I used to be a member of the NigeriaUnion of Journalists (NUJ) FCT Council but not any longer. I have since moved on, doing all genres of things tangential to or constitutive components of journalism, including being a journalism and media studies teacher and now back to school as a student. However, my spirit remains committed to the best journalistic traditions because, of all expressive arts, none in my opinion is as constructive as journalism - I mean in a civic and illuminating sense. This explains my interest in the coming election of the NUJ FCT Council.
Expectedly, in this year’s election the stakes are high. Although elections of all Abuja divisions of any national association are always keenly contested – especially in any year preceding general elections in Nigeria – but this year’s is unique, and that explains why I stated earlier that the stakes are high at this particular historical juncture. Undeniably, the shoes left by the likes of Jok Isiyaku Shok Amos Dunia, Malachy Uzendu and others, have expanded in multidimensionality and needed to be used only by those who represent the best of the times as expressed by their history. I have followed the intrigues concerning this election, as well as the twists and turns, which are expected as defining matrices of politics. So, even while I remain on the side lines, I considered it necessary to reconstruct the narratives in a very instructive sense.
The reason I am involved is because Rafat Idris Salami is contesting. I have never been neutral on any issue. Importantly, I have an obligation to support certain persons in their aspirations because of my historical connection to them – I mean, because we are related. Rafat and I met as students preparing for the Higher School Certificate/GCE Advanced Level examination three decades ago at the School of Basic Studies (SBS), Kwara State College of Technology (Kwaratech), Ilorin. At SBS, students studied for the examination by focusing on a three-subject combination, but those with considerable level of political consciousness identified with one of the three departments with which they are academically connected in order to contest elections in the departmental associations – Kwaratech was a hotbed of one of the most revolutionary student activism of the 80s and the 90s. Like Rafat, I identified with the English Students Association, peopled by those studying to write the Advanced Level Literature in English examination. My other combinations were History and economics, and I remember Rafat also studied history.
It was the days of the Dele Bolajis, Bode Bamgboyes, Oyin Medubis, Tokunbo Ayoola-Giwas and the rest of the teachers in English Department, and of course the Iges and the Toluhis in the department of history. I refer to the period when within a fortnight students will be required to review four Shakespearean tragedies. In the same period, Ige may experience a ‘brainwave’ and insist you must review Walter Rodney’s HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA. You will be lucky if one of those ‘terrible’ lecturers in Economics Department did not request for a term paper on Adam Smith, or on Marxian or Keynesian economics. Indeed, anyone who survived Kwaratech can survive any circumstance, and it was a sacrilege to be an indigene of modern Kwara or Kogi States without attending Kwaratech – though the institution was quite multicultural and noted for academic rigour and excellence.
Yet, we had time for politics. So, Rafat and I were in the same political group. She was a year ahead of me. Accordingly, while she ran for the office of General Secretary of the English Students Association (ESA), I contested as her deputy. James Onimisi was our presidential candidate, Juwon O Martins was Social Secretary, and so on. When Rafat graduated, I was elected unopposed as her successor and I won again unopposed the election into the central student body as the Secretary General of the Student Union Government. I held the two offices concurrently. It was in the days of Dr Abdul Ali as Rector, Collins Ozoemena was the registrar in charge of students’ affairs. I refer to the days of Steve Aluko, AKA ‘Maradona’. The same one ABU students ‘inherited’ but did not know he cut his teeth in unionism at Kwaratech. It was the days of radical, almost iconoclastic student activism.
I remember taking my first lesson in how to write minutes of meetings from Rafat as her deputy in ESA. Fate would reconnect us again at the University of Abuja where both of us secured admission as pioneer students. The situation at the University again demanded a dialectical response. Having been armed with the tools of dialectics, Rafat and I were among those who challenged the authoritarianism of the school administrators of that era. That audacity came with a price – arrests, detention, suspension and expulsion. Rafat was among the few ladies who were part of the Group of 45 (G45), later G54, following the expansion in the boundary of the geography of victims of the academic terror of that period. While we challenged our expulsion in court (Niyi Ibietan & 44 Ors Vs University of Abuja & 2 Ors), five of us enrolled at the International Institute of Journalism for a diploma programme. Rafat was one of us and the only lady. Like the rest of us Rafat graduated at the journalism school with distinction.
On the assumption of office of General Abdulsalam Abubakar as Head of State, the University of Abuja authorities were ordered to obey the court orders reinstating our studentship – several of them, including historic rulings from the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Federal High Court and the Federal Court of Appeal. Consequently, Rafat returned to the University to complete her degree in English, graduating in flourish of trumpet. Since then she has worked as a professional journalist, distinguishing herself as a leading light of a profession that is so patriarchal, even in salutation.
Consistent with her belief in working within organisational platforms to promote, project and protect group interests, Rafat has been an active member of the National Association of Women Journalists (NAWOJ), Chairperson of the Voice of Nigeria (VON) Chapter of NUJ, and Secretary of FCT Council of NUJ. For years, she lent her intellection and other resources to the promotion of training and re-training activities within the NUJ as a demonstration of her belief in the centrality of knowledge to the preservation of professionalism and organisational integrity.
She supports men and women to aspire to the height of their potential but she never asked for a special place because she is a woman. While she lent support to other women to migrate from victimhood to freedom, she never advocated for men to pause their race – but she demonstrated a healthy hatred towards any form of discrimination, especially against women on account of their biological constitution. Indeed, her story speaks eloquently to tolerance and accommodation without compromising on ennobling values. As a witness to her battles, dialectically and on the barricades, Rafat earned her place by intellection, discipline, commitment and tenacity of purpose.
A perfect exemplar of resilience and reliability, Rafat is an amazing team player and team builder. Her energy and organisational capacity is distinctive and contagious. An uncommon hard worker, Rafat abhors laziness in all its manifestations. In her spiritual and physical constitution, Rafat represents a pure disinfectant for dishonesty, inertia and incompetence. She does not “run for public offices on the strength of vacuous verbosity”, she told a journalist emphatically last week with her characteristic objectiveness and candour – very rare combination that is painfully and rapidly ebbing in the waters of our national landscape but which NUJ requires at this point and time.
As a mother to a child with special needs – whose care she considers to be a privilege – Rafat has been taught patience, she has been taught how not to judge others, and importantly, how to give a hand to those that do not fit into the standards created by warped minds. No wonder she is noted for lending helping hands to friends, families and institutions of the civil society that fight their way upwards in search of a qualitative improvement of the Nigerian condition. In other words, Rafat has successfully combined her roles well – as a mother, exemplary public servant, pure-blooded professional, and civil rights activist – in such a perfect and enviable manner, tackling her challenges with great faith and philosophical calmness.
Given her experience in NUJ politics and affairs, she is determined to launch a renaissance in the larger body of journalists through the series of programmes she has outlined towards the restoration of the dignity of the profession, and she wants to start with the FCT Council. Among the outlined programmes is a Welfare Trust Fund for Journalists which she is set to institute at the FCT Council of NUJ. Anyone with a discerning mind can visualise a new NUJ under her leadership because the Union stands to harvest a lot of derivable benefits with her ascendancy as the Chairperson of NUJ FCT Council.
The foregoing stand to reason, that Rafat has paid her dues as a citizen of the Republic distinguished for consistency in the struggle for the restoration of the most ennobling values in governance of our country on all fronts. An amazon of distinction, Rafat occupies a preeminent place in the annals of dogged but constructive engagement with tyrannical power, especially in her capacity as a defender of freedom, liberty and democracy – suffering in the process, irredeemable damages and right from her days as a young student leader. As a public servant she has demonstrated the promise of the civil service as the real bastion of establishment through her personal commitment to impeccable service delivery to all stakeholders.
Suffice it to say that, as a professional journalist, Rafat deploys her knowledge and goodwill to illuminate the social fabric in a responsible manner. In totalising, hers has been a life of sacrifice and it is encouraging that she is competent, suitable and ready to offer greater service as CHAIRPERSON OF NUJ FCT COUNCIL. I therefore beseech all members of the distinguished body of journalists in Abuja to cast their votes for Rafat, and thereafter stand with her and her team all the way.
May God bless NUJ, may He bless Nigeria!
Comments
Post a Comment