Time for friends and comrades to celebrate Rauf Mustapha

The weekend Memorial in Abuja in honor of my late senior comrade and brother Abdul Raufu Mustapha, a professor of African studies at Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford who died, on 8th August 2017 was eminently a celebration of life albeit post humously. It’s time friends and comrades start celebrating themselves while alive. With serial eminent memorials for late comrade Abubakar Momoh, (1963-2017), Alhaji Maitaima Sule (1929-2017) and Funmi Adewunmi (19602017) in recent times, many comrades are legitimately fatigued. Undoubtedly Rauf Memorial was a celebration of life witnessed by scores of compatriots that included Dr and Mrs. Haroon Adamu, who Rauf’s wonderful widow, Kate Meagher described as “pillars” of their 27-year old marriage, Mr A.B and Mrs. Justice Pat Mahmood SAN and President of NBA, Dr. Jibril Ibrahim among others. But their acknowledgment of the positive intellectual legacies of the late Professor would have been better at the birthday of the accomplished scholars.

Witness Professor Ibrahim Gambari, CFR who ably delivered the Memorial lecture: “Rauf in his lifetime was a scholar with many parts and interests. His work on the postcolonial state, the working poor, the politics of emancipation, the unfinished business of nation-building, the role of the military, and other related subjects spoke to his passion about building a more just society founded on principles of equity, inclusion, fairness, and freedom at all levels. It is, therefore, apt that the topic that has been selected for this memorial lecture is on Democracy and Development and Foreign Policy.

“In many ways, the topic very summarizes the core essence of Raufu’s lifelong preoccupation and struggles. For a person who, like many of us, came of age in a context of prolonged military rule in Nigeria and experiments in elected civilian government that left alot to be demanded, it would not be surprising that a good proportion of his work centered on the politics of democratization and the democratization of politics. Integral to this preoccupation, indeed organic to his understanding of politics in general and the struggle for democratic governance in particular was an abiding engagement with the politics of development”.

Witness Yusuf Bangura, a great friend, who wrote a tribute from Switzerland: “For the 37 years that I knew him, Abdul Raufu Mustapha, who departed this life on 8 August 2017, lived a life of courage, commitment and fulfillment. A versatile scholar and an internationalist, he had an incredibly open, perceptive and critical mind. He prioritized the public interest, whether in terms of his persistent questioning of the failure of his country, Nigeria, to live up to its potential in most dimensions of development, or his engagement with scholars in other parts of the world in articulating an agenda of social change. He was charming, kind and resolute-personality traits that were a product of his core values of fairness, inclusiveness, equality in all its dimensions, and contempt for corruption and authoritarian habits.

“He always expressed his views clearly and boldly, and was not afraid to call out or challenge injustice, exclusion and oppression. He had a good sense of humour, especially when expressed in the popular Nigerian pidgin. His mother tongue was Yoruba, he spoke Hausa like a native speaker, and could hold a conversation in Igbo, having lived in Eastern Nigeria during part of his formative years. Raufu was a versatile and consummate scholar, with diverse professional interests.

“In this tribute, I have tried to read him through the lense of four key themes. But the totality of his work transcended these themes. He co-published in 2008, Gulliver’s Troubles: Nigeria’s Foreign Policy after the Cold War; and edited Conflicts and Security in West Africa in 2013. He served on the Boards of journals, newspapers, and research centres, including the Review of African Political Economy in Sheffield, Premium Times in Abuja, and the Development Research and Projects Centre in Kano.

“He was a consultant to international policy think tanks; and participated actively in the work of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Dakar, serving as Director of the 2002 Governance Institute and as a member of the Scientific Committee between 2009 and 2011…Raufu was the first person I bonded with when I first arrived at ABU as a young lecturer in 1980. He booked me into Kongo Conference Hotel at the Kongo area of Zaria, and we had a late lunch at Shagalinku restaurant, which specialised in jolof rice and lamb pepper soup, and became my favourite restaurant in Zaria. His favourite eatery was Mama Kudi, which we often visited at Sabon gari, to eat pounded yam, eba and amala with egusi soup and okra or draw soup (I quickly learned that draw soup in Yoruba is obeyoh, which Raufu always ordered).

“Another favourite eating place where we went in the evenings was an Igbo-owned bar along the Samaru road to eat isi ewu (goat head peper soup). Raufu invited me to spend a few days with him in Ilorin, in 1985, where I had the opportunity to meet his mother (deceased), father (now in his nineties) and members of his extended family. He taught me how to use the overcrowded molue buses in Lagos and to navigate my way around the city during a three-week visit we both made in 1985 to collect documents and conduct interviews with officials in various government agencies and industrial firms for a project on the politics of economic crisis and structural adjustment.

“During the Nigerian Political Science Association’s annual conference at the University of Benin in 1984, he nominated me for the post of Vice President-a position which improved my interactions with colleagues in Nigeria’s numerous campuses. It was at this conference that I presented the paper ‘Overcoming Some Basic Misconceptions of the Nigerian Economic Crisis’, which later generated the Usman-Bangura debate on the Nigerian economic crisis.

“Raufu was a very devoted family man. He is survived by his lovely wife, Kate Meagher, also with a D.Phil from Oxford (where they both met) and an Associate Professor of development studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science; and two children, Asma’u and Seyi-both graduates of Oxford”.

These words in celebration of worthy life would have also been better appreciated by the icon while alive. May his soul rest in eternal peace.