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Significance of Adegoke Adelabu: The Nationalist Philosopher

Honourable Adegoke Adelabu: Penkelemesi: The Nationalist Philosopher by Yinka Adelabu and Lekan Olagunju; Africa in Ebullition by Adegoke Adelabu; Jericho Business Club; Lagos; 2005
 

By Reuben Abati

culled from GUARDIAN, September 5, 2005

Every society needs to identify its icons, celebrate them, and preserve them for posterity, erect them as role models and as sources of inspiration, indeed as a part of the collective heritage for future generations, use them as it were to construct the history of the group. The struggle for Nigeria's independence and the country's early history was littered with the heroism of such men and women who stood in the frontline of the battle against British imperialism, and who with the force of their ideas and personalities helped to build an idea of Nigerianness, and who through their involvement in the emerging processes became authors and architects of the country's early history. Adegoke Adelabu, easily the most important, most versatile and colourful and intellectually gifted politician to have emerged from Ibadan in the middle part of the 20th century, was one of these.

But in the politics of personalities that soon became established in the new Nigeria that emerged, with history being written for many years from the perspectives of the triumphant, and more remarkably, with Yoruba politics headed in one direction for more than four decades, and the victorious crowd forcing the people to look at history solely, almost exclusively from their own side, the likes of Adelabu, who stood on the other side in Yoruba politics, were either overlooked or deliberately ignored, and the prize of recognition and historification was carted away by the triumphant crowd. The present celebration of Adegoke Adelabu by the generation of his children and grandchildren, and younger Ibadan kinsmen may well help to correct this situation, for what is being done is to give honour to a man to whom honour is due, to correct many years of selective appreciation and understanding in Yoruba politics and by extension, Nigerian politics, to force a sense of balance on existing historiography.

It is worth noting that up till this moment, Adegoke Adelabu is often mentioned in Yoruba and Nigerian history, almost nearly in parenthesis as the author of that expression: "penkelemesi", a Yorubanisation of the phrase, "peculiar mess" which Adelabu, who had an excessive gift of the garb, who revelled in his mastery of the English language, and who spoke English in a manner that fascinated and confounded his audience, had used on an occasion to describe the opposition in the Western House of Assembly. Not understanding what he meant, the non-literate section of his audience translated the phrase into vernacular as "penkelemesi".

It is a word that Adelabu has added forever to the Yoruba lexicon, and instructively, it is now the title of a weekly column in the New Age newspaper, and the sub-title of a factional book by Professor Wole Soyinka, Ibadan: The Penkelemesi Years. But beyond this singular record of linguistic inventiveness, not much is known in the Nigerian political space about Adelabu, his efforts and ideas have not been fully studied and analysed, and yet he is, without any argument one of the founding fathers of the Nigerian nation, a visionary of the Nigerian revolution, whose ideas and politics, continue to bear special resonance, whose words have proven to be prescient and prophetic.

Perhaps, the starting point for appreciating his importance would be a reading of his biography as written by Yinka Adelabu who is described as a "scion of Adegoke Adelabu family", and Lekan Olagunju, also an Ibadan man. Introduced with a rhythmically pleasant foreword by Otunba T. O. S. Benson, Adegoke Adelabu: Penkelemesi: The Nationalist Philosopher is essentially a tribute. The authors provide information and perspectives which locate Adelabu as a major historical figure, not only in Ibadan politics, but as a Nigerian nationalist, with very strong, progressive views, and an unwavering commitment to the politics of ideas and principles. In seven chapters, Adelabu's accomplishments are placed on full display: he was a self-made man, born on September 3, 1915, into a humble family, but whose enormous mental capacity and gifts, hard work, and versatility turned into one of the leading figures of his time. He was so brilliant that he was constantly given double promotion, ahead of his peers, and at every turn, he was the first in many endeavours.

He was the first beneficiary of a scholarship given by the United Africa Company (UAC) for outstanding ability, the first Nigerian to occupy the position of a manager in the UAC, the first chairman of the Ibadan District Council, first National Vice President of the NCNC, member of the Western House of Assembly, Minister of Social Services and Mineral Resources....Adedibu was also a salesman, a merchant, a writer and a journalist. He was a short man who attained great heights, and stood taller than many of his contemporaries. We are introduced to the high points of his life, particularly his growth as a politician and his role as the main champion of the NCNC led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, in Ibadan, and in fact, as the leading Ibadan politician of his time. He was a fiercely independent-minded man who refused to be swayed by the herd mentality, and the politics of tribe and personality which governed politics in the West in the 50s. Ibadan was notably the centre of much that happened in the politics of the West and of Nigeria, between 1951 and 1964.

The city was the largest in West Africa, and the headquarters of what was then known as the Western region, and in terms of ethnic composition, a varied and cosmopolitan centre. Lamidi Adelabu in his autobiographical political treatise, What I saw in the Politics of Ibadanland has given a detailed account of the special place that Ibadan occupies in the politics of Nigeria through events and personalities, but the colossal figure in that city between 1951 and 1958 was Adegoke Adelabu. He was instrumental to the formation of the Ibadan People's Party (IPP), the Ibadan Taxpayers Association and the NCNC Mobolaje Grand Alliance. He was a charismatic politician with the common touch and appeal, and with a strong sense of his own significance, and potentials; he knew the value of politics, and he led the Ibadan Division into the NCNC.

In the now historic famous carpet-crossing incident that sowed the seed for the future implosion of the Western region and Nigeria in the First Republic, Adelabu stood on the side of principle, and emerged as the leader of the opposition in the Western House of Assembly. He chose to be a nationalist rather than a tribalist; he chose to be a man of his own conviction, rather than a member of the crowd; while his own colleagues in the NCNC/Ibadan Peoples Party who could have handed over the government of the Western region to Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe crossed to the Action Group, Adelabu chose to stay with Nnamdi Azikiwe in whom he had found a kindred spirit, and in defence of his own principles. Given the feverish politics of the West at the time, Adelabu was a man of courage, standing up to the Action Groupers in parliament and on the field was a remarkable show of character. Unfortunately, Adelabu's biographers have not done enough to place these events of his life in a proper context for the reader; they deal with the highlights whereas a contextualisation would have provided much deeper analysis.

For example, a passing reference is made to his travails in form of persecution and criminal charges that he had to face, the nature and details of which are not disclosed. What for example is the content of the Nicholson report? What about the "alleged Isale Ijebu affray?" The authors also refer to a press statement jointly authored by Hon Adegoke Adelabu and Mallam Aminu Kano titled The Dividing Ideological Line on the NCNC-NEPU alliance. That statement should have been reproduced; as a well as a fuller account of Adelabu's contributions as the leader of opposition in the Western House of Assembly. The highest point of this book however is the sudden death of Adegoke Adelabu in a motor accident on Thursday, March 20, 1958. The Western House of Assembly held a special session in his honour, and the authors have reproduced the tributes paid to him by his fellow parliamentarians, very moving tributes which perhaps convey the reluctance to speak ill of the dead, if not the deep respect which the opposition had for Adegoke Adelabu. The book is brought to a close with more tributes by those who were privileged to have known and associated with the subject. The tributes are particularly warm; they constitute the most engaging section of the biography.

By the time of his death, Adelabu was only 42 years old, and yet he had packed so much into that short space, so much brilliance and productivity, so much history, and yet so much activity in his private life, with 12 wives and 15 children! Adelabu and Olagunju have missed in their account an opportunity to report the impact of Adedibu's death on the Ibadan community. The whole town mourned. It was as if the city's source of illumination had gone out and many rioted, for it was suspected that there was a diabolical side to Adelabu's sudden death. Four years later, this impression resurfaced in the course of the face-off between Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Ladoke Akintola, then premier of the Western Region. Akintola's supporters went round the city of Ibadan singing provocative songs against Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his supporters who had also been Adelabu's political opponents. One of the songs, reported by Chief Obafemi Awolowo in his Travails of Democracy and the Rule of law (1987) goes thus: "Akintola o se pa, enyin ti e pete pero, ti e p'Adelabu, Akintola o se pa" ("Akintola cannot be killed, you that conspired, plotted and killed Adelabu, Akintola cannot be killed").

This reference to Adelabu and Akintola in opposition to Awo and the Awoists in the Action Group is to be taken beyond the personality clashes that affected Yoruba politics, and damaged it permanently from the days of Adelabu to the present, and located in the strain that had developed in Yoruba politics since 1951 between those who wanted the Western region and particularly the Yoruba to close up the region to outsiders and preserve the politics and the geography as a basis for negotiating with the larger Nigerian system, and those like Adelabu and Akintola, who thought that the Yoruba should not play the politics of irredentism but the politics of the centre. Chief Obafemi Awolowo was the leader of the first tendency, and Adelabu and Akintola, and many others who reached out beyond Yorubaland, and who defended other political platforms within the Yoruba enclave were demonised, isolated, harassed....This internal strife in Yoruba politics has remained, with both tendencies scoring victory and defeat at various times in Nigerian history. At the moment, it may be said that it is the centrists, for want of a better of expression, that are in their season of triumph, with the regionalists, to use that term for the purposes of description, having been routed in the 2003 elections. This is perhaps why the time is ripe for the promotion of "the other side of the coin" in Yoruba politics, and Adegoke Adelabu was clearly the most stubborn champion of that alternative tendency in the region.

The extent to which this is true is well borne out in his Africa in Ebullition. Introduced as "a handbook of freedom for Nigerian Nationalists", it is a book that deserves to be read by all and sundry and especially the younger generation, and everyone who is interested in the politics of Nigeria. This is Adelabu's personal manifesto, his articulation of his vision of society, a summation of his political catechism. It is a very forceful political commentary on the subject of Nigerian independence and how that new nation can be built and sustained, a moving, intellectual tour de force written by a man who obviously believed in his own genius, his place in history, and had the confidence that he was a gift and a blessing to both his country and the world. Adelabu's self-celebration and advertisement, his extraordinary command of language, the high velocity of his ideas and grammatical constructions, his sheer fascination with words, and the richness of his vocabulary, his deliberate display of erudition, even his theatricality are all at once amusing and instructive. This is the work of an educated man, an enlightened soul, and a good advertisement for the quality of education that was once available in Nigeria.

However, the main strength of this book, with a foreword by Adelabu's hero, the late Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, lies in the ideas that Adelabu canvasses on its pages. The author deals with two broad issues in the book: first the politics of the Western region, and second Nigeria's quest for freedom from colonial rule, and the future of the Nigerian state. In the introduction, Adelabu deals with his membership of the Azikiwe-led NCNC, and what he describes as the "tragedy at Ibadan- a blessing in disguise", namely the desertion of the NCNC by five of the elected members from the Ibadan Division, who had been members of the NCNC and the Ibadan Peoples Party. In December 1951, there was no clear majority in the House by any party, and the IPP with its six members held the deciding choice; if they had all joined the NCNC, that party would have produced the Government of the Western region, but one after the four of the IPP members and other NCNCers from the West crossed the carpet to join the Action Group, thus giving that party an advantage, and wrong-footing Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, for whom Adelabu in this book reserves very high praise.

Adelabu reviews the events of that moment and descends heavily on those whom he accused of playing the politics of opportunism. He argues that the politics of principle is nobler than the politics of personalities. He identifies the former as the basis for growth and the latter as ephemeral and unstable. He is nonetheless an optimist for in 1952, he had hoped that the treachery of his former colleagues on the floor of parliament provided an opportunity for identifying the right materials for leading Nigeria towards independence. In this regard, Adelabu may have been mistaken, for indeed what has endured unfortunately is not his brand of politics, but its opposite, the politics of personalities and opportunism with succeeding generations of Nigerian politicians swearing to oath in juju shrines and turning politics into commerce in the same manner in which he accused certain politicians in 1951. In the subsequent part of the book, Adelabu calls for independence from British colonial rule in 1956, what he calls a "cosmological imperative." Although he did not live to witness Nigeria's independence in 1960, he had in this book spelled out his own ideas about freedom and its meaning. Freedom for Adelabu, was not just freedom from the shackles of imperialism, but freedom in general from all forces of reaction, retrogression, compromise, and even what he calls, "black treachery", promoted by those who would make it difficult for freedom when attained to be translated into reality.

A strong, moral tone runs through Africa in Ebullition, equally remarkable is the immediacy of his analysis; written in 1952, and largely a critique of the colonial and indigenous tendencies of the period, Adelabu could well have been writing about today's Nigeria. Adelabu's words remind us forcefully of hwo so little has changed in our lives, how freedom from colonial rule has not translated into real freedom in the lives of the people. In Chapter Three entitled "Self-Government", Adelabu attempts a critique of leadership patterns and identifies three camps of nationalists: the materialistic camp, the intellectual camp and the spiritualistic camp, with the observation that the spiritualistic segment of the nationalist front represents the "higher order". He says: "They are seers and prophets. And they are heroes, saints and angels. How and why? They abjure leisure, they embrace castles, they adorn jailyards, they scorn the transient, they revere the everlasting, they worship the eternal. They are selfless. They are gallant. They are humble. They are loving. They are sublime, divine and immortal. When you see them, you know them....Nigeria must learn to seek, find, encourage, cultivate, acclaim, appreciate and canonise the few among her children who have the WILL POWER to do (sic) the toga of spiritual armour. They are the only insurance for success in the BATTLE OF FREEDOM...."

Adelabu's spiritualists are obviously not religious priests, but priests of the revolution committed to principles even at the price of their lives, his dismissal in comparison of intellectualism as "a joke" may be overstated, but Adelabu's idea of the kind of leadership that can lead Nigeria to the promised land was informed by his analysis of the trends in the politics of his time, and hence in a later chapter on National Unity, he revisits this same question of leadership as he identifies "the imperialists, the tribalists and the isolationists" as "enemies of Nigerian unity". The sad news is that Adelabu's hopes have not been met, since 1958, it is the undesirables of his analysis that have flourished in the public space, Adelabu's view that they are "doomed to failure" is no more than wishful thinking. With these elements having taken charge of the Nigerian society, the bigger tragedy of retrogression overtook the nation. Adelabu was an ardent nationalist who saw tribalism and regionalism as obstacles to national unity. He wrote: "tribes must die, ethnic groupings fade away and sectional interests submerged and sacrificed, in order that a NATION, vigorous, virile and transcendental may ARISE." Here, Adelabu was mistaken, tribes and ethnic groupings need not die for nations to survive and endure, indeed ethnicity is an asset, but the root of the failure in Nigeria is clearly the human factor, which Adelabu had correctly identified.

From Chapter Four to Seven, he examines in the following order the issues of education, agriculture, industrialisation, and Africanisation. Adelabu's criticisms of the Nigerian situation in 1952, fit so perfectly into the present Nigerian context, in fact the words he used could be lifted verbatim and applied to the present, so much that the reader cannot but wonder how a country so blessed has nevertheless managed to remain fixed in one spot for more than 50 years. Other major issues examined by Adelabu which continue to remain relevant in Nigerian politics and life include the making of a people's constitution, political parties and ideologies, the need for social, ethical and spiritual revolution, resource allocation and management, the interest of the poor and the collective responsibility of the citizenry.

In Africa in Ebullition, Adelabu's intellectual gifts are on display; he represented a now scarce breed of Nigerian politicians: that is the politician as thinker and man of action; it is not everything he says that is well-considered, for example, his dismissal of ethnicity and his call for "federal supremacy", but he belonged to an era in Nigerian politics when despite the differences of ideological affiliation, the professional political class made an effort to think, as borne out not just by Adelabu's writing but also by the quality of thought in parliament, an impression of which is conveyed in a section of the aforementioned biography by Adelabu and Olagunju.

Adelabu's political career and life provide further opportunities for research and publication, and this may involve the publication of his newspaper writings, as well as his contributions in parliament. The biographers on this occasion have carefully left out what may be considered negative comments about Adelabu, perhaps they should have reflected such comments; for in his lifetime, Adelabu may have been loved by musicians who sang his praises and the masses who adored him but there were others like Ayekooto, the newspaper columnist who in the Daily Service, occasionally took broad swipes at Adelabu calling him on one occasion, "the portable mogaji", and on another, "the parachute man", and yet in another piece, the late Bisi Onabanjo accused Adelabu of jumping from "one mistake to another and from all accounts available, he seems to like the acrobatic performances".

There was also a loud contradiction at the heart of Adegoke Adelabu's politics and methods. Whereas in Africa in Ebullition, he had made a strong case for the adoption of "free and compulsory education from the age of five", two years later, in 1954, in the course of campaigns for the Federal elections, Adelabu had opposed the Action Group's free education policy, and so effective was he that he almost single-handedly caused the defeat of the AG in that election. This resort to Machiavellianism on the political field is patently contradictory. In addition to the lack of balance, the biography contains too many unpardonable errors of proof-reading which could only have been the product of undue rush to the press. Africa in Ebullition as published by Jericho Business Club, also contains no acknowledgement of the original edition, no ISBN, and even no date of publication. Both books also do not contain any index, a regular oversight by Nigerian book publishers, which devalues such publications as ready reference materials, placing an extra burden on researchers.

All these oversights are however more than compensated for by the historical value of the efforts that have been made, Adelabu's significance as a revolutionary idealist and the rediscovery of his Africa in Ebullition.