HER transition warrants falling back on Queen Mary University London academic, Sophie Harman’s paradigm of making the invisible visible. Prof Harman used it as feminist and decolonial paradigm to checkmate selectivity in agency inclusion and exclusion in International Relations. I am using it to capture and insert into international development my mother’s defiance of and triumph over systemic limits on rural existence in immediate post-independence Nigeria. And I have to do that as part of a tribute I owe her and the collectivity she signifies in this piece – rural African mothers as well as draw the attention of international development players to one or two issues involved.
It would amount to violence against the production of a more comprehensive repertoire of inequitable sharing of global advantages not to tell the story of my mother’s individual sheroism and triumph over all the adversities tacked against her by her circumstance of birth. This tribute is thus not a case of indirectly soliciting for condolences but a summoning to partake in celebrating a personification of the struggle of most rural African women against the boundaries mapped for them by their circumstance and their very successful remapping of the boundaries in many cases, the details of which makes her own transition at nearly 90 years of age a reflexivity-inviting event.
Rural privations and the burdens they impose on women in particular is that very one dimension of postcolonial Africa that has seen little or no change. With death ever-present, stalking mothers and infants, a statement such as this is no exaggeration. After all, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan who became president of Nigeria in 2011 won his election largely because of the evocative force of the one-liner in his campaign – the boy who never had shoes -. As true as it that poverty in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria has an extractivist peculiarity to it, Dr Jonathan’s one liner is the one liner of most boys across Nigeria. It is worse for the girl-child, most of who suffer sexual degradation in one form or the other. Beyond Dr. Jonathan, there was the late Chief Moshood Kashimawo Abiola, the wealthy winner of the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential poll in Nigeria who never tired in telling the story of how his mother died because he didn’t have the hospital fee to pay. His critics attacked him for romanticising poverty but Chief Abiola was not romanticising poverty or glamourising it. He was telling a story that had to be told.
This is no more about my mother who lived up to roughly 90 years in rural Nigeria, which is her other triumph that must be brought up here. Living that long is contrary to her morbid fear that people from her kindred in Ogene rarely last long enough to reap the benefits of their investment in children. She carried that fear deeply. But her fear did not materialise. In fact, the last medical doctor who examined her on April 12th, 2025 found her intact – no liver, kidney or any system crisis apart from elements of dementia and all that. It was more a case of someone who wanted to go because she no longer had the people who used her existential grammar. Although we talked a lot on phone from wherever I was, she found me funny many times and I had to battle her disgust against further living, including quoting the Bible to support my position. In all such encounters, I won but it never lasted.
Unlike Abiola’s mother who found herself in a hospital at all, there was no hospital for Ojongo, my mother, to receive medical attention, either at Ejaji, the hamlet in which we lived in the present Okpokwu Local Government Area of Benue State in central Nigeria. Otukpo, the nearest urban centre to us had hospitals but which nobody had the kind of money that seeking medical attention there would have entailed around 1964. So, hers was not about being unable to pay hospital bills. Hers was about no hospitals at all but my mother survived a still birth. A crack team of traditional birth attendants was called in and she survived it. They successfully induced the dead child in her womb to exit. That would have been her fourth child. This must be around 1966.
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On April 13th, 2025, I went to Ogene, the village under which subsists Ejaji, the hamlet I was born. My mission to Ogene was to piece together the specifics of her miraculous survival by talking to any of the actors involved. Predictably, I met no one alive who witnessed it. Persons of that age are all dead in that village now. But I could easily activate the inter-generational memory as to learn that there were three most notable traditional birth attendants in the area. These were Onyaidu Oobe, Oogo Onyonminyi and Omeno Onyagbo. They were the leading experts. If it was beyond them, then Onyaidu Ogwube was sent for from Agadagba, not far away but a different settlement. She was well known for dexterity in the realm. She rarely failed the test although Onyaidu Oobe was beating her to it in a few testy cases. Amenyo is the name of the practice. It involved collecting and mixing herbs, fruits and roots. Each expert collected a different set of these raw materials, used different techniques of blending them and administering it. It rarely failed. The traditional birth attendants took out the stuff from my mother’s womb and she returned to continue giving birth to more children. Dr. Okpeh Alleh Okpeh of the University of Abuja who grew up in Ogene in those days and who spoke on this issue must be right to assert that rarely did delivery related complications resulted in death. The miraculous in my mother’s survival remains in that child dying in the womb was not the regular experience. Delayed delivery or related cases were commoner. All such cases posed no problems for the attendants.
That is precisely the tragedy today in the successful primitivisation of traditional birth attendants in, I guess, much of Africa without anything by way of replacement from a stillborn modernity across the continent. Neither the power elite in Nigeria, for instance, nor the international development planners appear to have thought about alternatives to the largely neoliberal packing of their services, all of it trapped in Enlightenment narrative of science. As such, none of the superintendents of modernity have been able to think through alternative groundings of healthcare delivery even when absolutely nothing today has changed from the situation in the early 1960s. Rethinking international development is important, given that a culturally better informed, more systematically funded and less patronising international development regime is sure to succeed the one Mister Trump is currently vandalizing. Those who speak of the postcolonial moment in (international) security studies have made the case for it and they have been heard in the appropriate quarters. The world cannot do without mitigating the excesses of contemporary capitalism.
This is no more about my mother who lived up to roughly 90 years in rural Nigeria, which is her other triumph that must be brought up here. Living that long is contrary to her morbid fear that people from her kindred in Ogene rarely last long enough to reap the benefits of their investment in children. She carried that fear deeply. But her fear did not materialise. In fact, the last medical doctor who examined her on April 12th, 2025 found her intact – no liver, kidney or any system crisis apart from elements of dementia and all that. It was more a case of someone who wanted to go because she no longer had the people who used her existential grammar. Although we talked a lot on phone from wherever I was, she found me funny many times and I had to battle her disgust against further living, including quoting the Bible to support my position. In all such encounters, I won but it never lasted.
I locate the last illustration of Ojongo’s triumph over systemic privations in her motherhood of Adagbo Onoja whose emergence as chief ideologue of the 2008 Jigawa Talakawa Summit is the unfolding of Ojongo, Onoja himself being an outcome of the Ojongo exertions and for whom the summit remains the most ideologically meaningful outcome from the opportunity to serve in the Sule Lamido governorship of Jigawa State, 2007 – 2012.
Third illustration of the claim of triumph must be for a woman who lost five out of eight children but got over it. In Africa, children are all that people have. So, the experience of losing children must have been devastating. Hers might not be the worst-case scenario but no less soul destroying an experience from which few gathered themselves back. She had eight children in all, out of which only three of us survived. That and the misery associated with each loss is what stole her vibrance. She was, otherwise, such that her father called her Ojongo, his own exclusive name for my mother. I never knew what it meant until April 13th, 2025 when Ejembi Aba, an elder, told me at Ogene that it is an adoration name for the pretty, brilliant and mostly light complexioned, all of which applied to my mother until misery and burdens of children drained her. Although Abbyjjak – her self-assured and no-nonsense giant of a father who walked, talked and gestured in equal proportion with his size – gave her a new name every other day, Ojongo was the most invoked, subsuming Ikponya, my mother’s real name. It is no longer early 1960s but infant mortality is very much with us, a crisis that, again, has an international development dimension more than even the role of the political leadership in Nigeria, given the global character of capitalism, especially in the parts of the world incorporated into it in the most stressful and incomplete manner Africa was.
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The fourth illustration and a paradoxical one for that matter is someone of her material challenges remaining a one – woman ‘socialist’ throughout her life. It is not easy to be poor and be high minded and take other people’s problems on board. Send my mother money today, with the message to her to keep it for the rainy days and the money will end up solving someone else’s problems. I always got to know each time this happened because the beneficiary would call to ask me to thank my mother. It was always exasperating learning this because, in most cases, the same beneficiary has already received his or her own ‘share’ of one’s one-man experimentation in redistribution. And when you query my mother, she would say something like ‘can’t you see that the person has a big problem’? I wanted a situation whereby, at any one moment, she had substantial money in that pouch in which rural women hide their money. It was my own way of unmaking her past. She never got it. She was like her father in that attribute of high mindedness and cheerful giving.
I was an eating problem. I was not eating anything foo foo till sixth birthday or thereabout. In a community in which the staple was foofoo (pounded yam, dried cassava made into stuff that could be swallowed. Garri, another swallow made from fermenting cassava was not that popular then), I must have been a nightmare for my mother, though a lovely nightmare. She had to perpetually assemble long pea, pigeon-pea, ground pea, grains, water yam, cocoa-yam, beans and what have you for my feeding. As such, I was the child of concern whenever she wasn’t around despite my not being the first child.
I locate the last illustration of Ojongo’s triumph over systemic privations in her motherhood of Adagbo Onoja whose emergence as chief ideologue of the 2008 Jigawa Talakawa Summit is the unfolding of Ojongo, Onoja himself being an outcome of the Ojongo exertions and for whom the summit remains the most ideologically meaningful outcome from the opportunity to serve in the Sule Lamido governorship of Jigawa State, 2007 – 2012. Although the Jigawa Talakawa Summit did not proceed to the next level, it remains distinctive, being the first ever conversation between the masses on the one hand and the informal coalition made up of political leadership of the Jigawa State Government; the traditional authority in Northern Nigeria, (over a dozen Nigerian and Nigerien traditional rulers led by the Sultan of Sokoto); the UN (led by the Global Call for Action Against Poverty – GCAP) and the Nigerian civil society. It made it possible for the concentration of the Nigerian masses in Jigawa State to capture and represent exclusion and poverty direct to the power elite in their own words, unadulterated by elite summary writing. One day, the entire Nigerian masses will have a same opportunity when the Jigawa Talakawa Summit is replicated at the national level. It is the best mechanism for emancipation through voice, power, inclusion and equity in a highly unequal and exclusionary society.
These five illustrations of triumph speak to a number of specific challenges that she confronted, in most cases because of me. Taken in no chronological or any order, the most interesting of these challenges would include the following.
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I was an eating problem. I was not eating anything foo foo till sixth birthday or thereabout. In a community in which the staple was foofoo (pounded yam, dried cassava made into stuff that could be swallowed. Garri, another swallow made from fermenting cassava was not that popular then), I must have been a nightmare for my mother, though a lovely nightmare. She had to perpetually assemble long pea, pigeon-pea, ground pea, grains, water yam, cocoa-yam, beans and what have you for my feeding. As such, I was the child of concern whenever she wasn’t around despite my not being the first child. It complicated the absence during the stillbirth which was completely different from her constant dash to Ogene and back within a few hours or to the market at Ugbokolo, the equivalent of anything urban around the place. I must have been around 3-4 years old. All I experienced was the pangs of her absence during the ordeal because the ‘surgery’ was not done in Ejaji. It was done in Ogene, the larger settlement under which Ejaji is a hamlet and where the world unfolded. That was where she went obviously on sensing danger. I think it took about four days of her being away. Nobody told me she had a stillbirth partly because she was taken for dead and partly because it is not the correct protocol. I am not sure my senior brother knew either. Surely, my father knew but it was impossible to read what was going on within him from his face. I cannot remember how the girl following me was taken care of during the four days.
Anyway, I have no idea where it came from that l ended up one of the very few in the entire village who wasn’t into foo foo. I have not also gone back to find out why it happened. All that everyone knows today is that one day, it all came to an abrupt end. There was someone called Ella Eeje. He was well known throughout the village as the enforcer of what no one asked him to but which no one frowned at. And he could exert himself to the point of biting any stubborn boy into compliance. Surely people notified him of anomalies they felt he could/should correct, sometimes to the anger of mothers of his prey as it were. In my own case, I just sighted him one day coming into our compound. He must have planned it because I had no room for manoeuvre. He asked my mother to bring foofoo, then asked me to eat. The fear of what would happen next meant that I had to eat. There were no questions of what might have made me to reject food. I ate, then he left, telling no one in particular he should be informed if I strayed back. I have never strayed back since. I also don’t know if my mother was happy but she was certainly relieved although no one believed I wasn’t going to fall sick or develop reactions later. But it normalised. I was the contrast to the other similar case. He never overcame his own in spite of the biting by the self-imposed enforcer. He got nicknamed after yam, yam being his staple. Everyone called him Ogwuche Ihi (yam in Idoma language). With that, my mother’s second adversity and incredible burden in that environment was over.
It was that sense of ‘stardom’ which fuelled my refusal to bring myself to carry out any errands those already in school were exempted from. I simply felt too clean, too ‘educated’ to carry out such errands, partly because I was already seeing myself in the image of the Ellas. But only my mother could guarantee my transition to that level because, when I reached the age to transit to the senior primary school at Olanyega, where Fred and Ejembi Ella were passing to every morning to my admiration, my father came up with the idea that I should remain at home till my senior brother completed his primary school.
Tugging at her to ensure she found my next meal produced a different outcome – the bonding that she never had with any of my siblings. My senior brother was rarely around, either engrossed in ‘homework’ from school or cutting palm fronds to make brooms for school ‘handwork’. Onyema, the girl child who followed me had no capacity to assert herself. That left me as the only source of ‘trouble’ for a long time, each such trouble bringing an additional burden for my mother.
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One of these came from nowhere. Ejaji is in between Ogene and Olanyega. Every weekday, two young boys much older than even my senior brother would trek from Ogene to the senior primary school at Olanyega. We used to run to the main road to admire these two. Somehow, they discovered that I could comfortably recite ‘Our Father in Heaven’ even though I had yet to see the four walls of a school. It became a ritual. As soon as I sighted them returning, I would run to meet them naked, sure to be asked to recite ‘Our Father in Heaven’ and get the fill from doing so. On March 25th, 2025 when I called Chief Fred Ella, now a retired Accountant from the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, Zaria and one of the two pupils for whom I was reciting ‘Our Father’ then, we laughed over it all. He reminded me of how I used to recite it without comma, full stop or pausing at all. But they were clapping for me and I was getting a super star sense of myself from what no other kids in the hamlet were doing.
It was that sense of ‘stardom’ which fuelled my refusal to bring myself to carry out any errands those already in school were exempted from. I simply felt too clean, too ‘educated’ to carry out such errands, partly because I was already seeing myself in the image of the Ellas. But only my mother could guarantee my transition to that level because, when I reached the age to transit to the senior primary school at Olanyega, where Fred and Ejembi Ella were passing to every morning to my admiration, my father came up with the idea that I should remain at home till my senior brother completed his primary school. He explained he could not combine mine and my senior brother’s school fees. If it was just the tuition, he argued, it would have been possible but there were charges such as the AMC (Annual Mission Collection, mischievously renamed as ‘Africans Must be Cheated), payments in lieu of handwork by pupils and donation of eggs for mission operatives. It included yams but donating yams was not a problem for over 95% of the community. So, my father was right to some extent. It was in this context my mother stepped in, assuming responsibility until Edward, my senior brother, completed his. That was agreed or so my mother and I thought. But the burdens kept widening.
The Xmas culture we grew up to meet is to appear in new dresses every Xmas. It was no more than what was called L & K in those days but it was not cheap by our material standard. Somehow, most men found a way of dodging this. It was as if they usually held a meeting and reach a consensus to dodge and pass the burden to the women. I cannot remember any Xmas I didn’t wear new dresses to the Church on December 25th. The bigger share of this fell on my mother.
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Where did she raise all the money? She was the unchallenged in the community in brewing Burukutu – alcohol brewed from fermented grains. She made money from it. Her father – Abbyjjak after whom my first son is named – was an incredible source of psychological, material and whatever support thinkable.
By 1974, my senior brother had finished primary school and gone to work in Kaduna where someone poisoned him to death. I learnt this by accident. After I finished secondary school and went to Kaduna in 1981, someone who was introducing me to someone else said I was the junior brother of Edward who was poisoned to death here in Kaduna. It was the first time I heard the cause of his death. I then came to understand why they put arrows in his coffin. It meant they told my father because I saw when he was escorted by his friends and neighbours to put the arrows in the coffin. Edward was working in Sani Bakori Brothers as a Secretary/Typist. His friend Peter Abah with whom they finished primary school together had gone straight to secondary school because there was a Francis Adah in Kaduna, a textile manager who was very good in sponsoring younger ones. Peter and Edward arrived at how Edward would be able to go to secondary school by saving money.
The departure of Edward from the village to Kaduna meant that I was the only child whose maintenance was the challenge. It would still take time for the girl who followed me to transit to the senior primary school as to become part of the problem. The two others who would have been had all died before they reached two years. One was called Isaac while another was called Enuwa.
At this time, it was not just school fees but also the social activities that came with being in school, each of which cost money. To make matters worse, I was a disaster in any of the things that could bring money. I never mastered fishing by using the hooks. I was never good in sustained bush mango collection. I was not good in hunting, too afraid of animals. My only value was in escorting my mother, helping her carry firewood, cassava and yams, especially whenever we went to her father’s farm. My only other capability was in doing ridges in the farm.
Even the few areas I was of any use to her never lasted because, early 1976, every other things gave way to the struggle for me to go to secondary school. I still don’t know why I went to write what was called the Common Entrance Examination by which one entered any of the about 15 or so catholic secondary schools in the old Idoma Native Authority. The principal suspect must be my new settlement – Opialu. The decision had been taken for my father to relocate to his father’s village as a possible way of undercutting whatever was responsible for the infant mortality in the family. That meant moving from Ejaji/Ogene to Opialu or from upper to lower part of Edumoga District. I was asked to move ahead of the family so as to enter St. Theresa Primary School, Opialu in September 1975.
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That year, there was a conscientisation exercise targeted at pupils in Class 6 to write the Common Entrance Examination instead of waiting till Class 7. There was a certain teacher by name Gapfiller. His real name was Gabriel Ochigbo but he was more known by his guy name. He didn’t want to hear any pupils telling him that his or her family did not have the money to pay for secondary school education. He would say, “pass the examination first”. So, I joined others to go and write the examination. And I passed. The more rigorous interview came. I also passed. So, who pays my college fees?
Again, it was back to my mother but this time not a matter of cash but of dexterity. I had passed both levels of examinations but no certainty of going anywhere. I left Opialu back to Ogene. It was a very tense situation. The tension was so much that the family I was staying with came up with a suggestion. Why don’t you go and see Chief Daniel Adulugba? Both of you are from the same place. Chief Daniel Adulugba was the District Head of Edemoga by then. He knew my father very well and knew we were from Opialu but living in Ogene, close to the District Headquarters. That was a perfect idea but my father had never gone to greet him as he should have done, an attitude which I put to my sense of him as nursing a grudge against the system after trekking with his friends from our place to Makurdi to join the army but only to be turned down. None of us knew about this until the late Abalike Ella with whom he trekked to Makurdi told the story of their great trek at my father’s burial in 2014. I have been wondering how stiff a soldier my father would have been.
Anyway, before anyone could say Adulugba, I was already in Ugbokolo, having a meeting with Peter Abah, my late brother’s friend in the primary school, asking him to draft the letter which I would take to Chief Adulugba. Peter was at this time a fourth-year student of Emmanuel Secondary School, Ugbokolo. Sleeping in Emmanuel Secondary School increased my desire to be part of that place. The following day, I was off to see Chief Adulugba at the Edemoga District Headquarters. He was not in. But Mama Eliza, one of his wives knew our family. Ikponya Abba’s son needed no introduction to her. It was to her I gave the letter to deliver. And I then went back to Opialu.
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About two weeks thereafter, I got a summon to Chief Adulugba’s huge compound at Opialu. He was on a regular visit to the village from the District Headquarters. He told me that unless he died before September, nothing would stop me from entering Emmanuel Secondary School then. The Irish Principal of the school, Rev Fr O’ Vincent O’Brien was his friend and he would tell him he was bringing his ward to the school. It was too good to be true. Too good for me to tell anybody in case bad belle people went to do their worst. What I later discovered is that the letter Peter Abah drafted had such a powerful impact on the chief that he made up his mind to see to my going to the school. He didn’t even bother to test me on the letter. Chief Adulugba loved brilliance. Beyond Peter Abah and my mother, nobody knew. But it wasn’t something that could be hidden and as soon as it was known all about, trouble started.
I had moved from Radio Kaduna to Kano State Government-owned Triumph Publishing company, then to Concord Press of Nigeria and back to Kano in 1989 to read for a Diploma in Mass Communication at Bayero University, Kano. While in Concord employment, Comrade John Odah who subsequently became the General Secretary of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) got Chief Adulugba to put pressure on me to rewrite WASC contrary to my decision never to have anything to do with the West African Examination Council (WAEC) again because they told lies that our set had leakage. It simply meant that they had no idea at all about Emmanuel Secondary School, Ugbokolo as at then. It was not possible to have leakage as long as ‘Equillary’ was the Vice-Principal. ‘Equillary’ is the name students gave him. His real name is Mr. J. U. Ekwueme. He is late now. So, I didn’t see the point in submitting myself to a set of liars again. With the GCE I was ‘forced’ by Odah and chief to write, I could go for a degree at last.
Opialu Village was fractionalized over the clan headship of Ojigo. The clan headship wasn’t as a big deal as District headship of Edumoga but a new regime of practice made clan headship of one’s clan a requirement for the District headship or something like that. In the division over the clan headship, my father found himself in one of the camps opposed to Chief Adulugba. So, what was my father to do? Risk alienation in his own kindred by supporting Chief Adulugba who was taking responsibility for his son’s college or remain with his kindred and annoy Chief Adulugba? As it turned out, Chief Adulugba was not bothered by all these. It was my father, obviously instigated by his kindred, that was silently protesting my impending sponsorship by Chief. My mother smashed that silent protestation in a way I could not believe. She went to Chief Adulugba’s kindred to which my father also belongs through his father’s mother and reported him. It was a reporting with a veiled threat of what she would do if I did not go to college by September because of my father’s positionality. Her protest put everyone in a quandary. The elders to whom she reported had their affinity to my father. But they were Chief Adulugba’s loyalists as well. The truth is that I can no longer remember how it was resolved. By September 1976, I collected the money I needed to enter Emmanuel Secondary, Ugbokolo. The impossible had happened. Peter Abah was elated. People I left in Ogene did not know how it happened. My bonding with Chief was perfect. On holidays, I would go out with him on tax assessment, putting me in a position where, until recently, I knew the biggest villages in the entire Edumoga by taxation metric.
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Three different appearances on NTA, Makurdi Schools Quiz Competition while in the secondary school put the idea of working in either Radio Benue or NTA, Makurdi in my head. So, to Makurdi I headed after completing secondary school. I was meeting Inalegwu Odeh who later became State House correspondent of NTA during the IBB regime but Makurdi. He was accessible but no job was on its way. That was the situation till Liman Adulugba, one of the sons of Chief Adulugba who had just graduated from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria asked me to leave Makurdi and meet David Adulugba, his senior brother who had just started practicing law in Zaria. Barrister David would take me to Dr Agi at the School of Basic Studies, ABU who had been spoken to about my admission into the school. Liman scoffed at the idea of looking for employment in Makurdi. However, admission pursuit suffered a knock out because my WASC result didn’t support it. I had about three A’s – Economics, History and one other subject but I had only a pass 7 in English. Mission impossible!
While thinking through the confusion, I went to Radio Nigeria, Kaduna where a schoolmate of my late senior brother was working. He guided me to James Audu’s office. Audu, now late, was a big name in broadcasting in Nigeria. I told him I could think and put my thoughts in good prose, a line straight from one of Dele Giwa’s columns. He seemed impressed by my claim as to ask his secretary to take me to Mallam Mohammed Suleiman, the then Manager of News and Current Affairs. He, in turn, told me to come back in two weeks because they had just concluded a recruitment exercise the week I was there and no new one would take place again till another two weeks.
This is the sense in which her story amounts to triumphing over the limits set for her by circumstance except that with her exit, and preceding her, Chief Daniel Adulugba, Francis Ada, Benedict Ochiga and Peter Abah, there is a coming loneliness in the crowd for some of us. Unlike her with whom nothing was left untouched from the list of the things to discuss, none of the others gave me that opportunity. I spoke with Peter Abah a few hours before his death but it wasn’t the sort of discussion that we should have had. In the case of Okpani Ben Ochiga, I was just woken up with a call that he had died. Okpani Francis Adah is not the sort of person who will admit being at the point of death if you were speaking to him on the phone. He just wasn’t that sort of person. He was as complex as he was simple and disarming. The only comforting thing in his own case is that I participated in his burial to the fullest. Death of Chief Adulugba was the last thing on my mind. It was incomprehensible for a long time because there were absolutely no hints. These were the people who knew me. Benedict Ochiga would say, ‘those of us who know you are not many’.
I thought it was a story to send me away. So, I just forgot about it and went to Zaria where I felt comfortable with Joe Adulugba, another of the Adulugbas. But before long, I was told I had a letter from Radio Kaduna. When I returned to Kaduna and opened the stapled letter, it was an invitation to an interview. I stayed back, attended the interview and was employed as a News Assistant on the very day of the interview, April 28th, 1982.
It was a major turn because it meant arriving at that junction where I could now start taking care of my mother. Since that day, she has been on the priority list but not in the clean – break proportion I wanted. And it was disturbing me internally. More so that that the last two children who had survived had come of school age and she was still the leading force.
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I had moved from Radio Kaduna to Kano State Government-owned Triumph Publishing company, then to Concord Press of Nigeria and back to Kano in 1989 to read for a Diploma in Mass Communication at Bayero University, Kano. While in Concord employment, Comrade John Odah who subsequently became the General Secretary of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) got Chief Adulugba to put pressure on me to rewrite WASC contrary to my decision never to have anything to do with the West African Examination Council (WAEC) again because they told lies that our set had leakage. It simply meant that they had no idea at all about Emmanuel Secondary School, Ugbokolo as at then. It was not possible to have leakage as long as ‘Equillary’ was the Vice-Principal. ‘Equillary’ is the name students gave him. His real name is Mr. J. U. Ekwueme. He is late now. So, I didn’t see the point in submitting myself to a set of liars again. With the GCE I was ‘forced’ by Odah and chief to write, I could go for a degree at last.
But the thought of four years in the university pursuing a First degree was an uncomfortable one. What if my mother died while I was on it? Would I survive it? An idea came to me. Take BUK’s Advanced Diploma in Public Administration and, with it, take either an MBA or a similar course that puts me at that level. That way, I did not have to spend four years pursuing a First degree programme. Everything would take two years and I would have arrived ‘there’. In my mind, Prof Attahiru Jega, the BUK academic I thought had the most leverage to get me admitted into the Advanced Diploma in Public Administration. So, I went to him to lay my request. Jega, however, replied in the negative. That diploma, he said, was for senior civil servants who needed to move up on the job. It was not for people of my age nor an academic programme that could lead me anywhere.
Meanwhile, the comrades were relentless. I was about the only one who was in that circle who was not a graduate. It seemed dodging a First degree was impossible. Towards the end of the diploma in Mass Communication at BUK, I got employment as a Staff Writer with Chris Anyanwu’s TSM. It was a strategic error. The job itself was fine but it took me to squatting with Comrade Odah’s in an NLC house in Lagos which served more or less as the operational headquarters of the radical activists. There was a night devoted to my case against going to the university. I argued that Kano was too violent for me to take the admission to BUK which had already been secured. Comrade Chom Bagu asked whether I thought of what happens if there were no riots in Kano for the next four years. I had no answer to that. Then I said BUK didn’t have that prestige. It was a disastrous move. Labaran Maku who later became Information and subsequently Defence Minister wanted to know if BUK is not where Tajudeen Abdulraheem who was setting academic and activist agenda in Oxford University graduated from. He said I should go to Kano with a determination to be the second of only two survivors of the worst violence imaginable in Kano during the four years I would be an undergraduate there. John Odah who was very good in setting the fire but then withdrawing to the corner never said anything. At the end of the day, every plausible alibi I advanced in trying to escape going to the university was defeated. That was how I left Lagos for BUK in February 1992, graduating with a 2.1 in Political Science in December 1995. It is the reason why I am used to reminding Comrade John Odah of the trouble he has caused for me. If I didn’t go to the university and then take two different Masters degrees and been on a PhD programme, I would not be aware of, much less worry whether Donald Trump is an aberration in democracy; whether US and China are heading for classical Thucydides trap or not; whether socialism is superior to capitalism, Africa’s insertion in global capitalism and its consequences or if the police is violating people’s human rights. Rather, I would be in the bliss that ignorance guarantees.
The period after the degree has been different. I am far from being a rich person by any metrics but it still makes sense to say that my mother was taken care of in her life time. This much, she admitted every now and then. She shocked me each time she expressed gratitude to me. I always felt like asking her: have you forgotten that you made all these possible? My memories of her early morning rounds on her Burukutu business, all for my sake, makes me believe I can never repay her.
This is the sense in which her story amounts to triumphing over the limits set for her by circumstance except that with her exit, and preceding her, Chief Daniel Adulugba, Francis Ada, Benedict Ochiga and Peter Abah, there is a coming loneliness in the crowd for some of us. Unlike her with whom nothing was left untouched from the list of the things to discuss, none of the others gave me that opportunity. I spoke with Peter Abah a few hours before his death but it wasn’t the sort of discussion that we should have had. In the case of Okpani Ben Ochiga, I was just woken up with a call that he had died. Okpani Francis Adah is not the sort of person who will admit being at the point of death if you were speaking to him on the phone. He just wasn’t that sort of person. He was as complex as he was simple and disarming. The only comforting thing in his own case is that I participated in his burial to the fullest. Death of Chief Adulugba was the last thing on my mind. It was incomprehensible for a long time because there were absolutely no hints. These were the people who knew me. Benedict Ochiga would say, ‘those of us who know you are not many’.
May all four of them be blessed as we head for Ojongo’s burial, preparatory to her transition to where good people go to. It has to be so because I cannot even guess what deficits the angels night find in her records!
And after that, then the struggle for expanding the democratic space for those left behind by exclusionary modernity resumes. As Prof Okello Oculi is used to saying, it is the ultimate paradox that rural women across Africa continue to give birth on top of leaves many decades after independence. Fighting for a reframing of the narratives of international development intervention in Africa constitutes the starting point of a reinvigorated struggle against mass misery. Interestingly, that battle has been won with the defeat of crude neoliberalism among the major players – the IMF/World Bank, the UN family broadly, the global civil society and post-positivist academia. The tragedy is how this battle has yet to start in much of Africa arising from fixation with structuralist cum rationalist reasoning. Time to move over to the strategy of ‘making the invisible visible’!
What is left is to thank a number of people. Mr. Eddi Adoga who, since mid-2022, took the handset to her every three days, making it possible for she and I to speak, directly and sometimes through voice note. This was irrespective of whether I was in or outside Nigeria. Thank you very much, Eddi. Nurse Vero Okoh is next. She took over from a previous nurse in the past two years or so. The doctor who reexamined my mother on April 12th, 2025 praised Nurse Vero so much. Thank you, Nurse Vero. All gratitude to Madam Onyikwu Adagba, my mother’s junior sister who left her base in Ugboju to take control in the past two months. So much gratitude to all those solidarising through calls, texts and other different ways. Everyone is invited to join in the impending burial next where we sing Ojongo home with ‘Olena yawu okuno’ At 90, there is no mourning but celebration of life!
Onoja, the author, is a doctoral researcher
