convince the voters as desirable replacements for the government of the day.
Is it Atiku Abubakar or Peter Obi who, in defiance of any known ideology, have crisscrossed political parties in their inordinate ambition to rule over this country? Could it be Rabiu Kwankwaso or any of those former this or that contesting for the presidency without any established principle of policy programmes?
The opposition in Nigeria is fragmented with no clear or unified direction. In this shambolic state, they still nurse the illusion of seizing power without a coherent or alternative vision for governance. Where’s the desired strategic direction and not the currently weak and uncoordinated front by the country’s opposition?
Can the current opposition compel effective accountability from the ruling party? Current opposition lacks ideological clarity. They are more interested in bringing about effortless alignment with the ruling party rather than strengthening their oppositional foundation. No wonder that the opposition always struggle to create a niche in the electoral turfs due to their lack of a compellingly clear message from the political status quo.
The search for an ‘Awolowo’ in today’s opposition continues while the search for solutions to the country’s economic and security challenges daily become an elusive challenge.
• Sanusi, former MD/CEO of Lagos State Signage & Advertisement Agency, is currently managing partner at AMS RELIABLE SOLICITORS. (sms/whatsapp-07011117777)
