By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

The week when the Justice Doris Okuwobi Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Lekki Massacre and the #EndSARS uprising in Lagos of October 2020 submitted its report is a good time for a retrospective on dissent in Nigerian history.

This week also coincides with the 72nd Anniversary of a lethal landmark in the history of dissent in Nigeria: the massacre by the colonial police on November 18, 1949 of 21 coal-miners in Iva Valley, Enugu.

What follows is a bit of a tour of the tapestry of the Nigerian civic space and why it needs to be preserved. It will show three things: First, Nigeria’s civic space has always been raucous through the ages. Second, it has historically been defined Nigeria by dissent.

Third, it has also always been a source of profit for Nigeria’s elite. Fourth, the most avid among these have been politicians, traditional rulers, lawyers and soldiers. I will highlight a few landmarks briefly to show that in the #EndSARS generation are the latest in a supply-line of Nigerian traditions of dissent as old as the origins of the country’s modern history.

For Mahmud Aminu

This also happens to be the week in which Mahmud Aminu was born 53 years ago. Over 30 years ago, in July 1991, I visited the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos. The military were in power; the prison held many high-value detainees and access was not easy, but there were people on the inside who were committed to ideals higher than regime interests.

They informed me while there that they had custody of the leadership of the National Association Nigerian Students, NANS, then the most active organised body of dissent in Nigeria. They made it possible for me to see these detainees, led as president by a lanky under-graduate, Mahmud Aminu. Also detained with Mahmud was the association’s general-secretary, Chima Okereke. Both of them were final year law students of the University of Jos.

Among the detainees also was Bamidele Aturu, whose lamentable death in 2014 at the untimely age of 49 robbed the country of an extraordinary advocate. He chaired the NANS Mobilisation Committee but was in fact the Svengali of the group.

Aturu had already achieved national fame half a decade earlier when, as an act of conscientious objection, he declined at the passing out of his National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, in Niger State, to accept his NYSC award from the then military governor, Lawan Gwadabe.

Having returned to the university to read law, he had also become a prisoner of conscience. They were joined by others in the Ikoyi Prison, including Mahmud’s Vice-President, Naseer Kura; as well as Bunmi Olusona, Funso Omogbehin and Christian Akanni.

The abduction of these student leaders by the state occurred in different locations in Nigeria around May 1991. By the time I saw them, they had vanished for nearly two months with no one able to account for their whereabouts. Nuhu Aliyu, who died last August, was then the Assistant Inspector-General, AIG, of Police for Intelligence and Investigations.

In retirement, he represented Niger North in the Senate from 1999 to 2007. Eight years before he became a Senator, on June 11, 1991, AIG Aliyu announced that over 200 student leaders were in detention under the State Security (Detention of Persons) Decree No. 2 of 1984.

The crime of these student leaders was that they were mobilising for a national protest against military misrule, emblematised then by the interminable and ruinous transition to civil rule programme of General Ibrahim Babangida.

The prison officials informed me that they were under instructions to deny the students any visits. I was the head of the legal directorate of the Civil Liberties Organisation, CLO, then the leading human rights organisation in Nigeria.

ALSO READ: Nigerians starve, FG serves falsehood

The decree under which they were detained precluded lawful legal recourse against their detention. The then Chief Judge of Lagos, Ligali Ayorinde, assigned our case seeking their urgent release to Nureini Abiodun Kessington, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, DPP, of Lagos State whom the military appointed high court judge in 1989 against the objections of judicial fraternity in Lagos State. Justice Kessington was unpredictable.

I recall the case first came up on a Thursday morning. The previous day, I had visited the law offices of the doyen of those kinds of cases, Kanmi Isola-Osobu, in his office opposite the Panti Police Station in Yaba, to brief him. Kanmi was lawyer to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and to the student movement.

When I turned up at the High Court in Igbosere, prepared to argue the case for the release of the students, Justice Kessington stood down proceedings and asked me into his chambers. As I entered, he had lit up a stick of cigarette and behind rings of cigarette smoke, let out a huge laugh: “You want me to order soldiers around, ehn?” he bellowed. He told me he could easily issue an order for the release of the student leaders but that he would not issue an order that “the military boys” would ignore.

Going back in time, he told me the story of how he was appointed a judge and went out of his way to reassure me that the students will be released but that it would require him doing something unorthodox. When we returned into the court hall, the judge called up the case again and summarily adjourned it by one week.

On the adjourned date, the judge took a few cases, then asked the registrar to call up the case of the student leaders. We had mobilised a few people to be present in court as supporters. When the case was called up, the judge congratulated me for getting my boys out and simply struck out the case.

He invited me into chambers again and told me he had gone to see the soldiers who ordered the arrest of the students and explained to them why they should release them. He also warned them, he said, that he would embarrass them if they did not release the students by the next adjourned date. As he went into court that morning, they sent him a message saying the student leaders had been released. Since he had given us what we wanted, he said, he would strike out the case.

All of those student leaders went on to become citizens of consequence. Despite the best efforts of the military and university authorities to stop them from graduating or becoming lawyers, Abdul Mahmud Aminu, Chima Okereke and Bamidele Aturu would go on to graduate and be admitted to the Nigerian Bar in 1993. Naseer Kura and Mahmud became delegates to the National Conference of 2014. Theirs is another generation that suffered for dissent in Nigeria. They were not the first nor would they be the last.

In the Beginning

In 1851, the British intervened in the struggle over for the Obaship of Lagos between Akitoye and Kosoko, resolving it in favour of the former, who was reinstated as Oba, a seat from which he had been de-stooled in 1845 by Kosoko. In 1853, Oba Dosunmu succeeded his father, Oba Akitoye and would proceed in 1861 to conclude the cession of Lagos to the British.

Two years later, in July 1855, Christopher Sapara Williams, whose paternal roots were in Ilesha, was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Admitted to the Bar of the Inner Temple in England in November 1879, Sapara Williams returned to Lagos, where, on January 13, 1888, he became the first Nigerian enrolled to practise as a lawyer. He went on to become a quite influential political actor over much of the next quarter century until his untimely death in 1915. He is buried at the Ajele Cemetry, now occupied by the Ajele Stadium.

In 1885, just as the countries of Imperial Europe concluded their carve up of Africa in Berlin, Oba Dosunmu died. His son, Oba Oyekan 1, succeeded him. At the death of Oba Oyekan 1 on September 30, 1900, a fierce succession battle ensued in which the leading lawyers of the day took sides.

Christopher Sapara Williams was a lawyer in that dispute. When the dust settled, Oba Dosunmu’s grand-son, Eshugbayi Eleko, ascended the throne in 1901 to one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of Lagos. This period also coincided with the colonial consolidation in the territory that would become Nigeria. In the inevitable conflict between the colonists and dissenting natives, lawyers proved pivotal.

The Eleko proved to be a chronic dissenter around two issues: racial segregation privileging Whites, and free expression for native populations. Over a century later, these same issues – discrimination and freedom of expression – and how we react to both continue to define Nigeria.

To be concluded

Prof. Odinkalu, a human rights activisit, wrote from Abuja

Vanguard News Nigeria