If only the dead could weep at his or her own funeral, Dr. Tajudeen Abdulraheem would definitely have been the most spectacular self-mourner. One can already imagine his vigorous protest or a pleasant disbelief and wonderment about the many nice things lavished on him that noon at Sheraton Hotel, Abuja on June 3rd, 2009 and in Kampala , London , Nairobi , New York and Funtua later that week.

The climax of it all that noon must be when Professor Okello Oculi declared him as the First President of Africa because “Taju went to every corner of Africa , talking to the people, the helpless and the forgotten”. He, in Okello’s words, was, therefore “the President of Africa but in a different way”.. Taju, said Okello, was a concrete critique of the Africanism promoted by the OAU which absolutised sovereignty in a way that made the organization indifferent to evil, dictatorship, poverty and corruption in the individual countries. Taju did not accept this as he insisted that Africans must talk across the borders, Okello said.

Psycho-analyzing Taju, the former lecturer in Political Science at ABU, Zaria maintained that Taju certainly decided early in his life that if he couldn’t be bigger in size, he could develop his brain power to compensate for the physical stature. This, he did and from this brain came the many antics and tactics of his Africanist counter narrative to Caucasian metaphysics about Africa . Professor Okello cited one of such tactics this way: “Taju laughed like a machine gun. He used that to break space, force you to listen, to rouse you”.

Comparing himself and Taju, Okello said they exchanged citizenship in that he, (Okello) came to live in Nigeria while Taju made his home in Uganda , traveling on Ugandan Diplomatic passport and raising hairs among some people in the intelligence community as to whether he wasn’t a spook even though he spoke his mind too often to be a spook. The fact is that he saw himself in the image of an Amilcar Cabral, a Samora Machel, an Augustino Neto and such other icons of the African revolution, a thesis confirmed by Fr. Mathew Hassan Kukah’s testimony that as a student in London, Taju insisted on going about decked in the military fatigue that proclaimed the African self in the face of historical hostility. For Okello, the lesson of Taju for Pan-Africanism is that, from now on, Africa Day must become special for us, something beyond the rituals.


In the end, said Fr Kukah, Taju defied space, geography and almost everything else and the contradictions of his life manifested most in the Muslim whose 40th Day mourning was to take place on St. Anne’s street in London .

In applying this analogy, Dr. Nana Busia of the UN system concluded that Taju was a dualist, in the sense of being both a revolutionary and a reformer but for whom Africa remained the constant at every phase of the Pan-Africanist struggle, including the difficult period after the collapse of ‘communism’ and the associated analytical problems in using class, race and gender.

Speaking from the sentiments of her husband’s recent electoral warfare in Ekiti, Bisi Adeleye, the activist wife of Dr. Kayode Fayemi humanized the discussion with the suggestions that one, we, an obvious reference to activists, must reverse the tendency to take friendship for granted. It is not in accord with the spirit of Taju who was given to calling and keeping in touch with people and two, each of us should strive to document our lives since we don’t know when we may pass on. The Chairman of the occasion, Dr. Kole Shettima of MacArthur Foundation was to re-echoe this point later. When a griot or the elder man or a woman dies in Africa , it is a whole library that has gone down.

For Bisi, the attempt to celebrate instead of mourning Taju is to be located in how, according to her, Taju has responded to the questions that she said are on the lips today: is Nigeria worth dying for?; should we be proud for being Africans?; is Nigeria Heaven or Hell?

Taju’s responses to these questions, she said, were always that “this is our country, this is our continent”. That was his own way of saying, balkanization, stupid. Forget that, get on with building an African nation instead of balkanizing one African country and splitting it into smaller, incompetent nation-states.

This is the message wrapped in one of his slogans, ‘One country is not enough’.

The poet, Odia Ofeimun brought out this in reading a poem to Taju, prefacing his act with a one liner: who can be impersonal about Taju? The poet lied not this time at all. For he must have taken account of the different references to Taju in terms of the man who had irresistible presence, passionate, conviction, good sense of humour, vivacity, audacious, infectious, impatient with protocol, irreverent treatment of powerful people, less than an organized life and thus a penchant for missing his flights. Absolutely no one could be indifferent to Taju, not in Funtua or London or North, South East or West of Africa.

Not someone who always came with a message which he insisted on delivering, irrespective of whether you approved of it or not. Lately, according to the Communication Officer of the Africa Office of the MDGs in Kampala , Sylvia Mchuli, Taju’s message was that MDGs were achievable in terms of the mind-destroying crisis profile of Africa, characterized by the reality of 25 million Africans which is half of the population of UK , are infected/down with HIV. And 40 million children are out of school. The maternal mortality statistics is no less horrible. And these are beside other public health disasters viz meningitis, polio, T.B and, of course, deadly malaria, typhoid and the fact of fake drugs. All these are public health challenges to which the incompetent African states have no idea how to fight. Hence, the acceptable pragmatism in Taju’s dramatic ideological come-down from the ‘revolution’ to the ‘reform’ of UN inspired MDGs.

Believing as he did that Poverty is not going to be wiped out by the next workshop, meeting or slogan, his own notion of the MDGs is a citizen based strategy as well. Said Mchuli, “He (Taju), was of the firm belief that it is citizens, through collective actions, who will change things because politicians will never deliver anything to the citizens on a platter of gold.

Former member of the House of Representatives, Comrade Uche Onyeagucha recalled how he used to challenge Taju to return to Nigeria and join the struggle. He maintained that the best tribute to the memory of Taju is to organise and kick out those who he said had put Nigeria in a mess.

Then there was a flash of the contradictions of Taju’s life. National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Professor Rufai Alkali stood on the protesting side of life at this occasion. He was protesting being restricted to speaking for one minute. “You can’t give AC, (referring to Usman Bugaje) two minutes and give PDP one minute. It is rigging”, he told the moderators. The laughter from this encounter served its purpose. He said he was just hearing that Taju was a Yoruba and proceeded to assert how BUK in those days equipped the students to see things beyond themselves. It is only people who leave legacy in terms of service to the human community die and are quickly forgotten.

He must have learnt of Taju’s Yoruba aspect of Taju’s identity from Hajiya Sadautu Mahdi, the Executive Secretary of WRAPA who said she felt fulfilled the day Taju’s dead body was taken to be buried in Funtua, thereby blurring the Yoruba aspect of his identity. That, for her, makes Taju the barrier breaker and example to all of us. She, therefore, implored the youths of Funtua whom Taju had mobilized and organized to stay organised the way, beyond chauvinism.

It was left for Dr. Jibo Ibrahim, the Executive Director of the Centre for Democracy and Development, (CDD) to say what was left to be said at this point. He said three things but only one has not been covered in this write-up yet. That was the story of how Mounira, the late Taju’s wife once put an emergency summons through to Oxford based Nigerian academic and their family friend. Akinola thought that something damning might have happened and so made his way to the house of the Tajus where he was confronted with charges against Taju. The charge was that Taju was going about the whole place pursuing causes to solve the problem of humanity, a humanity of which his wife is a part of but from which she had been excluded as a wife. After confirming that it was not a case of unfaithfulness or any of those sins that the Church, for example, regards as mortal sins, ‘Justice’ Akinola now turned to peace making and was successful. The logic of the story is the logic of the sometimes contradictory matrix of the personal and the political. And how, sometimes, our family is ‘punished’ by the dynamics of the struggle. It is great that Dr. Jibo reported that there was a peace deal right away as “Taju advised himself since then”.

Relieving the session on the 40 days of the death of Taju, one gets the impression that he must have died fulfilled in the sense that he has done that which he could. The owner of a provincial secondary school in Nigeria today whose students could stand up in a crowd and pay tribute to their founder in very fluent presentation (as the students of Hauwa Memorial Secondary School, Funtua established by Taju) did that day must, indeed, have died a happy man. Because the shredding of education in our country today is the biggest manifestation of our crisis as a nation. Once again, Adieu, the first President of Africa.

Taju’s happiness would also flow from the eminence and diversity of the people who attended the 40th Day session. From where I am writing and apart from those already mentioned as presenters, I can readily recall Prof Attahiru Jega, the VC of Bayero University, Taju’s Alma Mata; Dr. Alberic Kacou, the Head of the UN system in Nigeria; Dr. Otive Igbuzor of ActionAid International; Mallam Y. Z Yau, Executive Director of CITAD, Kano; Dr Pam Dung Sha of the University of Jos, Dr. Husseini Abdu of Action Aid-Nigeria, Mallam Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, Executive Director of CISLAC, Comrade Chom Bagu, Comrade Abbas Hassan of the Kano State Government House; Dr. Mairo Mandara of Packard Foundation; Comrades Amina Salihu and Salihu Lukman of Coalition for Change and Passion Consults respectively, Dr. Abdullahi Sule Kano, immediate past ASUU President.