Fighter to the End; Adieu Iturity - a tribute to Ayodele Akele
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| Comrade Ayodele "Iturity" Akele |
The death of Ayodele Akele marks the loss of one of the
fiercest and most consistent class fighters in Nigeria, over the last four
decades. From June 1980, when, as a students’ leader at Yabatech he emerged as
founding Secretary General of the National Association of Nigerian Students
(NANS) he trod a path of self-sacrifice and unrepentant struggle as unionist
and socialist activist. At the time of his death, he was National General
Secretary of the National Conscience Party (NCP).
As a quantity surveyor, he worked at the Lagos State
Property Development Corporation (LSPDC) from where he was elected Lagos State
Chairman of the National Union Public Corporations Employees (NUPCE) in the
late 1980s till 1996 when NUPCE along with CSTWUN and RSEU, merged to form the
Amalgamated Union of Public Corporations Civil Service Technical and Recreation
Services Employees (AUPCTRE).
Beloved by rank and file workers who had implicit trust in
him, he was elected as the first Lagos State Chairman of AUPCTRE, a position he
held until he was sacked as an employee of LSDPC by the military governor
Brigadier General Buba Marwa, for his union activities.
While rank and file workers had unalloyed confidence in
Iturity (the authority of “itu”), same could not be said for most sections of
the trade union bureaucracy. He was in the view of these strata, too hot-headed
for the “politics” of “bargaining”, “negotiation” & “social dialogue”. Not
surprisingly, when he ran for Chair of the Lagos State Council of NLC in ‘92/’93,
he came third out of three contestants. The winner, who was from CSTWUN would in
no time leave to serve as a commissioner under Buba Marwa!
As soon as the new civilian government of Bola Tinubu was
sworn-in on 29 May 1999, we (as leaders of public sector unions in the state)
demanded the reinstatement of Akele. Playing the card of a NADECO “fighter for
democracy” card, Tinubu promptly heeded our call. In his first speech on being
reinstated, Akele immediately amplified our call for action to reinstate
workers who had been sacked by Tinubu (yes, one of the first things the
so-called pro-people AD did in Lagos was sack thousands of public sector workers
in the name of “rationalisation”, starting within its first month in power!)
The state government constituted a review panel headed by a permanent
secretary (who would later become head of service) Mr Sunny Ajose. Akele led a
team of unionists representing the Council of Industrial Unions Operating in Lagos
State to the panel. Along with Akele and me, there were officials of NANM, NUCSSASW,
NUPPPPROW and ASCSN.
When Akele was sacked a few years later, I remembered how
Ajose and other permanent secretaries on the panel kept saying “Mr Akele, you
don’t even appreciate how kind we have been in returning you”. This was because
he never stopped calling a spade a spade and in the most iconoclastic manner
during the review. We eventually got most of the workers (particularly in the
health sector) reinstated. He was obviously never forgiven.
The following year, workers in Lagos were locked in a
monumental battle with the government. NLC had negotiated a review of the
national minimum wage to N7,500 for the federal public service (and richer
states like those in oil producing states and Lagos) and N5,500 for
(other) states. The Alhaja Olorunimbe-led NLC Lagos state council abandoned workers
to their fate when the Lagos state government insisted it could not pay more
than N5,500. Akele rallied the COIU leaders and rank and file union members. A
partial victory was won. But the empire struck back, once again Akele was
sacked, and as much workers as were reinstated after the 1999 retrenchment were
as well thrown into the abyss of unemployment.
A founding member of National Conscience when it was established
as a party on 1 October 1994, he was always unshaken in rolling up his sleeves
to work for the party till his death, despite a hiccup when he was passed by
for a politically nondescript ologbeni to lift the NCP banner for the
Lagos gubernatorial polls in 2003.
This led to his finally breaking all ties with the
Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM). Akele was a founding member of Labour Militant (as the Trotskyite group that would later become DSM was called in its first decade), in 1986/7. He was the most
renowned trade unionist to have ever come out of the group and helped support
LM in terms of political infrastructure as best he could. The paid
organising secretaries of Lagos State NUPCE under Akele’s watch were all LMists.
And whilst Segun Sango’s chambers at Tabon Tabon in Agege served for meetings
of the group’s Executive Committee and Editorial Board, larger meetings like
the National Committee and National Congress sessions were held at the NUPCE
Conference hall in Anthony Village. Akele thus felt betrayed when the group
(which provided leadership for the NCP Lagos branch at the time) felt more
comfortable having the Tokunbo candidate from USA than him for the
gubernatorial ticket.
Iturity was in Geneva to attend a meeting of the United
Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva in March 2017. Before leaving Nigeria,
he had called me to say “Baba Aye, I will be coming to see you when in Geneva.
There are two important issues we have to talk about”. And I told him it would
be my pleasure to have him visit us.
After a steaming meal of amala and ewedu together, we talked
extensively on radical politics back home. He then came to the two issues. He
started with what he considered the more important one. He had discussed with
other leaders of the National Conscience Party and they were keen on having me
serve on the party’s National Executive Council as Director of International Mobilization
& Coordination (DIMC). The second was that he was looking at expanding LHAHRDEV’s
activities by having an office established in Geneva (that was characteristic
of Iturity, his personal concerns came, always, only after the collective
concerns).
There and then, I told him that, whilst I would definitely
do my best regarding the second request, there was no way I was going to take
up the office. I had my hands filled with work as it were, and besides I hadn’t
been active in NCP. He was like, “look Baba Aye, I am not the person you will
be telling that you have not been active in the NCP. You were one of the mobilisers
of National Conscience (NC) before it transformed into NCP. And I know you’re
no longer active in the Labour Party, we need you badly in NCP”.
I did not budge and he also never stopped urging me to
reconsider my position. A year later, the Take It Back movement was born, and
NCP appeared to be a veritable partisan base for the TIB candidacy of Omoyele Sowore,
considering the party’s rich history of struggle from the Gani Fawehinmi days.
So, after discussion within my organisation, we resolved that I take up the
DIMC responsibility. Akele was elated. But the first meeting of the NEC and NCC
that I attended on 3rd & 4th August 2018 respectively,
were also the last I would attend before turning in my resignation letter.
There were two issues which had become points of friction in
the weeks leading to those meetings. One was the charges for would-be NCP
candidates to contest in party primaries. Those of us on the left felt that
these were too high and also expressed our disappointment that Akele had been
involved in putting up such high primaries’ fees. His argument was that, “look
we don’t have money, if we cannot raise money with these, how will we raise
such? Besides, can anyone who can’t pay these amounts raise money for campaign?”
While my view was starkly different from Akele’s, one could
not but, in a sense, see beyond his position. It spoke more to how electoralism
is rigged against poor working-class people, even before “on your marks”. But,
as I stressed (as well as comrades who met with him earlier in Lagos), it was
not for us to surrender to such bourgeois-reinforcing currents of electoralist
politics.
The major battle was however over a more political issue.
The party’s national leadership had compromised the very ideals on which the
party was formed 24 years earlier, when it entered an unprincipled alliance
with the Peoples Democratic Party as an accursed Coalition of United Political
Parties (CUPP). The NEC and NCC meetings showed that the rot ran deep. At the
NEC meeting, where I spoke repeatedly until I almost went hoarse, only Akele
and Waheed Lawal (a deputy national chairman) echoed my position against the NCP
joining that coalition of brigands. And at the NCC, more than two thirds of the
state chapters voted in support of the shameless gulps from a CUPP of shame.
There were comrades in our midst (we worked together in the
party as the NCP Socialist Forum) who called on Akele to lead us into declaring
a faction. But, whilst I did not share Akele’s view of staying in the party, I
could understand his stance against such factionalisation. In his own way, he
was an organisational man to the last. We had hoped that, with Mr Tanko Yinusa
leaving soon (after an over extended longue duree of tenures!), Akele
would emerge as National Chairperson. While returning to NCP could definitely
not be on the table, for me at least, he would have been a major ally in seeking
to build a broad front of left and left-leaning registered political parties. But
alas, that will now never be.
Iturity took ill sometime last year, and as I would later
gather, suffered a stroke. It was in November I had any inkling of his state of
health. I had written to him to be part of the Global Eosocialist Network which
we were putting together at the time, with John Molyneux and a number of other
socialists involved in the climate justice movement across the world. He
responded that he would have loved to be involved but had been down. But even
as comrade Akele now goes out, he goes unbowed.
Adieu iturity, there are few who fought so selflessly and as
courageously as you did, for working-class people in Nigeria. You will forever
live in our minds.
Comments
Tahir Hashim