By Owei Lakemfa
NIGERIAN Students were in disarray in 1981. After their heroic but deadly battle against military dictatorship three years earlier, they were now in factions.

The Obasanjo regime had in 1978, sought to smash the Student Movement by banning the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS). Students had responded by establishing a bigger umbrella, the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) which incorporated students from all tertiary institutions.

In 1979, the NANS had an interim leadership from the Yaba College of Technology with Danlad Oladele as Chair and Ayodele Akele as Secretary General. The following year, it put a constitution in place and elected Tanimu Kurfi as its founding President. Within months, Kurfi (who later became Chief Economic Adviser to President Yar’Adua) was victimised and expelled from school, and NANS was in a spiral.

The rump of the Kurfi Executive claimed leadership of NANS as did the former interim leadership, and student leaders from the Universities of Lagos (UNILAG) Benin (UNIBEN) and Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN)

In order to reunify the NANS and nurture it through its teething stage, a Pan-Nigeria student group, the Patriotic Youth Movement of Nigeria (PYMN) met at the University of Ife (now OAU) to scout for conscientious and committed student leaders to contest the November, 1981 NANS elections.

As the then Secretary General of the PYMN, I led a delegation to the Eastern Zone where the NANS Secretariat comprising the President and Secretary General, had been zoned. With Femi Fatonode, now a lecturer at Accra Poly, Ghana, we began with a visit to UNIBEN that was to host the NANS Convention. The Pariotic Youth League on the campus was our focus.

However, our main target was UNN where we hoped to raise candidates. UNN students were known as lions and lionesses. We had discussions with the leader of the radical students on the campus, Femi Ahmed (now Pastor Femi Israel) We succeeded, but headed to the University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT) First to campaign for our UNN candidates especially when the leading contender for the NANS Presidency was from the University of Science and Technology (UST) in the same city. Secondly to raise an alternative set of candidates in the event something went wrong with the UNN arrangement. Our UNIPORT comrades presented Nimi Wariboko to run for the Presidency as back up if our UNN comrades failed to run.

Then, we headed for the University of Calabar (UNICAL) where we met the leader of the radical students, a quiet Fisheries student, called Komo (Kayode Komolafe, now Deputy Managing Director of THISDAY Newspapers) He promised to ask some UNICAL students who spend holidays in Benin, to attend the Convention.

At the Convention, our UNN candidates did not show up, nor did the alternatives from UNIPORT. We became despondent and wrote off students from UNN whom we thought were more of domestic cats than the lions they claim to be. On the eve of the NANS elections, we decided to draft two UNICAL students, Chris Mammah and Eddie Igharo who were on holidays in Benin to run. Incredibly, they won!

The year 1986 was a very difficult one; the Babangida dictatorship was in full bloom. Dissent was repressed. The NANS which was under siege, managed to hold its convention, and elected two UNN students, Emma Ezeazu as President and Jonas Awodi as Secretary General. Given the past experiences with students from UNN, some did not have much confidence in them; what good can come from UNN students?

But they turned out to be true lions who led Nigerian students during one of the worst periods in our history. It was a season in which the regime shot dead four students of the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) banned student unionism in all campuses and occupied the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC)

NANS, led by Ezeazu was proscribed and the regime set up the General Abisoye and Justice Akanbi Panels on student unrest. Also, many activists were on the run or in detention, and the regime decreed that there can be no alternative to the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and the IMF Conditionalities it had imposed on the country.

Ezeazu as NANS President was often on the move or lay low to evade capture by the military. When his one year term expired, he could not handover as it was too dangerous for student leaders to congregate. He had to lead our country’s students for another year. That was how, without subverting the NANS constitution, he became the longest serving NANS President. In those two years, I met the quiet and unassuming Ezeazu a number of times. He never complained. He never compromised, gave up, sell out or surrendered.

It was therefore not surprising that he went on to become a champion of the voiceless. He spent all his life in the service of the people whether as Executive Director of the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) the Community Action for Popular Participation (CAPP) or the Alliance for Credible Elections (ACE)

But Ezeazu and Awodi (who unfortunately died early) were not the only lions that roared from UNN. One day, at a conference of the NLC, a slim gentleman approached, wanting to know whether I am Owei Lakemfa. He introduced himself as Chima Ubani. We went into an embrace. I knew the name; one of the courageous and committed student leaders then under attack.

Ubani, who like Ezeazu went on to lead the CLO, was an outstanding student and mass leader. He went on to become Secretary General of the Campaign For Democracy (CD) the umbrella organization of patriots who organized and led the Pro-democracy protests which forced Babangida out of power. Like Ezeazu, it was difficult to associate the quiet, unassuming gentleman, Ubani, with radical activism. Tragically, on September 21, 2005, while returning from an anti-fuel price increase rally in Maiduguri, Chima Ubani fell on the road to Potiskum, never to rise again. Then on May 18, 2015, the lion, Emma Ezeazu, champion of democracy and peoples’ rights, passed on. An eternal farewell is planned for him next weekend in Onitsha. What a loss!