September was a bad month for Nigeria. First Chima Ubani, 42, director of the country's premier human rights NGO, the Civil Liberties Organisation, died in a car crash. Then, veteran activist Dr Yusuf Bala Usman died on September 24. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem remembers the lives of two extraordinary activists and calls for their spirit of struggle to be remembered.

The past week has not been a good one for the endangered species of committed progressive people in Nigeria. In the middle of the week there was the tragic death, by yet another road accident, of Comrade Chima Ubani,42, director of the country's premier human rights NGO, the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), a foremost defender of the poor, and a shining star for consistency and total commitment to the struggle for the liberation of the ordinary people in the face of the successive autocratic military regimes of the 80s and 90s in Nigeria and the creeping elective dictatorship of Obasanjo since 1999.

Ubani died in an accident between Maiduguri and Kano in the north-east part of the country, where he had been part of the key leaders of civil society and the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) mobilizing support for a successful series of national strikes across the country against yet another increase in the price of petroleum products. His body was returned to Lagos on Saturday.

That same day (Saturday 24 September, 2005) yet another tragedy struck at the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, with the death of a senior comrade, veteran struggle activist, radical historian and organic intellectual in the tradition of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral: Dr Yusuf Bala Usman.

Many people outside of Nigeria may not have known him personally but more would have become aware of him by reputation and remember and mourn the sad loss. It was an inconsolable weekend. For my generation of student activists Bala Usman was the icon of our times whose radical scholarship and political activism caused us to ask very uncomfortable questions about the kind of knowledge we were being taught and the society we were living in.
The 70s and 80s were full of epic battles and the cold war was at its peak. In Africa, the liberation of Southern Africa, including the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau on the West coast, Zimbabwe and South Africa from settler regime and apartheid were prominent on the agenda.

The struggle against neo-colonialism was also intense and anti imperialist struggles were being waged across the underdeveloped world from Africa through Asia to the Middle East and Latin America. These were days before donor-driven formalized struggles that have today turned many revolutionaries into ‘resolutionaries’. They were periods when imperialism was called its proper name and not disguised under euphemisms like globalisation, friends or partners!

Bala and his peers of equally committed scholar-activists from across the continent who were teaching in various universities in Nigeria in those oil boom days opened our eyes and ears to the world around us and inspired us to believe that we can change it for the better.

There were many radical scholars, some of them exiles and refugees from the Idi Amin and Obote 2 regimes in Uganda, including Prof Yolamu Barongo, the indomitable Okot a P'itek and Ocello Oculi. There were others like Yusf Bangura, AB Zack Williams and others. There were radical scholars from the Diaspora too like Dr Patrick Wilmot who was later deported from Nigeria by the Babangida regime. People Like Ali Mazrui were regular guest lecturers on Nigeria's campuses, trailing one controversy or the other. By no means were all the radical lecturers only Africans or people from the Diaspora.

The high point of this was the Centenary of Marx conference held at Ahmadu Bello University in 1983. Some of the sectarian political and intellectual battles that were to decimate the left forces can be traced to this period. Bala was very prominent in these debates and enjoyed for many years the status of first among equals. He was born into the royal house of Katsina in northern Nigeria and did not have to do anything to survive. He could just have demanded and be given anything he wanted by way of personal pleasures and riches by virtue of being a royal and growing up at a time when the Emirs held sway.

Bala could have combined his royal spoon with his academic erudition and choosen to be part of any government or ruling clique across the country and feed fat on the sweat and blood of the people of Nigeria. But Bala chose to side with the masses. He became a traitor to his class. He committed class suicide and remained a revolutionary throughout his life. He could have checked out of the country like many of us (some voluntarily, some of us stranded, and others through coercion or for tactical /strategic reasons) but he did not. He believed that he was best able to contribute directly from the home front.

Whatever political or intellectual disagreements anyone may have developed with Usman in a life steeped in struggles on many fronts, even his worst critics will pay him the tribute of saying he remained true to his convictions.

Nigeria is indeed made more impoverished both intellectually and politically now that the loud and very clear and thunderous voice of Bala will no longer be there to speak unpleasant truths to power in a potentially great country damned by successive little-minded leaders impervious to any knowledge that could go beyond their noses.

It is perhaps befitting to a life of struggle that Bala's last public duty that many will remember for its high drama was at a conference last month called by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on corruption. Bala was one of the participants. President Obasanjo was the chief guest and he addressed the audience with his usual monologue and holier-than-thou pomposity.

At intervention time Bala was on the floor and he, as was characteristic of his fearless and fierce intellect took on Baba Iyabo (Father of Iyabo, as Obasanjo is also known in Nigeria) and tore into the empty shrines of his timid anti-corruption crusade and leader-centric governance. As we all know, Obasanjo is such a big 'democrat' that he cannot understand or continence anyone disagreeing with him.

He ordered his security goons to seize the microphone from Bala. Somehow the security heavies could not find the over 6 feet tall Bala who was standing with a microphone in a hall full of all the high and mighty in Nigeria. The conclusion of many was that even the security guys were sympathetic to Bala's lampooning of President-Know-All.

That was Bala Usman: Bold, full of guts and fearless before those who think of themselves as our lords and masters. Of course the hypocrisy of conspicuous grief after death of a public figure is already suffocating the country. The President was one of the first to send condolences on the two departed comrades declaring one “a brilliant young activist” and the other “a statesman”. It is customary to pray for the departed: May the spirit of Bala and Chima remain restless and continue to haunt us to continue the struggle for which they lived and died actively serving.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa. ([email protected] or [email][email protected])

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