General AbdulKareem Adisa

I think it was May 1997; I was just about three months into my job as the pioneer General Manager of the Kwara State Television Service in Ilorin, when I received an invitation to a meeting with General Abdulkareem Adisa. I had met him as governor of the old Oyo state. But like most people of my generation, he was an ‘unknown quantity’ in the context of the tapestry that is social life in Ilorin. More about this later.

On this day, I went to his house at the Ilorin GRA and would discover a couple of other people also waiting to see General Adisa. These included Professor Rotimi Fakeye, the Chief Medical Director of the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital; Professor Shehu Ahmad Jimoh of the University of Ilorin; Samuel Kolawole, the Managing Director of Trade Bank; Hajiya Zainab Oniyangi, wife of the Walin Ilorin and former minister, Akanbi Oniyangi; Justice Jimoh Lambo Akanbi and Hajia Ayinla who was the vice principal of the Queen Elizabeth School, Ilorin.

After a few minutes of bantering with these distinguished people, we were ushered into a large living room in the house, and a smiling General Adisa. He was then at the height of his power as Nigeria’s minister of works, and one who never seemed able to stop talking to the media, and who has cut a rather controversial image.

Adisa told us that he was trying to institute a scholarships scheme and had decided to search for a creditable group of people to run the scheme. It was his search that brought us together, and before long, we constituted the Board of Trustees of the Adisa Bakare Educational Endowment Fund (ABEEF). The fund was launched with much funfair, and we eventually collected over Twenty five million naira, which has been kept in a fixed deposit at the Trade Bank, ever since. Each year, since 1998, the Board of ABEEF has awarded scholarships to hundreds of indigent students to help their educational pursuit.

I found quite instructive the story General Adisa told us that evening about his life. He said that he was born into near abject poverty, and his father had in fact been a migrant labourer somewhere on the outskirts of Ibadan, the capital of the old Western Region. Adisa said that he was verv lucky to have received any form of education at air, and in fact praised the Nigerian military school system for giving him the opportunity to get a headstart in life.  His decision to institute the scholarships fund, was therefore a reflection of a passion that was coming from his life experience as a young boy. He knew that there were several young people like him out there who would not be able to reach their potentials in life, just because they don’t have somebody who could give a helping hand with the financing of their education. If he could step in, at least these young people would have been able to get the opportunity to become an asset to the community and our country.

The logic of his thought convinced all of us and we worked with a great deal of determination to get the finance funning. As it was, he would be attested for participation in the coup attempt against General Sani Abacha at the end of 1997, but that did not stop the work of the Adisa Bakare Educational Endowment Fund (ABEEF). We have continued to give out the scholarships, using a formula General Adisa himself worked out: Sixty percent to citizens of Ilorin Emirate; thirty percent to other local government areas of Kwara State and the remaining ten percent going to non-Kwarans, resident in the state.

It was quite instructive to note that by the time of his arrest for the 1997 coup attempt, General Adisa had become increasingly popular amongst the people of Ilorin Emirate as a philanthropist and promoter o f community development efforts. It came as a shock when he was arrested and it was also a kind of challenge to the spiritual prowess of the Ilorin community.

This is because after the arrest, the Mallamai in Ilorin began a series of special prayers in all the mosques of the Emirate, for the release of General Adisa. A leading Mallam in Ilorin told me during the period, that they had done, at the behest of the Emir of Ilorin, some special prayer, which had not been done for any individual in living memory. He had told me, that even if they had tied him to a stake, they would somehow have to release him! As it turned out, a sequence of events led to the release of General Adisa and the others, and his return to Ilorin, on a Friday, when people were massing for Jumat Service, witnessed an outpouring of jubilation and a crowd, the size of which I had never seen in Ilorin. It seemed that the spirit of Islam was truly strong in Ilorin afterall.

For anybody who had grown up in Ilorin, it is easy to notice some basic incongruities in the personality of the late General Adisa. His language and general style of speaking sometimes brash, often uncouth, are not typically Ilorin in content and form. These are directly related to the fact that he did not grow up in Ilorin. The South West where he grew up, seemed to have burnt an imprimatur on his language and behaviour. These are traits that Ilorin people generally find vulgar, unattractive and often offensive. However, the strength of General Adisa’s personality a single-minded commitment to find relevance assisted him to overcome this negative aspect of his persona.

Adisa discovered that total fidelity to Islam was the most constant aspect of the social existence of the Ilorin people; he plugged into the life of the community almost with a vengeance, and before long, he became an accepted member of the elite of Ilorin. In so doing, he overcame the debilitating poverty of his birth, the non-recognition of the earlier years and we might even say that he turned into strength the peculiar weaknesses of his life. How he did it must be sought in another unique side to his life. Most of Nigeria’s neo-colonial elite, especially the soldiers amongst them made so much fortune through a rogue process of privatisation of the state. Adisa benefited from this process during the nineteen nineties. However, while many of his colleagues would enjoy their wealth alone  with members of their nuclear families, General Adisa made a productive use of his wealth.

I don’t know of many people in our community who have invested in various employment and wealth generating ventures like General Abdulkareem Adisa. He made investments in Banking, with his AFONJA Community Bank; DISKABOG FARMS; DISKABOG HOSPITAL, DISKABOG RENTALS; a sprawling Resort named after his mother, called BELAWUAKANKE DIMENSIONS (BEKANDIMS). All of these organisations employ people from various parts of Nigeria, and in their different ways to remove several people from the streets.

General Adisa’s presence in the community in Ilorin extended to such areas of social life as visits to the sick, and the bereaved and the regular donation of money towards all forms community development projects. In my view, it is these acts of generosity and sincere engagement with the community that will for long be remembered about General Adisa. It is also these sides to his life, which brought out the genuine outpouring of emotions in Ilorin, when the news of his death broke last week.

Many commentators have underlined his sense of loyalty and fidelity to his military constituency. They are very correct reflections of General Adisa’s attitude. But a lot of the commentators did not bother to situate these elements of his person, within a larger context of the difficulties of his birth and upbringing; the poverty of a labouring family that was torn away from its roots in the context of a colonial political economy.

That political economy had instituted a taxation regime and the rudiments of a colonial capitalism which demanded labour in a cocoa cash crop region in Western Nigeria. Gen. Adisa’s father was drawn into that nexus and he (Adisa) was born into the deprivations so characteristic of that period in Nigerian history.  Adisa’s life might not have been different from thousands of other young people of his generation, for the break he got from the colonial military that was transforming at independence into the Nigerian army.

He lapped up the opportunity to begin to build-new friendships within an institution that had rigidly defined boundaries and codes of authority. The military and its ways was an escape from the poverty of a peasant surrounding in Western Nigeria, and it became everything away from the drudgery he would possibly have lived and died in, unknown and unsung. So desp ite all the odds, Adisa learnt his ropes as a “militician,” in a Nigerian manner of speaking, and found a national relevance and eventually, a local acceptance in the context of the cultural norms of his home town Ilorin, from where his father has been torn much earlier.

The negative elements of the social life of General Adisa must be firmly analysed in the context of the military dictatorship that took hold of Nigeria by its jugular for years and by extension, the inability of Nigeria’s ruling class to assume a historical role of a modernizing ruling class, able to lay the basis for the institution of an industrializing society and leading a cultural revolution against superstition and backwardness. In this millieu, General Adisa must be adjudged as guilty as other members of the elite, which took our country to its sorry pass today.

However, General Adisa was a compassionate human being, who was able to pull free of the poverty of his childhood. He did not forget the pains of poverty and therefore did everything to assist others to fulfil dreams that would otherwise lie prostrate due to the disadvantage of poverty. He became increasingly committed to Islam in his latter years, and held passionately a loyalty to the history of Ilorin Emirate and  Northern Nigeria. May Allah forgive his sins and grant Him Aliana Firdaus.