Memories of Yusuf Dantsoho (II)

The entire Board followed him to the Premier’s Office to put forward the suggestion. Sardauna came out of a meeting to hear what the matter was, and when Coomassie explained, the great Premier overruled him, saying there should be no quotas within the North. Dantsoho said at that point, Coomasie banged the table and Sardauna banged the table, and other members of the board dived under desks and chairs while the two big men stood and glowered at each other.

Mahmud Jega

Dantsoho told me many more stories, about Sardauna, about how he had daily battles on the Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation [NBC] radio against Malam Aminu Kano, and about how, in the wake of the 1966 coup and the killing of the Sardauna, Malam Aminu Kano initiated a secret reconciliation with the NPC leaders in order to deal with what he saw as a dangerous situation for the North.

But let’s leapfrog into the Second Republic, which I was more familiar with and was able to ask a lot of questions. Dantsoho told me that he entered GNPP, rather than NPN as most former NPC men did, because a very eminent Northern leader, who he refused to name, asked him to help his son-in-law. I think Dantsoho was referring to Sir Kashim Ibrahim, but those who know better should correct me.

From what he told me that day, Dantsoho’s sojourn in GNPP wasn’t a very happy one, largely due to the cantankerous nature of Uncle Waziri Ibrahim. Dantsoho told me that in late 1978, leaders of the Club 19 wing of the then undivided NPP, namely Chiefs Solomon Lar and Paul Unongo, wanted to bring Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe into the party and they asked Alhaji Waziri to choose between national chairman and presidential candidate and leave the other post for Zik. Dantsoho said they urged Waziri to accept the deal, but he insisted on having both positions, thus forcing a split in NPP and the founding of GNPP.

For at least a year from 1981, Dantsoho mulled over crossing over into NPN, which he told me was the greatest political party in Nigeria’s history. How about NPC? I asked, and Dantsoho said while NPC was more principled and more disciplined on account of its having such great leaders, NPN was a more wondrous political force. It had greater bunkasa, he said.

His eventual cross over was melodramatic and partly bungled. He told me that in 1982, when Shagari was visiting Kaduna, he went to the airport to welcome him, and as Dantsoho stood in the reception line, Shagari whispered to him, “When are you coming over?” “Soon, soon”, Dantsoho said he whispered back. But he said after Shagari and the NPN crowd departed for the town, he suddenly felt ashamed and didn’t know how to explain it to fellow GNPP men, so he bought a Nigeria Airways ticket, boarded a plane and went to Kano, then immediately flew back. When Alhaji Waziri charged him with going to welcome Shagari, Dantsoho protested that he was only at the airport on his way to Kano!

When he finally went to NPN headquarters in Lagos and crossed over, Alhaji Waziri sent GNPP thugs to retrieve a Mercedes 200 car that he gave to Dantsoho years earlier, and fisticuffs resulted. Why didn’t he just give up the car? I asked. Dantsoho replied that when he first went to work for Waziri, he himself was very wealthy, being a Kaduna Textiles dealer who made a profit of N3,000 a month from the 1960s. Waziri gave him the car because his own Mercedes fell into a ditch during a GNPP tour of Benue State in 1979, he said. “I was very rich at the time”, Dantsoho said. Then, reflecting on his fairly poor situation as we spoke, he added, “It was only later that rain drenched the big fowl”.

Over the next year and a half, Malam Lawal and I were regular visitors to Dantsoho’s house, and he told me many more interesting stories. For example, in early 1993, when Alhaji Bashir Tofa won the NRC presidential ticket and Today newspaper’s publisher Abidina Coomasie began a spirited campaign to pull him down, I asked Dantsoho why he wouldn’t intervene, as an NRC chieftain and also a director of Today Communications. He said, “Leave Abidina. He wouldn’t listen to anyone. He is like that. He inherited it from his father”. Was his father, the great Malam Ahmadu Coomasie, like that? I asked. Dantsoho then told me a story, that the old Coomassie, as Permanent Secretary for Education in the North, was also chairman of the Scholarship  Board, of which Dantsoho was a member. He said in those days, students from Kwara and Kabba Provinces took nearly 90 per cent of all the scholarships, so Coomassie proposed a quota system. The entire Board followed him to the Premier’s Office to put forward the suggestion. Sardauna came out of a meeting to hear what the matter was, and when Coomassie explained, the great Premier overruled him, saying there should be no quotas within the North. Dantsoho said at that point, Coomasie banged the table and Sardauna banged the table, and other members of the board dived under desks and chairs while the two big men stood and glowered at each other!

Dantsoho also told me the story of his 1992 parting with Alhaji Lema Jibrilu. He said Lema swallowed the Babangida line about “newbreed politics” hook, line and sinker, to the point where, when they went on campaign tours, he would shun meetings with well-established politicians in favour of dancing and singing parties of youth. He said he warned Alhaji Lema that “hangen dala ba shine shiga Kano ba”, to no avail.

Anyway, let’s bring the story to a close. In late May 1994, I returned from an internship course in the US and Malam Lawal told me that Dantsoho had a stroke. I immediately went to see him at Sefa Clinic. He couldn’t speak, but soon as he saw me, he grunted something, and the young men around said he said I should sign the visitors’ book. I went to see him again some days later, and was planning to do so a third time when one morning, from the first floor window at Citizen, I saw Dantsoho’s driver rush into the building, enter Alhaji Mamman Jallo’s office and depart again in a hurry. My heart was pounding; I feared the worst. As I came down the steps, Alhaji Mamman Jallo said, “Your man is no more”. I was present at the funeral at Zango Road cemetery. From late 1994 to late 1995, when I worked at The Sentinel magazine, I always drove past that cemetery on my way to work. Whenever I drove by, I said a silent prayer for Alhaji Yusuf Dantsoho.

Concluded.