In sum, CO substantially impacted good governance in Kwara State and in Nigeria as a whole. First, he used his opportunity to participate in politics as commissioner and governor in the state to further democratise education and improve governance. Second, CO used his Senate seat at the centre to hone his democratic credentials and expand his ideological network to enable him participate in a drawn-out struggle for equity and minority rights in Nigeria.
Cornelius Olatunji Adebayo became a lecturer in the University of Ife at 28, founding head of English at Kwara College of Technology at 32, Commissioner of Education at 35, a federal senator at 38, when he could still have passed as a member of most youth organisations. However, he came fully prepared for all these roles and had already received state-wide notice that enabled him to become a governor at 42. More significant is that in each of these positions, he displayed an ideology that abided with him till 84: a passion for the politics of amelioration, which consistently included life-long learning that made him an enviable ideology-driven politician of the Awolowo school of politics for the common good.
Plato’s idea of philosopher-kingship in The Republic raised a question about who should qualify to be a king or in today’s language, a leader — king, president, governor, lawmaker, judge, or minister in small or large polities or human societies. The search for an ideal leader has continued since the emergence of Plato’s The Republic till today.
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Plato’s ideal leader is a man or woman who acquires wisdom derived from deep learning that can enable the owner of such understanding to plan and act with wisdom, enlightenment, fairness, and justice in the performance of his or her leadership role. The learner can be institutionally trained or self-trained to acquire deep understanding of the fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, values, reason, and reality, to the extent that he or she can make decisions that benefit the entire society, in contradistinction to a leader who governs to serve the desires of members of the ruling class.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Theory of Mental Magnitude is strikingly like Plato’s idea of philosopher-kingship, and not surprisingly so because Awolowo in the early 1940s was an avid reader of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, and Ghandi. Awolowo, like these thinkers, grasped and nurtured the concept of citizen’s welfare, security, and development as the raison d’être of government or governance. The sage’s conviction that an educated citizenry is the foundation of the social, economic, political, psychological, and spiritual development of the citizenry is evident in the thoughts and actions of CO in his public and private lives.
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Even as a young boy, CO made the right choices about his personal development. He paid attention to his studies in primary school, which readily enabled him to have his secondary education and higher education with distinction at the famous Barewa College, Ahmadu Bello University, and the University of Legon. His choice of Legon for a post-graduate degree and the University of Ife for his first academic job is significant to the type of politician he became later in life. The University of Legon started as one of the institutions influenced by Kwame Nkrumah’s ideology of decolonisation. Similarly, the existence of the Institute of Ideology in Winneba was an additional resource for young Africans to imbibe progressive ideology in West Africa in the 1960s, when many young members of the Action Group political party of Chief Awolowo were given the opportunity to train in the institute.
Adebayo’s choice of the University of Ife, like his selection of Legon, must have affected his ideological politics, just as his choice of academic discipline must have affected his attitude to politics and governance. His early exposure to metalinguistics and meta criticism ( an academic specialisation that provides the student with specials skills to analyse discourse) predisposed CO to pay critical attention, more than the average Nigerian politician of his generation, to the role of military-authored constitutions in the country’s underdevelopment.
Before CO was appointed by Colonel George Agbazika Innih as Kwara State’s commissioner, he had succeeded in exposing students of the Kwara State College of Education to social democratic ideology and liberation pedagogy, knowing that majority of students in Ilorin had grown up in the conservative culture of northern Nigeria. Many of such students came to Ife to study in a university once characterised by General Muhammadu Buhari’s military government in 1984 as an institution that housed teachers not teaching what they were paid to teach — the ideology of social democracy and citizen empowerment.
As education commissioner in the military government of Colonel Innih, CO made a noticeable impact, so much that he was also deployed to coordinate the affairs of the Ministry of Planning and Finance, and at another time he was put in charge of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. With this vast policy-making experience, CO was primed to bring innovations to the governance of Kwara State. This experience also prepared him for committee assignments while he got to the Senate. Relatedly, such legislative experience broadened CO’s views about the 1979 constitution and also prepared him for his collaboration with Chief Enahoro in organising the Movement for National Reformation (MNR) much later when another coup returned to Nigeria.
As part of the executive, CO made and implemented policies that further democratised education by building more classrooms in secondary schools and abolishing the shift system in primary schools in Kwara. He used this appointment to launch his ideological politics in Kwara, so much so that he became a natural choice of the Unity Party of Nigeria’s senatorial candidate in 1979, after the first demilitarisation of governance in the country since 1966.
In the first sSnate in the country’s second Republic, CO demonstrated the significance of his ideology-driven lawmaking skills, political sagacity, and region-wide political ideology, marked by ideological mobilisation of the Middle Belt Forum, which he also once coordinated.
Although CO’s gubernatorial tenure in Kwara was cut short by General Buhari’s coup, his entrance into the politics of executive governance in the state altered the political dynamics of Kwara’s political culture, much more than most people could imagine. Who could have imagined that CO could have the temerity to challenge the father of Action Group/Unity Party of Nigeria’s progressive politics in the old North, Papa Josiah Olawoyin, not to think of winning the state’s election against the incumbent Governor Adamu Atta, one of the proteges of the father of Ilorin’s political hegemony? I went to Ilorin for the third UPN primary from Ife in 1983 to witness one of Nigeria’s most stressful but affable politicking in Nigeria.
Since CO never allowed a vacuum in his political space, he spent the long period of the second suspension of the country’s 1979 constitution to advance his consciousness raising in the Middle Belt and reinforcing the ideology of re-federalisation of Nigeria, until the annulment of MKO Abiola’s free and fair election of June 12 that pushed CO into exile for NADECO’s pro-democratic and pro-federalism activism. Before that, CO was able to give more energy to the Enahoro-led Movement for National Reformation, as secretary far into his commitments in exile to restoration of democratic and federal governance in Nigeria, as one of NADECO chieftains in exile: Chief Anthony Enahoro, Professor Wole Soyinka, General Akinrinade, Senator Bola Tinubu, ( now president of the Federal Republic), Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, and many other names too many for the length allowed for this piece.
I was in Cote d’Ivoire at the beginning of a multi-country mobilisation of the Yoruba diaspora in West Africa, especially in West Africa’s A Kwaba countries with significant Yoruba presence: Republic of Benin, Togo, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone under the auspices of NADECO- and NALICON-abroad, headquartered in Washington for North America. I was on my way with my host in Abidjan, Professor Theophilus Oyeyemi Fadayomi, to pick late Baba Omojola and other pro-democracy activists from Lagos from the motor park in Abidjan, when my host suddenly asked me if I knew that CO had arrived in Abidjan from Cotonou, while pointing at a non-descript roadside hotel in the Deux Plateau area of Abidjan as the place he had earlier dropped CO to protect him from any health hazard in his former bed and breakfast place in Trechville! I suggested that we first pick Baba Omojola’s group and return to surprise CO.
We returned to CO, who was surprised to see us in Abidjan. Baba Omojola quickly informed him of our mission. Incredibly for CO’s discomfort even in his new hotel, he enthusiastically volunteered to join us in this phase of the struggle, while awaiting his Refugee Visa from Canada to coordinate NADECO activities in that part of North America. We advised against overexposing himself to avoid jeopardising his Canadian visa. He then offered to assist in whatever we wanted him to do for us. CO spent weeks with us on this project before his visa arrived. While in Canada to coordinate the activities of NADECO, CO did not miss any meeting called for Washington and to participate in the writing of communiques, and the rest is history.
In sum, CO substantially impacted good governance in Kwara State and in Nigeria as a whole. First, he used his opportunity to participate in politics as commissioner and governor in the state to further democratise education and improve governance. Second, CO used his Senate seat at the centre to hone his democratic credentials and expand his ideological network to enable him participate in a drawn-out struggle for equity and minority rights in Nigeria. Third, Chief Cornelius Olatunji Adebayo spent most of his adult life to fight for de-militarisation of governance in Nigeria and expand the space of progressive ideology across Nigeria.
Awe! (a term of endearment for a friend in Ondo dialect of Yoruba) You lived a life worth emulating and have acted with maximum patriotism and sacrifice to make Nigeria democratic and sustainably united. Rest in peace.
Ropo Sekoni is a retired professor of literature is the chairman of Levirop.
