By Adagbo Onoja
If it were when Nigeria was intellectually booming, allowing nothing the luxury of passing without being problematised, the death of Prof Sonni Tyoden would have been a bigger story than it has been. He doesn’t belong to the most senior crust at his death at age 74 last Sunday (May 4th, 2025) but he still reached a status in Political Science to be a subject of lively memorialisation.
One, he was a key name in the imaginative debate in the 1980s on the military road to Socialism. He wrote the essay that generated much of the responses that constituted that debate on the theme, ‘military vanguardism’.
The book we all have to read again because meaning is never static
It remains puzzling that the idea of a military road to socialism remains apetising in spite of the pitfalls associated with it. That is the power of the social sciences to bring up and face down such puzzles.it shows how Nigerian Political Science anticipated the on-going heroic narrativisation of Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore, what is right of it, what is Left of it and what is simply false or misleading of it. In that case, Prof Tyoden might no longer be physically with us but will still be part of the conversation in political analysis.
The second issue of note with Prof Tyoden is his part -authorship of The Kaduna Mafia, one of the fractions of the Nigerian power elite. There is something about analytical foresightedness in the book because it is built on the notion that it is neither ideologically nor tactically right to understand the power elite in Nigeria as a homogenous entity. And if they are not homogenous, then it is important to understand the approaches to accumulation typical of each, even for the purposes of mass conscientisation and contingent electoral alignment. Again, it means that Tyoden might be dead but still part of the conversation.
Reading the debate on military vanguardism in the 1980s will help us delineate the potentials as well as the dangers of this sort of narrative for radical change in Africa!
In fact, it is now that the debate on Kaduna Mafia will begin and, by implication, the whole debate on each of the different fractions of the power elite. Tyoden’s Kaduna Mafia will be an essential item in the reading list, along with Bala Usman, Claude Ake, Eskor Toyo and all those who foresaw this moment on that topic and wrote copiously on it.
It is not totally surprising he ended up in politics, serving as Deputy-Governor of Plateau State between 2015 to 2023. What achievements are traceable to him in that position may take sometime before they are more fully known. Politics is not like academia where hierarchy is determined by clearer criteria. Otherwise, it would have been expected that he served as a minister or some higher level corresponding to his academic records. He was a Vice-Chancellor which is not completely administrative.
Typically, he had rough encounters in his academic journey. He was among the five most noted academics that Prof Isa Mohammed, a late Vice-Chancellor of the University of Abuja removed the roof of their university quarters in the hey days of the Babangida regime when the late Isa Mohammed was so powerful because of his reported influence on the equally late Mrs Maryam Babangida. The story is that Prof Jonah Isawa Elaigwu saved Prof Tyoden.
There is so much to confirm this speculation, going by Prof Elaigwu’s crisp tribute to Prof Tyoden which reads: Just shocked about the news of Sonni’s transition. Never even heard about his illness. Since joining us at UNIJOS in 1980, I had worked closely with him and found him to be a reticent, assiduous and diligent worker. He derived special pride in accomplishing his mission, such as the research work which he accomplished with his equally bright colleague, late Bala Takaya – The Kaduna Mafia. We worked closely even after my retirement on the Peace In Jo’s project. I will surely miss his quiet and humble mode of advice. May the angels carry him through the dark phase of life, called death, to eternal light with his maker. May GOD protect, guide and be with his family through this trying times. Amen”
That’s Elaigwu who reportedly rehabilitated Tyoden after his encounter with Prof Isa Mohammed by giving him a salary, accommodation and an official car at the National Council on Inter-Governmental Relations (NCIR) where Elaigwu was the head. In other words, Tyoden illustrates the complexity of the Babangida persona in one way: one appointee of Babangida – Isa Mohammed – removed the roof of his official quarters (and several others) and for Prof Elaigwu – another appointee of Babangida – to locate him.
Perhaps, such is life!
