Adebanjo gamble

I read the interview of Chief Ayo Adebanjo published in The PUNCH edition of Friday, March 20, 2015 on why he will not forgive Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) because of the latter’s persecution of the Unity Party of Nigeria leaders as military head of state. While one must concede the Chief’s right to hold his view, the public is entitled to its own reaction to such views on a matter of public interest.


By now my views on Buhari and the need for national reconciliation are well known from my previous article on the issue. This is a time for the nation to move on. This nation is greater than each of us. Those who refuse to put the past and the present in proper perspective will surely lose the future. In the same vein, those who hold to the past will forfeit the future. The past is only important for the lesson it teaches the future.

I surely can lay claim to knowing the Chief dating back nearly 40 years to the days of the Committee of Friends which metamorphosed into the UPN under the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Adebanjo is a good man, one of the surviving grandees of Nigerian politics. Socially, he is a type of “king of the boys” and loves young people. He was one of our leaders in the UPN and the contemporary of the likes of the late Chief Bola Ige, Chief Bisi Onabanjo and Alhaji Lateef Jakande. He is a general of many wars and a combatant in peace and in war. He was one of the foot soldiers and relics of the old Action Group and the treasonable felony saga. He was once a fugitive in Ghana as a guest of the Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah when he was wanted in Nigeria. He has his scars to show for his struggles and you have to respect him as an old warlord. He was extremely loyal to the late Chief Awolowo.

In many ways, he is a blessed man. The trouble with our papa though is that he sometimes holds his strong views too strongly. He can be fastidious, unbending and extremist. The trouble with extremists is that they can be so conscientiously wrong. He still wants to lay claim to being a purist of the Obafemi Awolowo school of politics.

But as he has aged, one is sometimes embarrassed by the company of political renegades in which he is found and in which he obviously feels very comfortable which is totally at variance with his vaunted claim to principles. At the age of close to 90, hardly the age for the political militancy, he still wants to be in the forefront of political struggle. He lives in denial because whether he accepts it or not, a large measure of atrophy has set in even for a man who still looks quite well. It is not strength for an “agbalagba” (respected elder) to be found doing certain things. There is a time to step back. Success without a successor is failure.

His claim to being the champion of the late UPN governors is laughable because many of the direct descendants of the friends whose cause he claims to be supporting have moved on and are ardent supporters of Buhari. His excuse that he does not belong to the same party as the children of those friends of his is, with all due respect, specious. Is bitterness and unforgiving spirit on the manifesto of his party, the Social Democratic Party? Similarly, even the direct victims of the detention of the period such as Audu Ogbe and my humble self and many others have forgiven Buhari in the interest of the nation. The Chief’s attitude is that of a person who is more Catholic than the Pope. If he had been tried and jailed, what would he have done? You would have thought that if we younger ones were being so severely bitter, it is an old man like Chief Adebanjo that will plead for reason, restraint and logic.

I am aware that even though he did not refer to any personal experience of his under Buhari in the interview, the Chief did have a short spell of detention himself under the instrumentality of Oladipo Diya who was Buhari’s draconian military governor of Ogun State. When my cabinet colleagues and I in the late Chief OlabisiI read the interview of Chief Ayo Adebanjo published in The PUNCH edition of Friday, March 20, 2015 on why he will not forgive Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) because of the latter’s persecution of the Unity Party of Nigeria leaders as military head of state. While one must concede the Chief’s right to hold his view, the public is entitled to its own reaction to such views on a matter of public interest.

By now my views on Buhari and the need for national reconciliation are well known from my previous article on the issue. This is a time for the nation to move on. This nation is greater than each of us. Those who refuse to put the past and the present in proper perspective will surely lose the future. In the same vein, those who hold to the past will forfeit the future. The past is only important for the lesson it teaches the future.

I surely can lay claim to knowing the Chief dating back nearly 40 years to the day