Twenty-nine years ago, Nigeria lost one of its greatest avatars. And so, even without any prodding, his country home, Ikenne, as usual, on Monday, played host to people of all classes. Obafemi Awolowo, statesman, patriarch and nationalist, played predominant roles in the pre and post-Independence Nigeria and his nationalism constituted the core of the superstructure of the Nigerian nation of today.
Three strands of Awolowo’s 79 years of existence have become subjects of intense and multi-pronged political and academic interrogations. The first is his moralisation of politics; the second, his developmental politics and the third, his exceptional leadership. Because no politician, before and after him, has arguably been able to equal these strides that have become legends in political discourses, Awolowo has continued to be, true to the description of former President Ibrahim Babangida, the main issue in Nigerian politics.
The struggle for Nigerian independence was fierce. Through the Ernest Ikoli-led Nigerian Youth Movement, which he pioneered with others like Hezekiah Oladipo Davies, James Churchill Vaughan and Oba Samuel Akisanya, and where he rose to become its Western Provincial Secretary, Awolowo became the driving force of much of the myriad progressive social legislations that forged a modern nation out of the erstwhile colony. As the first Leader of Government Business and Minister of Local Government and Finance, as well as the first Premier of the Western Region in a parliamentary system from 1952 to 1959, Awolowo consciously used governance as an instrument for the betterment of the lives of his people, as well as an anvil on which he unconsciously forged immortality for himself.
As Premier of the Western Region, Awolowo made developmental strides that have become nuggets and reference points for Nigerian leaders decades after him. Undoubtedly as a recognition of this, his Yoruba kin invested him with the leadership of the race, making him the first and only individual in modern Nigeria to be named Leader of the Yoruba.
The proponent of the Regime of Mental Magnitude, an idealised model for personal discipline and self-regulation involving gradual emasculation of fleshly excesses, Awolowo’s mental acuity and aggressive studies of other leaderships and developmental models across the world appear alien to the present Nigerian leadership for whom reading to mould the intellect is a rarity. He brought into government a high level of morality which was unprecedented. Before him and, worse still, after him, politics was an enterprise highly steeped in deceit, corruption and immorality.
Still, infrastructure was perhaps the axis where Awolowo’s immortality became a given. Recognising education as the superstructure for subsequent erection of an intelligentsia to drive development, he formulated an educational programme that made education free and mandatory for all in the Western Region, his most remarkable accomplishment to date, driven by the conviction that true nationalism, self determination and a progressive society would be achieved only when the generality of people were educated. At inception of the policy, it was envisaged that about 275,000 children would enrol in primary school but over a million did. There were only 25 secondary schools with 6,775 pupils at the inception of the policy in 1955. But the number had, by 1959, increased to 139 schools, with 841, 374 pupils. Indeed, even though he did not win the 1979 and 1983 presidential elections of the Second Republic, his free education and free health care policies were implemented with resounding successes in the states controlled by the Unity Party of Nigeria, and remain the pivot of political campaigns till the present day.
This system was thereafter to produce a corps of educated elite that drove the immediate post-colonial Nigeria. Thereafter, he began to weave an infrastructure web that became first of its kind in Black Africa. First was the establishmen
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