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Abubakar Rimi’s life was marked by a certain restlessness.

In 1983 he decamped from Aminu Kano’s
People’s Redemption Party, of which he was a founding member, and on
whose platform he had been elected governor, to Nnamdi Azikiwe’s
Nigeria People’s Party. More than twenty years later he would make a
similar move, dumping the People’s Democratic Party, which he helped
found, for the Action Congress; and then months later make a
controversial return to the PDP.

For a man who early on earned a
formidable reputation as a ‘progressive’ politician (he was once quoted
as saying “I hate whatever the NPN stands for; it is a manifestation of
everything that is bad”), his affiliation with the PDP, the 4th
republic incarnation of the NPN, remains surprising. But then wasn’t
this also the man who publicly swore, after leaving the PDP, that he
would never return; but within a year was back, and remained a
prominent member until his death?

Roller coaster

Abubakar Rimi was one of the founding
members of the Peoples Redemption Party. In 1978 he was elected deputy
National Secretary of the party. In the run-up to the second republic
his ambition was to be a senator.

By a stroke of fate he ended up – a
dashing thirty-nine year old – as the first civilian governor of the
old Kano state. As governor, he demonstrated remarkable fidelity to his
party’s (PRP) ideals, making the economic and educational empowerment
of the talakawa (“common man”) the priority of his administration.
Following his decampment to the Nigeria People’s Party, he honourably
resigned his position as governor of Kano State on the 1st of May 1983,
making him the first – and only – Nigerian state governor to do so. He
would later contest for a second term on the NPP platform, losing to
Sabo Bakinzuwo, the candidate of his former party.

In 1984, he was one of the legion of
second republic politicians tried and jailed on corruption charges by
the Muhammadu Buhari regime, which brought to end the second republic.
Rimi would spend the next three years in at least two Nigerian prisons
(Benin and Kirikiri). That spell was his second; the first, a much
shorter one, occurred during the build-up to the 1964 Federal House of
Representatives elections (in which he was contesting on the platform
of the Northern Elements Progressive Union), when the rival Northern
People’s Congress engineered his arrest and detention.

Rimi was also one of the prominent
politicians initially banned from participating in the transition to
civilian rule by military dictator Ibrahim Babangida in 1991. In the
3rd Republic he was a prominent member of the Social Democratic Party
(SDP), and a leading supporter of Moshood Abiola’s presidential
campaign. But when Sani Abacha came to power, Rimi, alongside other SDP
members like Lateef Jakande, Iyorchia Ayu, Babagana Kingibe and
Ebenezer Babatope, accepted a ministerial position in the junta. They
were all later dropped from the cabinet.

In 1998 Rimi teamed up with a group of
eminent Nigerians to form the G34, a political pressure group that
stridently opposed Abacha’s plans to transform into a civilian
president. The sudden death of Abacha in June 1998 and the subsequent
opening up of the political space by the Abdulsalam Abubakar government
provided an opportunity for Rimi to once again achieve political
relevance. The G34 transformed into the People’s Democratic Party,
positioning Rimi to become an influential member of the political
platform that would soon become the nation’s ruling party.

The Aso Rock dream

His overriding ambition until his
death was to become the President of Nigeria. He sought to contest in
the PDP primaries in 1999 and 2003, in defiance of the party’s internal
arrangement that zoned the presidency to the South. In 1999 he bowed to
the party’s decision. But in 2002 he, alongside Barnabas Gemade, took
the PDP to court to challenge its zoning the presidency to the South.
“[T]his time around, the race is open to anybody, everybody; and it is
equally not true that the political mood favours any particular part of
the country. It is not true at all. The race is open to all parts of
the country. And so I am in the race,” he told a national daily in
November 2002.

The PDP would later reverse its zoning
decision (barely 48 hours to the national convention) and allow the two
men to contest the Presidential primaries. Those present at Eagle
Square, Abuja venue of the primaries, or who watched the live
broadcast, will recall Rimi’s name intermittently punctuating that of
the two main contenders, Mr Obasanjo and Mr Ekwueme, during the public
ballot counting that followed the voting, presided over by Tom Ikimi.

A controversial legacy

Politics dictated that Rimi would part
ways with some of his closest allies. As Kano state governor, Rimi’s
differences with his mentor Aminu Kano caused the PRP to be split into
two factions. Two decades later the struggle to control the PDP in Kano
and Jigawa (which was carved out of the old Kano state) states caused
Rimi to fall out with long time friend and political associate (and
fellow disciple of Aminu Kano), Sule Lamido.

Rimi was also an unrepentant critic of
Mr Obasanjo, despite his appointment as Chairman of the board of the
Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Company. In 2006 his frustration
with the PDP (he publicly accused the party of having a hand in the
2006 murder of his wife) led him to switch to the Action Congress,
where he became a National Vice Chairman.

But he was not to stay long in the new party, returning to the PDP in October 2007.

Throughout his long political career
Rimi never failed to reveal flashes of the disdain for
establishment-style politics which defined his early years as a member
of the Northern Elements Progressive Union and the People’s Redemption
Party; both of which sought to be progressive bulwarks against the
conservatism of the powerful Northern aristocracy. As Kano State
governor he abolished age-old taxes, and famously queried the Emir of
Kano, a potentially politically suicidal move.

But at certain periods when it
mattered, and especially towards the end of his life it was hard to
find evidence that Rimi was not an establishment person. In the end, he
leaves a fascinating legacy – a colourful political career whose
unpredictability soon came to become very predictable, a history of
unguarded public statements, and an impressive list of
associates-turned- enemies.

But perhaps what will serve as the prevailing symbol of that legacy
will be the tens of thousands of mourners who attended his funeral on
Monday, evidence that while the Rimi political magic may have waned
over the years, it never quite vanished. In death, as in the beginning,
Rimi was a man of the people.