A celebrated historian and associate of the late Chief Obafem
i Awolowo, Prof. Banji Akintoye, will be 83 years old this year. He shares with GBENRO ADEOYE, his thoughts about Nigeria and President Muhammadu Buhari’s performance in office.
You wrote open letters to President Muhammadu Buhari about three years ago. Did you get a response?
No, he doesn’t respond to subjects; we are his subjects. I have made a number of statements directly addressed to him. He doesn’t respond.
Why did you see the need to advise him, especially as he arrested you and others when he was military head of state in the 1980s?
It is our country. Whatever he may have done in the past, he is the leader today and our duty is to make sure that he does the job well. Actually, I didn’t write a letter; I just wrote a public statement directly addressed to him.
When he seized power in December 1983, he detained a large number of politicians. He said he was detaining people because of corruption and so on. But it was very strange that he would arrest someone like me and those of us in the Unity Party of Nigeria, who were known all over Nigeria as corruption fighters.
Not only were we not involving ourselves in corruption but we were fighting it. I was a senator and we were fighting it in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, and the states – everywhere. We were known as a party dedicated to the welfare of the people; therefore, we were vehemently opposed to corruption.
So if you said you wanted to fight corruption, then why were you arresting who had been fighting it? But he just put us in prison and began to treat some of us as if we were corrupt. I wasn’t one of those treated like that because my life was too open for anybody to treat me like a corrupt person, but there were people whose cases were not that clear, people who were governors, for instance.
There was someone like Chief Adekunle Ajasin, unfortunately. He was an old man who had become governor. He was absolutely opposed to corruption. There were stories about him. This new thing called security vote, which didn’t exist before but was established by the military – a very corrupt idea of voting a large sum of money for security available only to the governor and which nobody could audit. Chief Ajasin said no, this is a corrupt thing.
He didn’t want to touch it. People told him that was the way it was done. He said well not everywhere, we are Yoruba people and Ondo State is in Yorubaland, and we don’t do such here.
His life was open; he didn’t have much in life in terms of physical wealth. He had one house in Owo – the old house he built when he was the principal of a school. And he never added to it or expanded the same old house. There were jokes in Ondo State that he came with a given number of Agbada and returned when he left with the same number of Agbada.
You know, he always wore Agbada. He had no additional car. I was a commissioner in his government. The day the (1983) coup occurred, I was packing my things into my car to leave Akure and one of our most senior officials said, ‘Banji, don’t put your things in that car’. I said, ‘Why sir?’ He said, ‘We would need another car for the governor – Ajasin’. He was that poor! You (Buhari) arrested a man like that, put him in detention, took him to the worst prison available in the country and set up a committee to investigate him.
They said they didn’t find anything on him, you said they should dig more. You set up another group to try him and they didn’t find anything and you set up a third group to still look. Why did you want to treat people like that?
Considering the reason why you wrote the statements and how far we have gone now, do you think the President has done well or are you disappointed?
Actually, I wouldn’t say that I supported him when he wa
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