A Paper read at the occasion of the birthday anniversary
of Dr. Martin Luther King organised by the Dr. Martin
Luther King’s People held at British Council Hall,
Yakubu Gowon Way, Kaduna on January 15, 1998.

[ Life of Dr King ]    [Nigeria Today]   [What hope for Nigeria ]   Preamble It is with a great amount of reluctance that I accepted the invitation of D-MLKP to give a paper on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day. My reluctance, I must quickly explain, has nothing to do with a reluctance to identify with the cause Martin Luther King lived and died for. Far from it, in fact, it is the identification with that cause that is occasioning in me the reluctance to accept the invitation. For one is still recovering from the shock of the physical but particularly moral devastation this country had gone through in the last one decade or so that one is not quite sure what to say. One may have to read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock to be able to understand the country again. Right has become wrong and wrong has become right and one needs the help of Eric Fromm’s ‘The Sane Society’ to make sense of what exactly is happening. You have politicians championing the cause of democracy yet calling for the continuity of the military and the military, who while ruling by military fiat yet are openly campaigning for continuity. The difference between the military elite and the political class, or what has remained of them, is becoming very much like the proverbial difference between psychotics and neurotics. Neurotics, it has been said, only build castles in the air but psychotics actually live in them. Indeed one can neither comprehend what exactly is happening to this otherwise great country, nor is one sure who exactly to speak to. Having overcome my reluctance and accepted to venture in to preparing a paper, I started wandering where one should start considering the prevailing circumstances particularly the level or extent of decimation of the civil society. The organisers have suggested a caption ‘Imagine Dr. Martin Luther King as a Nigerian Today - Political Perspective’. If I were to take this tittle I realise I will finish the paper in a sentence - For all his love for peace, Rev. King would have been in prison awaiting his death. This much the organisers as well as the audience know very well. He certainly would not have been allowed to lead a single demonstration today, for the only demonstration that one can hold today is the so called solidarity rally for which you can hire an adult for a whole day for less than one American dollar - thanks to the bastardisation of our economy. I therefore thought it would be more fruitful to discuss the cause Rev. King lived and died for, the cause of freedom, equity and responsible leadership, in Nigeria today. These are precious elements of human and civil society that have been threatened to extinction in this country today, more than ever before, perhaps since the colonial times, when we had an occupation army that was full of contempt of the natives and full of greed for their wealth. Life and Times of Dr. Martin Luther King Perhaps we ought to start by refreshing our memory. He was born on the 15th of January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, to a family of Baptist clergy. After taking a BA at Morehouse College in 1948, he proceeded to do a Bachelor of Divinity at Crozer Theological Seminary, which he finished in 1951. It was at this seminary that King developed a fascination for Mahatma Gandhi whose life and teachings were ultimately to influence his own destiny as a leading apostle of passive resistance in the United States. He went further to do take a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1955. While in Boston, precisely in 1954, he accepted to be a Baptist Minister in Montgomery, Alabama. Thus from his home background through his education and vocation King Jr. was inspired by religious ideals of love and justice. It was easy to understand why as a Baptist minister he could not accept the racial segregation in his Montgomery, Alabama. In 1956, he organised and led a boycott of the transit system to denounce racial segregation and force the desegregation of the city’s buses. His success in Montgomery encouraged him to venture out of Alabama and broaden his base and spread his gospel of passive resistance. He rose to national prominence through the organisation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Soon thereafter and following the refusal to register and the arrest of 2,000 African American voters in Selma, Alabama, King organised and lead a demonstration which was brutally suppressed by the authorities of Alabama. Within hours of showing the police brutality on the television, people were on their way to join King who was to lead the massive march on Washington in 1963 in which nearly a quarter million people of all races and religions took part. This, considering the prevailing tension and racial suspicion in the United States, was a remarkable achievement. The impact, rather predictably, was also remarkable. For within days President Lyndon Johnson addressed the American Congress on the issue. This speech, Known as ‘The American Promise’, said to be Johnson’s best speech ever, touched the nation and paved the way for the passing of the 1965 Bill of Rights, which, among others, gave the African American equal rights to vote. It may be worth catching a glimpse of Johnson’s American promise: "I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy ... There is no cause for pride in what happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government ..... Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. ... Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequalled to this issue, then we would have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?" [1] It was not surprising therefore that in 1964 Dr. King bagged a Nobel prize. While this brought him international fame and attention, it must have also attracted him more enemies at home. This did not appear to have worried him, for he proceeded to broaden not only his base but also his agenda. He was not content to fight for the civil rights of the African Americans but he moved into issues of social justice. In solidarity with some sanitary workers in Memphis, Tennessee who were demonstrating over their poor working conditions, he went over to organise and lead another demonstration. He was shot by an assassin while standing on a balcony on April 4, 1968, thus bringing to end a life of struggle against racial and social injustice. But his death did not mean the end of the struggle, if anything it fuelled it and spread it even further, for thirty years after we are gathered here to remember this great man and reflect the ideals he lived and died for in far away Kaduna. Death could not have come to him as a surprise nor could he have any regrets, for as he so aptly put it in one of his many speeches, "If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live." [2] For all his love of peace, Dr. King recognised that, "a riot is at bottom the language of the unheard." [Where Do We Go From Here? 1967] The Cause and the Issues Dr. King clearly started to address the issue of racial inequity. But he quickly realised that inequity was one thread that run through many of the social institutions in the united States. He therefore could see that it was not only the African American that were suffering but other races too. Clearly inspired by religion he thought it was his responsibility, as a man of God, to address the problems of all the children of God. This disposition must have rendered him vulnerable to the philosophy of non-violence and hence became a ready consumer of the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi of India. The idea, it appears, was that the pursuit for justice must not lead to injustice. In other words the oppressed in their struggle to liberate themselves from their oppressors, must not turn into the oppressors of their former oppressors. Many thought this position was neither apt nor practical, but until he died Dr. King refused to be dissuaded. How could he when, unlike his critics, he had a dream, in his now famous words: "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed - we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. .... I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and Justice." [3] Three issues appear to be at the root of King’s struggle. The first is freedom. Slavery was formally abolished in 1865 with the passage of the 13th amendment to the constitution but a century later the condition of the African Americans was hardly distinguishable from the days of slavery. They simply were not free. All the social, religious and even political institutions in the United States were not quite prepared to concede the freedom the constitution had formally granted. There was a big gap between what was in the constitution and what obtained in reality. The second was equity not only in terms of racial parity, but also in terms of jobs and treatment before the law. There were, (or still are) clearly two laws, one for the whites and the other for the non-whites. The third was the issue of the leadership's response to the plight of the African Americans. They were and perhaps still are not the priority of the American leadership, their welfare goes down to the bottoms of America’s scale of priority. In the practical day to day American life these issues are intertwined, we are only disentangling them here (on paper) for the purpose of analysis.