a retired chief of Nigeria Police Intelligence Department as well as Inspector General of Police and a one-time Minister of Internal Affairs in the military regime led by General Olusegun Obasanjo, with the independent Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training (CEDDERT) and its sister organisation, the Abdullahi Smith Centre for Historical Research (ASCHR)?
Meeting point
Although each had its own specific mandate, the ASCHR, established in 1985 and the CEDDERT, established in 1992, shared broadly similar goals. Both centres were set up by, mostly, the same university based intellectuals dedicated to the conduct of problem-oriented and policy-related scientific research into the processes of community and national development in order to build self-reliance and the ability of the peoples of Nigeria, the rest of Africa as well as the African diaspora to promote and defend their national and democratic rights and human dignity. Other important objectives the centres shared were to recover historical evidence; identify, collect and preserve accurate data and other research material as well as regularly publish the outcomes of their research, on all aspects of community and national development. Surprisingly, at least to those of us in the centres, who did not know MD well at that time, it was in these goals that our paths were to meet and a great journey was to begin.
We came to learn that, although born into the high aristocracy, being the grandson and favourite of his namesake, the Emir of Katsina Muhammadu Dikko, MD’s philosophy, since his early life, was anti-feudal (without being disrespectful) and deeply egalitarian. He was against the institutional oppression of the broad masses of the people, the Talakawa, and believed they must be allowed to enjoy their democratic rights of free association and free choice. Similarly, MD was convinced early in life that achievement was a function not of birth, creed, ethnicity or colour, but of opportunity, education, training and other social circumstances.
NEPU activist
No wonder, when MD went to Kano for his secondary education as a sixteen year old in 1947, he soon became attracted to the radical social and political ideas of Mallam Aminu Kano and other leaders of the Northern wing of the Nigerian nationalist movement. As many of his biographers have also documented, MD felt naturally drawn to the Northern Elements Progressive Union, NEPU, after its publication, in December 1950, of the Sawaba Declaration, which raised the spectre of a class struggle by the Talakawa to free themselves from feudal autocratic rule. Indeed, even after he had become employed as a Clerk in the Katsina N.A., MD not only led the effort to invite the NEPU in 1951 to establish its presence in Katsina, he became the party’s Provincial Secretary, despite all the very serious personal risks involved. As MD himself told one of his biographers (Ayo Opadokun, (Aristocratic Rebel: Biography of M.D. Yusufu), ‘’there was a lot of fear in those days because people were persecuted for their beliefs, but as I belonged to the ‘persecuting class’ I provided some protection for my membership’’.
But MD’s involvement with the NEPU was not an impulsive, one-off, act of rebellion; it followed a pattern of actions which he took as a young civil servant, all of which perfectly fitted into his life philosophy. Earlier on, he had organised N.A. workers to form a branch of the Federal Union of Native Authority Staff (FUNAS) to fight for their rights. He had also, in 1950, joined, and even became the Assistant Financial Secretary of, the Katsina branch of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, at that time the vanguard of the nationalist movement for Nigerian Independence.
Anti-imperialist foreign policy
However, after MD had become a senior bureaucrat with the Northern Regional Government in 1952, it became difficult for him to sustain his political and trade union activism, because both sets of activities were prohibited by law. In spite of this, when he became the chief of police intelligence, MD determined that it was in Nigeria’s national interest to use his security vote to support the establishment of the Afriscope magazine after the civil war in the early 1970s.
This was a very radical magazine edited by the late Comrade (Senator) Uche Chuwumerije, which soon began to give a Nigerian voice and direction to the anti-imperialist struggle for independence on the continent. This magazine focussed on Southern African liberation and published many educative articles on the apartheid system in South Africa, white minority rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the slave conditions of Africans living under Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique. MD was even a regular contributor to the magazine’s issues under an assumed pseudo name.
It was the knowledge, experience and contacts, which MD developed with the liberation movements and their leaders from Southern Africa since the 1960s which persuaded the military Governments of Generals Murtala/Obasanjo in 1975-79, to appoint him the Coordinator of Nigeria’s foreign policy. MD was able to handle this assignment successfully because of the enthusiasm and support he received from his friend and classmate, the late Ambassador Aminu Sanusi, Ciroman Kano and Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. MD had also established a reputation as a successful foreign expert during the Nigerian civil war, when he organized and coordinated a team in the UK and France to block the right wing French Government led by Charles de Gaulle from recognizing Biafra. He did this with the assistance of Mazi S. G. Ikoku and Ambassador Isa Modibbo, who shuttled between London and Paris, and Dr Patrick Wilmot, who was a Jamaican intellectual activist based in Paris.
This able team of three lobbied the French Left, other intellectuals and the Trade Unions and eventually succeeded in blocking the recognition of Biafara. It was after this successful French operation that MD got Dr. Patrick Wilmot employed as a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and maintained very cordial relationship with him up to the end of his life. It is also, perhaps, not public knowledge in both Ghana and Nigeria, that, after the coup overthrowing President Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966, elements in the military National Liberation Council encouraged mobs to ransack libraries and government buildings to fish out and burn all symbols of the President’s legacies, including books such as, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957), I Speak of Freedom (1961), Africa Must Unite (1963), Consciencism (1964) Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), etc. These were books which, at the time, were famous and popular amongst university students and other patriots throughout Africa and the African diaspora. It was MD who prevented a total wipe out of this important pan-African legacy, when he rushed to Ghana and persuaded one of the leaders of the coup, Police Inspector General J.W.K. Harlley, to intervene to stop the madness.
As the regime’s Foreign Policy Coordinator, all the leaders of the liberation movements in Southern Africa reported to MD directly, and it was through his influence that the Federal Government set up the National Committee Against Apartheid (NACAAP) and the Southern Africa Relief Fund (SARF). These two organisations, which had branches throughout Nigeria, raised huge amounts of cash and other materials in support of the victims of apartheid. One of the founders of CEDDERT, Dr Yahaya Abdullahi, now Senator-Elect, was a member of NACAAP.
It was also with the support of these two Committees that hundreds of young Southern Africans benefitted from scholarships to read in Nigerian colleges, polytechnics and universities. Quite a number of Southern Africans were also employed in Nigeria, especially in institutions of higher learning. Indeed, it was in acknowledgement of this leadership role played by Nigeria in the struggle against apartheid that the country was given the honour by the United Nations of a Frontline State and made the chair of the Committee on Southern Africa throughout the period of the liberation struggle. It should be added here that MD was well prepared for this new role by his earlier activism in the NCNC and NEPU, both of which had a pan-African vision of foreign policy, dedicated to the liberation of the continent from colonial rule.
Leading the centres
Soon after his retirement in 1979 MD literally picked up his politics from where he left it: he not only became a card-carrying member of the radical, NEPU-modelled, People’s Redemption Party, he raised the party’s flag in front of his Katsina retirement home and remained an active member until its proscription by the military in 1984. It was also during this period that MD suggested to his cousin and our founding Director, the late Dr Yusufu Bala Usman, and our fellow trustee, Dr George Amale Kwanashie, that the task of recovering evidence for the reconstruction of Nigerian and African history was too important to be left to government funded and run research centres alone. This was how, in 1982, the idea of ASCHR was born.
The Centre was appropriately named after the Late Professor Abdullahi Smith, who, along with his student, Dr Bala Usman, laid the foundation for what has come to be known, world-wide, as the Ahmadu Bello University School of History, which lays emphasis on factual evidence and a rigorous evaluation and assessment of all types of sources for historical reconstruction. MD was not only the initiator of this new Centre, he was its most enthusiastic supporter, contributing money for its take-off, accepting to serve as its Chairman and working tirelessly throughout his life to help build the library and raise funds for its research and publication activities. MD was to extend the same goodwill and commitment to the three monthlies we established for public education and mobilisation beginning from this period, namely, Analyst, Fitila and Analysis.
(To be concluded next week)
Adamu, Mohammed and Abba wrote on behalf of the Trustees, Associates and Staff of CEDDERT& ASCHR.
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