By Azu Ishiekwene
If it seems like only yesterday when the founder of LEADERSHIP, Sam Nda-Isaiah, passed away, it’s because he is still here in the present tense. Yet you might disagree if you are looking for him in the wrong place. Let me lessen your confusion.
If, for example, you still hope he’d call at 2.30 am to wake you up and ask why you’re asleep at that time, which he did without a hint of irony, and such calls have stopped since, then you may consider him part of the past.
There are other footprints. His hearty laughter, or the echo of his stuttering voice as he marshalled facts in a heated argument. These idiosyncrasies, now silenced since that December 11 Friday night five years ago, may also seem like a distant part of the past.
Yet, these recollections, like memories from the Magdalenean scene at the Talpiot tomb in Jerusalem centuries ago, are mistaken because they imagine Sam outside the realm where he made his most significant impact.
He’s not in his study at his house or on his way back from Hawaii, Beijing, Singapore, or any of those exotic destinations he loved to visit. Nor is he sitting in the corner of his favourite brown leather chair in his office, passionately debating the trouble with Nigeria with his friends.
Another realm
Sam lives on in another realm, the realm of words, where he made his most tremendous impact. And in that realm, there is no past tense, only a constant, unrelenting conversation with the present in the hope that if we heed, we might yet have a better future. Sam’s platform was his weekly Monday column, “The Last Word.”
I’ve been reading many of them recently, and you might be forgiven for thinking they were written yesterday. I’m not talking about the collection of articles he wrote and published under the title Nigeria: Full Disclosure, as a columnist with Daily TRUST before founding LEADERSHIP in 2004. That was quite something.
Yet, between the publication of Full Disclosure and 10 years later, when, literally speaking, Sam suspended his column at gunpoint to contest the presidential primaries of the All Progressives Congress (APC), he wrote many more thrilling pieces about many things, from politics to governance, and from corruption to the judiciary and international affairs.
Bosom of his words
Many of the articles are fresh and poignant. Take the one entitled, “The PDP Civil War,” for example. Sam, being Sam, he believed former President Olusegun Obasanjo was perhaps Nigeria’s biggest problem and hardly spared him. On the eve of that party’s presidential primaries in 2010, Sam examined the various forces at play, tracing the absence of internal democracy in the PDP to its militaristic roots and the hijack of the party by Obasanjo.
The PDP primary of that year was like no other. It featured the party’s biggest heavyweights from military president General Ibrahim Babangida to General Aliyu Gusau and, of course, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. The line-up was the surest sign that the Northern political establishment had parted ways with former President Goodluck Jonathan and would give him a fight to the finish for “betraying” a gentleman’s agreement to do only one term after completing the late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s term.
The coming war
For personal and political reasons, Sam, a founding member of Muhammadu Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), disliked the PDP. He said it was a criminal organisation, with only a few good people. His article, published before the party’s 2010 primary, was fascinating.
“I think the coming war in PDP,” he wrote, “will not be fought with machetes, cutlasses and guns. It’s going to be fought with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And, ultimately, it is in the interest of the nation that the party breaks. In its present form, it is an ogre that does no one any good.”
If Sam exaggerated the death of the PDP, perhaps he was more mistaken about its speed than about whether it would happen at all. A number of the actors have changed, but the party, still desperate to commit suicide, now hangs by a thread.
Meanwhile, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), of which Sam was a founding member, has grown so large and prosperous that it would be fortunate to escape the disease that infected and killed the PDP.
Reality of terror
Then there was another piece he wrote in December 2010, entitled “The Reality of Terrorism in Nigeria.” That was when Boko Haram, though still in its infancy, showed that it was only a matter of time before it would progress into unimaginable, deadly mutations.
Around this time in 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian, tried to blow up a plane heading to Detroit, US. A year later, bombs were detonating in Jos, Plateau State, and elsewhere in Nigeria, killing many people – something which, in Sam’s words, evoked the spectre of places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
“If after all the killings of the past several years in Jos,” he wrote, “the October 1 mass murder in Abuja and the several Boko Haram murders in Maiduguri, not a single criminal has been sentenced to death and executed, I wonder…they will happen again and again until we start punishing those who commit crimes.”
Sadly, 14 years on, with thousands dead, millions wounded or displaced, and many more living in fear, some still believe that negotiating and paying ransom to criminal gangs is the best form of punishment.
Worth dying for?
Sam hated injustice, a situation often worsened by impunity and corruption. After months of writing in vain to get President Yar’Adua’s government to do something about it, Sam wrote an article in 2008 calling on the government to declare a “National Rogues Week.”
The point of the article, entitled “Is Nigeria Worth Dying For?,” was what Sam considered a grave injustice that had been done to Nuhu Ribadu, who was not only removed as the Chairman of the EFCC at the time but also demoted in his police rank.
Ribadu had trampled so many big toes in the fight against corruption that corruption was not just fighting back; it was fighting big, led by forces that had taken Yar’Adua hostage.
Since Ribadu’s crime was tackling the sacred cows, for which he was fired instead of promoted, Sam suggested that the government should designate a week when rogues could receive their flowers and even be inducted into a hall of fame. “Crooks have benefitted more (from the system) than honest men,” he wrote.
The situation has changed for Ribadu today, and he might in fact argue that Nigeria is worth risking one’s life for. However, Ribadu’s story hardly reflects the suffering of millions of citizens, terrified by fear and poverty and denied the sense that honest, hard work means anything.
Finished or not?
Looking back, it appears that Sam wrote “Political Decline of the North,” or “Atiku is Finished,” in a glorious era. Of course, there are great Northern minds terrified by poor, crooked leadership that has wrecked the region. Yet, Northerners who helped to hasten the decline Sam wrote about now have children and grandchildren who have joined the business of not only killing the North, but also doing so quickly.
As for Atiku being finished, his philandering is legendary, with his wild oats scattered across the major political parties, except those that have yet to be formed. Perhaps Atiku still has something left in the tank?
I can hear Sam saying, “Dam’bura…!” as he rocks with laughter. And then, pausing: “You’re very stupid, Azu!” as he explodes again in laughter that even Atiku can’t resist joining!
Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book A Midlifer’s Guide to Content Creation and Profit.
