35 Years After Kirikiri Release, Abdul Mahmud Remembers Bamidele Aturu, Says ‘The Struggle Remains Unfinished’

35 Years After Kirikiri Release, Abdul Mahmud Remembers Bamidele Aturu, Says ‘The Struggle Remains Unfinished’

By Abdul Mahmud

Exactly 35 years ago today, on Wednesday, 28 August 1991, the gates of the Maximum Security Prison, Kirikiri, were finally flung open, and two young student leaders walked out into the Lagos morning after four months of detention by the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida, carrying with them the belongings with which they had entered the prison and the memory of a struggle that had already begun to shape their lives in ways neither of them could then have fully understood. They were this writer, Abdul Mahmud, then President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), and Bamidele Aturu, then National Mobilisation Officer of NANS, two young men who had committed the unforgivable offence, in the eyes of a military junta, of insisting that Nigeria deserved something better than the political contrivance that the regime called a transition programme.

The events that brought us to Kirikiri had begun several months earlier, between 29 April and 2 May 1991, when the Babangida junta moved against the central leadership of the Nigerian student movement and arrested student leaders across the country. The immediate offence was political, and there was nothing clandestine about it: we had called for the resignation of the military junta and demanded an end to what we regarded as its contrived political transition programme, proposing instead a Government of National Unity that would oversee a genuine, inclusive and credible transition to democratic rule. The student movement had understood something that the political class of the period sometimes struggled to acknowledge, namely that a transition designed by an unelected military government could not become democratic simply because the junta gave itself a timetable and announced a succession of political stages, and that the people whose country was supposedly being returned to them had a right to participate in determining the terms upon which that return would occur.

The response of the junta was to reach for one of the most notorious instruments of repression in its arsenal: the State Security and Detention of Persons Decree No. 2 of 1984, a decree designed to place political detainees beyond the ordinary protection of the law and to give the security apparatus extraordinary powers to detain people without meaningful judicial scrutiny. Under that decree, the courts were effectively shut out from enquiring into the circumstances surrounding an arrest and detention, while those detained could be denied access to visitors and legal representation, turning detention into an experience in which the state became the investigator, jailer and ultimate arbiter of the detainees’ fate. It was this legal hole into which a generation of young Nigerians was thrown, and for those of us who were barely out of our teens or in our early twenties, the experience was particularly brutal because the purpose of detention was never simply to confine the body; it was intended to break the will of the person who had dared to challenge the authority of the state.

I was 22 years and 6 months old when I was arrested, first taken to the holding facilities of the State Security Service on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos, and subsequently transferred to Kirikiri Prison with Bamidele Aturu. Other student leaders were also arrested and detained. Opeyemi Bamidele, who would many years later become the Majority Leader of the Nigerian Senate, Luke Aghanenu, the late Olaitan Oyerinde, the late Biodun Aremu, the late Biodun Ogunade, and Bola Aidi, who would go on to become a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, were among those taken into the SSS custody, while Kayode Olatunji, Chris Akani, who would later become a traditional ruler in Rivers State, Bunmi Olusona, who would later emerge as a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, Nasir Kura and Chima Okereke were detained in Ikoyi Prison. Looking back after 35 years, the different paths our lives eventually took make the circumstances of our youthful detention even more remarkable, because the state had gathered us together not because we were criminals but because we had become inconvenient voices in a political order that had little tolerance for dissent.

The experience of prison was deliberately calculated to humiliate and demoralise. Young men who had been students, elected representatives and organisers of a national movement were suddenly treated as though they were hardened criminals, and the authorities were perfectly capable of understanding the psychological effect of placing political detainees in a prison environment designed for ordinary criminal incarceration. For a 22-year-old, the message was unmistakable: the state wanted you to understand that your education, youth, office and political convictions offered no protection whatsoever once the machinery of military power had been turned against you. We were not before a court where the evidence against us could be tested; we were not appearing before a judge who could ask why we had been arrested; we were detainees under a decree whose very design was to remove the ordinary restraints of law from the exercise of state power.

There was, however, something the military rulers could not quite understand about the student movement, and that was the peculiar stubbornness of conviction among young people who had come to believe that their country belonged to them as much as it belonged to those who occupied the offices of government. Detention could deprive us of liberty, but it could not settle the argument that had brought us there, and imprisonment could postpone a political demand without making the demand itself illegitimate. The years have demonstrated that the questions we raised about military rule, political engineering and the credibility of transition programmes were not the products of youthful impatience; they were questions about the nature of political legitimacy that Nigeria has continued to confront long after the soldiers returned to the barracks.

Our release itself became a small theatre of the absurdity of military detention. On 27 August 1991, the SSS released us from its headquarters on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, but there was no formal release order, and, naive as we were, we returned to Kirikiri to collect our belongings, believing that the matter was finally over. The prison authorities, however, were not prepared to let us simply walk away, and so we spent another night in detention, as though the state had forgotten that it had decided to release us. It was only the following morning, 28 August, that the gates of Maximum Security Prison were opened and we stepped out into freedom.

I have often wondered about those gates, because they have acquired a meaning in my memory that extends far beyond the physical moment of our release. They opened after four months of incarceration, but they also opened into a future none of us could see. We were young men leaving prison with the conviction that Nigeria still had to be changed, although we could not have known what the next decades would bring, which of our comrades would remain beside us and which would depart before the work was finished. We could not have known that some of those who walked into detention with us would later occupy important positions in public life, or that others would become lawyers, politicians and community leaders, or that one of the men who walked out of Kirikiri with me that morning would not live to see this 35th anniversary.

Bamidele has gone ahead.

He died in 2014, at the age of 49, leaving behind a life that was far too short for the measure of his convictions. When I remember him today, I do not remember merely the political detainee with whom I shared a cell or the student leader with whom I confronted a military government; I remember a comrade whose courage was formed in the difficult years when dissent carried a price, a friend with whom I shared an extraordinary chapter of Nigeria’s history, and a man who believed that political freedom was not a gift to be bestowed by those in power but something citizens had to insist upon and defend.

Thirty-five years is a long time in the life of an individual, but it is a short period in the life of a country, and perhaps that is why the memory of Kirikiri remains so immediate. The faces of those who detained us have faded, the military decrees under which they acted have largely disappeared from everyday political vocabulary, and many of the young people who now participate in Nigeria’s politics were not yet born when those prison gates opened, but the fundamental question that brought us to Kirikiri remains alive: what does it mean to build a country in which citizens can challenge power without being treated as enemies of the state?

The struggle of that generation therefore cannot be reduced to nostalgia, because to remember those years only as an episode of youthful rebellion would be to misunderstand what was at stake. We were fighting over the right of Nigerians to determine their political future, and although history moved in directions none of us could have predicted, the obligation to continue that work did not expire when the military eventually left office. Political freedom is never won once and for all, and the generations that inherit the gains of earlier struggles inherit, with them, the responsibility to protect and extend those gains. So, 35 years after those gates opened, I remember Bamidele Aturu with gratitude. I remember the young man he was, the convictions he carried and the price he was willing to pay for them. I remember those with whom we shared those dark months, some of whom have gone on to serve Nigeria in very different capacities. Above all, I remember that the gates of Kirikiri did not open because the state had suddenly discovered the virtue of freedom; they opened because, in the end, detention could not permanently imprison an idea.

Bamidele has gone ahead. I remain. And the work for which we were detained remains unfinished.

35 Years After Kirikiri Release, Abdul Mahmud Remembers Bamidele Aturu, Says ‘The Struggle Remains Unfinished’