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People and
PoliticsThese must indeed be harrowing
times for the family of our first Prime
Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa who
was killed in the first military coup in
the country on January 15, 1966. First,
was the headline news in August about
the alleged kidnap of one Dr. Jhalil
Tafawa Balewa, self-acclaimed National
Coordinator of
Jonathan na Kowa,( roughly Hausa
equivalent for “Jonathan for all”), one
of the myriads of fly by night outfits
that have been campaigning for President
Goodluck Jonathan’s bid for the
presidency on his own steam next year.
“Jhalil
Abubakar Balewa, son of the First
Republic Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa
Balewa,” said
The Nation of August 30 in its own
story of the drama, “yesterday relived
how he escaped from the kidnappers’ den
on Saturday. He was abducted in Abuja on
Friday.” He escaped from his captors on
his own, he said, because they let down
their guard a short while after they’d
arrived at their den.
It soon turned out
that the newspaper, like all the others
that ran the story, swallowed Jhalil’s
melodrama all too easily, probably
because of his surname. Shortly after he
told his story, the police told a
different version. Far from escaping on
his own, said the police, they had to
engage the kidnappers in a shoot-out
before they could rescue him. This
raised questions about the credibility
of his claim that he was kidnapped, to
begin with.
It
now
became his word against that of the
police. The difficult choice for the
public must, I suspect, have been
resolved in favour of the police when,
soon enough, the family of the late
prime minister, denounced Jhalil as an
impostor.
The family had
denounced the man less than two years
ago when
Leadership published a story on him
in which the he made exactly the same
claim. This was in the newspaper’s
edition of December 21, 2008.
Nine
days after he had obliged an invitation
for a meeting with the family it issued
a statement denouncing him as an
impostor. Balewa, it said, “didn’t sire
a child outside wedlock.” His children,
the statement said, were “Yakubu (Baba),
Abubakar 1 (Bala), Mhuktar, Abubakar 2 (Saddiq),
Umar, Usman, Ahmed, Haruna, and no
other.”
Exactly one year later
an American domiciled website,
AllAfrica.com, published a claim by
one, Tunde Alatise, that Jhalil was a
fugitive from American law for Medicaid
and Medicare fraud. Jhalil’s real name,
he said, was Jalil Khadiri who lived in
Fayettville, Georgia, but was originally
from Ibadan, Oyo State. Not only was
Jhalil on the run, Alatise said, he had
eloped with his ex-wife who, on her own
part, had been deported from the U.S.
after serving one-a-half-year jail for
shoplifting, impersonation and
immigration offenses.
If the Balewa family
thought that all this had ended its
nightmare, the return of Jhalil last
month must have revived it. Less than
two years after their first nightmare,
he apparently jumped aboard the Jonathan
presidency gravy train using the magical
Balewa name. And the press swallowed his
claim of Balewa paternity hook, line and
sinker.
The controversy over
his claim had hardly died down when
another, perhaps worse, nightmare,
confronted the family. It came in the
shape of a recent interview with
The Nation by Chief Mathew Mbu, a
minister in Balewa’s cabinet and pioneer
Nigerian High Commissioner in the U.K.
Balewa, Mbu said, may
have died from asthmatic attack days
after the ’66 coup, contrary to the
story all these 44 years that the man
was shot to death by his military
captors on the very day of the coup,
along with his flamboyant Minister of
Finance, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh.
Predictably Mbu’s
claim has provoked strong reactions for
and against. O’seun Ogunseitan,
The Nation’s reporter who started it
all with his Mbuh interview, seems to
share his respondent’s claim, at least
in part. “Nigeria’s first Prime Minister
Tafawa Balewa,” he said in
The Nation on Sunday of September
19, “was not killed on coup day, January
15, 1966, contrary to widely-held belief
on the country’s first coup.”
His evidence was
hardly incontrovertible; of the two
eye-witness accounts the newspaper
published in the course of its
investigation, one by Pa Lawal Taibu
Atanda Olarewaju (73), said the body of
the prime minister he saw propped up
against a tree half way between Lagos
and Abeokuta had no bullet wounds. The
other by Captain Chris Israel Okigbo
(68) who was not only an eyewitness but
was, in the newspaper’s words, “among
the ground soldiers that assisted in
executing the coup,” said Balewa was
shot. “Everybody who fell in the January
coup was shot. Abubakar was shot. They
were abducted and shot,” he said.
Perhaps Ogunseitan has
been swayed by the position of the first
journalist to break news of the
discovery of Balewa’s body, Chief
Olusegun Osoba, two-time governor of
Ogun State, then a resourceful young
reporter with the then authoritative
Daily Times. Osoba has stood by his
report of 44 years ago that the body of
Balewa he saw had no sign of violence,
in sharp contrast to that of Okotie-Eboh
which was covered in blood and had
already in decomposed.
Ogunseitan and Segun
are not the only ones who believe Mbu.
Last Friday, September 24,
Vanguard weighed in with an
editorial which seems to support the
gentleman. “If,” the newspaper said,
“the Mbu version is true, it challenges
the accounts of January 1966. What else
would it challenge? There would be many,
depending on who is analysing the story.
Mbu is not a frivolous man...If Mbu
is wrong what is the correct version?”
(Emphasis mine).
The
Vanguard’s comment is very profound
because it raises questions about the
timing and the motive of Mbu’s remark.
Why did he wait for four decades before
revealing what he had apparently always
believed? Could it have something to do
with the serious challenge posed by the
region Balewa comes from to his support
of Jonathan’s bid to remain in office in
the face of the zoning provision in his
own party?
Whatever it is that
Mbu’s dubious revelation may
“challenge”, the one indisputable fact,
as stated by Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, the
most forceful opponent of Mbu’s story,
is that the coup makers killed Balewa.
It is, of course,
important to know how he was killed and
when. The answers, as
Vanguard said, could provide answers
to many of the problems we face today.
Unfortunately we may never find any
incontrovertible answers. The bottom
line, however, was that he was killed.
This makes it more
important to know why. Osoba, who seems
to support Mbu, gave a plausible lead in
an interview with
Sunday Vangurd (September 26). “My
suspicion,” he said, “is that after the
reign of government was handed to Ironsi,
if Tafawa Balewa had been alive then,
the government of the day would have
wasted him because if Tafawa Balewa were
alive, the handing over by the ministers
would have been null and void because he
was head of government.”
Anyone who needed
further proof that, one way or the
other, the coup makers were responsible
for Balewa’s death, need go no further
back than the Silver Anniversary of
The Guardian on October a couple or
so years ago.
On that occasion, Mr
Chinua Achebe, the most celebrated
African novelist, gave the most
conclusive evidence, in my view at
least, of why Balewa may have been
killed.
“The Prime Minister
and two regional Premiers,” he said,
“were killed by the coup makers. In the
bitter suspicious atmosphere of the
time, a naively idealistic coup proved a
terrible disaster. It was interpreted
WITH PLAUSIBILITY as a plot by the
ambitious Igbo of the East to take
control from the Hausa Fulani North.”
(Emphasis mine).
Like Mbu, Achebe is
not a frivolous fellow. But even more
importantly, he was a near-casualty in
the counter-coup of July 1966 and had to
flee for his life because the novel he
published days before the first coup,
A Man of The People, gave anyone who
read it the impression, wrongly I
believe, that he was privy to the coup.
Balewa has been dead
for over 44 years now. I don’t know what
useful purpose is served by splitting
our heads in raising questions that we
will probably never find any useful
answers to. The good man deserves to be
left alone to rest in his grave and his
family deserve to be left alone to
grieve their eternal loss.
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