Awo died 30 years ago. But thanks to the power of his ideas, he has continued to live
On May 9, 1987, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, former Premier of the defunct Western Region, died. Thirty years after, he has remained in the public realm, more than any politician of his generation. It is an ode to the eternal relevance of his evergreen ideas.
As a mortal, Awolowo was formidable. Though he had nothing near the infectious bonhomie of his great contemporary and rival, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, he was formidable as the portrait of a politician as an ideas juggernaut.
Indeed, no politician of his generation — and since then — is as self-documented as Awolowo. Nevertheless, this self-documentation is less about himself, but more about his country. Certainly, no Nigerian politician of any age has put down his rigorous and robust thoughts on how Nigeria should be politically organised.
Neither perhaps has any Nigerian politician, living or dead, faithfully implemented his ideas, thus establishing a buzzing link between theory and praxis.
Before the Awolowo social revolution in his premiership years (1952-1959), Western Nigeria, even with all its vaunted urbanisation, was no more than a neo-feudalist enclave, with an eternal struggle between the powerful local potentates and the bristling narrow crop that was the educated elite. After his tenure, the old West had leapt, in a generation, from a languid past to alluring modernity, that portended great promise.
Awo’s free primary education programme, with innovative and aggressive policies to push all frontiers of developmental knowledge, set the pace. But aside from Premier Awolowo’s keen push of social infrastructure in education and health, a no less ambitious push in physical infrastructure and technology — modern roads, first modern sports stadium in Nigeria, first television in Africa, Cocoa House, then the tallest building in all of Nigeria — would give Western Nigeria a massive head start over the rest of the country.
In a country that started with intense inter-regional competition, possible domination by one of the three regions, over the other two, was fair game, in real-politik terms. But while the other two regions of the North and the East tried to dominate by sheer primordial tactics, Awo countered with the sheer acuity of his ideas. That bred for him intense peer envy, and even more intense personal troubles.
Indeed, Awo’s problem with the East started with the checkmating of Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon (NCNC) from forming the Western Regional government, with Zik, an Igbo, as putative premier. The defeated Zik forces hollered “tribalism”, which has been uncritically echoed down the Nigerian ages.
But the fact is Zik’s defeat was a practical manifestation of Awo’s umpteenth idea of organising Nigeria along the lines of ethnic federalism, using the common tongue and contiguous cultures as development drivers. If that were so, where would be the appropriateness of a Zik premiership in the West?
