Solomon Lar: The man and his politics

OCTOBER 10, 2013 

Chief-Solomon-Lar

Chief Solomon Daushep Lar, meant different things to so many people. To some, he was a teacher, to others, he was a flamboyant politician and statesman, while to several others, he was simply an enigma.

Lar was born in Pongaa, Langtang, Plateau State in April 1933 to a farmer father and pottery maker mother. Like most children in his time, he attended at the Sudan United Mission Primary School in Langtang, before proceeding to  the Gindiri Teachers’ College where he qualified as a primary school teacher.

After two years, he returned to Gindiri for the Senior Teachers Training programme, earned his Higher Elementary Certificate and started to teach at the Senior Primary School level. His modest ambition was to become a clergyman.

But fate had a different course for him, he joined politics instead and was elected as a councillor to the Langtang Native Authority in January 1959. On December 12, 1959, he was elected to the Federal Parliament on the platform of the United Middle Belt Congress.

He was re-elected in 1964, and from then until January 15, 1966, when the first military coup took place, Lar was a parliamentary secretary to the late Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. He was also a junior minister in the Federal Ministry of Establishment.

When the military truncated democratic rule in 1966, Lar went back to school. He  attended the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, graduating in 1970 with an LLB and was called to the bar in 1971.

He established a private legal practice, and was co-founder and first National Secretary of the Nigerian Legal Aid Association. He was at various times a member of the Constituent Assembly (1977–1978), minister of Police Affairs and pioneer chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party.

Lar was elected governor of the old Plateau State in 1979. He had a trademark white handkerchief and a long traditional cap which stood him out of the crowd.

He was credited with opening up various rural roads within Plateau State, he also had to his credit the establishment of the Plateau Radio Television Corporation, and he started the Jos Main Market project. During his time, there was no ethno-religious crisis in the state.

He had an uncanny ability to promote harmonious living among the various ethnic nationalities that lived on the Plateau.

At the national level, he  was best of friends with the late Abubakar Rimi who was then Kano State governor on the platform of the Peoples Redemption Party and a former Enugu State governor, Chief Jim Nwobodo.