Dr Yusufu Bala Usman was, in the 1980s, a lion in the Ahmadu Bello University, ABU. His roar could be heard across the country. He was a domineering academic and political figure with followership in the country. His reputation had been boosted when, in 1976, he and fellow radical academic and historian, Dr Olusegun Osoba, as part of the 49 Wise Men charged with writing a new Nigerian Constitution, broke with the rest to present a radical Minority Report.

Then in 1984, Yusuf Bangura, a 34-year-old lecturer challenged Usman’s academic and intellectual scholarship right in his ABU lair.

Usman had in January 1984 delivered a lecture at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University. It was titled: “Middlemen, Consultants, Contractors and Solutions to the current Economic Crisis.” He had explained the Nigerian economic crisis as being the result of comprador elites generating huge profits for their foreign masters and repatriating them to the metropole. So, he focused on the ways the Nigerian economy had “…been shaped and moulded to serve the capitalist economies of Western Europe, North America and Japan…”. Usman added magisterially that anyone who refuses “…to face these fundamental facts about our economy and society, when we are on the verge of economic collapse, is not only unpatriotic, but actually treasonable.”

[Vanguard]