The ‘Balarabe Musa moment’ in Nigerian progressive politics: a critical tribute

November 29, 2020

Biodun Jeyifo

 

I THINK I speak for most Nigerians that were adults by June 1981 that when Alhaji Balarabe Musa died two weeks ago, the first thing that came to mind was the fact that Musa was not only the first governor of a state to be impeached in Nigeria, but he was also the only governor that was impeached, not for corruption or abuse of office, not for dereliction of duty or money laundering, and not for theft of public funds, but for impeachment itself. In other words, the impeachment of Balarabe was due to impeachment itself as the primary or only causation. This brings to mind Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman in which the dramatic action begins with a rousing, lyrical praise of the protagonist of the play, Elesin Oba, as the only man to have ever died, not from any disease, not from any accident, not from homicide by another person but from Death itself.

If this seems baffling or confusing, think, compatriots, of the stated or alleged reason given for the impeachment of the other six state governors that have been impeached in our postcolonial political history. Depreye Solomon Alamieyeseigha, Bayelsa State: theft of public funds, abuse of office, money laundering. Rashidi Adewolu Ladoja, Oyo State: abuse of office, corruption. Ayo Fayose, Ekiti State: mismanagement of public funds and alleged serial killings of many persons belonging to the state opposition parties. Peter Obi, Anambra State: gross misconduct and abuse of office. Joshua Dariye, Plateau State: alleged siphoning of public funds and money laundering. Murtala Nyako, Adamawa State: abuse of office, gross misconduct.

Yes, of the seven state executive governors that have ever been impeached in our country, only Balarabe Musa was impeached by and of impeachment itself. In plain language, Balarabe was impeached only because the political instrument or weapon of impeachment was available to be deployed for Musa’s removal by legislators of the state opposition party, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). This singularity of Musa’s impeachment is what is indicated in what I declare in the title of this tribute as the ‘Balarabe moment’ in Nigerian progressive politics. In the death of Comrade Balarabe Musa, we have lost one of the two or three most influential moral and ideological touchstones in progressive politics in Nigeria and Africa and the ‘Balarabe moment” on which I will concentrate in this tribute is only one of the many indicators of his achievement, his legacy. For this reason, permit me to delve carefully into the intricacies of this ‘moment’ before overlaying it with a profile of Balarabe’s place among his generation of frontline Leftists, progressive politicians and intellectuals

The impeachment of Balarabe Musa in June 1981 sent shock waves through the national body politic. In the first place, at this time, impeachment had never occurred in Nigeria. More important, the dominant NPN legislators in the Kaduna State Assembly could not and did not present any shred, any iota of corruption or wrongdoing by Musa precisely because there was none to be excavated and displayed. Most important of all, before his formal impeachment, Balarabe had very astutely boxed the NPN legislators into a moral quagmire by rejecting every one of their offers to “settle” them by giving some of them posts in his cabinet. Let me  repeat this: the NPN legislators made it abundantly clear that all they were asking from Musa were some cabinet positions. They felt a “natural” entitlement to this demand on the basis of two factors. In the first place, their electoral majority in the Kaduna House  of Assembly was so overwhelming that it seemed fairly obvious that for any of Musa’s policies to be passed into law, he would need their support. More important was the NPN legislators’ view that they were not asking for anything that was new or unprecedented in Nigeria and other parts of the developing world: Don’t we all know that “you scratch my back, I scratch your back” is the modus operandi of politics and governance in Nigeria and other nations and regions of the developing world?

For nearly two years before his eventual impeachment, Balarabe Musa was locked into this moral and political seesaw with the Kaduna State NPN legislators as the whole nation waited with bated breath to know where and how the battle would end. Would Musa stick to his guns and absolutely refuse to cut a deal with the NPN hyenas? Or would they, the thieving barawo legislators, compel the immoveable governor to face up to the specter of impeachment and give them what they were demanding? I don’t remember that the bookmakers in the betting industry placed any odds on which combatant, the governor or the legislators, would triumph but if they had done so, I think that most Nigerians at the time would have placed their bets on the NPN legislators winning over Musa. Indeed, among the community of Nigerian progressives at the time, the weight of opinion was that Musa should give the NPN legislators the few cabinet positions they were demanding in order not to jeopardize or neutralize the achievement of all the progressive and egalitarian policies and projects of the PRP party in Kaduna State.

Well, this is all history now, past history at that; we know what happened. Balarabe Musa refused to cut a deal with the NPN legislators in order to avert impeachment and on June 23, 1981 he was duly and effectively impeached, though with head unbowed and radical will unbent. This we should note that: unlike all the other governors who have been impeached in our country, as a matter of principle and honour, Balarabe Musa never cringed, never kowtowed to the legislators who impeached him. As a matter of fact, his impeachment seemed to have lionized him immeasurably and prepared him for the role he would thenceforth play in Nigerian politics for the rest of his life. At this point in the discussion, we come to the real historical import of the “Balarabe moment’ in Nigerian progressive politics. What was this?

Well, it turned out that apart from the NPN legislators, indeed far greater than the NPN, it was his mentor and spiritual and ideological guide, the saintly Mallam Aminu Kano, that Balarabe Musa was “fighting” in his battle with the Kaduna State NPN legislators. How was this so? Well, by the time that the crisis of Musa’s impeachment was consummated, Aminu Kano had initiated an ideological accommodation or alignment with the NPN at the national level and this had led to the breakup of PRP into two factions, one faction led by Aminu Kano and the other led by Balarabe Musa himself in conjunction with the late Abubakar Rimi, the then PRP Governor of Kano State. Permit me to make this point plainer: in fighting the NPN in Kaduna State, Musa was also in effect fighting his mentor, Aminu Kano who was in league with the NPN at the national level. This break with Aminu Kano constituted the core, the essence of the ‘Balarabe Musa moment’ in Nigerian progressive politics.

We must be respectful of the complexities and contradictions of Nigerian politics in saying that Aminu Kano initiated an accommodation of his faction of the PRP to the NPN, a “softening” of relations with that party’s conservative, feudalist and reactionary roots. This is because if we take into account the series of mutations and metamorphoses that linked the NPN with the Nigerian People’s Congress (NPC) of the past and both the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) of the present, then we must admit that most Nigerian Marxists, radicals and progressives that have ever become involved in Nigerian party politics have, at one time or the other, joined or aligned themselves to the ruling party at the center – as Aminu Kano did in the early 1980s.

Indeed, I make bold to say that Balarabe Musa is about the only ‘big name” politician in Nigerian political history that never joined or made his peace with any of the mutations of Nigeria’s ruling party at the center – the NPC, the NPN, the PDP, or the APC. Is it any wonder that it was Balarabe Musa who also initiated the formation of the Congress of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP), an alliance of all the opposition parties as an alternative to the APC and the PDP, this being a formation that Musa also led until two years ago when declining health forced him to retire from politics. If the thread or logic of what I am arguing here is not yet clear, let me make it unambiguously clear: it was the ‘Balarabe Musa moment’ in the years between 1979 and 1981 when he fought both the NPN legislators in Kaduna State and Aminu Kano and his faction of the PRP at the national level, it was this moment that defined the unique and essential role that Musa was to play in Nigerian progressive politics. Paradoxically, while he lost that battle and was impeached, he won the war in the fight against the dilution of radical, progressive politics in our country into the reactionary opportunism of our ruling parties at the center. Permit me to make this as unmistakable as possible: there was no price for buying Balarabe’s connivance with corruptive and oppressive power in our country precisely because he could never be bought.

I should add here that Balarabe Musa never sought and never accepted a post with any military regime that, like the NPC, the NPN, the PDP or the APC, justified its corrupt and oppressive rule on the claim of unity against disunity and centralized power at the center against irredentist and ethnocentric loyalties in the states. As a matter of fact, with the possible exception of the Western Region under Chief Awolowo’s welfarism and incipient social democracy, the PRP’s Kaduna State and Kano State under Musa and Rimi fared much better in governance and prospects for genuine development than anything ever achieved by the central government under either military or civilian politics. Virtually all those who were with him in the PRP, including Rimi, either served in the military and/or civilian governments claiming national unity as their raison d’etre.

I met Balarabe Musa in person only once. This was in either late 1981 or early 1982. I was in my last year as National President of ASUU. On a visit to London and being a guest at the home of the late John La Rose, my host informed me one morning that he was going to visit Musa at his hotel. Well, at the time, everyone knew that shortly after his impeachment, Musa had left Nigeria for the UK apparently in need of some respite from the long battle against impeachment. At any rate, John informed me that he had told Musa that the ASUU National President would be coming with him for the visit. Indeed, John further informed me that he would only stay for a short while, the purpose of the visit being a chance for Musa and I to talk, man to man, Marxist to Marxist, home away from home. Needles to say, this news pleased me a lot.

My discussion with Musa lasted nearly four hours. I am sure that those who knew him better than me or interacted more closely with him will confirm the impression I had about him after this meeting: a tremendous force of personality; a self-confidence, a self-possession that made you realize, from first to last, that you were in the presence of a man with steely willpower and boundless resolve. There was a small downside to this: Musa was so filled with things to say that he seemed barely to listen to what you, his audience or interlocutor, had to say. Seeing this in him, I wondered how those conniving and hapless NPN legislators in Kaduna could have ever hoped to bend Musa to their will!

But then I thought: isn’t it necessary for a revolutionary to listen and listen well to others? Going by this intuition, is it ungenerous of me to link this perception of Balarabe Musa to the one major critique that I have of the long years and decades of his otherwise exemplary post-impeachment politics: his popular base, his mass appeal seemed to have declined or never came close to what it had been in the ‘Balarabe Musa moment’. While he never tired of voicing his solidarity with the poor and the marginalized of our country and our continent, I never read an account of him leading a popular, mass protest. He was dominated by discourses among the political and intellectual elite. Is it fair for me to come to this judgment from only one personal encounter with him? I do not think so.

The essence of Balarabe Musa’s legacy is beyond dispute: he never ever comprised with the forces of reaction and oppression and the agents of corruption and misrule. May Allah (and the god of revolution) grant him peaceful eternal repose.

 

Biodun Jeyifo [email protected]

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