It must be the irritating but understandable infatuation with electoral democracy that can explain the quietude that has greeted the passage of Bayero University, Kano Professor of Political Science, Ahmed Usman Jalingo last March. But in whatever circumstance, it is violence to our collective humanity if none of his many students write a documented farewell. Although dead and gone to his grave without elaborate burial rites, a man like Ahmed Jalingo cannot go uncelebrated, even if only for the life of the decidedly organic intellectual that he lived, a life that remained unaltered by the vast opportunities he had at every turn of his life since the late Aminu Kano absorbed him in his twenties, sending him to Edinburgh University for his Political Science degrees. 

Immediately he came back to Nigeria, he was approached by Mallam Adamu Ciroma with a request to come over to work at the CBN. Though surprised that the CBN Governor knew he had been in school abroad and grateful for the opportunity, the budding scholar told Ciroma he would die early if he were to work in the CBN. In plain language, he was saying he is not cut to work in a place like the CBN.

In 1978, he was to be among the 13 or so scholars within the Zaria-Kano-Maiduguri intellectual axis who thought that Adamu Ciroma would be a better successor to Obasanjo. It was a pay back move by all or many of them who owed Ciroma one ‘debt’ or another over the years although the main explanation is that as someone of ethnic minority origin, Ciroma could not be a dictator because he could never find enough kinsmen to fill the regular police, the secret service, military commands and similar other institutions that sustain the typical African dictator. Fortunately and unfortunately, Ciroma lost out to Shagari.

Although my relationship with him was too limited for any authoritative piece, the agenda here is to demonstrate my assertion above that he remained an organic intellectual. Doing so will resolve the crisis of coming to terms with the reality that he is no more. Like almost everyone I know in the Bayero University community, I also knew Professor Usman Jalingo through Comrade Y. Z Yau, the Engineer turned Political Scientist. Because I was always in company of Y. Z Yau and M. M. Yusif of the Department of Political Science, I was bound to meet Jalingo and this happened in circumstances I cannot even recall now. Except that I was soon to become the one Jalingo would be asking about the two lecturers. The reason was because Y. Z Yau subsequently dissolved into ASUU national politics, becoming absolutely scarce on the BUK campuses, leaving me, as the squatter-settler in his house, to be responding to enquiries about his where about.

Other than this, Jalingo was never my lecturer in any formal sense. Throughout the four years I was in the Department of Political Science, he was out there struggling to become the NRC governor of Taraba State after having been SSG of what is Adamawa State now. By the time he returned to the campus after his problems with the Abacha government in the aftermath of his appointment as Sole Administrator of PENGASSAN, I had graduated. It was only in 1998 I began to meet him again on a much deeper level.

In early 1998, Professor Attahiru Jega hinted me about an impending newspaper in Kaduna and the desire of the emergent publisher to have me there. I had just rounded off the course work for a Masters programme at ABU, Zaria at that time and, contrary to an earlier resolution not to return to journalism after the 1993-96 break, I found myself heading to Kaduna to work in what is now Media Trust Ltd, (publishers of the Trust stables) once Mallam Kabir Yusuf came up with a response to the only problem I presented.

One of my earliest assignments in the Weekly Trust was fishing out a cover story on the 15^th anniversary of the passing of the sage, Mallam Aminu Kano. It was in pursuit of that story that I went back to Professor Jalingo. Having schooled in BUK, I knew he had been the custodian of the diaries Aminu Kano had kept for 41 unbroken years and I wanted to peep into it and possibly splash as much of it I could get. Professor Jalingo was not only interviewed for the story, he personally took me to virtually everyone in Kano who ought to know whatever is worth knowing about the late Aminu Kano. Above all, he allowed me to rummage through the diaries with stern warning against violating the restriction he placed on specific pages.

Going through the diaries even in the limited manner he allowed was another school entirely and if the cover story that was published in the following week fell short of the collector’s item, it must have been a reflection of my level of reportorial capability then. Otherwise, I had all the kinds of details I needed to have made it a remarkable cover. Having been Aminu Kano’s first political Secretary and having done his doctoral thesis on historical, ideological and organizational politics of NEPU, he discussed Aminu Kano in a way very few other persons could possibly do. And he was forth coming. It was from the interview that I learnt, for instance, that about the only thing Aminu Kano had ‘excess’ of were socks. According to Jalingo, Mallam hated wearing any pair of socks twice, hence he kept buying socks.

From thereon, he became a regular contact on every story I was put on to, displacing his own ‘yaro’, Yakubu Aliyu who hitherto provided me the analytical perspectives for my Journalism, whether in TSM or as a student-reporter for the African Guardian, etc. For example, when Weekly Trust decided to take a look at General Shehu Yar’Adua’s politics in the wake of his travails and I was put on the Kano end of the cover in the second quarter of 1998, it was to Jalingo I returned. Although he maintained that Yar’Adua it was who blocked him from becoming governor of Taraba by swapping his own votes as NRC gubernatorial candidate in 1991 for the SDP opponent then, he nevertheless described the General as a bridge builder, a thesis he defended in the interview which was published in the cover as a box material.

In early 1999, I was with him again on a cover story the paper had planned on the impending OBJ Presidency. It was then he said that in all cases, OBJ would defend Nigeria and would stand firm against imperialism. This was a statement he regretted much later, saying he based his comments completely on the OBJ he had interacted with at the Africa Leadership Forum, Otta Series. But the time he was making the statement of regret, I was no longer in a position to report it anymore because I was already the Media Adviser to Sule Lamido, OBJ’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. In that position, I had seen or heard OBJ raining verbal missiles on imperialism and its institutions even as his domestic policies bore imperialist stamps and I was no longer clear who, between Jalingo and OBJ, was right.

It was also at this meeting in his house at the Old Campus of BUK that I told him I had gone to the UI for PG studies. To my utter surprise, he said I was doing the right thing, saying that as an ethnic minority, I needed specialist education. I was getting a new dimension from him about going to school at that age. That was the second time he was advising me with reference to the concept of ethnic minority in our discussions. He once said I should never get involved in ethno-religious politics. It can make you to rise but it will destroy you eventually, he said.

When Sule Lamido became the governor of Jigawa State in 2007 and started by re-grouping the rump of the NEPU and PRP cadres, Jalingo was prominent. To make the re-grouping more concrete by publishing Jalingo’s PhD thesis which is on “The Radical Tradition in the North” was a task that must be done. It stood the chance of becoming the ideological and organizational manual of the emergent radical populist wing of the PDP under Lamido. With six out of the nine initial persons whose meetings graduated into the PDP proper viz Chief Solomon Lar, the late Chief Bola Ige, the late Abubakar Rimi, Dr Iyorchia Ayu, Professor Jerry Gana and Alhaji Sule Lamido being reckoned with as progressives, the original PDP is, in every sense, a project of the ‘progressives’ and the publication and popularization of Jalingo’s thesis by a government led by one of them made sense absolutely. When this was conveyed to Governor Lamido, he welcomed it and said we should work out the details but without sparing Jalingo for going to the NRC in 1991 instead of the SDP which was seen as more to the left. Somehow, the entire thing stalled after the take off of the government for reasons I cannot decipher now.

That was the situation until Lamido came up with the idea of a Roundtable on “Contemporary Nigeria: Where is the Missing Link?” in May 2010. When it came to selecting the speakers and the sole criterion was those who could relate the current crisis to the organizational/party requirement for managing crisis in Nigeria, Lamido insisted that he must be obliged Jalingo to be one of the speakers. When Jalingo was informed by the organizing committee of the request, he stalled. I was asked to find out why. The Professor said he was not going to attend the Roundtable organized by a Lamido who had refused to publish his thesis. In truth, Lamido never refused. Anyway, the two were able to speak and patch up on the issue, hence Jalingo’s intimidating appearance at the occasion.

The idea was for me to pick up the thesis issue therefrom. Again, I never did but that is to the extent that I never took a formal request to Governor Lamido for his approval. Otherwise, I had concluded in my mind that, for institutional integrity and connection with History, Mambayya House of Bayero University, Kano is the best publisher instead of where I was heading. That was the situation before I got Y. Z Yau and Yakubu Aliyu’s text messages on March 1^st, 2011 that Professor Jalingo is no more. It was immediately terrible thinking that one could never go to Mallam’s house at will and get him talk on whatever is the issue in context.  But much, much later, a team of Nasir Kura, Bala Bros, Dr. Nura Mohammed and myself went to the house for the condolence. It was the kind of team he would have loved to receive and engage. He was a talker, a very inspirational personality indeed for whom age difference was a non-issue.

There can be no forgetting Professor Jalingo. When Sule Lamido told Goodluck Jonathan at the PDP rally in Dutse recently that “that star there, (the Star being the symbol of the NEPU) shone over Northern Nigeria”, it was Jalingo that came to my mind in terms of one who could bring to earth the ideological implication of that sort of statement. Everything considered, I make bold to say that the lesson of Ahmed Jalingo was his intellectual, ideological and political commitment to Social democracy in Nigeria. He was not one of those monkeying around, to borrow a phrase from his friend, Eskor Toyo, trivializing the Social democratic requirement for national survival of Nigeria. Hence the need for more and more Ahmed Jalingos in contemporary Nigeria! Adieu Mallam!