Memories of Prof Festus Iyayi

The death yesterday of Prof Festus Iyayi in a car crash in Kogi State would cause great pain and anguish throughout the academic community in Nigeria but also to all the people who have known and stood with him in the trenches of revolutionary struggle in Nigeria. In my own brief stint as a university lecturer and also a member of the secretive Communist underground in the 1980s, I got to know Dr. [as he then was] Festus Iyayi quite well. Even though I have not seen him for many years now, we spoke on the phone as recently as two months ago.
Iyayi had replaced the late Dr. Mahmud Tukur Modibbo as National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities [ASUU] in 1986. Dr. [as he then was] Attahiru Jega was elected as his deputy. I was a young assistant lecturer then and an ASUU back bencher. Though I did not know Iyayi personally at the time, I knew that he belonged to ASUU’s dominant radical caucus which has exercised an unbroken iron grip on the union’s leadership for three decades now. It is not for nothing that ASUU’s leadership structure shows a remarkable continuity in agenda, personalities, institutional memory, language and methods of operation. Tukur was a shining member of the Left [as we euphemistically called ourselves] and he led ASUU during its first nation-wide strike since the Gowon era, which was in late 1981. That strike ended after only a few weeks and mostly overlapped with the long holidays so it was not as disruptive as ASUU strikes later became.
When ASUU held its convention at Ife in 1986, we waited with bated breaths for the outcome and we were ecstatic when he heard about Iyayi’s election. He was the chairman of ASUU’s University of Benin branch and a very solid member of the Left. His rise to ASUU leadership coincided with the appointment of Professor Grace Alele Williams as Vice Chancellor of the University of Benin by the Babangida regime. In no time Iyayi was at loggerheads with Williams, who was accused by ASUU of pursuing a fascist agenda.
My longest interaction with Iyayi occurred in 1986. Soon after the so-called Ango Must Go riots of that year, the Babangida regime appointed a Commission of Inquiry under Justice Mustafa Mohamed Akanbi that went round university campuses and held public sittings. ASUU constituted a team that followed the panel around the country. When the panel got to Sokoto in October 1986, Iyayi was there with the ASUU team and because I was a bachelor, my house became the unofficial base of ASUU. I had just returned from three months’ hospitalization at the Dala Orthopaedic Hospital in Kano and was still walking with crutches but I was very glad to play host to the ASUU leaders. I organized their food and other needs during the hot review and strategy sessions that always took place in my house in-between sittings of the Akanbi panel. It was at these sessions that it was decided who will speak, what he or she will say and what questions will be posed to non-ASUU people that testified, such as the vice chancellor and the police commissioner.
In 1987, we were dealt a stunning blow when the Uniben Council sacked Iyayi and four other senior academics from the university’s staff. The allegation was that Iyayi, who was a senior lecturer in the Department of Business Management, had done some consultancy contracts outside the University Consultancy Services Unit. Even though Iyayi was off the Uniben staff, ASUU continued to recognize him as its President. However, ASUU was also pursuing many issues with government at that time and Babangida regime officials, notably the Education Minister Prof Jibril Aminu refused to negotiate with Iyayi, so at such meetings Attahiru Jega was presented as the Acting President. ASUU finally decided to call “an early convention” at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1988 where Jega replaced Iyayi as President and Prof Maurice Iwu replaced Jega as vice president. In July that year, Jega led ASUU on a nationwide strike to protest the failure to pay university lecturers an elongated salary scale that had been paid to all over civil servants since January 1988. Babangida then banned ASUU and clamped its leaders in Ikoyi Prison. It remained banned until 1990.
After Dr. Festus Iyayi left the ASUU leadership, I met with him again at meetings of the underground Socialist Congress of Nigeria, SCON. By then he was acquiring a new reputation as a novelist especially when his novel Violence won the Commonwealth Literary Award. Unlike other Marxist types who regaled in bombastic ideological rhetoric and laced every statement with references to imperialism, neo-colonialism and bourgeois class exploitation, Iyayi always spoke softly, lucidly and logically. For a man who projected a reputation on the national scene as a firebrand, Iyayi was actually very gentle in person and very caring. Years after I fully recovered from my 1986 accident, he still wrote letters to me asking about my injured leg. I last spoke to him about two months ago and was not surprised to see that he was still very much active in ASUU’s councils during its current strike action. His death yesterday was a very big loss for Nigeria because men of Prof Festus Iyayi’s brilliance, patriotism, energy, personal composure and total devotion to duty are in critically short supply these days.