In the roaring 1970s, the nationalist fervent was at a feverish pitch in the country and, the Pan- Africanist and independence fires were tearing through Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Zimbabwe and Western Sahara. Also, there was fire in Soweto.
Our politics was positively influenced by people like Samora Machel, Ruth First, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Robert Mugabe, Amilcar Cabral and Mwalimu Nyerere. Writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Wa'Thiongo, Peter Abrahams, Nadine Gordimer and Okot P'Bitek held our literary skies.
The music of Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Max Romeo was telling the youths to rebel against the oppressive system and remake the world. It was in the furnace of those volcanic eruptions some of Nigeria's finest youths were baked. For them, there were no compromises to be made; it was struggle until victory. They embraced danger like lovers and saw no future without qualitative change.
They were married to revolutionary change till-death-do-them- part. Those fearless youths welcomed my generation to the campuses, nurtured and cultured us. It was in Ife I ran into the troika from Kano-Zaria: Yahaya Hashim, Abdulrauf Mustapha and Jibrin Ibrahim, popularly called Jibo. They had graduated in the mid-1970s and were building alliances to change the country and transform Africa.
It was as a member of the youth corps in Kano I first met Abdulkadir Isah Uguda, an intense mind who lived every second for revolutionary change. That was in 1982 and already, he was a veteran carrying the scars of struggles. This included his 1964 prosecution when he was a ten-year old Primary Three pupil. He was charged with furthering the aims of the opposition Northern Elements Progressive Union, NEPU.
He had also been expelled from the Kaduna Polytechnic and had his scholarship cancelled. His expulsion along with 14 other students followed national protests by the National Association of Technological Students, NATS, against somersaults in polytechnic education policies. This included changing the two-tier system of Ordinary National Diploma, OND, followed by one year industrial attachment and two years of Higher National Diploma, to a single three-year programme followed by industrial attachment. The students argued this was a deliberate lowering of polytechnic education standards.
The detained students, rather than be charged in the normal courts, were taken before Alkali courts where they were certain to be thrown into prison as lawyers did not appear in those Islamic courts. In fact, some of the students had already been sent to prison before their arraignment! When the 1979 Constitution was promulgated, radical lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi, represented by Mr Femi Lanlehin, went to court and got the students freed.
Abdulkadir's scholarship was not restored because the Kano State Scholarship Board which interviewed him said he did not convince it that he would no longer participate in student union politics. He joined the Immigration Services and became a member of the Customs, Excise and Immigration Staff Union, CEIMSU. He also became the Assistant Secretary of the Borno State Council of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC. Abdulkadir was later elected the National Vice President of the CEIMSU. As a national labour leader, he opposed the privatisation programme and rejected collaboration with the military rulers.
There were clashes between the CEIMSU led by Secretary General Bernard Odulana, and Interior Affairs Minister, Colonel John Shagaya. This eventually led to the proscription of the union. This was where Abdulkadir, despite being an officer of the para-military corps, rose to campaign against the proscription, thereby endangering his career. He fought the NLC leadership of Paschal Bafyau for collaborating with the military to proscribe the union. He told me: "It was the NLC that carried out the folding up of CEIMSU without even contacting the leaders who were contesting the obnoxious action...the ILO's move to intervene was subverted by the NLC." Today, even after retiring from service and, 35 years after the CEIMSU's proscription, Abdulkadir continues to nudge the NLC and ILO to fight for the union's de-proscription.
Jibrin 'Jibo' Ibrahim has spent his life building societal organisations and mentoring people for a better world. As a student in the Ahmadu Bello University, ABU, he helped to develop the radical students Movement for Progressive Nigeria, MPN, into a fighting force for change. Although the members were repeatedly expelled by the authoritarian university administrators and he himself, endangered, he never gave up. He also helped to build a similar organisation at the national level called the Patriotic Youth Movement of Nigeria, PYMN. The PYMN was instrumental to the establishment of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, in 1980 and running it into the mid-1990s.
Jibo also helped to establish the Youths Solidarity Against Apartheid, YUSSAN. A firm advocate of women rights and equality, he was one of the founders of the Women In Nigeria, WIN, in 1982. Intensely intellectual, Jibo, a professor and advocate of the downtrodden, puts his prodigious knowledge at the service of the people by simplifying and making it available through his weekly columns. He is known for his religious-like advocacy and defence of fundamental human rights and expansion of the democratic space. This has seen him build and develop civil society organisations. He was the Executive Director of the Centre for Democracy and Development, CDD, and chair of the West African Civil Society Forum, WACSOF.
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He is the leader of the social movements in Abuja and, when necessary, leads them in protests as he did in January 2012. One of the major reasons why Jibo attracts the young and is widely respected even in government circles is that he has a listening ear, is highly tolerant of other views and focuses on solutions rather than mere criticism.
Jibo is an example of a person who not just paid back, but gave far more than he was given. He had come to the School of Basic Studies and ABU at 18, never having heard of different cultures of progress, radicalism or Marxism. Those experiences and the fact that his generation had a good and high quality education irrespective of their social background, moulded his life. Since then, it has been how this has changed him and his comrades; transformed them and, how it has shaped the struggles they have undertaken.
Some of us stand on the broad shoulders of these fearless, selfless and principled fighters for a better universe and a New World Order. Abdulkadir Isah Uguda turned 70 on Monday, November 11, 2024 and Jibrin 'Jibo' Ibrahim reached this milestone 19 days later, precisely on Saturday, November 30, 2024. Nations that have such people are blessed. May Africa never run short of such people of vision and conviction.
