Professor Segun Osoba, a renowned radical historian, was honoured at a symposium in Abuja on Tuesday, 28 July, where scholars and activists celebrated his life and intellectual legacy. The event, themed “The Historian as a Public Intellectual: Segun Osoba, Radical Historiography and the Defence of the Common People,” was hosted by the Osoba for Eternity group, which comprises 230 radicals, intellectuals, lawyers, trade unionists, journalists, and social activists.
A Life of Radical Scholarship
Dr Samuel Olusegun Osoba passed away on Thursday, 14 May, at his residence in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, at the age of 92. He obtained his first degree in History at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, and a doctoral degree at the Moscow State University. He taught History at Ife for 25 years, starting in 1967.
Professor Jibrin Ibrahim, who spoke on “Comrade Segun Osoba: The Radical Historian Who Stood with the People,” stated that the deceased “was deeply patriotic, committed to Nigeria and had a clear socialist ideological orientation.” He noted that Osoba became nationally known for the Minority Report & Draft Constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1976, which he co-authored with Dr Yusuf Bala Usman. The Obasanjo-led military administration dismissed the report, yet deployed police to tear-gas and beat up students and radical activists who tried to launch it in Zaria.
Impact on Students and Academia
Professor Toyin Falola, a former student of Osoba, wrote that his “distinctive intellectual and human attributes” and his “love for history was contagious, and his ability to make complicated historical events comprehensible to his students, despite the embedded convolutions of philosophy, appeared to many a gift of nature.” Falola added that Osoba made “history come alive” and “relevant and interesting.” This, Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), revealed, created ‘problems’ for him, as more unregistered “students” kept trooping to his classes to audit “Osoba’s classes and public debates for critical analysis and inspiration.”
Dung Sha, a professor of Political Science at the University of Jos, wrote that Osoba “taught us never to suppress our voices in silence; to challenge hegemony; resist provincialism; push the boundaries of knowledge; and cultivate resilience in the struggle for (a) transformative society.”
Symposium Highlights and Calls to Action
Femi Falana chaired the symposium, while Owei Lakemfa, a writer and labour leader, served as the Master of Ceremony. Solidarity messages were delivered by the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic’s (Western Sahara) Ambassador to Nigeria, Brahim Salem Buseif, and the Cuban Ambassador, Miriam Morales, who highlighted ongoing attempts by the Trump administration to isolate her country.
In his remarks, spokesperson of the Organising Committee, Dr YZ Ya’u, said the symposium was first to pay tributes to Osoba, whose ideas are “eternal and will continue to resonate with society when they speak to the realities of that society.” Secondly, it was to popularise his ideas “beyond academia and the movement,” adding that society will come to “appreciate his ideas, which have continued to remain relevant in the discourse and struggle for a better Nigeria.”
The organisers said they hope that popular engagements with Osoba’s ideas would help define the missions of patriots “who are committed to the remaking of this country. We do not take ideas as ornamental pieces to decorate our speech. We take them as tools for action, and we invite you to do so.”
Osoba’s Legacy and the Left’s Challenges
Ibrahim emphasised that Osoba was “one of the first to popularise Marxist methodology thus helping to make Ife one of the first hubs of radical thinking and student unionism in the Nigeria of the 1970s and 1980s.” He reminded the audience that the “Nigerian political space is completely dominated, not by bourgeois forces, but by criminals pretending to be politicians; whose focus is looting the treasury. They have no agenda for the people but are highly skilled in divide-and-rule tactics continue to divide citizens along primordial lines while they loot. They have been able to do so because the participation of the political Left in partisan politics has been weak and poorly organised.”
He challenged left forces “to work hard to challenge and remove them from power” through independent political organisation. He noted that Osoba “opposed the short cut path to revolutionary change and devoted his life to improving ideological clarity,” and had no respect for “revolutionaries who decided to take the short court of joining bourgeois politics [and] ended up as turn coats who betrayed our ideals.”
Papers and Discussions
Professor Toye Olorode, a botanist and social activist, addressed “Comrade Segun Osoba and Class Struggle in Nigeria since the Mid-1970s,” focusing on the encounter of Ife comrades with Osoba and the collapse of the Left and working peoples’ resistance movement. The paper examined the crisis of capitalism, the class struggle it triggers, and the crisis of left forces, underscoring the social base of a socialist struggle in Nigeria from 1976 to 2026.
Labour leader Comrade Hauwa Mustapha discussed “Historiography and its Effects on Gender Inequality in Nigeria.” She aligned with Osoba’s intellectual legacy, which rejects “the assumption that archives are politically neutral,” and stressed the need to critically “interrogate who produced these stories, whose interests they served, and whose voices were systematically excluded.” She asserted that historians must “recover the experiences of women through oral traditions, market histories, family archives, songs, court proceedings, indigenous institutions and community memory,” viewing this as “an act of social justice.”
The symposium concluded with a call to transform words into action, as Ahmed Aminu-Ramatu Yusuf, a retired deputy director at the Presidency, noted in his analysis.
