Painful Exit of Didi Adodo: Comrade, Friend and Dependable Ally In Struggle !! By Comrade Abiodun Aremu

Painful Exit of Didi Adodo: Comrade, Friend and Dependable Ally In Struggle !! By Comrade Abiodun Aremu.

“The last 72 hours have been very challenging for me to attend to unavoidable tasks! At 3.55am yesterday January 12, I drove out en route to the Lagos Airport to get an urgent message across to Abuja and head to Ikoyi very early! While heading towards Oshodi, Comrade Debo Adeniran’s call came: Good morning Aremson, we lost Didi early this morning …And we talked on what could be the cause of his death and others! Suddenly I felt disturbed, Didi gone, so sad! I remembered parts of our last encounters in November 2020, when his wife’s immediate younger sister, died in a ghastly motor accident!.

Then memories of our first meetings in 1985 kept coming – probably at the meeting of the Patriotic Youth Movement of Nigeria (PYMN) and NANS Senate meeting in UNILAG! And same 1985, Didi, also then probably the only surviving PYMN comrade in the University of Benin hosted the crucial PYMN meeting where the consideration for the host of the NANS Secretariat among the institutions in Zone B of NANS was debated. UNIBEN then operated like a military garrison with Prof Grace Alele-Williams’ authoritarian rule as the Vice Chancellor and dissenting voices – both of students and radical academics were viciously repressed. Prof Alele was so desperate then to crush every perceived opposition to the extent that she had to ban the Youth Solidarity on Southern Africa in Nigeria (YUSSAN) at a time Nigeria provided official leadership for Africa in the fight against Apartheid South Africa.

Hosting a PYMN meeting in such a campus with heavy security presence and monitoring of the classrooms and hostels by security operatives at regular interval was the situation in which DIDI operated like a lone ranger to get 11 of us PYMN cadres assembled for that meeting after several manoeuvres! I can still recollect Femi Ahmed now Pastor Femi Israel and Rima Shawulu now a Honourable Member in the House of Representatives were at that meeting because of the fierce polemics and exchange of banters! And DIDI was in and out of the venue almost everytime to ensure that the security elements didn’t discover us! It was a tensed meeting that we had to vote, cancelled the votes and eventually had an uneasy consensus! A meeting in which 11 participants suddenly became 12 at voting to stalemate the meeting. That moment of encounters with DIDI and other comrades at the meeting were memories that reflected to me each time as I recall Debo’s message – we lost DIDI!

36years we have been friend and comrade and have worked and collaborated together in several struggle spaces!
DIDI served and worked with ASUU UNIBEN shortly after surviving the Alele’s hammer before he relocated to Lagos to take charge of the Iron and Steel Senior Staff Association of Nigeria with the office then at Pepple Street, Ikeja, which was directly adjacent to the African Shrine! And the ISSSAN office became a rallying point for our convergence with other comrades who had also painfully exited in the last few years – Laitan Oyerinde, Otunba Ayodele, Benedict Edherue, Biodun Ogunade REVO and Frank Aiyede (Owan)
A moving force of SESCAN (Senior Staff Consultative Association of Nigeria) which later became the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC), Comrade Didi Adodo on principles in one of the struggles against hike in fuel prices, following the sudden call of the strike by the then TUC leadership, joined forces with other unions to pull out of the TUC to form the Congress of Free Trade Union (CFTU) and allied with the NLC to wage subsequent struggle against hike in fuel prices. The CFTU affiliates were later to join up with the NLC at the 2007 Delegates’ Conference as affiliates of the NLC till date.

A foundation member in the Kolagbodi Memorial Foundation (KMF), Comrade DIDI played a key role in the operation of the KMF, first by providing logistics support, which was followed by providing office space for the KMF in the ISSSAN Secretariat for close to two years!
A veteran in several struggle spaces, Comrade DIDI belongs to the Socialist Revolutionary Vanguard (SRV), where we also have history of working together with M.E. Kolagbodi, Ola-Oni, G.G. Dr. Yomi Ferreira, Darah, Rotimi Yaqub Obadofin, Laoye Sanda, Tony Iyare, Orion-Akhaine, Laitan Oyerinde, Revo, Alex Ayatollamoh, et al.
Comrade DIDI would be greatly missed in the Labour constituency, particularly at this period when there is a clamour to rebuild the Trade unions movement on the basis of ideological and principled leadership.

Hoping in the next few days, I would be able to commit more words of reminiscences to the memory of Comrade DIDI, whose sudden departure is a reminder to the few of us remaining in the same generation that ‘Time’ may no longer endure for us!