A Case of 3 Scores and 10 Postponed
On a continent where the average lifespan is 55 years, there is hardly any logic in denying a 70 – year old housewife, mother and grandmother a clicking of the glasses. But that is not what Mrs Christiana Abbah did when she was 70 Monday, September 9th, 2024.
Nobody stopped her from the path of abstinence. It was her own scale of propriety. Someone had died in the family not long ago. As the matriarch of the family, she didn’t think it was proper for her to be complicit in any form of celebration yet.
For that personal reflexivity, she restricted her own 3 scores and 10 to some cooking for the church and a cake cutting ceremony witnessed by just herself, Angela Odah, her most senior daughter and a civil society activist and her husband, Cde John Odah.
A case of 3 scores and 10 gone unmarked, absenced, postponed, deferred. And thus a vote for propriety!
So also With Y. Z. Yáu in Kano
From Kano, Nigeria comes what has also passed as an unmarked birthday. There are no stories of a bash or ‘washing’ for Cde Y. Z. Y’au, the other of the erstwhile young men in Northern Nigeria nicknamed junior Aminu Kano. The second junior Aminu Kano is the University of East Anglia educated Economist who teaches the subject in Bayero University, Kano.
Aminu Aliyu, that being his name, is not really a believer in the strategy of delinking that dependency theorists advanced years back but he has not allowed himself to be trapped into the virtual world that information technology has created. To that extent, he is out of circulation but he ‘dey kampe’, probably not on the same scale with Obasanjo. Intervention does not know why they call them junior Aminu Kano but it is a very suggestive and revealing image – schema about who they are.
Falling back on a file photo in the absence of any ‘washing’ of the birthday
Cde Y’au, for example, can be cited as a generational signifier for the detachment of young men and women who set up the NANS project in the early 1980s and around which radical nationalism served the second notice of the possibility of another and better Nigeria. The first notice of that possibility was served by the technocratic detachment of the bourgeoise driven by what Yusuf Bangura, another ex-ABU, Zaria teacher calls a Third Worldist orientation which insisted on planning the national economy because a nation cannot control what it has not planned. These were the well-educated super – Permanent Secretaries of those days who produced the 2nd National Development Plan (1970 – 1975). Both the students’ as well as the technocratic bourgeoisie’s were ruined by the IBB regime, with no replacement whatsoever. The ruining of the students’ is touched upon in the book Great Nigerian Students: Movement Politics and Radical Nationalism which Yáu edited along with the Swedish political scientist, Bjorn Beckman, who was, for years, teaching Political Science at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
High up in the politics of ASUU, Y’au and his types had to look elsewhere, husbanding immanent critique of globalisation to land in information technology, the defining arena of informationalised capitalism. That is his domain anyway, having read Electrical and Electronics Engineering, contrary to the more popular reckoning with him as a social scientist. He thus provides additional evidence that the distinction we insist upon between the disciplines is just to make room for Heads of Department, Deans, professors and specialists. The disciplines are not that far from each other as they all meet in ‘Philosophy of Science’ which serves as the motherland of knowledge.
So, what do we draw from Y. Z’s birthday anniversary in terms of social importance? Well, there can be no one answer arising from differential experience of the social. A broad plausible inference could be how it enables us to ask if there are Nigerian universities that can produce the junior Aminu Kanos of Nigeria today, with particular reference to learning and character. Two, do we have young people who are growing into Aminu Kano type politicians? That is younger elements who did not grab the name but earned it?
Any reader can add more questions, of course!
