Comrade Dan Umaru – A Warrior Of The Working Class; By John Ejoha Odah

I MET Comrade Dan Umaru after over two and half decades of not seeing him at the last National Delegates Conference of the Amalgamated Union, the successor Union to the Civil Service Technical Workers Union of Nigeria (CSTWN).

I came to Jos, the venue of the conference, with a lot of anticipation. Having been invited as a Special Guest of the union, and having travelled from Abuja; as Executive Secretary of the Organisation of Trade Unions of West Africa (OTUWA), I had an outline of what I planned to say in my solidarity message to the Delegates Conference.

For reasons which the union’s high command did not bothered to explain, I was unable to deliver my solidarity message. It took the then Deputy Governor of Plateau State, Prof. Sonni Gwanle Tyoden, as Special Guest of Honour, representing the state governor to loudly acknowledge one’s presence in the conference hall, referring to our activist years at UNIJOS.

Meeting Comrade Dan more than made up for everything. We talked about sundry issues, the state of the Labour Movement, and tried to catch up on everything we could think of. He gave me his sons’ numbers – Prof. Theo, Barrister Innocent, and Solomon, who he said was based in Lagos – all bearing Lagi as their last name. He made me promised that I would reach out to them. In my excitement I didn’t remember to ask Comrade Dan why his children weren’t bearing Umaru, the surname we knew him with.

Comrade Dan was a unique comrade, who started the Civil Service Technical Workers Union of Nigeria (CSTWUN) office in Jos following the merger of industrial unions into 42 and the inauguration of the Nigeria Labour Congress in 1978. He and Comrade Ibeagwuchi, who retired as Deputy General Secretary of the successor Amalgamated Union of Public Corporations, Civil Service Technical and Recreational Services Employees (AUPCTRE), had come into the trade union movement already as cadres and activists of the Nigeria Youth Congress (NYC). As Comrade SOZ Ejiofoh, the longest serving General Secretary of the two unions put it, the duo came into the trade union movement already with revolutionary consciousness.

The generation of student activists at the University of Jos in the 1980s and 90s met in Comrade Dan someone who was very welcoming and easy to relate with. No 3 Tafawa Balewa Office of the Union became “a go to” place to resolve all manners of issues: – to cyclostyle press releases, hold strategy meetings, seek advice on sundry issues, send messages across the country among others. Some of the most heated meetings of the Patriotic Youth Movement of Nigeria (PYMN) held at the Conference Hall of the union office in Tafawa Balewa Street.

In one of such meetings, Ahmed Aminu Yusuf, then National Vice President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), threatened to throw a comrade from the then University of Ife through the window from the first-floor conference room. The comrade in question is today a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN). Not only student youth meetings held there, some of the formative meetings of the Socialist Congress of Nigeria (SCON) took place there also.

Comrade Dan was a mentor’s mentor. At a time when that word had not become over used and fashionable, he mentored many of us and did this effortlessly and perhaps many were not even aware that by his exemplary character, affection, warmth, courage and fearlessness, he was impacting in them strong revolutionary and leadership attributes.

Today many comrades are wondering whether all our struggles haven’t been in vain given how bad things have become. Some even question if following the path and hope of a proletarian route to changing our society is indeed the correct thing to have done three or more decades ago and now. In my discussion with Comrade Dan some two years ago, to which I referenced at the beginning of this tribute, he was still as convinced and as committed to that path to the transformation and rebirth of our society.

No doubt, there has been severe reverses, serious degeneration in the trade union and social movements. Cadres within these movements have suffered serious attritions. But true revolutionaries will see these as obstacles that need to be overcome.

To give up hope for a just and equitable society is to give up on a bright future for our children and our children’s children.

Comrade Dan knew, perhaps far more than many of his contemporaries in the Labour Movement, that we had to wage a sustained struggle to overtake and overturn the control of the movement by reactionary elements who will do deals with the class enemy and even sell the interest of the working people. He knew that it was a life-long struggle. He would therefore expect those of us alive to continue the struggle for the actualisation of the ideas of an egalitarian society in which exploitation of the vast majority of our people by the greedy and corrupt ruling elite would be a thing of the past.

As a true revolutionary, Comrade Dan realised much earlier than many trade union colleagues the importance of building bridges with the student movement and the community, and his efforts produced huge successes in the Jos axis producing some key activists from the students plank who went on to play important roles in the struggles of our people at the national level.

Indeed, comrades from the old Plateau State with contacts with Comrade Dan who played key roles in our peoples struggle for a democratic and just society, include the late Chris Abashi, who led NANS as president in 1983. He was also the youngest General Secretary of the Socialist Congress of Nigeria. Others include Chom Bagu, whom he recruited as Education Officer of CSTWN in Jos after graduation, before he went on to join three other student activist as young officers at the NLC headquarters in Lagos. Chom later left to join the Nigeria Union of Journalist (NUJ) and emerged as its National Secretary.

Tony Akika, who, with three others, escaped been expelled in their final year at UNIJOS in 1983, went on to serve in the revolutionary Alao Aka Bashorun chambers in Lagos and later returned to the newly created Nasarawa State and served as its Solicitor General and Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Justice.

This writer was the 2^nd of the four cadres from the student movement that went to work at the NLC headquarters at the beginning of 1987, and went on to become the General Secretary of the NLC for over a decade.

Labaran Maku, who similarly escaped having his university education truncated during the post-1986 ABU students’ crisis, leading to the closure of most tertiary institutions in the country, has Comrade Dan to thank for standing by him and providing support and advice at this most turbulent time for him.

Comrade Maku was UNIJOS Students Union president – the first up till then to emerge in that position in his 2^nd year, and NANS PRO at the time of the said crisis. Comrade Maku later became Deputy Governor of Nasarawa State, Deputy Minister and later Minister of Information as well as Ag. Defence Minister under the Goodluck Jonathan Government.

So, Comrade Dan Umaru did not only produce biological children who were successful in their life’s endeavours – like Prof. Theo, who had headed the social science faculty of Nasarawa State University as Dean, Innocent, who had been Attorney General and Commissioner of Justice of his own state of Nasarawa, or Solomon or Naomi to mention a few of the children – he also had a wide set of other non-biological children and mentees who had contributed their quotas to national development.

Among these we have to include the current President of Amalgamated Union, Comrade Anthony Benjamin, also a current Vice President of NLC, who was recruited into the Union by our Comrade Dan.

Comrade Dan, you have come and played a vigorous and active part in the service of our motherland! In due course, we shall document for posterity your sterling contributions while you were with us!

This was one of the messages I planned to share with the union at its last delegates conference: that we needed to document the huge contributions that comrades like Dan, Goodluck, Sunmonu, Ejiofoh and a few others had made to the development of (public sector) unionism in our country.

Fare thee well, Comrade Dan, and Rest in Peace with your maker.

Comrade Odah, Executive Secretary, Organisation of Trade Unions of West Africa (OTUWA), Abuja and ex-General Secretary of the NLC, was a student of UNIJOS between 1979 and 1986 with one-year break for National Youth Service in 1983/84.