Recently, fate dealt Nigeria a cruel hand when death took two of its greatest patriots and elder statemen in the space of one week. Pa Ayo Adebanjo, 96, who died on February 14, 2025, and Pa Edwin Clark, 97, who died three days later on February 17, 2025, were Nigeria’s conscience and moral compass. Until they breathed their last, they fought relentlessly for a just, fair and equitable nation-state.
Hardly anyone would say that a nonagenarian died too soon. Yet, that’s true of Chiefs Adebanjo and Clark: they died too soon! This is because they were almost indispensable. In a country where most elites bury their heads in the sand or easily compromise their principles once “settled” by the state, Pa Adebanjo and Pa Clark were selfless and fearless: they spoke truth to power and vociferously underscored the need to transform Nigeria’s deeply flawed political and governance structures. Thus, their deaths leave a big void, which, sadly, only a handful of the living are patriotic and dogged enough to fill.
Both Chief Adebanjo and Pa Clark knew that the greatest threats to Nigeria’s unity, stability and, even, future are the mismanagement of its diversity and the failure to restructure the polity to decentralise and devolve powers within a genuine federal structure. Unfortunately, the politicians pay lip service to Nigeria’s unity, opportunistically mismanage its diversity and continue to ignore the fact that no other country with Nigeria’s type of multinational make-up has Nigeria’s type of centralised political structure, where excessive powers are vested in an Executive President, and concentrated in a leviathan central government at the expense of the regions, wherein reside the core ethnic identities.
I repeat, no single multi-ethnic country, not Canada, not South Africa, not India, name it, none denudes its regions of powers, resources and autonomy as Nigeria does. Those countries, and others like them, allow their provinces to feel the fullest autonomy of nationhood within a federal state. Even the United States, a country of immigrants, operates a genuine federal system under which the constitution limits the powers of the federal government and reserves huge powers, responsibilities, resources and autonomy to the states.
But Nigeria is not a country of immigrants. Rather, it is a country where the various ethnic nationalities had owned and lived in their respective territories as independent nations and kingdoms for centuries, long before Britain cobbled them together and forced them into a political entity called “Nigeria”. Yet, despite the perverse nature of its creation, Nigeria’s existence has been accepted as a fait accompli, a fact of life, by most people in this country.
However, while most people accept Nigeria’s creation as a settled matter, they also believe the deeply flawed political structures forcibly foisted by the colonialists, and later made worse by the military, must change so that Nigeria can become a genuine federal state. Truth be told, any diverse, multi-ethnic country that is not organised along a proper federal structure, with significant regional or provincial powers and autonomies, will be perennially beset by disharmony and instability, and might eventually disintegrate, as previously seemingly indissoluble countries like Yugoslavia did.
Those, in a nutshell, were the federalist arguments of Pa Adebanjo and Pa Clark. They made those arguments personally and through their respective sociocultural-cum-political groups: Afenifere and the Pan Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF. But while they single-mindedly fought for political restructuring and a new constitution for Nigeria, they also frontally confronted the evil that has afflicted Nigeria’s political governance: the mismanagement of Nigeria’s diversity. There are three main areas where Nigeria’s diversity has been, and is being, mismanaged. They are ethnicity, religion and resource control. And on each of these, Chief Adebanjo and Pa Clark provided the strongest and most powerful countervailing voices.
Take ethnicity. President Muhammadu Buhari was the first civilian president to be accused of mismanaging Nigeria’s ethnic diversity, with, allegedly, a Fulanisation agenda. In his eight years as president, Buhari filled most of the critical offices of state with his Fulani people and found no single Igbo officer good enough to be one of Nigeria’s military or security chiefs. Furthermore, Buhari sided with the marauding Fulani herdsmen against their brutalised Middle-Belt farmers. In 2020, retired Colonel Abubakar Umar, the cerebral and highly-respected former military governor of old Kaduna State, wrote an open letter to President Buhari, accusing him of mismanaging Nigeria’s diversity with his lopsided appointments. However, Pa Clark and Chief Adebanjo were the strongest and most sustained critics of Buhari on the issue, both personally and through their organisations.
In 2019, both Chief Adebanjo and Pa Clark felt they and their groups could not support Buhari’s re-election because of his ethnic bigotry. Yet, they also believed the North must complete its two terms. So, they put their weights and those of their organisations behind former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar on the condition that he would do only one term to complete the North’s two terms. Atiku agreed, and they campaigned vigorously for him. In the election, Atiku beat Buhari in the South, but couldn’t garner enough votes in the North. So, he lost. But Chief Clark and Pa Adebanjo had fulfilled their side of the deal!
However, in 2023, when Atiku wanted to run for president, both Chiefs Adebanjo and Clark vehemently opposed him, arguing that after the eight-year presidency of Buhari, a Northerner, power should return to the South. Even though Atiku’s running-mate was Governor Ifeanyi Okowa of Delta State, a South-South state, Pa Clark opposed the ticket, berating Okowa for betraying the Asaba Declaration, in which Southern governors demanded powershift.
The story of Chief Adebanjo and Bola Tinubu is even more fascinating. Pa Adebanjo opposed Tinubu’s presidential bid on the basis that the Igbos were the only major ethnic group that had not produced president since 1999. Thus, while the tribalists in Afenifere, led by Chiefs Reuben Fasoranti and Olu Falae, backed Tinubu simply because he’s Yoruba, Pa Adebanjo supported Peter Obi, an Igbo, on the grounds of fairness, justice and equity, values that underpinned the philosophy of Afenifere and its founder, Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
To be sure, Tinubu has mismanaged Nigeria’s diversity far worse than any before him. He is the first with a Muslim-Muslim presidency; the first Muslim to succeed another Muslim; the first to politicise the Muslim pilgrimage, Hajj, with excessive state funding, for electoral advantage; the first to put “Emi-lokan/Yoruba-lokan” above ethnic harmony; the first to truly ethnicise a government: Tinubu’s Yorubanisation is worse than Buhari’s Fulanisation! Both Chiefs Adebanjo and Clark strongly opposed Tinubu’s divisive and exclusionist politics. In all issues, including resource control, which Pa Clark was noted for, they fought for justice, equity and fairness – and for a restructured, united and stable Nigeria!
May their souls rest in peace!
The post Ayo Adebanjo, Edwin Clark: Adieu, great champions of a fair, just Nigeria, by Olu Fasan appeared first on Vanguard News.
