At long last, Nigeria’s self-styled Military President, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (rtd), has summoned the courage to tell his own story of the controversial June 12,1993 presidential election. Either by reason of hubris or, perhaps, more of the trepidation about the ambush of the hurtful, harsh verdict of history, the former military leader, whose eight-year rule was so eventful, had allowed the June 12 story to remain bottled up in him for 32 years!
It, however, came at last like a feint, because Gen. Babangida, responding to prods from friends, associates and well-wishers to tell his ‘June12 story’, had earlier foreclosed any possibility of doing so by writing his memoir. He actually believed then that nobody would read it.
Obviously, the prowling ghost of June 12 and its fretful silhouette, which eventually hounded the former military leader hurriedly out of power, had been haunting him ever since. It was good that the octogenarian, who is obviously in the twilight of his years when he should wisely be righting the wrongs of his early years, has not allowed the guilt to haunt him to the grave.
And so, like a bolt from the blue, the announcement of the public presentation of Gen. Babangida’s autobiography hit the news space some weeks back at a time most Nigerians must have forgotten all about reading his ‘insider account’ of the most heinous electoral heist of our time.
Of course, like a fair-minded leader, he quite commendably fessed up to his evil deeds, which he regretted, and took responsibility for the truncation, by his administration, of an electoral fest that once pulled down the hitherto impregnable walls of the north-south political-cum-religious divides.
However, his own version of the June 12 tale is a mixed grill of facts and a tissue of pokies. It is an acknowledgement of the somewhat jejune facts about MKO’s already well-known victory at the annulled polls, on one hand, and a fetid, vexatious contrivance that seeks to upend history, on the other!
In other words, for the first time in 32 years, Babangida made a volte-face about MKO’s electoral victory and acknowledged the open secret that MKO, indeed, won the June 12 poll. But he went ahead to hide under one finger by exonerating himself from the actual electoral heist, claiming that the annulment of Nigeria’s freest poll ever, took him by surprise and that he did not authorise it!
First, admitting his error at last Thursday’s presentation of his autobiography, titled: ‘A Journey in Service’, and the fundraiser for IBB Presidential Library in Abuja, the ex-military leader had said: “Although I am on record to have stated after the election that Abiola may not have won the election, upon deeper reflection and a closer examination of all the available facts, particularly the detailed election results…there was no doubt that MKO Abiola won the June 12 election.
“Upon closer examination of the original collated figures from the 110,000 polling booths nationwide, it was clear that he satisfied the two main constitutional requirements for winning the presidential elections, mainly majority votes and geographical spread, having obtained 8,128,720 votes against Tofa’s 5,848,247 votes and securing the mandatory one-third of the votes cast in 28 states of the federation, including Abuja.”
He added: “As a leader of the military administration, I accept full responsibility for all the decisions taken under my watch. And June 12 happened under my watch; mistakes, oversights and missteps happened in quick succession, but I say in my book, in all matters, we acted in the supreme national interest so that Nigeria could survive.
“Our nation’s march to democracy was interrupted, a fact I deeply regret. But Nigeria’s democracy is still alive, a testament to commitment.” Babangida admitted that the annulment of the election was contained in “a terse, poorly worded statement from a scrap of paper, which bore neither the presidential seal nor the official letterhead of the government, annulling the June 12 presidential election.”
The ex-military president acknowledged that credible, free and fair elections occurred on June 12, 1993. He, however, explained that the administration responsible for creating a near-perfect electoral system and overseeing those exemplary elections could not finalize the process.
He described this shortfall as a lamentable “accident of history,” adding that the nation was justifiably owed an expression of his remorse.
“Undoubtedly credible, free and fair elections were held on June 12, 1993. However, the tragic irony of history remains that the administration that devised a near-perfect electoral system and conducted those near-perfect elections could not complete the process.
“That accident of history is most regrettable. The nation is entitled to expect my expression of remorse,” he said.
Second, however, having done well by regretting and taking full responsibility for the annulment, Babangida immediately fouled the scent; he flagrantly floundered by trying to maintain a standoffish stance, heaping the whole blame on some “forces” in the military, led by the Late Gen. Sani Abacha, who took the reins of power after sacking the Shonekan-led interim contraption put in place after he (Babangida) “stepped aside.”
Exonerating himself from the annulment, the ex military leader admitted in his book that the annulment was only a component of a series of other options. He said: “But to suddenly have an announcement made without my authority was to put it mildly, alarming. I remember saying: ‘These nefarious inside forces opposed to the elections have outflanked me! I would later find out that the ‘forces’ led by Gen. Sani Abacha annulled the elections”!
In a grotesque twist, the man the Nigerian press had nicknamed ‘evil genius’ had claimed that he was away to Katsina to commiserate with the Yar’Aduas over a bereavement when he heard, perhaps like other ordinary Nigerians, the announcement of the annulment of the election, in a dictatorship in which he was the de facto head!
“There and then,” he said, “I knew I was caught up between ‘the devil and the deep blue sea’!! From then on, the June 12 elections took on a painful twist for which, as I will show later, I regrettably take responsibility.”
Babangida also regretted in the book how the fallout of the annulment of June 12 election had divided the military hierarchy in 1993. He said: “Within the military leadership, there was palpable outrage. The best of us, like Lt. Gen. Salihu Ibrahim and Major Gen. Ishola Williams were alarmed and Col. Abubakar Dangiwa Umar threatened to resign.
“Even Admiral Aikhomu, whose press secretary, Nduka Irabor, had announced the annulment, was horrified. The public vilified me. Instigated, among other things, by elements within the Armed Forces, the Nigerian press called me all kinds of names and described me as a power-drunk dictator who desperately wanted to cling to power.”
Probably further extending his specious argument that his administration acted in the nation’s best interest by so brazenly truncating the people’s collective electoral will, Babangida surmised that Abiola would have been eliminated all the same had he been sworn in as president!
His words: “Unfortunately, the forces gathered against him (Abiola) after the June 12 elections were so formidable that I was convinced that if he became President, he would be quickly eliminated by the same very forces who pretended to be his friends”!
Babangida’s attempt to wash his hands off the June 12 fiasco, in our view, is no more than a vacuous fib incoherently put together, a vapid tale emanating from a daunted conscience. It failed woefully to jell. Simply put, the June 12 debacle was the inchoative, gross out price of an imperious, power-mongering military leader, who lived up to his pet moniker of ‘maradona,’ who had the predilection of dribbling Nigerians to entrench himself in power, but eventually mucked up the whole thing by dribbling himself and scoring against himself.
Babangida, in his hypocritical manoeuvres to maintain a stranglehold on power, ran the most convoluted and duplicitous transition program in political history. He contrived novel, but perfidious political experiments, characterised by a streak of banning and unbanning of party candidates and political parties, running the country in an execrable vicious circle, that was perhaps meant to end nowhere but perpetuation in power.
Political analysts who saw through the ex-military leader’s political shenanigans, contended that he actually goaded his friend, MKO Abiola on, when the latter formally sought his blessing for his presidential ambition. But according to them, he did that because he had thought that Abiola’s opponent, Kano-born Othman Tofa (of blessed memory), the presidential candidate of the defunct National Republican Party (NRC), would roundly beat MKO, who was flying the banners of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP).
After all, no southerner had, as at then, ever won a presidential election. In Babangida’s estimation, it would have been less rancorous to annul an election won by a northerner like himself. But it was a gross miscalculation that has earned him a slot in the annals of infamy.
So, in our view, much like a bull that broke loose from the lair, the events that immediately trailed the annulment of June 12, leapt out of Babangida’s fierce grip and the prowling ghost assumed a life of its own immediately afterwards. In other words, the otherwise cerebral military strategist, indeed, lost control. This, we believe, prodded his ambitious lieutenants in the military, like the Late Gen. Sani Abacha, the Chief of Defence Staff, to cash in on the lacuna to satiate their own lust for power.
The annulment itself, from our reading of the events then, was a last ditch strand clutched unto by the ex-military president and his ‘boys’ in their ghoulish desperation to silence the ghost of June 12 to cling to power. Hence, Babangida’s excuse that some people would have hurt MKO and himself, if the former had been allowed to assume his mandate; or that the nation’s survival was imperiled, in our view, is all outright bunkum.
Abiola’s mandate was an unprecedented pan-Nigeria one. It was an election in which the whole country spoke as one, cementing both the north and south as a united block. Even military men, high and low, voted massively for a man they had seen as a ‘messiah’, a man with the heart of gold who had built a surfeit of bridges across the divides through his uncanny regime of philanthropy. So, who would have hurt the carrier of such a revolutionary mandate?
It is, however, despicable that the nation was made to lose that defining moment in its chequered life. Instead, MKO was unjustly hounded into detention and he died in yet unclear circumstances after literally ‘rotting’ in the gulag for five years.
As Babangida was unfurling his putrid underbelly through his autobiography in Abuja last Thursday and rambling between a muffled remorse and a veiled hubris in his failed attempt to upend history, Abiola, his wife, Kudirat, a woman imbued with the steely courage of the fox, who was mauled down in cold blood for protesting against her husband’s truncated mandate, and hundreds of pro-democracy fighters, who were gunned down by soldiers for defending their votes, as well as other martyrs whose blood was used to water the crucible of the modicum of democracy and political freedom we are enjoying today, would definitely be smirking in their graves at this travesty of history.
What is more, after Babangida was forced to ‘step aside’ (meaning he probably meant to return to power), Abacha, who succeeded him, foisted on the nation a five-year despotic rule in which pro-democracy activists, including journalists and chieftains of the National Democratic Coalition(NADECO), a body put together to seek the actualisation of Abiola’s mandate, were visited with the worst savagery.
The NADECO chieftains were particularly accused of the most risible offences, including allegedly being behind the cold murder of Kudirat Abiola and the series of mystery bomb explosions that ravaged the Southwest then, just to justify their being massively clamped into detention. Some notable Nigerians like Alfred Rewane, Alex Ibru, Harry Marshall and many others died in heinous attacks during Abacha’s brutal misadventure.
The losses from the June 12 misadventure were massive and pervasive. The pains remain indelible and penetratingly hurting. Abiola’s family suffered the worst. The widows lost a formidable husband in the Yoruba’s generalissimo (The Aare Ona Kakanfo). The children and close relations lost an irreplaceable patriarch and breadwinner in the billionaire business colossus. Hundreds of workers lost a benefactor with the collapse and eventual ruination of his vast business empire that spanned Nigeria and the African continent. Hangers on lost a philanthropist like no other.
However, like the elders say, the child went to hide the knife after inflicting a deep cut on his neighbour. It is no use hiding the knife because the deed has been done. The June 12 debacle has happened with all the hurting gross outs. We believe it is high time we properly buried the festering ghost of June 12 and move on as a nation.
This we could do by instituting a purely fact-finding Truth Commission, akin to the one set up in post-apartheid South Africa (after the collapse of apartheid hegemony). It will be made up of men and women of integrity across the length and breath of Nigeria. It should be headed by a retired Justice of the Supreme Court from the North, a jurist with an incorruptible record of service, in the mould of Justice Mohammed Uwais and the like.
The commission will interrogate and ventilate issues around June 12: The remote and immediate causes of the debacle; who played what role and how do we prevent a reoccurrence? Nigerians, including Babangida and other June 12 actors who are still alive, including NADECO chieftains, pro-democracy activists and top rate legal minds, would be made to make presentations in an atmosphere of camaraderie. The proceedings should be televised live for all Nigerians to be part of it. Nobody should be booed or victimised.
This is with a view to unearthing the whole truth about that dark moment in our history and come out with recommendations that would heal the lingering wounds of June 12 injuries and adequately compensate Abiola’s family. It will properly place the martyr of democracy in his place in history as a full-fledged president (beyond the commendable recognition accorded him by the Buhari administration) and other martyrs who paid the supreme sacrifice over that watershed in our nation.
And what a felicitous moment: The current administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a protagonist of the June 12 Vanguard, who himself suffered a lot of personal deprivations and made sacrifices, including self-exile, is best suited to institute the Truth Commission. The recommendations should be gazetted and if possible, they should be imputed into the secondary school curriculum and taught as a History or Government subject.
