The Daily Times Person of the Year 2020: AISHA YESUFU

FELIX OBOAGWINA

Epochal awards are usually given to persons, groups and others who clearly deserve to be conferred with such honours after scrutiny of a lineup of nominees.

In choosing our persons of the year 2020, we at The Daily Times ruthlessly disregarded fear or favour to uphold the truth, patriotism as well as selfless contributions to socio-political progress of our beloved country. 

Above all factors, we were guided by our conscience in choosing Folarin Falana (popularly known as FALZ) and Aisha Yesufu as The Daily Times Persons of the Year 2020 for their fearless and patriotic roles in the recent youth-led national movement and protest for genuine reforms and change, tagged #EndSARS, which began as a revolt against police brutality and other excesses.

This heroine first broke into national limelight as a Co-Convener of the #BringBackOurGirls (BBOG) movement, following the terrorist group Boko Haram’s 14th April 2014 abduction of 276 female students of Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. Those were the days of President Goodluck Jonathan. Playing somewhat second-fiddle to the likes of former Education Minister, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, and former Secretary to the Government of Kaduna State, Hadiza Bala Usman, Yesufu joined other patriots demanding the release of the unfortunate Chibok girls. Their group organised walks and demonstrations. They visited the locus. They comforted grieving parents. They met with The Presidency. They picketed Aso Rock and the Legislature. In all this, the BBOG group more than anyone else made and raised the girls’ plight to an international project or platform. It became an albatross around the neck of the Jonathan government. In the end, the crusaders’ efforts failed to yield the expected liberation of the remaining 112 abducted girls. But it formed a major plank in achieving a regime change. In the election that followed, recovering the Chibok girls became a major campaign pledge by the opposition All People’s Congress (APC), and it went on to win the election.

However, in the face of what many see as the dismal anti-climatic performance of what should be a corrective administration, struggle Amazon Yesufu this year October returned to the trenches to resume speaking truth to power and holding leaders responsible. Yesufu stormed Abuja, the country’s capital, to join the peaceful #EndSARS protest. And there she struck an iconic pose. The country’s youth had taken to the streets to demand reforms in the Nigeria Police Force, starting with the dissolution of the notorious Special Anti- Robbery Squad (SARS) that had become tainted with unbridled extra-judicial criminalities of harassment, murder, rape and corruption perpetrated against citizens. Its (SARS) dangerous excesses had reached a crescendo and time had come to send it packing. And this mother of two hit the streets once more like she did with the BBOG five years before.

Perhaps used to the indulgent response of the former administration to street protests and sit-ins, Aisha found the President Muhammadu Buhari reaction to the #EndSARS protest nightmarish. Pummelled by police, armed to the teeth with guns and tear-gas, Yesufu remained defiant. On one of such #EndSARS street actions, she and her co-strugglers confronted cops. The peaceful demonstrators were soon suffused by fumes of teargas. At that moment, this hijab-clad struggle Amazon raised a clenched fist to the sky and a smart photographer ingeniously captured her in that expressive pose. That image became a symbol of the struggle and quickly went viral. It was the moment that Aisha had lived for. That singular photograph proclaimed this veteran as  icon of the supposedly leaderless #EndSARS struggle.

She would tell an interviewer: “Activism has been part of me all my life. I am somebody that stands up against injustice because I have a ‘big mouth.'”

Mrs. Yesufu made the 2020 list of the BBC’s 100 Women announced in November. It would not be her first recognition. While doing her one-year national youth service (NYSC), she had won an award for service to humanity in 1999, and 10 years later, a national newspaper crowned her the “Voice of Humanity 2019.”

Aisha Yesufu maintains a robust presence in social media, especially Twitter, where her handle says of her, “You would either love me or hate me and either one is perfectly okay!”

Several people mistake her twin Muslim name for that of a Northerner; but Aisha’s parents actually hail from Agbede in Edo State. They gave birth to her on 12th December 1974 in the ancient city of Kano in North-West Nigeria where she was raised. She grew up in a ghetto area of Kano teeming  with street urchins, drug users and Almajirai who randomly filled the streets. However, she remained unbowed by the challenges she faced as a girl-child growing up in the male-centric North. By the time she clocked 11 years old, Aisha had had most of her friends married off, but she never gave up her dream of education. Her father sponsored her through one of the best schools in the city until he suffered a business collapse. Even then poverty never quenched her voratious appetite for reading, a passion she has maintained till adulthood. In 1991, her attempt to secure enrolment into the Nigerian Defence Academy broke her heart, as authorities rejected her for being a woman. Aisha would later endure a chequered tertiary education through three universities. Finally, she managed to graduate from Bayero University, Kano, with a degree in Microbiology. Following this, she took to business and has always worked for herself. Married in 1996 as an undergraduate to Aliu Yesufu, a Chartered Accountant from Auchi in her native Edo State, Aisha is today a mother of two children, a male and a female.

This woman who confesses her lacking the feminine patience for domestic chores describes her husband as “such an amazing human being. He is just different from other men and I would say it is the only reason we have spent 20 years together in our marriage. I cook very well but I need to be very motivated before I enter the kitchen to cook. I am not a big fan of house chores.”

Since that first time at the Unity Fountain 2014 in Abuja where she maintained a stoic resoluteness as the ranks of those who initially joined the #BringBackOurGirls sit-ins, began to thin out, Aisha may have chosen the lonely road of activism as her destiny. But she remains undaunted. Nothing will silence her demand for citizens and women’s rights.

She says: “My advice to women is to fully and unapologetically take their place in the world. Women should stop asking for a place at the table –they should create their own table.”