Adegoke Adelabu: 50 Years After
By Reuben Abati

On Tuesday, March 25, 2008, it will be exactly 50 years when Nigeria lost one of its most illustrious sons, Honourable Adegoke Adelabu, the colourful, charismatic and grassroots Ibadan politician known as the Lion of the West, Marshall Scorpion, Akande Iji, Omo Kumo, the man who introduced into Nigeria's grammar of politics, the phrase: peculiar mess or penkelemesi. In a country where history is no longer taught in many schools; where it is taught at all, it is an optional subject, and in the face of so much present-mindedness and the spread of organized amnesia, very few people remember or know this great intellect who was one of the founding fathers of independent Nigeria.

In the South West, his political constituency, Adelabu, like other members of his generation, has been further eclipsed by the writing of the story of the politics of the First Republic by the triumphant Action Group and the Awoists. Adelabu was 43 when he died. Death came calling for him in form of a motor accident on the old Lagos-Ibadan road precisely at Ode Remo.

The list of prominent and not-so-prominent Nigerians who have been lost to road accidents remains a sad reminder of the developmental crisis that Nigeria continues to face. In Adelabu's case, fate would seem to have dealt him a cruel hand on that fateful Tuesday, March 25, 1958. In the 1956 Regional elections in the West, Adelabu had hoped to win a parliamentary majority and emerge as Premier of the Western region. He had arranged with a Lebanese businessman to make a special Ankara to celebrate his eventual victory.

But it turned out, when all the tallies were made, that he lost the election to Chief Obafemi Awolowo's Action Group. He had to return to the Western House of Assembly as Leader of the Opposition. He had incurred huge debts on the aso ebi that he had ordered, and his Lebanese friend whose business was threatened by bankruptcy had started visiting him. On March 25, 1958, he was in the middle of a family engagement, preparing for the burial of a relation, Mr Tanimowo Tomori, when the Lebanese arrived. He had to suddenly schedule a trip to Lagos with the Lebanese, Mr Albert Younnan, telling his wives, he would return by 4 pm. He never did. He, the Lebanese and two of his relations who had accompanied him (Adeleke Aremu and Ganiyu Lawal) had a fatal accident at Ode Remo. By 7 pm, just as guests at the relation's burial were leaving, news came that Adelabu was no more. He left behind 12 wives, and 15 children and a large community of admirers.

The report of his death resulted in the outbreak of rioting, for days, Ibadan was in turmoil; there were superstitious affirmations to the effect that Adelabu's death in Ode Remo, in Awolowo's constituency, could not have been purely accidental. Adelabu at the time was the most influential Ibadan politician, and clearly Ibadan's most remarkable son. As Leader of the Opposition in the Western Region House of Assembly, Adelabu was feared and respected by both friends and adversaries.

He was a gifted debater, a colourful orator and a diligent prosecutor of causes in which he believed. So influential was he that the Action Group ruling government of Chief Obafemi Awolowo who was Premier of the Region had to subject every proposal before bringing it forward to the Adelabu test: what will Adelabu think? What will he say? Adelabu was a member of Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe's NCNC, and he was not one to suffer the opposition gladly. Within the Yoruba political space, he was clearly Awo's rival, and with his credentials and gifts, a truly worthy political rival indeed.

It is a measure of Adelabu's strength of character and independent-mindedness that he remained an ardent supporter of Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, in the midst of the feverish ethnic frenzy that attended the politics of the Western region in the First Republic. His role in the aftermath of the 1952 elections is of historical importance. This is what has now become generally known as the famous carpet-crossing incident in Nigerian politics and to which the beginning of rabid ethnic politics is often traced. After the 1952 parliamentary elections, involving mostly local, community-based, political parties in the West, and the dissolution, via electoral college, of the elected candidates into the main political parties, neither Zik's NCNC nor Awo's Action Group had a clear majority in the Western Region House of Assembly.

The local Ibadan Party, the Ibadan People's Party however still had six members, and if they chose one way or the other, they would have determined which party, AG or NCNC would appoint the Premier of the Western region. Members of the IPP were wooed by both the NCNC and the AG and the numbers kept changing. Eventually, the Western House convened on January 7, 1952; five of Adelabu's colleagues in the IPP, (Moyo Aboderin, A. M. A, Akinloye, S. O. Lanlehin., D. T. Akinboiyi, and S.A. Akinyemi) showed up wearing AG badges. Adelabu joined Zik's NCNC.

And he protested: "The tribalistic school is the most clamorous. It has a great appeal to the unthinking, the lazy in thought, the unwary, the parochial, the provincial, the chauvinistic in outlook, the jingositic by disposition and the selfish substratum in human nature. It finds fruitful soil among the cowardly and haughty section of the Yorubas in the West. It obtains a congenital home among the crude and stay at home portion of the Igbos in the East. It is symbolized culturally by the Egbe Omo Oduduwa and the Igbo state Union." He also argued: "The age of personalities in Nigerian politics is passing away. We must inaugurate the age of principle." Many versions of the 1952 incident have been written with the most detailed being perhaps late Ganiyu Dawodu's How AG Won the 1952 elections in the Western Assembly. But no one has been able to doubt Adelabu's principled stand. Adelabu accused his colleagues of "shamelessness" and upbraided them for becoming shareholders of "Political Booty Ltd.".

Adelabu refused to join the Action Group and chose the NCNC which he considered more national in outlook. He rose to become the First Vice President of the NCNC. He also served as Federal Minister of Social Services and Mineral Resources between 1955 and 1956. Adelabu was a member of the Nigerian delegation to the Constitutional Conference in London; the talks that prefaced Nigeria's self-government, in 1957. But essentially, he was an Ibadan man at heart. Ibadan has always played a major role in Nigerian politics, and in the middle of the 20th century, Adelabu was most instrumental in developing the local politics of this community. He was founder or co-founder and almost always the main inspiration behind all the major grassroots-based political movements in the Ibadan of his time, including the Ibadan Peoples Party, the Ibadan Tax Payers Association and the Mabolaje Grand Alliance which he later led into an alliance with the NCNC.

He mobilized the people of Ibadan for political action, he was a gifted orator and a man of great influence with the masses. Although he belonged to the middle class, he was more at home with the masses, even if he was equally at home with the rich. He rode a Rocket Oldsmobile, a prestigious car by the standards of the time, but he was fond of giving ordinary people a free ride in it. His house which he named the Taj Mahal, was a meeting place for all categories of politicians. He was a folk hero, and a role model for many who had heard of his exceptional brilliance and gifts. .In 1954, Adelabu became the pioneer Chairman of the Ibadan District Council, but his imprint was felt more in his alignment of Ibadan politics with that of the NCNC, and his contributions to nationalist politics. With Adelabu alive, the Action Group could not take Ibadan from the NCNC, not even in the 1956 Regional Elections.

Adelabu's political opponents did not allow him an easy ride either. He faced many travails; at a time he was tried for about 18 cases all relating to his political activities. But he won all the cases, including a trial by a Commission of Inquiry. Adelabu was not just resourceful, he was an energetic politician who was driven by the love of ideas and progress. A keen debater he contributed articles and commentaries to newspapers, particularly the West African Pilot and the Southern Nigeria Defender. He was also widely admired and regarded across political lines as a prodigy and a man of great scholastic ability. Adelabu has been described as a genius, as the most brilliant student that ever passed through Government College, Ibadan, one of the first set of Nigerians to win a UAC scholarship and an asset to his town and country.

Dr Lekan Are, President of the Ibadan Foundation offers a description of Adelabu's abilities, that is difficult to improve upon, and so I quote him in extenso: "Born in 1915 at Oke-Oluokun, Ibadan, to middle class parents of relative comfort, Hon. Adegoke Adelabu was a child prodigy. He attended St. David's CMS School, Kudeti, Ibadan where his exceptional academic brilliance earned him double promotion twice, thus spending four years instead of six. He spent the next year at CMS Central School, Mapo, also in Ibadan, before proceeding to Government College, Ibadan, where he also had double promotion from Form 2 to Form 4 and finished the course in flying colours one year ahead of his colleagues!

"At the Yaba Higher College, the only and highest tertiary institution at the time, he spent only one year to finish the three-year course! Even more amazing was the fact that from the day he entered elementary school to the end of his academic career at Yaba Higher College, he never took 2nd position, he was always first in the class. It is on record that even when he gained double promotion from Form 2 to Form 4 in Government College, Ibadan, he still came first from the very first term and retained that position to the end. Over the years, Government College, Ibadan had produced many giants in academics and diverse professions but Hon. Adegoke Adelabu was evidently the best student the College ever produced; till today, his academic record has not been beaten anywhere in the world!".

Part of that record has been preserved for posterity in Adelabu's book, Africa In Ebullition. Written in 1952, it is truly the work of an original thinker and a man with an eye on history. In it, Adelabu sets out original ideas about self-government and the responsibility of freedom. It is his political treatise in which he articulates ideas about education, Africanisation, agriculture, industrialization, as well as his political aims, goals, vision and ideals. Africa in Ebullition is written in robust language and with the confidence of a man who was sure of his onions. His submissions on Nigerian Unity, types of leadership, parties and ideologies and his call for revolution remain fresh and relevant more than 50 years later. Adelabu was an optimist, a man ahead of his time; like all men who died early in their prime, we are left to imagine what he would have become had he lived to old age.

The deliberate attempt to forget Adelabu and erase his value is part of the collateral damage of the politics of acrimony that dominated Yorubaland for more than 50 years, and a national culture of selective remembrance. Adelabu also did not have anyone to help construct his place in history. His children were young at the time of his death. His wives were parceled out to relations under the system of leviration. In the past 50 years, all his seven sons have died. But recently there have been attempts to revive the memory of this forgotten nationalist. His grandchildren in collaboration with the Jericho Club of Ibadan have published a new edition of Africa in Ebullition, and a biography written by Yinka Adelabu and Lekan Olagunju.

The latter remains the only easy-to-hand biography of the man, Kenneth Post and George Jenkens's The Price of Liberty, an earlier biography now obviously out of print. To mark the 50th anniversary of Adelabu's death, the Ibadan Foundation, currently led by Dr Lekan Are, has now instituted an annual Adegoke Adelabu Memorial Lectures. The first lecture in the series titled "Life and Times of Honourable Adegoke Adelabu" was delivered by Dr Omololu Olunloyo on Thursday, March 20. Olunloyo's lecture is most engaging, especially in the parts where he takes on Professor Jide Osuntokun who had made uncomplimentary remarks about Adelabu in his biography of Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, another illustrious Yoruba leader and Nigerian statesman.

In celebrating the life and times of Adegoke Adelabu we are painfully reminded of how much of what he represents and the values that defined his time and politics are now in short supply: the quality education that he received; his principled stand on issues, his courage and commitment and his ideas about the future. Adelabu was a parliamentarian and in the parliament of his time, there were great debaters, men who used their brains even when disagreeing with the opposition. Today, there are no men of ideas anywhere in the Nigerian parliament, and the opposition is long dead.

The Adelabu lecture last Thursday took place in Ibadan, now under the political control of Chief Lamidi Ariyibi Adedibu. In his informative book, What I Saw in the Politics of Ibadanland, Adedibu expresses admiration for Adelabu, and his contributions. Unfortunately on the same streets of Ibadan, where Adelabu promoted the ideas of progress and the politics of principles, a new breed, Adedibu, and the recruits into his garrison, have introduced a culture of unreconstructed thuggery in the service of what Adelabu deplored as "Political Booty Ltd".

Robot  # 1 | 23.03.2008 23:10

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