My old man recently turned ninety-three. Father never married until he was well past forty. Mother was an extremely attractive eighteen year-old. I wouldn’t know what she saw in the aging Socrates. But it was a wedding made in heaven. As a young man, father worked with the white missionaries of the Sudan United Mission (SUM) who toiled in the vineyards of the old Plateau, Bauchi and Benue Provinces. A maternal uncle only recently told me something I would never have known. When father was a young bachelor he started gathering an impressive collection of books.
Whenever anyone asked to borrow he would flatly refuse. He insisted that he was building a library for his son.
Unbeknownst to anyone, father had made an Abrahamic Covenant that his first child shall be a son. And he had vowed that he would dedicate him to the Lord and would live a life untainted by alcohol, tobacco, drugs or sexual immorality.
It was my good fortune to have come into this world as a child of covenant; a prize which I am told comes with certain infallible promises. Father is also the kindest man I have ever met - generous to a fault - and absolutely without guile. He has never treated anyone on the basis of religion, ethnicity or race. He would be the first to come to the help of his worst enemy - if he had any. It was at a certain stage in my intellectual development, when I was immersing myself in studies of Greek philosophy, that I fully appreciated where father stood in the ranks of sages.
But he is no saint. He nearly smacked an electoral officer with the end of his walking stick during the 2007 elections when the man tried to dictate to him where he should cast his vote. Without a doubt, father has gone through his own trials and temptations. And he may have fallen short in certain areas.
We weave a lot of myths around our fathers, just as nations do theirs. In America, there is a surreal aura surrounding ‘Founding Fathers’ such as George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. It does not matter that some of these White Anglo-Saxon Protestant males were slave drivers who raped black women. Nations of course need their myths; idealisations that serve to hold fragile societies together.
We in Nigeria have also many false myths about our Founding Fathers. I have explained elsewhere how I thought Obafemi Awolowo failed as a politician. For all that has been said about him,
Nnamdi Azikiwe was quite a shallow thinker who was much given to flippant displays. And both were avaricious. I honestly believe that the future of our democracy requires some irreverent critique so that we can rebuild our republic on the foundations of a just and lasting peace instead of deceitful iconology.
Recently, an impressive 5 billion naira was raised for the Ahmadu Bello Foundation. The late premier of the North has been eulogised in superlative terms as a leader without equal. That may well be so. But we cannot overlook the little difficulties he had over the management of Sokoto Native Authority funds when he was a civil servant. The idea of One Nigeria was probably an alien abstraction to him.
If I were looking for the ideal of what Tony Kirk-Greene of Oxford University terms ‘mutmin kirki’, I would look to Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa rather than to Gamji. Justin Tseayo and the late Paul Logams have shown how Middle Belt peoples were for the most part mere pawns under the Sardauna in his effort to enhance his power base in the competitive regionalism that Dame Margery Perham termed the fragile Nigerian ‘tripod’. And they got nothing out of it -- neither industries nor development nor self-respect.
From my father’s generation to ours, this hypocrisy has continued to prevail. Chief Solomon Lar recently raised the matter in a fascinating media interview. Predictably, the response has been a withering silence - a brick wall of silence that speaks volumes.
The truth is that the idea of a single, monolithic, North rings increasingly hollow by the day. The millions of the youths of the Middle Belt do not think it exists; and they have been given no reason to feel otherwise. And their disenchantment is reaching heartbreaking proportions.
Every generation, according to the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, “is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors”. In my view, we can only assuage this historic burden if we genuinely speak truth to ourselves, atoning for the sins of our fathers and resolving to live in genuine equality, mutual respect, justice and honour.
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