Excerpts from the book - The launch of Radio Freedom Frequency was a propaganda coup and it revived optimism about possibilities in a struggle weary democracy movement, providing concrete evidence that the movement was not dead after the NUPENG/PENGASSAN strike and buoyed the flagging sprits of a disappointed populace. It however also revealed the dependence of the democracy movement outside the country on certain individuals, a factor that increased underlying tensions in the individual organisations and amongst many who also legitimately felt they needed approbation whatever little efforts they were making. As highlighted earlier, my own centrality in all of what was happening in the opposition movement had begun to generate some tensions within our Forum at a time that the Forum was undergoing its own transitions.
I had written earlier about Tajudeen’s exit as Chair of the Forum and his replacement with Tayo Oke, after Olu Oguibe (our Secretary) and myself declined to take the position. Whereas we wholeheartedly embraced and supported Tayo’s accession into the Chair, he never really felt comfortable with me, since there was evidence to suggest that I was still the key figure in the Forum, even if I didn’t carry the title – Chair and he saw himself as being in office but not in power. What made this more difficult for the Forum was that the strong relationship that Olu Oguibe and I had built before then had begun to lose its vitality. There were many reasons for this. Olu was keen to concentrate on his academic career after his PhD, and he had secured a position at Goldsmith College – a College of the University of London – as a Lecturer in Art History and Critical Theory. Two, following the birth of our son, Folajimi in October 1994, Bisi and I had moved out of New Cross/Deptford axis where we lived alongside Olu, Taju, and Tayo in the early 1990s, constituting the hub of the Forum’s activities, for the southern part of the Lewisham Borough. Olu had moved next door to Tayo Oke in Deptford and the conditions for disaffection and disconnection had been fostered by the infrequency of our meetings. Prior to this period, Olu temporarily lived with us in our ‘poky-chokey’ one bedroom apartment in Berwick Tower when he had accommodation problems. We produced Nigeria Now from this place and the tasks of writing, designing, photocopying and generally preparing the journal always took us far into the night. Olu got on very well with Bisi, especially when it came to Bisi’s ‘agony aunt’ advisory services to Olu on his ‘women problems’.
I was frankly not alive to the nuanced shift in the relationship at the time, because I was really too busy with many things. I was a new father, had just finished my doctoral thesis, in full time employment as a Strategy Development Adviser in the urban regeneration agency, London Deptford’s City Challenge and also busy with the activities of the Forum and my expanded role in the democracy movement. Tayo’s way of originally dealing with his discomfort about my assumed power and authority was to put in place new rules to govern the Forum, and in the process expand the powers of the Chair of the Forum. One of the areas where he felt he needed to do this was with regards to the publicity work of the Forum, which was my responsibility. I had written earlier about the fact that a code of conduct had been prepared by Tayo aimed at binding executive members of the Forum when he assumed the office of the Chair and also indicated that efforts were made to revive the operations of the NNF constitution, but these were deferred because we genuinely felt that things had become more fluid and that we could not afford to use legalities to cripple our operations which had become more politically sensitive. On the publicity front, Tayo wanted to approve all statements getting out of the Forum, and I made it clear to him and the rest of the executive committee that I did not think that were feasible. I suggested that the best that could be done was maintain our tradition of keeping at least one officer of the executive briefed on press statements especially in an emergency situation.
Given my increasing involvement in the broader work of the democracy movement beyond the Forum though, and for many of the reasons highlighted above, we were not meeting at the Forum as regularly as we used to. This was construed in some quarters as my abandonment of the Forum, since I was attending NADECO meetings regularly at this stage. At every opportunity, I made it clear that my primary constituency remained the New Nigeria Forum, but also explained to my colleagues that the democratic struggle had moved on beyond individual organisation’s compartmentalisation towards realising a clearly defined objective to which we subscribed. Although this argument could not be faulted, there was more to this than the effectiveness of the democratic struggle. It was also about the perception that my stars were shining above others, and this was largely the result of the access that my role as publicity officer of the Forum had provided.
The fact that I was of course central in a number of projects, which my colleagues didn’t have full information on – such as Radio Freedom Frequency operations, did not help matters. It indeed provided a clutch for justifying my purported abandonment of the Forum. I also discovered later that there were many people outside the Forum who were fuelling this misunderstanding by spreading many unsubstantiated stories about me, some about the radio and others stretching as far as claims of gun running and planning to overthrow the illegitimate government of Nigeria by force of arms. One or two of the Forum members who had forged links with some members of NADECO who found me ‘disrespectful and arrogant’ concocted many of these stories and they spread like wild-fire, especially stories about gun-running and my so-called responsibilities for the bomb blasts in Nigeria. This myth making continued unabated and even when I realised it was going on, I chose to ignore it and concentrated on what I considered to be my primary tasks.
By now, I had had a few altercations with Tayo on his running of the Forum and challenged him on numerous occasions to apply himself more usefully to the activities of the organisation rather than focus on his powers or lack of it. I believe he was led to believe that he had to move against me by those he considered to be his allies within the Forum because I was going to use my influence on the general membership to oust him, run him out of the Forum and took over the chairmanship of the organisation. Frankly, I saw my work as larger than the Forum’s activities at this stage and really couldn’t care less whether Tayo was Chair or not – a position that was clearly an important one for him. In January 1995, two of our main colleagues in the Campaign for Democracy, Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti and Mr Femi Falana were arrested by the security services, and I released a Forum’s statement informing the international community of the arrest, condemning it and insisting that they be charged to court if the government had evidence of any wrong-doing on their part or release them. At the next meeting of the Forum, a few days after the statement was released, this matter came up for discussion and Tayo asked why he was not informed about the statement issued prior to its release. I told him that there was no reason to inform him, as we never took a decision that the Chair must be informed, even though I acknowledged that that was what he proposed.
I then in anger informed him that I was really tired with his constant fiddling while Nigerian burned. It dawned on me that at least three of the four other people at this meeting saw it as an opportunity to have a showdown on the basis of a pre-arranged plan. The three participants – Tayo, Taiwo Akinola, Greg Odo (Olu’s tenant) insisted Tayo’s recollection that statements must be cleared by the Chair was correct. I made it clear to them that I would rather resign as Publicity Officer of the Forum than clear any statement with Tayo, especially in situations of emergency and I indicated I was really fed up with this nit-picking over nothing. In all of these conversations, Olu was unusually quiet and I could sense that he was labouring under some pressure. What was curious though was that he promptly wrote in his capacity as Secretary of the Forum, copying all the officers as well as general membership accepting my resignation, and hoping of course that this was going to be the end of the matter.
Majority of the Forum members took exception to these cavalier methods. The Vice-Chair, Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi and the ex-officio member, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem also resigned in protest. To gain wider acceptance of their machinations, information about my resignation was circulated to our usual contacts they could lay their hands on, both in the UK and around the world. Additionally, Tayo and his friends hurriedly put together a fake version of our journal, Nigeria Now, and made me the issue. Although this was the only edition they were able to produce before they fizzled out of operations, their misrepresentation in the edition further hardened positions of the wider membership. Not only did they use the names of members who had nothing to do with them in the publication – Taju, Bisi and Femi Babalola were mentioned as members of the fake edition’s editorial board even though they knew nothing about the publication. They also informed the reading public that the reason they were dissociating themselves from me was because they had information that I was definitely working with other people in the movement to wage urban terror against the Abacha regime. Tayo Oke stopped short of writing this in the full page he devoted on me in the fake edition, he chose instead to concentrate on what he referred to as ‘the singleminded individualism which formed Kayode’s strength and weakness,’ as the reason for our parting of ways. He then promised that they were going to restructure Nigeria Now and the Forum and encouraged new members to come on board.
Following the resignations of Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi and Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem from the Executive Committee of the Forum over the leadership of Tayo Oke, the general membership of the New Nigeria Forum dissolved the Executive Committee of the NNF and replaced it with a Caretaker Committee chaired by Femi Babalola with Danbala Danju as Secretary. In a statement issued by the Caretaker Committee on the dissolution of the Executive Committee and the circulation of a fake Nigeria Now journal on February 16, 1995 informed the general public on the process leading to the dissolution of the Tayo Oke led executive committee and protested strongly the appearance of the names of Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem and Femi Babalola in the fake copies of Nigeria Now in circulation, describing this as a misrepresentation and an embarrassing act of dishonesty. The statement also regretted that ‘Mr Tayo Oke deemed it necessary to enter publicly into details of his disagreements with our former publicity officer, Dr Kayode Fayemi. The crises within the Forum exceed the personal differences between two individuals…even for those who would wish to give Mr Tayo Oke the benefit of the doubt, the fact that he lost his Deputy Chair, his Publicity Officer and other senior members of the Forum within one week should speak for itself…” The statement acknowledged that every political and social movement goes through periods of difficulties, and hoped that the Forum will emerge stronger from its own crisis.
In no time, people who wanted to restructure and reform the Forum began to collapse around themselves like a pack of cards. In the heat of their problems, Olu who probably regretted being part of the plot withdrew from all involvement with the so called New Nigeria Forum and headed for the United States to take up a position at a University in Florida. I was fond of Olu, and at a point, we were very close but his was a deeply troubled soul. A dedicated, hardworking and unusually brilliant brother, Olu was the only one I really had time for in the gang of four involved in the precipitation of the Forum’s crisis and in spite of his involvement, I still hold him in esteem and I am not surprised that of the lot, he had gone on to a very successful career in his chosen field as an academic. Greg Odo returned to Nigeria, and Akinola and Tayo Oke soon fell out for their own reasons. Tayo eventually came back to apologise for all that had happened, seeking re-entry into the original Forum, but whilst I had no objection to his re-entry, it was really not up to me to help him achieve that objective. He later concentrated on his job as a Labour councillor in Lewisham borough before returning to Nigeria soon after the death of Abacha. Although these colleagues had all contributed to our work in exile and to the democratic struggle in general – particularly Olu, their own ambitions and lack of understanding about multiple approaches to opposition movements ultimately resulted in their exit from the work that we jointly did. Whereas we made extra-ordinary efforts to rebuild the Forum and continued publishing Nigeria Now, and I was eventually forced to assume the Chairmanship of the Forum in spite of my reluctance to do this, the nature of our struggle had changed and I came to the realisation that the Forum had served its purpose.
Personally, I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to do something else, pursue my passion of bridging academy and activism and establish the space for policy oriented scholarship for the work of the democracy movement. This objective was eventually achieved when the Centre for Democracy & Development was established in 1997, but before then – the struggle to rid Nigeria of military dictatorship needed further coalition building and alliance strengthening on the part of all of us in the democracy movement.
