*Salute to Sola Mike at 60*
There was no student leader that inspired me as much as @+234 703 876 2371, in my formative years as a student unionist. He had been expelled as President of the University of Ilorin students union along with Mathew Joe Abereoran (Secretary General) and Matthew Keyi (PRO) in the aftermath of the April 1984 NANS nationwide action during the brutal reign of the Buhari/Idiagbon junta.
I got into Unilorin’s medical school a few years later. Haven been a revolutionary before this, I headed to the students’ union building in my first week on resumption, and I remember that black and white poster of the three of them, with the demand for their reinstatement. There were still copies and I took one which I posted in my room at Block F, Hall II.
Several times after I became a students’ union leader at Unilorin, management would always say “look be careful, if we could kick out Sola Mike with all his oration, we can deal with you”. In my mind I would say “oníranù people” and damn them. One of the “damn them” steps I took was as Hall Secretary of Hall II, when in 1989 we renamed the hall *Sola Mike Hall.*
Management was outraged and never granted recognition to that name change. But I taunted them, including it boldly on our letterhead and further inscribing it when signing
You can imagine how elated I was then, when I met Sola Mike for the first time. This was in May 1990, at my inaugural session as Speaker of the Students Representative Council. Here was Sola Mike in flesh and blood!
He stayed outside most of the time, not wanting to disrupt deliberations. And we didn’t get to talk much until after the session. But I learnt a lot from the discussion we had. I would not meet him again until a decade after – at the 6th Quadrennial National Delegates Conference of MHWUN held at Ibadan.
But I would, once again in a sense, follow his path; the path of “Medical”, as most staff of the Medical & Health Workers’ Union of Nigeria (MHWUN) used to call our great union at the time.
I left medical school to become a professional revolutionary at the beginning of 1991. Haven learnt from the Faculty of Hard Knocks in the University of Life that this was not sustainable both politically and personally with the state of the movement at the time, I returned to the university. But this time to the University of Lagos and to study a course which would clearly put me at the service of the working class; Industrial Relations (& Personnel Management).
Of one thing my mind was made up when I graduated, I would never work for the bourgeois or in the then emerging “NGOist” sector, which I had critiqued in a `1995 paper at Maiduguri. If I couldn’t be a full time revolutionary, the next best thing was to work for a union.
Which union would this be? My project supervisor Prof Dafe Otobo felt I should go join the newly emerged AUPCTRE and offered to discuss with SOZ Ejiofoh. The HOD at the time Prof Sola Fajana suggested that it had to be private sector union because that’s where, in his view, industrial relations was actually palpable in the Nigerian context.
I had however learnt from Rotimi Yaqub and S.O Joshua (the Ag. GS of MHUWN at the time) that “Medical” was recruiting. I chose this, because I have always had a predilection for health and care, for several reasons. The fact that Sola Mike had worked for the union was icing on the cake for me.
There, I got to appreciate a side of him beyond what had inspired me as a student – and this further endeared me to Sola Mike. Beyond all the grammar of “Marxism” and such like, the measure of how true a comrade is to the revolutionary transformation of the world, can – in my view – be found in how s/he relates with co-workers and particularly so, with those who are subordinate to her/him.
The first person to discuss Sola with me when I got to MHWUN was Comrade David Adékòyà, a senior secretary (DGS at the time). SM had worked under him, and he spoke highly of Sola, whom he said I reminded him of, as a conscientious and brilliant worker committed to the cause of the working-class.
But it was what the auxiliary workers had to say that touched me the most. Dúpé who had worked with Sola Mike as office secretary/typist was quite unambiguous when she said there was no superior officer she had worked with who was as sincere and thoughtful of junior staff as Sola. And she had worked with quite a few.
Then there was what “my wife” as I used to call Mrs Badà, the (now) octogenarian cleaner at the MHWUN National Secretariat used to end any discussion about SM with: “ha Solá s’omolúàbí o!”
Beyond what the (junior) staff had to say about Sola Mike, he took a step which further cemented love for him in the hearts of junior workers at the 2000 MHWUN NDC which took place at the Premier Hotel Ibadan.
Things had been rough with MHWU during the 1990s. Checkoff dues were not coming to the National Secretariat as they should. Whatever came in would be shared in the spirit of “make something sha touch everybody hand”. So for several months it was either no salary or a fraction of (at times just about 20%) each person’s salary touching her/his hand.
In this context, pensions and gratuities were tales by moonlight. But by the Ibadan NDC things had begun shaping out well. The union thus resolved to pay up outstanding gratuities. These included Sola Mike’s.
Sola, who by then had become an academic at the University of Ibadan told the union’s management that he appreciated what MHWUN had been to him and those he worked with.
And thus, whilst he might not be too comfortable himself, realizing that there were people in the union that would need the money more than he, his gratuity should be shared amongst the junior staff he’d worked with.
There’s a lot more one could and would want to say about the humble, sincere and committed Pan-Africanist and revolutionary socialist intellectual that Sola Mike is. For now, I merely lift up my glass of spirits here (wish I had palm wine) to toast to this towering stature in a seemingly frail frame, whose torch ignited mine in the land where iron is grinded.
*Happy diamond jubilee Sola Mike!*