Intervention would hold the record of reference to this document, especially the section of it that argued against the privileging of indegeneity or the refusal to follow it and hence the violent conflicts in most parts of the Northern part of Nigeria. It is good that the centre the late Dr. Bala Usman was crucial to has seen the need to re-present the Minority Report written by the two radical activists as a counter to the majority report of the Constitution Drafting Committee, (CDC) in 1976). Re-presenting the document now contributes to confirming that meaning resides in space and time rather than in a text or its author(s). Great if the re-presentation acts a trigger for looking at the Nigerian crisis all over again.
Written and published in 1978, this is arguably Dr Segun Osoba’s landmark academic work, just like written yesterday
While we wait for the day of the text re-presentation, it might be important to introduce Dr Segun Osoba properly and by which is meant that the Segun Osoba under reference here is different from the journalist and former governor of Ogun State. This Segun Osoba is the Historian, thinker and progressive activist who used to teach History at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. He is quite old in age now but the brain and the tongue are very much at their activist best. Both Dr. Osoba and Dr Usman constitute a generational and ideological statement for Nigeria as well as a statement in historiography.
It is interesting that in most crucial national assignments many members of that generation were given, they wrote a minority report which the government of the day either pretended did not matter (except in one case) or did not read or read but could not make critical sense of. But, in all cases, they are the same issues Nigerians are paying dearly for today. Intervention, for example, has recently been publishing excerpts from a similar Minority Report by the late ASUU National President, Dr Mahmud Tukur, (one more installment remaining, with two already published) on the question of business model. The tragedy is that the youths of today, including more than 90% of those in the universities as well as majority of the politicians, are neither aware of such crucial documents nor do they possess the capacity or interest to engage such documents.
