AYO OBE AT 70: Politics Is The Art Of The Possible

Prominent legal practitioner, Ayo Obe, is one of the most recognisable icons of the June 12 struggle and the Bringbackourgirls campaign. Her recent ascension into the septugenarian club was to coincide with the conferment on her of the National Award of the Officer of the Order of the Niger by President Bola Tinubu. In this chat, she goes down the memory lane and drops nuggets about the advancement of insurgencies in the country.

Excerpts:-

How does 70 feel?
Not much different, frankly. At the end of the day you know you are in the departure lounge. As you get older, you feel stiffer and so on although because I do litigation, I still go to court, still have cases but effectively myself and my partner Chief Sonibare have closed our physical office so we just sort of work from home. In my case I go to court.

It’s been 11 years since the 15th of April abduction of the Chibok girls. How has the Nigerian child fared since then?
I am not a child rights advocate The issue of Bring Back Our Girls is the responsibility of the state to account for children, particularly children that were put into its care and the reaction of many Nigerian women when they saw that the government of the day tried to say, “oh, it’s very sad but we just have to move on”. We had Buni Yadi, the children there were killed so we can understand the idea but these children are alive. They have been kidnapped. You can’t be expected to just say “that’s a shame”, and move on.

When I said you were the last woman standing in the Bring Back Our Girls Movement, you laughed. Who else?
We don’t come out every Saturday now. We recently decided that we would continue to meet at least one Saturday a month. We are getting ready to hand over the direction of the campaign over to be Chibok Girls themselves. Some of them were rescued, finished their education . We were standing in the gap for the Chibok Girls and now they are ready to stand up for themselves.

The Murtala Mohamed Foundation are compiling a definitive list which shows what happened to every one of the 276 girls that were abducted. Some of them escaped during the abduction. They started to renovate the roundabout where we meet.

Some of them were recovered during advances of the Nigerian Armed Forces and some of them were released as a result of negotiations by the government of President Buhari. But we still have something like 90 of them unaccounted for so we say that’s not good enough. We want to know what happened. For certain some of them have died in captivity and until government accounts for all of them, we cannot let go.

What is the body language of the Tinubu administration over the issue?
It’s as if the issue is someone else’s problem except that there are people who are involved in the campaign who are also members of the administration such as the Minister of Finance and Hadiza Bala Usman who have attended our sit outs and been helping us. It’s not that every twist and turn of the negotiation should be made public but we expect they will be pushing the case within the administration.And when we bring out the comprehensive list of the Chibok Girls then it will be a matter of, now explain what you intend to do with those that we know are alive and repatriating the remains of those who have perished.

In 2017, you warned in an interview that kidnaping, if left unchecked could go out of hand. This was 2017. Is there more criminality now or is it just more politicking?
Remember that kidnapping was treated almost like a joke in the wake of the kidnappings in the Niger Delta. Nigeria’s Delta militancy grew out of the fact that people who were hired to help people win elections had been cast adrift and effectively told that they should live off the land and they started with kidnapping the oil executives. It was a method of making money but also parlayed into a political statement that these people are making money from our land and not leaving anything for the people.

On the contrary, they were polluting the area. Kidnapping then became big business. I had a friend who went to Aba at that time. It became a ghost town and you would hardly see people wearing decent clothes driving nice cars. It got to a point when kidnappers would stop a keke and look at those in it. They were kidnapping people for 10,000 naira. It became very big until the federal government decided to effectively go in. It’s not as if the kidnappers were unknown. The army went in and life returned to Aba.

It was very glaring. The governor of the day did not want the news to come out. Two things happened, one was the kidnapping of school children. The other was some journalists and it became news. Kidnapping became some kind of business confined to the Southern part of the country.

You know the story of how Boko Haram came and they decided that they needed to learn how to be proper terrorists so they could take on the Nigerian government which had arrested so many of their members and when President Obasanjo tried to mediate between them and government, they gave him a list of their members who had been arrested that they should be handed back them but it so happened that most of them had died in prison. So, they went to learn from Al Shabab in Somalia because they felt the way they were treated did not suggest good faith. It was the start of their own insurgency to start this mass raid on schools to make education unattractive and that was why I got involved. If we are talking about trying to reflect the federal character but the people who are coming from one part of the country are not measuring up because they are being driven away from modern education, then it puts the unity of the country at risk and for that reason we need to do what we can to encourage people particularly girls to pursue modern education so they can compete with their counterparts in the rest of the country.

It’s fashionable for us to sneer at people from the North and their qualifications but it’s not because they dont have brains but because they are being dissuaded. And then of course the fact that it can happen to anybody. One of the things that Bringbackourgirls did was an audit of schools in Lagos to see if anybody can wander in to take a child. It’s one thing to take huge batches of children like we see in the North but what if you can just take one or two? We had to draw government’s attention.

What can be done at this point?
It’s time for the Inspector General of Police to establish a special anti kidnapping unit. He should pick the officers that will man it, people that can be trusted. Kidnapping is just an evil thing but now it has become a business. Call it banditry or whatever. The bandits who are foolish go and kidnap large numbers of people from poor villages and kidnap children but the smart ones go for people who have money. Many people who pay ransom just pay their ransom and go their way. They just try to put it behind them so we don’t really know the extent of the problem and if we are talking of security, these are low hanging fruits that ought to be grabbed by a government that is serious.

When I am saying prayers, I say let the factors that are turning people to insurgencies be dealt with because it really comes from lack. I am not saying it’s the only readon but we have to do what we can because the armed forces have successes in raiding them but if the stream of people joining is not turned off then it’s a continuing problem.

In your informed opinion has the matter of June 12 been laid to rest?
MKO Abiola died in prison. How can it be laid to rest? I had left GOK Ajayi’s chambers by the time he was representing MKO Abiola after he came back and had been arrested and incarcerated by the Abacha regime.

When Babangida cancelled the election, people were looking for a peaceful resolution. As I understand it the expectation was that after Babangida had been forced to step aside, the Nigerian people came out first of all on demonstration and when they decided that they would slaughter so many people on the streets of Lagos, the Nigerian people decided they would stay at home. Babangida handed over to Ernest Sonekan and in that atmosphere, I am not surprised if Abiola was negotiating to say, where does Sonekan come in to the equation? I won the election. You can’t just swap me for another Egba man. It doesn’t work like that.

It was believed that Abacha, in removing Sonekan would actualise the mandate of June 12. You might say Abiola was naive but I don’t blame him for negotiating with Abacha to actualise his mandate. I don’t have any criticism for that.

We needed a peaceful resolution but when Abacha took over unfortunately, he decided to seize power and do what Babangida had been unable to do which was try and succeed himself to remain in power.

What June 12 stood for was Nigerians speaking in one voice. Kano voted for Abiola against Tofa and all of those things that had never happened before or since.

We voted for a Moslem Moslem ticket and it has happened again.

Should this even matter?
Politics is the art of the possible. You enter politics to turn the world into what you would like it to be but you don’t get to do that by pretending it is already what you want it to be. If you have a Muslim Muslim ticket it should not make a difference to how citizens are treated. Then the world will become a place where such things don’t matter. Abiola never got the chance to show that Nigerians who were not Muslims were not going to be disadvantaged.

The next time was when Ribadu ran for president with Fola Adeola and Nigerians for one reason or another did not support it. Then President Tinubu came with a Muslim Muslim ticket and more Nigerians supported it than ever. When

Awolowo ran for president on the platform of the Unity Party of Nigeria, he chose a running mate from the South East. Probably he had this weight of conscience on him. He needed to show the East that he wasn’t against the East but of course it did not have the desired outcome.

So do you think that in honouring members of the pro ïemocracy squad, the Tinubu Administration did enough to recognize the many contributions of women?
There were two women on that list. One of them was dead and the other elderly and that was me. So obviously I think that the contribution of women was overlooked. When Buhari made June 12 Democracy day as opposed to the mean spirited way in which Abdusalami and Obasanjo made the handover date May 29 just to be able to avoid making June 12 a significant day in Nigeria’s history; as at that time in 2018 only one of the two democracy activists had been given any National honour and that was Olisa Agbakoba and he had been given an OON for services to the legal profession.

He was Convener for United Action for Democracy but at least he has been given. It was actually UAD that took up Abacha with our 5 Million Man March. We had worked to unite the movement between those who said “On June 12 We Stand” and those for Sovereign National Conference. Up until that time there had only been Olisa.

When President Buhari came as a military dictator on the cusp of 1984, Gani Fawehinmi had defied the Nigerian Bar Association by saying he would appear before a tribunal in which a judge was a junior member. The position of the NBA was that if you are going to have a military tribunal, that’s ok, but if a High Court judge was going be a member of that tribunal that High Court judge must preside. He cannot be sitting in a subordinate position to military officers.

Gani was more focused on the idea of fighting corruption and said that he would appear. He took out a half page advert in the National Concord of Tuesday the 11th June 1993 saying he is not voting in this election, it’s a sham. He also did it to Kingibe.

That was the same with many menbers of the pro democracy movement. They did not trust Babangida.

I voted because I like to vote. Through the annulment, Gani was one of those saying, we are standing on June 12. He was given an award by the president and I was asked to give some remarks on that occasion. I did not list those of us who are alive. I said, there are those who gave their lives to the struggle, 96 people slain on the streets of Lagos on the 6th of July 1993 when we had our first major demonstration. Kudirat Abiola, also slain on the streets if Lagos on June 4th, Chief Alfred Rewane and Alhaja Suliat Adedeji. Those like Fawehinmi did not live to see this day. I mentioned Dr Beko Ransom Kuti who was leader of the Campaign for Democracy and Chima Ubani who had been seconded by the CLO to be the organising Secretary of the CD. I mentioned Festus Iyayi, Bamidele Aturu, Olàitan Oyerinde, Emma Ready, Mohammed Sule and Oronto Douglas who had died before 2018.

There were a lot of us who were alive. On that day we had Kokori. I do remember Dr Jo Okei Odumakin who was arrested and taken into custody. She is an expert in unarmed combat so when the police were trying to arrest her she was throwing men left and right until they brought out their guns. She is a heroine of June 12 anyhow you want to look at it. Even the Americans recognised her. Even Nike Nedum.

I don’t know the criteria by which the list was drawn. Many of them are political allies.

When Buhari finished at first they said they were going to add to the list. All of a sudden everybody was a June 12 activist.

Then we lost Abba Kyari who had been our advocate in the Presidency to COVID. It was shelved effectively. The president has done well.

Even when Buhari did it in 2018 people were saying all the Yorubas are now going to vote for him. It was not an ethnic based struggle. Why would you see it on those terms?
I am a big believer in the Oliver Twist approach: this is Good, we want some more!

I know the sacrifice. On the day of the 5 million Man March my law partner Supo Sonibare had come with us. We went in 3 or 4 danfo buses but when we got to the venue, Olisa (Agbakoba) said, let me go and talk to these police who had occupied Yaba Bus Stop . The next thing he had the butt of a gun smashed accross his face and was taken into custody and a picture of him with his eyes all swollen made headlines accross the world the following day. The danfo driver made a quick reversal. In those days you had to have a permit in order to have a demonstration or a march.

I don’t believe that the chapter is closed. We have heard the story of Nicolas Winton who in 1938 when he was a diplomat in Czechoslovakia was issuing papers to Jewish children so they could be brought out of the clutches of the Nazis and saved many people that way. On his 90th birthday the family took him to a theatre and they said anybody here who was saved by Nicolas Winton or who is a descendant of someone who would not be here if not for this man should stand up and everybody stood up but this man. He was 93 when Queen Elizabeth got round to knighting him. He would live to enjoy his knighthood for 10 more years.

In Nigeria we do post humous awards but we shouldn’t have to wait until people die. There is a danger of the honours given of being perceived as only available for those the president considers to be on his side.

Talking about a Sovereign National Conference….should we be having one?
We saw what happened when Goodluck Jonathan tried to hold a National Conference. We tended in the media to focus on the fact that they wanted 56 states created and things like that. There were so many important recommendations in that report and what surprisingly disappointed me was that President Jonathan did not pick any of them. Buhari really went out of his way to see some of the things that people had been calling for attended to . The Not to Young to Run Act. We tend to think that democracy is an event. It’s not an event, it’s a process. They had elections in Norway because somebody thought the government of Norway are not doing well enough and we over here think Norway is like paradise. What can they possibly have to complain about?

Democracy is not an end in itself. You choose the person that you think will do well and if they dont, you choose another one. Everything is not black and white. As John Keybe said, “When the facts change I change my opinion”.

What is the state of Civil Society in Nigeria?
I had made up my mind that once we returned to civil rule I would only be involved in single issue campaigs. Even Endsars was a single issue . The police need reform and having chaired the police reform committee in 2011. Many of the recommendations that we made, the government paid no attention. They picked what they liked and we are still where we are.

As one of those who survived June 12 what would your response be to those being sympathetic to a military coup at this time, comparing Nigeria to Bourkina Faso?
Let them go and live in Burkina Faso. The brutal military dictator is not even keeping his own people. You seize power because you’re complaining about the way the fight against the insurgency is being waged and then you are even worse at it than the civilians that you chased away. In Niger it was a case of, I had better jump before they jump on me but in Mali and Burkina Faso, they were fighting an insurgency and they have not brought it under control. On the contrary we now see a situation where Ukraine, because they are fighting Russia have said that one way they can weaken Russia is to support those whom Russia is fighting in Africa so suddenly, we see the insurgents having sophisticated weapons.

During the time of Obasanjo we used to talk about “Benevolent Dictatorship “. The Abacha dictatorship was not benevolent. The Babangida, Buhari dictatorships were not benevolent. We like to delude ourselves. I remember Obasanjo when he was a military dictator the president of Zaire came to him and he complained about the way Nigerian press had been traducing him and doing cartoons and rubishing him. Obasanjo just picked up that day’s Nigerian Tribune and showed him cartoons. Mobutu Sese Seko had to keep quiet.

So the Nigerian spirit is not one of cowardice. When Abacha came they said it was an acronym meaning “After Babangida Another Criminal has Arrived”. When we came out to oppose Abacha’s self succession plan the popular song of the day was, How many people soldier go kill….?

When the captain insists on steering the ship to the rocks and Mr Captain refuses to change course, it’s man overboard. The next thing we heard was Abacha had eaten apple and died.

That actually allowed them to take control of the transition and they were able to install Obasanjo. It was a bit like what they did with Ernest Sonekan. Abiola is dead…here is another Egba man, can you manage this one?

Talking about Endsars….
I read the coroner’s report and I am not one of those who believe there was a massacre. CNN were determined to present this story of massacre. I don’t watch CNN again because I just got so annoyed. I must say that I believed it because I had a friend who lives accross the water in Ikoyi so they could hear the sound of the shooting. There were a lot of people before it became a story that people wanted to run with because of the need for regime change, but when it comes to civil society there is a lot of things that should concern us.

When, for example the president goes to Benue State and all you can talk about is what he wore. It’s irrelevant. What did he say should be done and is it being done? That’s what I need to know. And having school children line up in the rain… What for?

Source: Vanguard News