For someone born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, the man lived a lifestyle that was difficult, if not impossible, to beat for its simplicity and austerity. A plain, mostly white, three-piece babanriga with no embroidery and a simple cap to match, was his trademark wear. With a medium size carrier leather bag slung across his shoulders, probably containing just a few changes of clothes and his toiletries, he seemed permanently on the move within and outside Nigeria. And he seemed to prefer doing so unobtrusively.
An encounter in Ibadan in 1966 between him and the late Alhaji Magaji Dambatta, one of the North’s most prominent journalists and public servants, as told by Dambatta himself in his 2010 autobiography, Pull of Fate, provided some insight into the essential character of the man, Alhaji Muhammadu Dikko Yusufu, a former Inspector General of Police, who died two Wednesdays ago, on April 1.
The encounter between the two was against the background of the events which led to the July 29, 1966 counter-coup in which the military Head of State, Major-General Aguiyi Ironsi who had come to power following the country’s first military coup on January 15, 1966, and his host as Military Governor of Western Nigeria, Col Fajuyi, were kidnapped and eventually killed by Northern military officers.
Ironsi’s apparent reluctance to deal with the perpetrators of the January mutiny and his promulgation of the Unification Decree 34 caused widespread disaffection in the North which in turn led to bloody riots in the region in May and July. This prompted Ironsi to embark on a nationwide tour, beginning from the North, to be followed by those in the West and East, to reassure Nigerians that he only acted in good faith.
During his tour of the North, there were fears that a counter-coup might be attempted by Northern military officers. The fears turned out to have been unfounded.
A week after that the head of state embarked on the Western tour. During the tour, he was expected to address traditional rulers from all over the country who had been invited to Ibadan for that purpose. At that time, however, rumours were rife of plans by Southern military officers to kill Ironsi along with Northern Emirs because they had all allegedly failed to deal decisively with perpetrators of the May and July riots in which thousands of mostly Igbos lost their lives. There were also counter-rumours of plans by Northern military officers to get rid of Ironsi, now that he had finished his tour of their region.
Dambatta had arrived in Ibadan the day before Ironsi was to address the traditional rulers with directives from the Northern military governor, Lt. Col. Hassan Usman Katsina, “to observe and report on the meeting’s proceedings and other sideshows.” He was accommodated in the city’s Catering Rest House and soon discovered that MD Yusufu, then already in the top echelon of the police as an intelligence officer, was also a guest at the rest house.
Dambatta discussed all these rumours with MD Yusufu in an attempt to establish the truth of the matter. He drew a complete blank, he said. “Typical of M. D. Yusuf,” Dambatta said, “he was not forthcoming at all. A short while later, I saw (him) walking to the Rest House Reception with his carrier bag on his shoulder. I immediately followed him wondering what he was up to. Was he checking out or relocating to another accommodation? He tried to dodge the question, but finally said he was going to Lagos to return later in the night. I discovered later that (he) relocated from the hotel to a friend’s house somewhere in Ibadan.”
Dambatta said from MD Yusufu’s dodgy reply to his enquiries and his hurried departure from the rest house, he put two and two together and came to the conclusion that there was indeed trouble ahead. He left Ibadan first thing the following day for Lagos and then on to Kaduna by flight. It turned out, as is now well known, that Magaji’s suspicions were borne out; Ironsi was killed on July 29, along with his host, the day after MD Yusufu disappeared from the rest house.
Alhaji Muhammadu Dikko Yusufu (he spelt his own surname with a “u” at the end, and not Yusuf as is commonplace) was a great grandson of the legendary Emir Muhammadu Dikko, the founder of the ruling dynasty in Katsina. He was born into the family on November 10, 1931. Virtually all his adult life, however, he shunned aristocracy, beginning from his youth when he joined the radical Northern Elements Progressive Union of Malam Aminu Kano which opposed the ruling conservative Northern Peoples Congress in the North. And until he died he never took any aristocratic title.
Perhaps helped by his royal background, his radicalism was no hindrance to his joining the Nigerian Police Force in 1962 as an assistant commissioner in its intelligence arm. It was as a senior intelligence officer that he got wind of plans in 1975 of a coup against General Yakubu Gowon who had been in power since the July 1966 counter-coup. As a loyal police officer he alerted Gowon and, according to Professor J. Isawa Elaigwu, in his biography Of Gowon, sought Gowon’s permission to confront Col. Joe Garba, the Commander of the Brigade of Guards and a spearhead of the plotters. Gowon, Elaigwu said, preferred to do so himself, which he reportedly did on the eve of his departure to Uganda for an OAU summit, a summit from which he never returned as head of state.
One of the ironies of the coup against Gowon which MD Yusufu was apparently against was that he became one of the biggest beneficiaries of the General Murtala Muhammed regime that took over, as the country’s third indigenous Inspector General of Police (IGP), after Louis Edet and Kam Salem. However, as IGP not only did he preside over the affairs of the police, he also played a leading role in formulating what became the widely acclaimed “dynamic foreign policy” of the country, especially as it concerned black Africa’s liberation war against Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and apartheid in South Africa in the seventies.
In his first coming as head of state in 1976, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who succeeded Murtala after his assassination in the unsuccessful coup of February 13 that year, has been universally acclaimed as the first military ruler in Africa to keep his regime’s promise of handing over power to a civilian regime. As head of state, the buck, of course, stopped on Obasanjo’s table but the fact was that a four-some of the country’s service chiefs led by Lt-General T. Y. Danjuma as army chief, and MD Yusufu as IGP, gave Obasanjo no chance to have a change of mind as Gowon did in 1974.
In retirement as IGP the man continued with his commitment to public service in various ways, the most prominent of which was perhaps that as the Chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum, the non-partisan, non-religious umbrella organisation of the North. He came to this position apparently recommended by, among others, the courageous role he played in establishing the Grassroots Democratic Movement as the sole credible opposition to the never declared plan by General Sani Abacha to succeed himself as civilian president in 1998 at the end of his five years as military head of state.
His media and poster campaigns that year stand out even today as among the most creative and issue based in the country’s politics. One such memorable poster was titled RIGHT to CHOOSE! “They say 2 million Nigerians were on the march in Abuja. Good for them!” This was in reference to what became the infamous 2 million-man march in Abuja in support of Abacha. The poster, however, went on to add that “Our concern is the 98 million other Nigerians who were not in this Abuja march. We ask for their right to choose their right to decide who and what to march for. Their right to pick their leader.”
Another one urged people not to reject whatever those in authority gave them as bribes. “If they give you rice take it…If they offer you television sets, soaps, or even money…take. After all it is your money. But demand your right from them! Your right to terminate forced rule. Your right to determine who leads you. Your right to determine your own fate.”
Yet another one asked “Continuity! Continuity of What?” and then followed with a long list of the shortages Nigerians were afflicted with, including those of petrol, electricity, portable water, and a surfeit of those they could do without, including poverty, hunger and insecurity. “What we need,” the posters concluded, “is CHANGE!” Obviously MD Yusufu preceded President-elect Muhammadu Buhari by seventeen years.
It is easy to take his courage for granted today but given the fate of several of those who opposed General Abacha’s self-succession plan in 1998, fates which included deaths and self-exile abroad, only someone with MD Yusufu’s deep commitment to public service at even the expense of his own life could have done what he did at the time he did it.
May Allah grant him aljanna firdaus.
