June 12: An erstwhile activist as President

By Joe Okei Odumakin

President Bola Tinubu was a NADECO member. What NADECO did was to ask Abacha some uncomfortable questions.

He had to escape through the NADECO route when he was being asked his life as answer. Others were served the same compliments.

Yet, the story today is not what Tinubu did or failed to do. I just reflect on the “others”. Where are we? Where are the others who have not rested and not turned political moguls? Why has Tinubu attained the heights alone?

Did he walk right and the other chieftains walked wrong? Or they walked right and he changed path? That one could not follow the other. A detachment of the falcon and the falconer at the risk of the query on which is which.

This question is not academic. It raises a poser on the fold of activists of different hues and Activisms of different shades.

Broadly, an activism which holds for a lifetime and the other which leads to affluence and political influence.

How does a massive project like June 12 activism evolve and dissolve?
What does this lone climb portend? Or a climb in the embrace of another band of strugglers.

Yes, June 12 is unity day and national holiday. Where is the value in all these receding faces and figures?

Receding with cogent argument and just moral pressure.

Would it be now a moment of emerging when erstwhile comrades could be forthcoming ? Returnees on righteousness. To finish the project. Standardize elections.

Not especially towards any juicy appointments but to rise in duty and in dignity to make offerings of the mind which could also be virtual.

Would they be heard and realized? Would erstwhile comrades have a dutiful communion in a salute to the June 12 epic.

And a Nigerian president at such a table, designed not to feast or chop as such, but to bless the struggle for a new Nigeria from the recesses of the same Aso Rock where orders once issued forth to crush NADECO and all June 12 comrades.

Could an electoral code be submitted to our erstwhile comrade which would forever erase election rigging and transform the leadership processing system in our country.

While at it, the portrait of MKO should look down from their pantheon at the present time as other presidents from the past.

It shouldn’t be hard from where Gen. Muhammadu Buhari pushed things.

On June 12, there should be a healthy reunion of erstwhile June 12 activists. The one in Aso Rock and those in other rocks.

This must be germane, since the annulment of June 12 election results was the worst kind of rigging to ever occur in Nigeria.

And such commemoration must not be misconstrued as an application. The erstwhile gentlemen and ladies have been gainfully engaged for thirty years.

-Dr. Joe Okei Odumakin is the President, Centre for Change.