The Memorial Lecture in honour of a hero of radical politics in Nigeria, Dr. Yima Sen, was fixed to start on the dot of 10 am November11th, 2020 at the National Women Centre. But it was not until 10. 37 a.m that Amina Salihu’s voice rang out constituting the House as much as signal narrative turbulence ahead. It was never going to happen to memorialize Yima Sen without what someone calls the Yima problematique in radical politics in Nigeria cropping up. Yima’s rupturing of binary reasoning and the associated practices was rarely something the structural Marxist reasoning that dominated radical politics in the country easily came to grips with. In other words, there were always muted reservations about what sort of Marxist could also belong to fronts such as the Middle Belt Forum, Northern Elders Forum and such other platforms of micro-nationalism?
It was complicated by the curious shifting of the Keynote Statement which would have disciplined the discussion at the occasion towards the end of the occasion, leaving room for diversity gone haywire. Matters were not helped by neither Dr.Usman Bugaje nor Labaran Maku who were the two of the three discussants of the keynote statement failing to speak to the statement when it was eventually read. Only Ngozi Iwere, the first of the discussants anchored her contribution to the Keynote Statement and very richly too. Perhaps, it is in the nature of Yima that a session on him could not be otherwise. He took his mandate of Marxism far and wide. The great story is that Prof Jibrin Ibrahim anticipated the Yima problematic and made a contentious but beautiful intervention on that in the Keynote Statement as we shall see below.
There must be something instructive that Dr. Kole Shettima, the Chairperson of the occasion, declared at the opening that the #EndSARS generation had actually issued a generational retirement for the activists who drove radicalism from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s. That made the Memorial Lecture a retirement session for that generation as much as it memorialized Yima Sen, one of its leading lights.
The message of what he was insinuating must have become clearer by the time Famimi Sen, the younger of Yima’s daughters read the citation on her father to the audience – sensitive, hitch-free audience management that is not typical. If the power elite in Nigeria today is still believing its escapist narrative of the #EndSARS generation as what opposition, enemies of government and cultists put together, then they have got a different thing coming. A new generation with completely new ways of thinking and enacting themselves are in place and kicking with digital jabs that can send systems into disarray. It was part of Brexit, for example, just as it also fuelled the Floyd revolt in the US.
What Nigeria they are going to build is not what anyone can foresee right now. Dr. Shettima’s hope is that it would replicate what Yima Sen symbolised – the harmonious membership of wide ranging sites of activism. In other words, it was the era in Nigeria when a young undergraduate at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria would head for Portharcourt in far away Rivers State, his or her only guarantee of safety being that another comrade is there to welcome him or her and they will be speaking the language called Nigeria as soon as they hit it off from the Motor Park. Today, that is not what obtains. Enemy images have taken over, along with deep suspicion and mistrust, things that Yima fought against.
As if a flashback to those days, Ene Obi, Country Director of Action Aid Nigeria and a former President of the University of Jos Student Union took the floor to lead a rendition of Solidarity, the global anthem for the brotherhood of forces fighting exploitation. The floor had also become a complex mixture with presences stretching from names such as Senator Jack Tilley Gyado, Chief Audu Ogbeh, Professor Iyorwase Hagher, Prof Hauwa Biu – another warrior of those days, Senator Ameh Ebute, Chief Joseph Aneh and many other big names.
Prof Hagher who went to the same Bristol Secondary School, Gboko with Dr. Yima interpreted Yima’s path as the outcome of the motto of the school. They were trained to be the light of the world, he said. For him, the larger background of Yima’s radicalism were two. One is the original Tiv society which he claimed was completely egalitarian before its contamination with money, then institutions, then corruption and, lastly, mismanagement. The second is what he puts at the oligarchic tendency in the North that he said Yima rejected and hence his choice of the University of Lagos as opposed to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria as was the commoner case for prospective students from the Middle Belt then.
Interestingly, Prof Hagher was to be contradicted almost immediately by Mallam Bukar Zarma who was Yima’s roommate at the University of Lagos, (UNILAG) and now a mandarin of the Northern Elders Forum, (NEF). Zarma who was a one-time editor of the defunct New Nigerian said out of the 1,800 student population of the University of Lagos then, there were 16 from the old North, 10 of that figure coming from the old Kwara State and the remaining six coming from the rest of the North. His clincher is that Yima Sen was the president of the Yan Arewa Students at the university.
Before that very first clash of narratives at the occasion, Dr. Abiodun Adeniyi, the Head of the Department of Mass Communications at Baze University, Abuja where Yima was lecturing had taken the floor to describe the departed as irreplaceable in his combination of rich experiences in life with theory as a lecturer. Dr Ayo Ojajune who taught at the University of Lagos also spoke but his voice was so low much of it was lost to this reporter. Hajiya Hauwa Mustapha, another warrior of the struggle in those days at ABU, Zaria delivered a statement from the Nigeria Labour Congress , (NLC) which she represented at the occasion. Add Chief Joseph Aneh, the head of the Tiv community to the list up to this point.
Then the Middle Belt Forum, (MBF) took the floor, speaking through Engineer Ben Ackaka. He started by disclosing that the forum issued a statement on learning of Dr. Yima’s demise. His point of departure though is the pointed argument that it is a missed opportunity that a Yima was never identified and given a higher responsibility even as everyone knew he stood for exceptional capacity and efficiency. He did strike the chord if he is understood to be saying that the trouble with the Nigerian system is its utter lack of the ability to identify and recruit merit. In other words, he might have been articulating classical Middle Belt Forum sentiments but doing so in a manner that says a system that works on ascription is doomed. If this interpretation is right, then he scored a point. Any society that finds it easier to label and stigmatise than go for the unique selling point of each potential resource person is, of course, in trouble.
The atmosphere changed slightly at this point as the second of Yima’s daughters took the floor to deliver a family tribute. She did this quite bravely up to a point before the tears interrupted. Well, she controlled herself and was able to continue, making the point that her father was the president Nigeria deserved. She said her father was the first female feminist she knew. But she knew him as her daddy, not in any estranged language of radicalism or intellectual high mindedness. And as daddy, Yima was the good listener, friendly daddy and a father with amazing faith in his children. It is either her or her junior that the late Dr. Yima talked endlessly of her going to study under Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Economics. He imagined the student and the professor/supervisor who shared a same surname but have no blood relations. The lady was still an undergraduate in Cyprus then.
A traditional dance interlude entertained the audience and then it was time for the official philosopher of the day to speak. It is not a question of whether those who pushed different narratives of Yima were telling the truth or not. It is rather that they were seeing him from where they stood. It is not that Prof. Jibrin Ibrahim, the keynote address giver was not seeing him from where he too stands but that he had been asked to bring all angles to the phenomenon called Yima and put something on the table. His analysis is not conclusive but it provides a much more complete sense of Yima Sen. Here, only a paragraph is taken from the statement delivered on his behalf in the end by Dr. Otive Igbuzor because Prof Ibrahim fell ill shortly before the D-Day. Luckily, Otive has the booming voice and it went well. It goes as follows:
Yima Sen was not a closet Marxist with disdain for what some might call bourgeois politics. He believed that every political opportunity should be taken and gateways to advance the progressive agenda seized. Essentially, political praxis for him meant taking every path that could lead to progress but resisting incorporation into the world of bourgeois politics in which power is the only thing that matters rather than the good that power could be used for. He had the opportunity to access power early in life and could have chosen the path of retrograde bourgeois politics centred on primitive accumulation and a life of self-aggrandizement. He was one of the youngest officials who served as Special Assistant to the President in the Second Republic, Alhaji Shehu Shagari. Subsequently, he was also a presidential adviser during the Obasanjo Presidency, working with then Vice President Atiku Abubakar. At the international level, he had served at the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, in Lagos and Nairobi. For him, these opportunities were occasions to push the progressive agenda at the policy level in his life long struggle to leave the world as a better place than he found it.
It has already been mentioned that only Ngozi Iwere spoke to this contention by raising questions about how this legacy might be sustained; worrying about inter-generational mentoring; breaking the divide between community based organisations, (CBOs) and NGOs based on current referencing to them in a manner reflecting a local-global tension; rescuing the gender struggle from a women only effort and, above all, how progressive forces could take over leadership of the narrativisation of Nigeria’s diversity. “We have allowed the wrong people to take control of the narrative of diversity in Nigeria”. By ‘we’, she meant appetitive and run of the mill politicians manipulating differences when the celebration of difference is what would have made Nigeria the envy of the world. She concluded by arguing that the best tribute to Yima is to begin today to deepen the discussions. She was spot on.
Although he didn’t speak to the keynote address, Dr. Usman Bugaje brought in the point about the preparation of the Arewa Research and Development Project, (ARDP) to publish, preserve and promote the vista of politics Yima signified. Yima, he said, was someone who had clear political position, the courage of his conviction to push and defend his positions and declined to do what he said many Nigerians do – taking any and every opportunity just to get money. He revived the controversy about Yima being definitely a Northerner but also being passionately Nigerian and never parochial.
Labaran Maku, former Minister for Information as well as Defence under the Goodluck Jonathan administration who spoke last also made no reference to the keynote statement with a view to expanding, contesting or clarifying any aspects of it. He went on to fears that he said he had shared with Yima on how the idea of Nigeria is gradually dying in the minds of Nigerians, the creeping religious violence and the absence of leadership with legitimacy and believability across the country. He contrasted Nigeria to the US, India, South Africa in terms of leadership and management of diversity.
Ben Sen, Yima’s junior brother, spoke last before John Odah did. He confessed just knowing that his brother was such a big national actor. He also said his father was also a politician and gave Yima his name as a redeemer of the family. To do that, he sent the late Dr Yima to be bred in the house of the late Chief J. S Tarka’s household. Hence, the element of the Tarka’s integrative populism in Yima’s politics.
It was time for John Odah, the Chairperson of the Yima Memorial Planning Committee, to give the vote of thanks. His main take is how the legacy of Yima would be preserved and sustained. He expressed gratitude to all who came from far places such as Lagos, Maiduguri, Kano, Jos as well as those who joined via zoom from South Africa, Canada, Nairobi, the US among others.
It had been a long day and the audience had been looking at Nigeria from “Yima Sen and Radical Politics in Nigeria”. May the will of God be done as Dr. Yima is buried November 14th, 2020 in Benue State!
