This tribute is a brisk and short reflection on my Comrade President, Senator Bamidele Opeyemi. In the left-leaning student movement of the 1980s and 1990s, we were hand-in-glove together—that is where I met Ope, as we fondly call him, for the first time.

In highly a reactionary society that Nigeria was then, the student movement was the bugbear of military dictatorship in the country, and a major concern of centres of imperialism that sought to keep third world countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America permanently down.

The student movement was clear about the contradictions of our society as well as the place of the country in the international political economy as a subjugated periphery. We were determined to change this national condition through change in leadership of the country as well as the substructure, that is, the economic structure of society that undermined productivity, encouraged and rewarded indolence to the detriment of the majority of the people.

Beyond the student movement we had affiliation to different left revolutionary cells in the country poised to install a revolutionary government in Nigeria and stand up against forces of imperialism.

Ope who had earlier been the Public Relations Officer University of Ife Students Union (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile Ife, later became the Caretaker Chairman of the University of Benin Students Union, where he studied law. He was privileged to host the 10th year anniversary of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS). It is important to note that I single-handedly edited the Anniversary Newsletter.

However, Ope was subsequently elected to the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students in the 1989/90 Session. His leadership confronted the state’s imperialist policies, namely, the structural Adjustment Policy (SAP) and underfunding tertiary education in Nigeria. It was a task he inherited from Comrade Salisu Lukman leadership of NANS.

I could remember that as NANS President, his PRO, was Comrade Fola Odidi, who was a law student in Ife (now the Oba of Igbokoda). I was at the University of Lagos. With a media background, sometime, I performed the duty of the PRO as NANS frowned on bureaucratic bottlenecks.

Dramatically, in one of the protests against the state, we set out to submit a petition over rusticated students to the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Bola Ajibola who passed on recently. It was 1990. We marched, all robed in academic gown. As always, the police were on ground to exhibit the Glover Syndrome of the colonial era, which is, seeing the people as the enemy of the state. They arrested and took all of us to the Lion Building, then a dreaded Police Station in Marina, Lagos. We were held in a room upstairs of the station. The question was how to let the outside world know that we were arrested and being detained. The leadership in Ope rose to the rescue. As the “Esogban” of the Student Movement, I was asked to escape and issue a statement to the effect that we had been arrested and detained.

In the room where we were kept, the door was not bolted, and there was human traffic in the stairway. I watched carefully and blended with the crowd and found my way into the streets of Marina, hopped into a Molue bus and was free. I immediately issued a statement that the NANS President and his colleagues had been arrested. It made headlines in the media the following morning. They were consequently released to avoid a national rage by the ever-powerful Nigerian students. The question posed by the media was how I escaped since I was among the detainees. Some speculated that I could disappear. Such is the substance of myth-making.

The summary of my tribute really to my friend and comrade at 60 is that Ope has unconcealable leadership quality that has catapulted him to where he is today—the Majority Leader of the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The Nigerian Student Movement of our time was school for ideological leadership. We all benefited and we are patriots. Ope, as you turn 60 on July 29, I wish you long life of service to Nigeria and humanity.

Akhaine is a Professor of Political Science, Lagos State University.