Beckoned to serve

By

Chukwuma Nwokoh

Former President Shehu Aliyu Shagari's autobiography, Beckoned To Serve, is a welcome addition to the historical discourse on Nigeria.

As with all self-serving works, it presents a jaundiced view of certain events but its illumination of some events is greatly treasured.

In this 552-page account, Shagari tries to maintain a balance between radical and conservative inclinations. But his is a conservative voice.

One comes out with the realisation that Shagari was a Prime Minister or President-in-Waiting. Chief Olu Adebanjo, a former special adviser to the ex-president, once told Shagari that he learnt that he was a likely successor to Prime Minister Sir Tafawa Balewa.

Make no mistake. The ex-president was a suave and shrewd politician.

In 1946, Mallam Gambo Abuja and Shagari started the Youth Social Circle (YSC) in Sokoto. Sir Ahmadu Rabah (who is better known as Ahmadu Bello) was always there to extend his protective wings and support. In fact, Sir Bello's nurture started when Shagari sought Bello's assistance, who in 1951 was Councillor for Education, to get a job with the Radio Redifusion Service of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS). The Sarduana rather got him the job of headmaster of the new Senior Primary School at Argungu.

"We left the palace to Sarduana Ahmadu Rabah's residence where the Sarduana reiterated the advice of the avuncular Sultan. Actually, the Sarduana went a step further. He dispatched one of his attendants to a tailor to have the Sarduana's own turban (rawani) cut into two, one of which he turbaned me with. I felt rather old-fashioned and embarrassed by this first experience of wearing a turban, but also greatly honoured by the gesture. I was almost imperceptibly being initiated into a system I had consciously been seeking to reform. The overall import of the gesture was, however, not lost upon me," Shagari said.

The former president was there at the formation of the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) in Zaria when some of the Northern cultural groups merged into a regional body. He represented the YSC. Even with his radical disposition, Shagari knew the authentic radicals.

At a meeting in Jos, convened to make NPC more politically-active, Shagari was given the mandate by YSC to block the leadership bids of Mallam Aminu Kano and Sa'ad Zungur. He succeeded but Zungur told him that the suzerainty of Sokoto over other Northerners was gone forever.

It should be stated that few Nigerians were more adequately prepared to rule this country than Shagari from Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier to Commissioner of Education, Minister of Establishment, Minister of Economic Development, Minister of Finance and Chairman of Peugeot Automobile Nigeria Ltd. In addition, he was a parliamentarian from 1954 to 1966. He served both civilian and military administrations. In other words, he was a student of power.

Yet, his familiarity with power did not imbue him with arrogance. His humility has been acknowledged even by his acerbic critics and rivals.

It comes as a mystery that in spite of his romance with power, he never wanted the ultimate prize the presidency. One of the gems of Shagari's autobiography is the various efforts through blackmail, carrot and stick to make him become a presidential aspirant of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). It got to an extent that his people in Sokoto told him they would not support any other political ambition of his if he did not join the presidential fray. And he was interested in becoming a Senator! In fact, Shagari spent N200 to win the NPN ticket whereas his rivals in other parties and even within NPN spent millions of naira. Some had to found parties and sponsored the parties.

Shagari's account of the crisis in the West is nothing but disingenious. He dismissed the Action Group as kill-joys and a party without electoral backing. He gives the impression that Chief S. C. Akintola's United Peoples Party was admired throughout the region.

However, we should be grateful to Shagari for inadvertently outing the shameful role of Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, then Chief Justice of the Federation, in the row following the December 1964 general elections. Ademola's role leaves much to be desired given that the dispute could have come before his court the Supreme Court. Of course, he would not have recused himself on the grounds that he had been compromised.

Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the then president, had summoned the service and police chiefs to remind them of their oath of allegiance to him as their Commander-in-Chief and that they were duty-bound to effect his orders. That was after he had decided against inviting Balewa to form a new federal government.

Ademola and Dr. Taslim Elias, the Minister of Justice, asked Dr. Majekodunmi to advise Balewa to instruct the service chiefs to disobey any orders from the president. The premier did as counselled.

Ademola and Elias, who perhaps had become Balewa's think-tank, upped their intervention. "They requested Sir Vahe Bairamian, a British-Cypriot and Justice of the Supreme Court, to speak to his fellow British national, Major-General Sir Christopher E. Welby-Everard, the General Officer Commanding (GOC), to dissuade him from taking any precipitate action which might implicate and embarrass the British government," according to Shagari. May we ask: Did Balewa give Ademola the additional portfolio of political adviser.

The former president tasks Chief Obafemi Awolowo over some claims in My March Through Prison. He disputes Awo's allegation of an official conspiracy to poison him while he was in prison. "Nor was I aware of any other conspiracy inside the Balewa government. I was at the time so strategically placed in government that the alleged scheme could not have occurred without my knowledge; the more so as my co-operation would have been essential to its success," said Shagari.

The ex-president might not have harboured any such evil intent but it is difficult to disbelieve Awo given the scheme hatched by the NPC to resolve the impasse in the aftermath of the 1964 election.

Alhaji Mohammadu Ribadu, the deputy of Balewa and the minister of defence, had called an emergency meeting of NPC ministers and they decided, in view of Azikiwe's intransigence, to declare the president medically unfit to govern. Azikiwe, since May 1964, had been having problems with his health and needed specialist medical attention. Said Shagari: "Now, the idea was that since the Senate presidency was vacant following the dissolution of parliament, the president's professed illness would be officially recognised and proclaimed to enable the federal Chief Justice to stand in for him. Thereupon, the federal Chief Justice would ask Balewa to form a federal government. Somehow, this plan rapidly leaked to Dr. Azikiwe late on Sunday night, 3 January 1965. Within hours, the State House issued a statement that the president's physician had announced that Dr. Azikiwe 'who was recently indisposed is now quite fit and fully recovered and capable of fulfilling all his engagements both inside and outside the State House." Ademola was to be the handmaiden of the NPC schemers.

It is a shame that the Northern elite is yet to embrace the fact that the January1966 coup was not an Igbo coup to annihilate the leading lights of the North. Something went awry during the January coup. Just as Shagari found out during his presidency that objectives and actions can be distorted during execution. The bungling of the deportation of Dr. Patrick Wilmot, a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Ahmadu Bello University, is instructive. Shagari had directed the Ministry of Internal Affairs to ensure that Wilmot, because of his suspicious activities, "should be eased out of the country whenever he voluntarily travelled out of the country. Instead, the Immigration Department just bundled him up one night and tried to forcefully deport him. He escaped."

His account of the counter-coup of July 1966 is disturbing. He presents it as if it was unplanned. Yet, in another breath he calls Colonel Murtala Muhammed the co-ordinator of the counter-coup. Murtala, as communications minister, was to even crow about it when General Yakubu Gowon had rejected a policy of his at a cabinet meeting. He told Shagari, then finance commissioner: "We will soon remove him. We put him there."

Shagari tars General Timothy Aguiyi-Ironsi with being a tribalist  that he surrounded himself with Igbos. The same Ironsi whose kinsmen would send persons to inform of plots against his regime  by the Northern military and civilian elite and he would invite Colonel Gowon, then Chief of Army Staff, to hear the message of his kinsfolk! Ironsi deserves a post-humous apology for he was killed over unitarism which has become the hallmark of all military regimes.

Shagari's anger is smoking when he gives account of what happened in the Second Republic. He blames his rivals and their parties for the collapse of the second attempt at democracy. With hindsight, it must be admitted that we hounded democracy to the arms of the military. The role of the Lagos-Ibadan media is not elevating. This writer should know, given that as an undergraduate, one was an admirer of their scathing articles, features and columnists.

In the Tribune, there was "lnk In My Blood," "Till Death Do Us Part" and "State Of the Nation".

We must be grateful to God (or is it to the learning process) that the Fourth Republic has been without the unnecessary confrontation as was witnessed between the NPN-led Federal Government and the government in some states controlled by the UPN, GNPP, PRP and NPP that marked the Second Republic. Imagine the Oyo State government bulldozing a Federal Government housing estate or the Bendel State government stretching its luck too far by disallowing students from welcoming President Shagari in Benin.

But the NPN is not without blame. To Shagari, NPN was the best gift to have been bestowed on Nigeria. The ex-president blames the failure of his "Green Revolution" and the housing scheme on the hostility of the state governments not governed by his party. But were they successful in states governed by the NPN?

The NPN was also responsible for heating up the polity. The misuse of the police by NPN members was rampant. Even state police commissioners refused to take instructions from state governors. And the introduction of murderous militias! In old Anambra State, there was the Ikemba Front and the Ekwueme Vanguard. Governor Jim Nwobodo refused to be outdone ñ the NPP and their supporters sponsored their own militias.

Shagari is on shaky grounds when he asserts that the 1983 elections were not rigged and that the riots that greeted the manipulated election figures in Ondo state were orchestrated. The NPN could have won the 1983 election without rigging it. The base of the UPN and NPP was getting narrower. And the PRP and GNPP were near-extinct.

Not too long ago, Dr. Joseph Wayas, the Senate President in the Second Republic, was preening that federal legislators of that republic did not saddle themselves with contract awards in contradistinction to those of the Fourth Republic.

But they did worse things. They took a $120,000 bribe from the Swiss firm, Societe Generale de Surveillance( SGS), during their probe of import inspection work by SGS. They ordered for an executive jet. "It emerged in May 1981 that about 90 per cent of MPs had since October 1979 been pocketing the pay of some 2,450 non-existent aides worth millions of naira," said Shagari.

President Olusegun Obasanjo and his hawkish aides who unnecessarily heat up the polity should read this book. Shagari offers several wise advice. One of them is that there is virtue in consultation. Hear him: "My intervention in the Open University affair convinced me that much legislative success could be achieved in spite of NPN's perilous minority position. For most legislators felt flattered whenever I personally staked my presidential prestige to request, even by telephone, their support over any issue before the NA. Especially if I held them individually responsible for its success or failure."

One lesson to be drawn from Beckoned To Serve is that no serving military person can be believed to be loyal to a government. In other words, the military is the most perfidious institution ever created by man. On two occasions, hints pointed at the direction of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari as a potential coup plotter. Twice, he denied. He even threatened to resign his commission given that his loyalty to the Shagari government was in doubt.

"Sometime, in late October or early November 1983, Major General Babangida and Colonel Aliyu Mohammed came to the State House to see me and we had a long discussion. They do pay me such visits usually at night long before I became president. One thing that struck me that night was that General Ibrahim Babangida assured me several times of his absolute loyalty and that of his colleagues to me as president. On each occasion, I acknowledged with thanks his reassurances but wondered why he dwelt so much on what I have always taken for granted. Now I know better!" rued Shagari.

Given the perfidy of Buhari and Babangida, one sees the wisdom in the forced retirement of political soldiers by President Obasanjo at the onset of the Fourth Republic. He should know as Buhari was a political soldier a former governor of Borno State and ex-chairman of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

It must be said that Shagari received a raw deal after he was overthrown. Even though he was not jailed, the solitary confinement was enervating. His cooks and stewards were ordered not to speak to him during his house arrest. On June 18, 1985, Shagari made this entry: "Today is Sallah Day: Idil-Fitr. For the first time in one and a half years, somebody has said 'Barka de Sallah' to me. He is Mr. Njoku, the cook, who though not allowed to speak to me, came boldly and said: 'Happy Easter Sir!" On September 3, 1985, he made another entry: "Today, I have been moved to another house, No 1, Hawkesworth Road, Ikoyi .... It is the first time since January 3, 1984 that I saw the sky! It is nice to take some fresh air and see the sunlight. It is exactly 20 months since I was detained in No 2, Ruxton Road and throughout my stay there, I never had the chance to step outside the door .... I also have the opportunity to stroll outside within the premises of the compound. It is the first time the police guards who have been with me for nearly two years have ever seen me face to face!"

How can such cruelty be justified? Moreso, for a former ruler who was eventually found not guilty of any criminal offence and was not corrupt.

Even after Justice Samson Uwaifo's verdict of not guilty over the charges against Shagari, General Babangida was still splitting hairs about the distinction between legal justice and social justice.

Apart from some few typographical errors, the grammatical errors are manageable. For instance, spelling aircraft with (s) and spelling foment as forment. There is also the tautological phrase  I myself that riddles the book.

All said, this is splendid book  a lode of learning. Beckoned To Serve is a delicious gari(millet flour) which you should sha(enjoy.)

The writer wrote in from Abuja