Mariam Mariam
On the Thursday night before his death on Friday, July 7th, 1995, my father laboured through the pain of his acute breathing difficulty to tell me that there were two things he desired to witness in life, but which Allah would not grant him: to see me get married and for Ibrahim to become Emir of Ilorin. When he died the following morning, the then Ciroman Ilorin, Hon. Justice . Ibrahim Sulu Gambari came in I think from Lagos where he was the presiding judge of the Court of Appeal. In the pain of our loss, I told him my father’s regret that he had communicated the previous night. Over a month after, in August 1995, Alhaji Ibrahim Sulu Gambari was named the eleventh Emir of Ilorin; but my own marriage would not come up until 1999, over four years after my father’s death.
The eleventh Emir of Ilorin was given his coronation on the 11th of November o f that year, 1995, and since then, the eleventh day of the eleventh month has become part of the popular folklore of Ilorin. Two weeks ago, the eleventh anniversary of the coronation known locally as “eleven-eleven” became a major event largely because in the past few years, a number of events happened which helped the Ilorin community to rediscover its unity after efforts had been made to tear it asunder. The community reasserted the primacy of its cohesion around Islam with the Emir at the heart of that unity.
When politics returned in 1998/1999, Ilorin people had decided that for the first time in the history of Kwara State, the time had come for an Ilorin indigene to become the governor. For a long time, the people had more ,or less accepted the role of kingmaker, and in succession, governors came from the other districts of the state; this time, it was felt that the time was ripe to have somebody from Ilorin. That decision carried a number of possibilities, both negative and positive.
Over the years, the fact that those who dominated political power and even bureaucratic power for that matter were not from the Ilorin community assisted in the maintenance of a united front by the community, especially in bargaining for access to the levers of authority, power and influence, in the best traditions of prebendalism. Such a united front helped to paper over the fault lines of Ilorin’s history which its enemies have always found very difficult to breach. This is especially true of the political forces of South-Western Nigeria, who have never hidden the fact of their ambition to ‘conquer’ Ilorin and make it a vassal of the Yoruba ‘race’.
So the decision about who was going to be the first Ilorin governor of Kwara State naturally had to be a historically sensitive one. Of course, the leading light of Ilorin’s politics is Dr. Saraki, which meant that after all was said and done, he would eventually determine who that candidate was. As we? all now know, Dr Saraki settled for Rear Admiral Muhammed Lawal, a retired naval officer. I knew that we would be in for a major crisis in the future, and this much we used to discuss with my friend from our days at Radio Kwara, Nurudeen Abdulrahim, who works as a Special Assistant to Governor Bukola Saraki on Media Affairs, but at the time was the Press Secretary to the military administrator.
I felt at that time that Saraki’s endorsement of Muhammed Lawal betrayed an elementary lack of understanding of history and politics. Here was a military officer who might have manoeuvred to secure the ticket, but who certainly had a mind of his own and ambitions too. Then there was the carefully constructed balance of alliances upon which Ilorin’s history was constructed; Lawal’s choice, depending on how vulnerable or secure he felt politically was likely to become a problem. And there were problems from the beginning, as the Emir of Ilorin was rumoured not to be in favour of the choice, while Muhammed Lawal from day one also felt that he did not get the level of endorsement he felt entitled to. I saw this problem at first-hand as the General Manager of the Kwara State Television Service. Prior to his inauguration , we had been planning a series of programmes to usher in the new dispensation, and such programmes included an interview with the governor-elect, which I would anchor. Muhammed Lawal had travelled out soon after his election and his return coincided with a special prayer organised by the Ilorin Emirate Council to commemorate the late General Abdulkarim Adisa’s freedom after the ordeal of the attempted coup against General Sani Abacha.
Governor-elect Lawal’s return to the state had been very well covered by a team of KWTV reporters and a small package was to appear on our news bulletin the following evening along with several other reports, including the prayer which held at the Ilorin central mosque for General Adisa. At that time, there was a very bitter misunderstanding between Adisa and Lawal; meanwhile, I was frantically seeking to arrange a meeting with Lawal in order to fix time for our interview. On the same day, the Chairman of the NUJ, Kwara State, Muhammed Tunde Akanbi, called to inform me that Muhammed Lawal wanted to see me that evening. I felt relieved that an opportunity was at hand for me to arrange for the interview with our governor-elect.
What I met in his house shocked me. Lawal was surrounded by a coterie of his hangers-on who were watching a video recording of his return to the state two days earlier. I didn’t have much interest in it since we had almost the same set of clips we had been working on for our own inauguration broadcasts. After what might have been an eternity, Lawal ordered that the video machine be stopped by an inconsequential, rather nondescript young man who I later learnt was Lawal’s son-in-law to be a certain Razaq Lawal, who would subsequently occupy a larger than- life place in Lawal’s government. The barely-educated son-in-law’s misbehavior and rudeness would eventually be one of the points of alienation of the regime from the people. But that belonged in the future. When the video recording was stopped, Lawal who had received my greeting with an almost inaudible grunt turned to face me and said to me: “GM, you have started to step on my toes”! I looked around instinctively to see if there was another GM besides me in that living room, but there was none.
Lawal continued, “Instead of you to be showing a video of me on your television, you were showing pictures of an ex-convict (that was supposed to be General Adisa)”. To say that I was shocked would understate my feeling. But Muhammed Lawal was determined to press his advantage, giving me no time to catch my breath, literally, “I know who is using you, my enemy! I will deal with him when I get into office (the Emir of Ilorin). And let me tell you if you don’t know I am now the most important person in this state. So whoever does not accept that will have himself to blame. You must never play that tape on the prayer held for the ex-convict this evening!”
I was angry and sad at the same time. I tried to explain to him that there was no way that we could have been part o f a conspiracy against him, that a power failure was not within my purview to prevent during our news bulletin, and at a time o f acute scarcity of diesel and other petroleum products for that matter. Muhammed Lawal was uncontrollably angry and had an obvious need to let me know that he was now in control or would soon be. It was still about two months to his inauguration. The last thing he said to me was predictable, “Get out of my house”! I left bemused but definitive in my mind that we would harvest whirlwind from the wind that Dr Saraki had sown with the choice of such a petty-minded man as the governor of Kwara State.
I was very surprised that when he began to sack heads of government institutions, Lawal chose to retain me as the General Manager of KWTV. We maintained a relationship from a distance in mutual respect, but that was before his son-in-law who had metamorphosed into the most powerful member of the regime, and his valet, a typical Sancho Panza type, the Press Secretary, Razaq Gidado, were attempting a remote control of the media institutions in the state to massage the tall ego of the intellectually-empty “first” son-in-law of Kwara State. They got control of the radio and the newspaper, but I was not obliging with KWTV. It was not long before Lawal was inundated with stories of my ‘disloyalty’.
Governor Lawal actually set up an inquisition which he headed himself and which I faced, crutches and all, since it was after my horrible road accident. “I have called you to ask him what I have done to him”, he told the groveling subservient clowns he brought together to ‘try me’. “He hates me so much that he removed my picture from his office and replaced it with that of the Emir”. Auzubillahi, one of the jesters answered! How on earth was I to answer such an accusation? His picture was on the wall in my office as we spoke along with the coat of arms and the president’s portrait. But it was also true that I had the Emir’s picture but it was in a different part of the office and had been on that wall since 1997, two years before he became governor of the state. The truth was that he was fighting the Emir and felt everybody should line up on his side of the divide; but with me, he chose a wrong person.
I resigned my appointment on May 6th, 2002 and left Ilorin to become the Editor of Daily Trust the following month. Unfortunately for Muhammed Lawal, he had alienated so many people with his abrasiveness and petty mindedness; he tried to humiliate the Emir of Ilorin, and in his desperation and opportunism began to posture as the defender of an ill-defined Yoruba agenda, which became a grievous mistake. It was of course popular with the political and media elite of the South-West, but it further alienated the people of Ilorin whose live history was NEVER ethnic, despite claims from the South-West. Ilorin’s ascendancy from the beginning of the nineteenth century had been built on the universal values of Islam, which provided the ideological bond for all its peoples; Yoruba, Fulani, Nupe, Hausa, Gobir, Kanuri, Gwari and Baruba. The Emir has always been the symbol of that unity of its people within the ambience of the certainties of Islam.
It was that unity which the ethnic card played for survival by Muhammed Lawal threatened to tear asunder, and it was inevitably the platform of his defeat in the 2003 elections. His estranged mentor, Dr Saraki who positioned himself as the defender of the historic values of the Ilorin people, was accepted on that basis, and he built a very formidable coalition which swept Lawal from‘power. I have always argued that Obasanjo and his PDP massively rigged the 2003 elections, but I think that PDP won fair and square in Kwara, because there was the determined effort to defeat Muhammed Lawal.
What the Emir celebrated two weeks ago was therefore more than the anniversary of his coronation. It was the celebration of victory and the renewed unity of a community which went through a major crisis of state-sponsored violence, the Emir was living on borrowed times because everybody knew that if Lawal had returned, the emir would have been deposed; the Emirate Council had been divided and in crisis, and for a long time, it felt as if the community was poised at the edge of a civil war. The election of Bukola Saraki helped to douse the crisis which hung over the community.
I was going to work last Wednesday morning when I received a text message from a London mobile phone number, at 1013HRS, which said that “ex-Govemor of Kwara State Muhammed Lawal passed away in London this morning. May Allah grant him peace.” I was stunned largely because I didn’t know that he had been in hospital, or was sick. I put a call to people in Ilorin and his death was confirmed; I called one of my brothers, Muhammed, who had married one of the younger sisters of Lawal’s first wife, Hajia Nusirat, so I could condole with her. That marvelous woman had been a bridge-builder who made near superhuman efforts to soothe the pains of people at the receiving end of Lawal’s short shrift.
Then there was also the fact that Governor Attahiru Bafarawa of Sokoto State reconciled us in May 2004 .1 was on leave that month and had spent a couple of days in Sokoto. I had dinner with him one Saturday night and I told the governor that I would be returning to Abuja the following day. Bafarawa urged me to stay till Monday and promised to send a driver to pick me for lunch the following day. He did, but what happened next was that instead of going into the dining room, he made for another living room where former Governor Muhammed Lawal was seated. Bafarawa told me that as Muslims, we should shelf whatever was the source of misunderstanding. “If you resigned from KWTV because Lawal didn’t want you, you moved on to become one of the most important journalists in Northern Nigeria.” He then added that “You must thank Allah for how it ended” . That did it for me.
When Muhammed Lawal lost his mother, I went to condole with him, but didn’t meet him at home, but I left a message which I knew would be delivered because I had left it with Hajia Nusirat. Unfortunately, we were never to meet again until the report of his death broke last week. Lawal belonged to the generation of Ilorin indigenes who went to school up to the tertiary level. There was a generation which straddled the traditional ways of our people and the unsettling trends of modernity. Given a combination of history and childhood deprivations, Lawal grew up very determined to make a success of life. He was very brilliant all through his educational career. He trained as a Mechanical Engineer but found his métier as an officer of the Nigerian Navy.
In the context of the cloak and dagger world of military politics, Lawal made the right connections and he was appointed the Military Administrator of Ogun State. It was the beginning of a new life for him as a stupendously rich military officer even if his Ogun State tenure came under some shadow of untidy bookkeeping. His mentors in the military explained away whatever controversy arose under his watch. He moved to other appointments and would eventually retire as a Rear Admiral of the Nigerian Navy.
Now in retirement, politics beckoned, what with a huge financial chest and not much to do otherwise , but with an opportunity to have unlimited access to lucre the second time, this time at the best possible level as the elected governor of his home state. Lawal again fell back upon his stubborn determination to succeed, got Saraki’s endorsement over and above so many other favoured candidates. Lawal became the first indigene of Ilorin to rule Kwara State. Unfortunately, the ambition to get a second term clashed with the well known proclivity to control of his erstwhile mentor, Dr Olusola Saraki. Ilorin was pulled through one of the most traumatic phases of its contemporary history as Lawal tried to tear down the Saraki myth to achieve what he craved most — a second term in office; on the other hand, Saraki was also obliged to pull all stops to ensure that Lawal did not return as governor, an outcome that would have sounded the death knell of Saraki’s domination of the political life of Kwara State.
It was unfortunate that in the effort to achieve his ambition, Muhammed Lawal dealt his community severe body blows from which it is still recovering. Yet it is also part of the contradiction of his life that he was one of the most distinguished indigenes of Ilorin of his time. I believed, and that much I told him on May 6th, 2002, the day I submitted to him my letter of resignation, that Lawal in power was a very
lonely man who became captive of a few people a round him, particularly his despicable son-in-law; Lawal also had an excessive craving to be loved and admired. He lived a very difficult childhood which must have been the source of his obsession with material possessions when he got the opportunity as a rich man.
Muhammed Lawal owned houses all over Ilorin, Lagos, Abuja and abroad; he loved construction which conveyed grandeur and that delusion of grandeur was one of the many flaws of his personality. Despite the eulogies which emphasized, as former governor Segun Osoba tried to do, his “passionate belief in the Yoruba cause,” the truth was that Lawal preferred to be loved and seen as the champion of all that was quintessentially Ilorin. He prided himself as an Ilorin man, a Muslim and despite Osoba and co., a Northerner. He felt more at ease dressed up as a Northerner and the latter-day conversion to wearing Yoruba caps was expedient at best. Ilorin’s culture had burnt its imprimatur on his life and four years of politics could not have changed very much all of that history and culture.
I think that the flaws of neo-colonial politics were laid bare by the crisis which Muhammed Lawal went through in his fight with his erstwhile mentor, Dr Saraki. The problem with neo-colonial politics is that the interests of the people are not really the determinant factors. Individual actors and their godfathers fight to secure were for the opportunities which is power confers upon them to aid their process of primitive accumulation. In this, Muhammed Lawal was not different from his political contemporaries around the country. May Allah forgive his sins and grant him Ah’anna Fir ’daus.
