By Tunde Akanni
It wasn’t surprising that the 70th birthday anniversary of a foremost human rights campaigner in Africa, Olisa Agbakoba, appeared to have sneaked away May 29 2023. There wouldn’t have been any basis to struggle in the media for attention on a day already officially and repeatedly faulted as the contraption of one man alone who had proclaimed himself to be evil-genius. But Olisa means every other thing in the contrary. He remains the head, the fountain and indeed the very source of hope for many of us in the human rights movement in Nigeria till date.
My favourite teacher of all time at the University of Ilorin, Olu Obafemi, in the course of cultivating me and my classmates in the relentlessness of seminality of ideas, had introduced literary works like Trial of Dedan Kimathi by Ngugi Wa Th’iongo to us. Little did I know, courtesy of the efforts of someone like Olisa, I was going to be demonstrative of Obafemi’s many submissions on the great play in not too distant a future. Kimathi, seemingly replicated in Olisa Agabakoba, is the indomitable anti-oppression champion in Kenya who remains undaunted in the face of all intimidation and torture and yet defies all officialdom and even goes ahead to talk wisdom into the heads of those being used to perpetrate injustice.
Way back in 1998, taking advantage of my exposure to human rights work to which I got exposed at the Civil Liberties Organisation, CLO, I was a Visiting Scholar to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, SIPA. One afternoon in the month of February that year, the lot fell on me to speak out to the world on my major concern with the Nigerian situation under the military siege then. While I was shouting myself hoarse at Columbia University on the downward slide of press and in fact all other genres of freedom, the military government of Coupist Sani Abacha was pounding OA at Yaba, Lagos Nigeria.
OA as we hailed the CLO President then, had staked his life to lead a 5 million man march beginning from Yaba against the fascist regime. It was a counterforce against Abacha’s grand falsehood in Abuja in form of one million march he had funded to advertise an unfounded support for his dictatorship. My audience at Columbia University felt a palpable pity for me. To most of them, it was unimaginable that Abacha could still feign support for himself in spite of the visible signs of resentment for his government nationally and internationally. OA left the grand march ground with swollen, bloodshot eyes.
Here’s hailing the real big brother in organized human rights campaign in Nigeria. From me to you sir, 70 gbosas!
Tunde Akanni, an associate professor and acting head of Journalism Department at LASU, is a multi-sectoral development consultant. Follow him on Twitter via @AkintundeAkanni.
