Bekololari Ransome-Kuti

Bekololari Ransome-Kuti (born August 2, 1940 in Abeokuta , † February 10, 2006 in Lagos ), popularly known as " Beko ", was a Nigerian politician , civil rights activist and doctor .

education

He completed his basic school education from 1945 to 1950 in the class of his mother, the famous women's rights activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti , who was also a committed teacher. He then went to Abeokuta Grammar School, where his father had been director for years. From 1957 to 1958 he studied in Coventry ( Great Britain ) at the Technical College and then from 1958 to 1963 at the University of Manchester , where he graduated as a doctor in 1963. In 1964 he returned to Nigeria, where he practiced at various state hospitals until 1977 and finally opened his own practice. Beko had already been chairman of the Nigerian Student Union in Manchester, and in Nigeria he chaired various medical associations, including the Nigerian Medical Association in Lagos .

Political career

While his parents had fought a passionate fight for Nigeria's separation from the colonial power of Great Britain, Beko felt called upon to take action for the freedom of his compatriots in the now independent country, against the grievances of Nigeria's democracy and the human rights violations during the protracted phases of military dictatorships. His brother Fela Kuti accused the rulers of arrogance in political texts, which he effectively dressed in music with his Afrobeat . Beko tried by means of the rule of law, in whose effectiveness he firmly believed, to hold the rulers accountable. For years he led an unsuccessful trial against the then military dictator Olusegun Obasanjo , whom he blamed for a brutal military raid, the consequences of which his mother died in 1978.

During the years under Ibrahim Babangida , Ransome-Kuti became chairman of the Campaign for Democracy (CD) , which grew into the central refuge of the resistance during the years of the Abacha dictatorship. Under Beko's initiative, the CD developed forms of nonviolent protest that were publicly effective and cost a minimum of human life. On June 25, 1995, Abacha had him arrested on charges of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment in a show trial. A week after Abacha's death on June 8, 1998, his successor, General Abdulsalami, ordered Abubakar Beko to be released, along with eight other prominent political prisoners.

In the last years of his life, Beko held a leading position in the Pro-National Conference Organizations (PRONACO), an organization in which politicians, human rights activists and lawyers advocate reforms of the Nigerian constitution, the federal system and democratization of Nigeria, against authoritarian centralism and Use corruption. Bekololari Ransome-Kuti was President of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR). On December 10, 1997 he was honored with the human rights award of the city of Weimar .