CHIMA UBANI & TUNJI OYELERU: 10 YEARS AFTER
(Being
the text of a media conference addressed by Comrade Baba Aye, National
Convener of the United Action for Democracy on Saturday, September 19, 2015, to commemorate the 10th year annivesary of the martyrdom of Chima Ubani & Tunji Oyeleru, at
the National Secretariat of the National Union of Air Transport Employees
(NUATE), Ikeja Lagos)
 |
| Chima Ubani at one of the anti-deregulation rallies, shortly before his death |
Sisters and brothers from the Fourth Estate
of the Realm, comrades and compatriots, colleagues and friends, I welcome you
all to this media conference on behalf of the National Coordinating Committee
of the United Action for Democracy. We are here as part of the activities to
commemorate a decade of the martyrdom of Chima Ubani and Tunji Oyeleru. Drawing
from the inspiration of their lives and deaths, we are charged with raising the
banner of working people’s struggle, for a better society, high.
The two patriots died in an auto crash at
Potiskum, on their way to Abuja after a rally against deregulation of the
downstream sector of the petroleum sector at Maiduguri, organised by the Labour
Civil Society Coalition (LASCO). The rally was part of a series of zonal
rallies to mobilise working people against the anti-poor neoliberal policies of
the Nigerian state, which started in Lagos.
They were both in the prime of their lives.
Tunji was 46years old while Chima was barely 43 years of age. But within the
short spans of their lives, they demonstrated excellence in the pursuit of what
they stood for.
Tunji
Oyeleru: the quintessential photo journalist and patriot
Tunji Oyeleru was deputy photo editor of
the Vanguard newspapers. He was an
exemplar of artistic rendition of reality with photography and displayed
impeccable professionalism as a photo journalist. It was his front page photograph
of the Lagos rally that caught the attention of Adams Oshiomhole, the then
president of the Nigeria Labour Congress.
Adams made enquiries from journalists on
the paper’s labour desk, keen to know who took such a superb photograph. It was
the night before the Kano rally that he eventually got across to Tunji. He
expressed his desire to have Tunji at Kano to take photographs of the rally the
following day, but expressed regrets that NLC might not be able to get him down
to Kano on time for the activity. Tunji Oyeleru told him not to worry,
promising to be there.
He bought his ticket and was at Kano before
the rally started. His lead photo of the rally was equally a masterpiece. From
Kano to Maiduguri, he was full of humour as he discussed with labour and civil
society leaders. We knew him closely only for those fleeting moments, but came
to appreciate him as great person, committed patriot and thorough professional.
The pain of his death shortly after that can never leave our hearts.
Chima
Ubani: a life of struggle for the working people
Chima Ubani had been one of us for three
decades, as a leader in the students, pro-democracy and socialist movements. Born
to the family of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Chima spent most of his
conscious life as a rebel in defence of the cause of the oppressed. As a
student of crop science at the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), he first
became active as a pan-Africanist, in the reggae movement.
He became president of the students union
and a member of the Marxist Students Movement by the mid-80s, at a very trying
moment for the radical left on campuses. The National Association of Nigerian
Students had been banned and in UNN, the university authority collaborated with
neo-fascist confraternity groups organised as “Operation Zero Option” who
physically attacked activists.
Ubani was jailed when the military
government cracked down on the students’ movement in the aftermath of the
Ahmadu Bello University massacre of May 25, 1986. After being released, it took
a court order for the university to allow him take his final examinations. But
he still graduated at the top of his class.
He took up employment with the Civil
Liberties Organisation after school and worked there for the rest of his life,
rising to become its Executive Director. But CLO was for Chima, basically a
platform for extending radical political work, organising struggle through
several forms of united fronts with the aim of achieving “system change”. Ubani
was thus pivotal to the formation of the Campaign for Democracy (CD) at Jos in
November, 1991. This was to be a united front of radical forces to fight for:
overthrowing the military regime; establishing a mass-based provisional
government and; convening a Sovereign National Conference. He became the first
elected General Secretary of CD.
Chima was at the forefront of CD’s struggle
for the actualisation of June 12, in those rebellious days of 1993. He came up
with the concept and practice of an “Expanded Secretariat” where a broad array
of activists strategized together and organised mass actions under his
leadership. He however broke with the CD at the Teachers’ House Convention of
February 4, 1994, at Ibadan.
The dominant elements of CD had illusions
in the “national bourgeoisie”. And through collaboration with MKO Abiola and
his cohorts, they had implicitly supported the November 17, 1993 coup by
General Sani Abacha. Their misplaced belief was that Abacha would hand over
power to Abiola.
After walking out of the Convention, Chima
and other leading members of CD who were firm in upholding the central place of
working people’s struggle to defeat military dictatorship as against
compromises between civilian and military elements of the ruling class, took
the bull by the horns in trying to build a more focused radical front. They
initiated discussions with like-minded forces across the country, which led to
the formation of the Democratic Alternative (DA), as a radical party of
defiance, at Benin City on June 4, 1994. Chima was elected as the General
Secretary at this founding convention. DA was modelled along the lines of the
pre-1994 African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. Its manifesto, The Liberation Charter was inspired by
the ANC’s Freedom Charter. He was its
Deputy President when he died.
Chima managed to escape arrest for a long
time. More than once, secret police who had come for him were fooled by his
slight frame and he would escape before it struck them that he was the larger
than life picture they had in their heads. But eventually he got caught in 1995
and spent about a year in detention. Amnesty International declared him a
prisoner of conscience and he was released a year later as a result of international
mobilisation for his freedom.
Shortly after this, with General Abacha’s
vice-grip becoming more vicious as he successfully crushed most mass democratic
organisations resulting in the ebb of popular struggle by 1997, Chima Ubani was
once again at the fore of finding practical ways forward, for uniting and
revitalizing the popular struggle, through organisation. This eventually took
the form of the establishment of the United Action for Democracy (UAD) on May
17, 1997.
UAD brought together different strands of
the radical movement significantly those arrayed with the Campaign for
Democracy (or rather a faction of it, as it had split in 1995) and those
aligned to the DA. Chima Ubani was elected as one of its founding
Co-secretaries (the other co-secretary was Sylvester Odione-Akhaine, who was
General Secretary of the CD faction that was part of the founding of the UAD).
UAD gave new life to the democratic
struggle against military dictatorship. It organised the “5-million man rally”
in Yaba, Lagos, to counter the pro-Abacha “2-million man rally” organised by
the sycophantic Youths Earnestly Ask Abacha (YEAA) group in Abuja, in 1998.
This marked a re-ignition of the anti-military dictatorship struggle.
When the transition to a civilian regime
was unfolded, DA resolved to participate in the transition. This led to a split
in August 1998 at the Pending Hotel Convention in Port Harcout. Chima was
convinced that the Left had to participate in the elections for a new republic,
leading to a parting of ways with the majority of young revolutionary activists
who were the majority of delegates.
Eventually, DA was not registered to
participate in the 1999 elections by the Independent National Electoral
Commission. It however pursued its case in court along with parties like the
National Conscience Party and the Peoples Redemption Party, opening the way for
a liberalisation of the space for partisan politics with a court ruling in
December 2002.
After the exit of the military, two
interlinked issues dominated the focus of Chima’s politics. First was building
unity of the socialist Left, the other was forging of closer ties between the
revolutionary Left and the trade unions. In pursuit of the first, Chima was the
moving spirit behind the summoning of the 3rd All Nigeria Socialist
Conference on February 21-23, 2003, at Benin City.
He was elected as one of the two
representatives of the Socialist Congress of Nigeria (the other was Festus
Iyayi), into the Working Committee of the Nigeria Socialist Alliance (NSA)
which the Conference constituted. Chima was unanimously elected within the WC
as its Chair. But unfortunately, Chima was too busy with his tasks as Executive
Director of CLO and could not provide the required leadership for the NSA. This
was central to the atrophy and unsung death of the NSA after just three
meetings of the WC.
The last of Chima’s organisational
achievements was with regards to the second issue. As a leading civil society
activist, Chima was always at the fore of several mass protests called along
with general strikes against pump price hikes, starting from 2000. The way and
manner the 2003 general strike was called off by the trade unions however led
to grave cause for concern within the ranks of the socialist Left which
constituted the leadership of the civil society movement.
Very much like what would later happen in a
more intensive way in 2012, first the TUC and later the NLC, called off the general
strike at a point when it was clear that it was leading to revolutionary
openings. Chima Ubani and other radical civil society activists then made it
clear to the trade unions that there was the need for the relationship between
the radical civil society movement and the trade unions to be more clearly
defined organisationally.
This led to the birth of the Labour Civil
Society Coalition (LASCO), as a platform for discussions between the trade
unions and civil society groups in planning, executing, and assessing mass
actions. There was thus the need for the civil society components within LASCO
to have a collective forum as well.
UAD represented the broadest form of a
unified civil society coalition. But some groups, which included the faction of
CD that had not joined in the formation of UAD (and which was then being led by
Beko Ransome-Kuti after he was released from detention in 1998), were not part
of it. Chima Ubani initiated discussions with them and this resulted in the
formation of the Joint Action Forum as the civil society component of LASCO.
While Beko Ransome-Kuti emerged as the JAF
Chair, Chima was unanimously made the General Secretary. It was in this
capacity that he was a central figure in the 2005 rallies against neoliberal
policies, particularly reflected in the incessant fuel price hikes. This would
be his last duty, as death claimed this indefatigable soldier of the working
class on the way from Maiduguri
Even in death, Chima’s very essence
symbolised the life he lived; one for the working people. He not only died in
the active service of the class he lived for. He died on September 21, exactly
30 years to the date that the Apena
Declaration for trade union unity was signed by the leaders of the four
trade union centres in Nigeria at the time, leading to the birth of the Nigeria
Labour Congress.
In
lieu of a conclusion
All his conscious life, Chima waged a
struggle to change the system, playing leading roles in different ways, at
different times. He was convinced that a better Nigeria, indeed a better world,
is possible and can be won only through the working people’s ceaseless
struggle. In the course of his life and over the past ten years, we have won
several battles.
For example, Nigerians can now have the
confidence that our votes will be counted and will count. But this is not
enough. Democracy must mean much more than just the franchise right being
exercised every four years, despite the importance of this. If democracy is, as
we made to believe: “government of the people, by the people, and for the
people”, it must flow from below.
Councils of representatives must be elected
directly in our workplaces and communities. Such representatives, up to the
highest level must not earn more than the wages of the average worker, unlike
what we have now where public office holders who are supposed to be the
servants of the people “earn” millions of naira, while the national minimum
wage remains a paltry N18,000 per
month. Our representatives must also be fully accountable to us, and the right
to democratically recall erring public officers must not be cumbersome.
Chima fought against all policies and
programmes that put profit before people. UAD continues to insist that
democracy entails putting people before profit. Privatisation, deregulation and
cuts in the funding of social services only benefit the rich and powerful. The
wealth of our lands and from our toil as working people must be used to ensure
the welfare and wellbeing of all citizens. UAD will thus continue to fight
against all anti-poor people policies, as Chima did.
We will thus hold the All Progressives
Congress and President Muhammadu Buhari’s government to their campaign
promises. We want to know when the social protection measures they promised
such as conditional cash transfers, massive low cost housing schemes and
improvement in public healthcare delivery would commence.
Chima Ubani stood for the unity of
organised labour and the civil society movement. UAD activists, state chapters
and affiliates will be organising a series of activities in commemoration of
the 10th year anniversary of the death of Chima Ubani and Tunji
Oyeleru in: Port Harcourt, Lagos, Nsukka, Kano, and Abuja. We use this moment
to call out to all pro-working people forces in the civil society movement to
work more closely together, for in unity lies our strength. We also call on the
NLC and TUC to take up the gauntlet of establishing the Labour Civil Society
Coalition (LASCO) as the veritable platform of struggle which it has the
potential of becoming, with the formation of LASCO chapters at states and
communities levels.
Finally, it is regrettable that most of the promises made when Chima and
Tunji died regarding the welfare of their families have not been met. We are
happy that the NLC under the leadership of Comrade Ayuba Wabba has taken up a
firm commitment in this regard. The Nigerian state is culpable of their deaths
by default and should bear responsibility for the upkeep of their families. We
also have to ensure that the historic roles of these two martyrs of our
movement are presented for future generations, to inspire the kind of
commitment that drove them in the struggle for system change. A biography of
Chima Ubani would thus be published next year by the UAD.
Thank you for listening.
Baba Aye
National Convener
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