Abdul Mahmud
On 27 August 1991, I walked out of Kirikiri Prison in Lagos, having been released by the military junta of General Ibrahim Babangida after a period of detention that had brought me face to face with the cruelty of a state determined to silence dissent.
My freedom, however, did not mean that the struggle for my rights had ended, for the University of Jos had expelled me unlawfully while I was in prison, punishing me for my leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) that made me the target of the IBB-led military junta.
I proceeded to the High Court of Plateau State, where I challenged the university’s decision, and in a landmark judgment, Justice Constance Momoh quashed my expulsion and ordered the university to arrange special examinations for the first and second semesters’ papers I had missed during my incarceration under the dreaded State Security and Detention of Persons Decree Number 2 of 1984.
The judgment should have restored my right to continue my education without further obstruction, but the university had other ideas about the authority of the law and the rights of a student it had already treated as an enemy of both the state and the university.
On Tuesday 24 September 1991, I entered the examination hall at the Faculty of Law to sit the first paper under the protection of the court’s order when the late Professor Kingsley Igweike, then Dean of the Faculty of Law, walked into the hall and directed that I be removed, insisting that no court order had been served on him.
What followed was a violent episode that remains indelible in my memory, not simply because of the physical injuries I sustained, but also because of what it revealed about the relationship between university authority, state security service, political repression, and the organised intimidation of student activists.
University security officers led me out of the examination hall, where a small crowd was waiting under the leadership of Solomon Dalung, then a diploma student at the university’s Gengere campus.
I recognised others among the group, including Dami and Afiku, before they set upon me with planks, whips, and other objects whose only purpose was to inflict pain. I was dragged from the Faculty of Law building into the open and beaten as I bled, then taken through the pedestrian gate behind the university primary school into Angwa Rogo, the settlement on the outer edges of the campus, where the assault continued. The scars of that encounter have remained with me, a physical reminder of a period in which the struggle for the rights of students could attract the kind of violence that ought to have been unthinkable within an institution devoted to learning.
Dalung and his gang were, in my experience, more than a group of students hostile to a fellow student. They were thugs operating in the service of the late Vice Chancellor, Professor Para Mallum, and as instruments of a wider machinery of repression in which the State Security Service had an interest in intimidating student leaders. Their hostility was directed particularly at activists whom they regarded as outsiders to Plateau State, and Dalung repeatedly made his position known to me: those of us who were not indigenes had no business organising student struggles in his home state and should return to our respective states if we wished to practise activism.
As President of the National Association of Nigerian Students, I understood the implications of Dalung’s position: he sought to deny students the right to participate in struggles for their rights on the grounds that they were not indigenes of Plateau State. His insistence that we return to our respective states was an expression of the exclusionary politics that treated student activism as the preserve of indigenes, rather than a legitimate exercise of rights that belonged to every member of the university community, regardless of ethnic origin or place of birth.
My experience was not an isolated encounter with Dalung’s methods. A few months before the attack on me, Benjamin Okonofua, the Students’ Union Public Relations Officer, had been kidnapped by Dalung and his associates, taken to an undisclosed location around the boundary between Plateau and Bauchi States, and subjected to terrible torture before being abandoned for dead along the highway.
Earlier, Dominic Ogankpa, the late secretary of the Marxist-Leninist group, Movement for the Advancement of African Societies, was pistol-whipped by Dalung and Dami and warned against activities directed at disturbing the peace of the university. These incidents formed part of the atmosphere in which student activism was treated as a threat to be crushed rather than a legitimate exercise of the right to dissent, and in which violence could be deployed against young people who dared to challenge authority.
I recall these events because of a public exchange that took place yesterday on Facebook, when I called Dalung’s attention to his own past after he criticised Abike Dabiri for posting a smiling emoji in response to a post attacking the Igbo. His objection to Dabiri’s conduct was justified insofar as the normalisation of ethnic hostility deserves condemnation, particularly from public figures whose words carry weight in a country where prejudice can so easily become a pretext for exclusion. But, the moral force of a condemnation depends in part on the willingness of the person making it to confront the record from which he speaks, and I found it necessary to remind Dalung that the violence I experienced at his hands, and the attacks on other student activists that I have described, cannot simply be erased from public memory because he now occupies a different place in public life.
The substance of my objection is not that a person who has committed wrongs in the past must forever be disqualified from speaking about injustice in the present. Such a proposition would deny the possibility of moral growth and make repentance meaningless before it had even begun.
My objection is that the authority to condemn the wrongdoing of others cannot rest comfortably alongside a refusal to acknowledge one’s own conduct, particularly where that conduct involved the deliberate infliction of violence upon people whose principal offence was their determination to exercise their rights.
A society that allows notable figures to assume the role of moral guardians without asking what they did when they possessed the power to intimidate others risks turning morality into a convenient instrument of public performance, available for deployment against political opponents while remaining safely silent about the injuries inflicted upon those who once stood in their way. The danger is especially acute in Nigeria, where the passage of time can be mistaken for the settlement of historical accounts, and where changes in political affiliation or public standing sometimes permit individuals to reinvent themselves without confronting the people who remember what they did. The victims of past abuses are rarely afforded the luxury of such reinvention, since the injuries they suffered remain part of their lives long after the perpetrators have moved into new roles, acquired new audiences, or discovered the language of public virtue.
I have neither forgotten nor forgiven the violence inflicted upon me on 24 September 1991, and I see no moral obligation to pretend otherwise simply because more than three decades have passed. Forgiveness cannot be demanded as the price of allowing a perpetrator to move on, while the victim is left to carry the memory in silence.
Perhaps, Dalung has undergone what is often described as a Damascus transformation, the kind of profound moral conversion that turns a person away from the convictions and conduct of an earlier life. I cannot determine the state of his conscience, and I have no interest in making assumptions about what may have changed within him over the years.
A transformation of this kind, however, must be more than a new public vocabulary or a willingness to denounce conduct that has become socially unacceptable. Its credibility rests upon the courage to revisit one’s own history, acknowledge the harm one has caused, and approach those who suffered it without the expectation that time alone has settled the matter. Where identifiable people were attacked, injured, abducted, or tortured, repentance must speak to the wrongs themselves rather than hide behind the generalities of regret.
I expect Dalung to acknowledge what he did to me and to the other student activists whose experiences I have recounted, and to offer an unreserved apology for his part in those events. Such an apology would not erase the past, nor would it oblige those he injured to respond with forgiveness, but it would recognise that the people who suffered under his actions possess a moral claim that public reinvention cannot extinguish. Until then, the question of transformation remains open, not because a human being is incapable of change, but because those who have suffered the consequences of another person’s conduct are entitled to ask what that change means in practice.
The mirror that Dalung holds up to Abike Dabiri must also be turned towards himself, just as every person who assumes the authority to police the morality of society must be prepared to confront the record of his own actions. Public condemnation is easy when the offence belongs to someone else; the harder task is to submit one’s own history to the same scrutiny and accept responsibility for the harm it reveals. The past does not become innocent only because its perpetrators have grown older, and history does not absolve those who have never found the courage to account for their deeds.
I was released from prison on 27 August 1991, but the freedom I sought that year was not simply freedom from detention. It was the freedom to live under a law that protected my rights, to pursue my education without fear of political violence, and to belong to a university community without being told that my place in it depended on where I came from.
The attack on 24 September was an attempt to deny me those freedoms, and the scars it left have endured long enough for me to insist that the truth be spoken without evasion. Dalung may have changed, and I do not foreclose that possibility, but a genuine transformation must begin with repentance, find expression in an unreserved apology, and recognise that those who suffered the violence of his past are not required to forget it in order to accommodate the moral authority he claims in the present.
