Abraham Adesanya and Jadesola Akande
By Reuben Abati

WITHIN the week, we have suffered in one fell swoop, two heavy casualties, a heavy blow which raises concerns about the increasing depletion of the stock of good men and women in our midst; there is the fear that a third may soon follow. The mortuary indeed, is full of the souls of good folks. Two of our prominent compatriots: Abraham Adesanya, 85, and Jadesola Akande, 67, have passed on in that direction. They will be sorely missed.

Abraham Adesanya was a true incarnation of the principled politician and public figure. His life was defined by the virtues of loyalty to friends, community and nation, consistency in the pursuit of principles, and an unbending faith in the rule of law and the capacity of man to change his own circumstances. That Adesanya was an Awoist is very well-known: he was one of the more ardent and loyal disciples of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whose ideas, years after his death, have remained the key issues in Yoruba politics, and to a large extent, Nigerian politics as well.

The late Adesanya belongs to the small group of fierce loyalists for whom Awo's ideas on federalism, ethnic nationalism, free education and good governance represent the torchlight for national progress. To this heritage, Adesanya added his own deep knowledge of traditional hermeneutics, of the law, and of Western philosophy from Edmund Burke to the present, and his strong personality, defined by courage, determination and a reflective sense of history.

When our recent history is constructed, Adesanya's name will always show up on the bright and progressive side of the records. He had cut his teeth in politics in the Egbe Omo Oduduwa and the Action Group as a young and faithful foot-soldier for the party. In the days when Adesanya and co foraged into politics, Yoruba and Nigerian politics was fed by sheer divisiveness, and it mattered a lot where one's loyalty lay. Adesanya made his choice very early and he stood by it. In 1979, he became a Senator of the Federal Republic on the platform of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Joseph Wayas who was the President of the Senate in that Second Republic has had cause lately to remark that the Second Republic had a far more qualitative and robust parliament. And indeed, he was right.

But it was people like Senator Abraham Adesanya, as Senate Minority Leader and the likes of Senator David Dafinone and others who gave that Second Republic Assembly its rigour and intellectual flavour. Since 1999, there has been a diminution of intellectual rigour in parliament, with many of our lawmakers not having enough moral sense to be able to determine what is good or bad for the nation. Adesanya belonged to a different generation and a higher order of men, who placed greater score not by material acquisition, but service, integrity and communal well-being.

Primarily, Adesanya was a lawyer and he was just as distinguished here as he was in the rough and tumble of politics. Lawyers remember him as a diligent advocate and a difficult adversary. Not only did he handle many tough cases, his chambers, Abraham Adesanya and Co. served as a training ground for generations of lawyers. When he felt compelled to do so, he was never at any time reluctant to go to court also as a litigant to test the law and to prove a point. Law students will remember in particular his contribution to jurisprudence through the case: Abraham Adesanya vs President of the Federal Republic, which is the locus classicus on the subject of locus standi. He was distinguished by his revolutionary temper and his irreverence for all forms of political chicanery.

This much became clear during the fervid struggle against military rule in Nigeria during the late 80s and specifically between 1993 and 1999. Adesanya was the Deputy Chairman of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) which was led by Chief Adekunle Ajasin. Adesanya was not merely a loyal deputy to Papa Ajasin, he was one of the most outspoken defenders of the cause of democracy and the people's right to choose, and a regular presence at all the rallies and protests. He has often been criticized for being a Yoruba irredentist, and indeed as one of the leaders of Afenifere, and later as leader of the Afenifere, and effectively leader of the Yorubas, Adesanya never shied away from defending Yoruba nationalism and the interest of the Yoruba within the Nigerian nation.

But the interesting part of his politics was that what he wanted for the Yorubas, and by extension the Itsekiris, whose politics within the larger Nigerian space is intertwined with Yoruba politics, is invariably what other Nigerians want for themselves, aspirations which had been frustrated by the militarization of Nigerian politics and the inequities in extant political processes and arrangements. In every sense, Adesanya was a humanist, a statesman and a nationalist.

This much was further illustrated by his heroic insistence on democratic rule in the face of military tyranny, and his well-documented views on federalism and good governance. In making his points however, he did not learn how to re-arrange his mind in order not to offend, and that was why on one occasion, he lamented that the North should not be allowed to count goats and cattle as human beings in an attempt to inflate population figures! For his principled opposition to military rule, Adesanya was rewarded with prison detentions, and shoot on sight orders issued by the military. Many legends grew up about him in the course of his career as lawyer and politician, how he miraculously survived the gun-shot attack on him in 1997 by General Abacha's agents, with his car riddled with bullets, and nary a wound on his lithe frame.

His country home in Ijebu Igbo later became the rendezvous for Yoruba politicians, both young and old, and his guests often marveled at his encyclopaedic rendition of incantations, the Ifa corpus and the thoughts of Edmund Burke. Adesanya had a great following among the masses, and between 1998 and 2003, he and his colleagues had an almost total grip on Yoruba politics. But they soon started making the mistake of determining who should be Yoruba and who shouldn't be on the basis of a curious political DNA test. They also made the mistake in 2003 of dinning with Obasanjo, the same Yoruba son whose bid for the Presidency they had rejected in 1999. Obasanjo, a soldier, ambushed the old men and launched an assault on the South West to gain political grounds for himself. Afenifere, the Alliance for Democracy and the House of Oduduwa have not recovered since then from the implosion, the political dispersal of the faithful, and the self-sacrifice that followed. Adesanya soon retired from the active arena and has now passed on, leaving behind a divided political front.

Jadesola Akande's legacy is far less controversial, a reflection also of her temperament and personality. Her pedigree was of the finest extraction: the daughter of Wuraola Esan, the first Yoruba woman in the Federal House of Representatives and a role model in her time. She was also the wife of Chief Debo Akande (SAN), a prominent Yoruba son, lawyer and community leader, who died in 2004. But Jadesola Akande's significance lies in her own personal distinction: what she stood for, what she did and how she impacted on her country and constituencies.

It was as if she had been born to explode myths of misogyny and phallocentrism, and to carry the torch for gender equality/equity, and women empowerment, and this was evident in her personal narrative and the advocacy to which she devoted the later part of her life. Professor Akande, as she was, studied at the University of London, obtaining an LL.B degree and was called to the English Bar (1963), she was later called to the Nigerian Bar, indeed she was in the first set of the Nigerian Law School in 1966 for the then three-months course. She later took up appointment as a lecturer of law at the University of Lagos, and it was here as a staff candidate that she obtained her Masters (1968) and Doctorate (1971) degrees.

As a teacher she taught courses in Tort, Nigerian Legal System, Evidence, Constitutional Law, Communication Law, Engineering Law, and rose to become an Associate Professor at the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (1979) and Professor of Law (1984). From 1988-89, Akande was a member of the Constituent Assembly that produced the 1989 Constitution. But her moment in the sun arrived when she left the University of Lagos for the Lagos State University where as Dean of the newly created Faculty of Law, she helped to turn a Faculty that started with just one room into a formidable centre for Legal studies which produced prize winners at the Nigerian Law School!. She was a gifted and determined woman who brought the best that she could offer to bear on every assignment. She later became Acting Vice Chancellor and later Vice Chancellor of the Lagos State University, and in this position for five years, she provided quality leadership and succeeded in managing all the volatile points in campus relationships.

She was the second woman in Nigeria to be appointed a Vice Chancellor, the first being Professor Grace Alele Williams at the University of Benin. It is a matter of public record that both women gave excellent accounts of themselves. Professor Akande was a distinguished scholar with over 30 academic papers to her credit. Her Introduction to the Nigerian Constitution 1979 (Sweet & Maxwell, 1982, later Introduction to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (MIJ Professional Publishers, 2000) is compulsory reading in all Law Faculties.

Professor Jadesola Akande retired from active teaching at the young age of 54, but she took on a new career in civil society advocacy distinguishing herself over the years as one of the clearer and more persistent voices on issues of gender equity and affirmative action. She was a woman in public life who through her personal example, commitment, and principled advocacy became a mentor and a source of inspiration to generations of activists on the gender issue. Her constituency instructively was not limited to women, she advocated the idea of engaging men and boys in the actualization of the rights of women and girls and as recently as February 2007, this was the theme of a workshop of the Women, Law and Development Centre, Nigeria, the civil society group which she founded and superintended as Executive Director.

Through the WLDCN (founded 1995), and its precursor, the Family Law Centre, Professor Akande was actively engaged in gender advocacy research, publishing in the process (in solidarity with women) some of the most informative papers and monographs on such issues as rule of law and human rights curriculum, women and vision 2010, gender equality and sustainable development, the Beijing Declaration, Reproductive rights of women and Customary Law, democracy and governance, women and housing, gender points in the 1999 Constitution, women and taxation in Nigeria, women's rights, and the role of men. The Centre organised programmes in all parts of Nigeria and Professor Akande was indeed a great networker collaborating not only with foreign agencies but also other groups in civil society. She was sister, mentor and mother to a long list of other gender activists. In 1999, she led the process that was set in motion for the creation of a Women's political party, and when that did not work, she and her colleagues focused on the campaign for affirmative action, recording significant progress with the Obasanjo's administration display of gender-sensitiveness.

She was a public intellectual in every sense. When a Sosoliso aircraft crashed in 2005, she led other women out onto the streets to cry on behalf of Nigerian mothers. They were cornered by the Nigerian police and tear gassed. She always spoke her mind courageously on issues of law, gender and human rights. I recall being with her on the same panel last year at the School of Oriental and Oriental Studies in London and later at the BBC Bush House. She was soft-spoken, and ever decent, but firm and stubborn with her views; she was a woman of great intelligence.

She was a member of the National Council of Women's Societies, Secretary General of the Nigerian Association of University Women (1971 -79), recipient of the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR), Pro-Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Yeyemofin of Itire, Yeyebobaseye of Lagos, and Matron of the Agbor Ladies Circle, Lagos Branch. There can be no doubt about her legacy and that of the man who became known as the Apamaku of Nigerian politics: both were heroic in action, both will endure.

Robot  Villager

# 1 Abraham Adesanya and Jadesola Akande By Reuben Abati WITHIN the week, we have suffered in one fell swoop, two heavy casualties, a heavy blow which raises concerns about the increasi...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 22.09.2008 10:05