Hajiya Gambo Sawaba (1933-2001) is one of the reasons no one is prepared to teach anyone a thing about contemporary Nigerian history. Had this political activist’s remarkable odyssey been generally known, people would long have internalised protest against state-sponsored injustice as a way of life. She was routinely subjected to torture. She once told an audience that all her front teeth were artificial, the natural ones having been knocked out by oppressors. On one occasion, a piece of broken bottle was used to shave off her hair. She was chased from Kano, ordered never to return to the commercial city, and forcefully deposited in Zaria, from whence she came. With 16 incarcerations, she holds the record for the most imprisoned Nigerian woman.
Wetin the woman do sef? Plenty! To begin with, she had the temerity to campaign from the rooftops for gender equality right in the heart of conservative territory. She preached against child marriages, against forced labour and – wonderment! – against the law that denied women the vote. All the persecution she suffered made her stronger and more defiant in her life struggle for socio-political justice. Sawaba’s formal education ended in primary school. But she routinely argued better-educated folks to the ground floor of their unreasonableness. Extra-generous, this mother of only one daughter had a home always teeming with adopted and homeless children. There was more to her uniqueness.
Dig this: On weekdays, while others prepared for work, for travel or for idleness, she readied herself for the courts. If a notorious judge was scheduled to deliver judgment, Sawaba pushed other concerns to the back burner to witness it. Inside the courtroom, she would post herself in the front row, staring unblinkingly at the judge, saying absolutely nothing. Whether in an Alkali, Magistrates’ or High Court, it was a settled matter that any day Gambo Sawaba installed herself in a courtroom, magomago abruptly went on leave. No judge or qadi dared to miscarry justice in her presence. Without practising or advocating violence, she represented the potent force of moral authority, charging no fees for wrenching justice for victims.
Dear Obidients. Sawaba’s example teaches that the regular national fare of injustice must be fought all the way down to a humiliating capitulation. Yet, the consequential fight for justice never means burning tyres on road intersections, torching houses, shattering craniums and ending human lives. It only means appropriating courage and integrity and employing them for resolutely uttering, whenever and wherever necessary, a resounding NO in the face of thunder. That is the Gambo Sawaba Constant. The Obidient Movement must cultivate this attribute now that it has reached a fork in the road.
Disreputable characters are desperately trying to discredit the movement, setting it up for institutional hammer blows. To sunder it, agent provocateurs are disseminating the objectionable in its name. One clown even crashed into social media to claim that he had established the Obidient Movement for a different purpose, only for Mr. Peter Obi to hijack it for his vested political interests! In the light of these vexations, the movement must strengthen its structures for real political change by going beyond theory and social media action to engage in direct praxis.
The Obidient Movement should adopt Order as its motto, for wherever order is in ascent, election rigging is anathema. Order denotes a state of organisation and peace. Wherever it reigns, harmony thrives. The Obidients could adopt the Black Power salute as a symbol of defiant salutation. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos used it during a medal ceremony to protest racial injustice in their country. Obidients should use it to abominate criminal politics, perverted governance, electoral fraud, treasury plundering and divisive policies. The Obidient Movement’s identity must outlast the present political generation.
It should become the benign breeze to blow into Nigerians a new heart of interethnic and interreligious harmony. In terms of praxis, what to do is straightforward: Follow who know road ! Sawaba knew the road. Mrs. Margaret Ekpo (1914-2006) knew the road, as did Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (1900-1978), who mentored both Sawaba and Ekpo. All three were detribalised. All three championed human rights. All three taught the masses with the thesis of personal example. People of the threesome’s distinction abound in today’s Nigeria. They include Mrs. Nnenna Otti, a professor of Soil Science and a university Vice Chancellor, who, rejecting vicious threats and dollar-denominated backhanders, bluntly refused to falsify the 2023 presidential election results in Abia State.
The Obidients must emulate these honest, dedicated and courageous women, and pay no attention to menopausal professors who announce election results at 3 a.m. or deny their social media imprints because of payoffs, ambassadorial portfolios and such ephemerality. Obidients should not be despondent because Professor Oti has no national honours. Those honours have become the exclusive and intangible toys of convicted criminals with transcontinental disreputations. The concrete honours for Ekpo, Oti, Ransome-Kuti, Sawaba and other patriots, both male and female, are global, enduring, meaningful and straight from the hearts of rational Nigerians who genuinely recognise and appreciate their legacies.
Obidients should celebrate nationals with impeccable moral rectitude, not hypocrites who postulated half a century ago that “justice is the first condition of humanity,” only to be speechifying the unwary today about the imperative of justice genuflecting before the altar of ethnic bigotry. People were in this country when someone called President Goodluck Jonathan a drunken fisherman. People were also very much around when someone else called First Lady Patience Jonathan a sheppopotamus . When such pretenders shriek today on the fine points of decorous language, the Obidients must respond with this retort: “ Tishas , don’t teach us nonsense!”
The Obidients must, like Sawaba and Company, go into the countryside, teaching the long-suffering that the Greek gift of stone-riddled rice is insolent to parents whose sons and daughters perish daily on account of abject destitution and unprecedented insecurity. They should be teaching the pauperised that N10,000, which can hardly produce a decent meal today, debases anyone who collects such filthy lucre to vote for demons. The Obidients should understand that when, to manipulate elections, any thug calls himself a Master of Ceremonies for Mayhem and Chaos (MC 4 MC), even in Oshodi, Lagos, their cadres must confront his platoon of illegally armed marauders with a million-strong, flag-waving chanters of patriotic songs.
Obidients should replicate Czechoslovakia’s 1989 Velvet Revolution. When a judge is to pronounce on electoral matters, a million chanting Obidients should deluge the court’s precincts. Following any unjust verdict, the judge must run the gamut of their numbers, to trade unfelt handshakes with 500,000 unsmiling males and embrace the formidable bosoms of 500,000 grimacing women. Such mass rallies will brand base judicial psyches with the truisms that khaki no be leather and kinkana no de sour.
Obidients should number heavily among permanent and ad hoc electoral personnel, preventing shifty hands from election-day superimposition of falsity on already counted and signed votes. Obidients should, in their millions, occupy the approaches to polling booths and collation centres, certain that neither uniformed force nor hired hoodlums can erase a people thoroughly fed up to the hairline with kakistocracy. Dear Obidients. Remember that a peaceful disposition does not discount the human right of self-defence. Never forget that your name is Order. Your name is Courage. Your name is Presence.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
