The Presidency scored a bullseye with the historic posthumous recognition accorded some categories of persons last Thursday. This was part of the exhilarating snippets in the presidential broadcast by President Bola Tinubu to the joint session of the National Assembly to mark the June 12, 1993 presidential election.
Honours awards are not new; they are a yearly ritual put in place to recognize Nigerians who have distinguished themselves in various endeavours, both in private and public lives. However, the awards conferred posthumously on a group and two persons last Thursday particularly stood out like a gaudy anthill in a desert. They were: the Ogoni 9; the late Prof. Humphrey Nwosu, who as the then National Electoral Commission(NEC) chairman, conducted the historic June 12, 1993 presidential election and the late Mrs Kudirat Abiola, the wife of the winner of the famed poll, who was mauled down in Lagos in broad daylight 29 years ago.
The significance of those special awards is the tendency to heal primordial wounds that had festered interminably. The unjust execution of the Ogoni 9, led by the diminutive literary giant, Ken Saro-Wiwa, represented an odious spectacle in the dark trajectory of the nation’s military interregnum.
President Tinubu on Thursday bestowed national honours on Saro-Wiwa and his fellow environmental campaigners, who were known as the Ogoni 9. The nine men —Saro-Wiwa,who was then the President of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People(MOSOP), Barinem Kiobel, John Kpuinen, Baribor Bera, Felix Nuate, Paul Levula, Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo and Daniel Gbokoo — were among dozens who received the honours as part of the nation’s annual Democracy Day.
The honours came about 30 years after the Ogoni leaders were executed for the alleged murder of Ogoni 4 leaders — Albert Badey, Edward Kobani, Samuel Orage and Theophilus Orage, who were also prominent figures in MOSOP.
The men were murdered by a mob on May 21, 1994. They were reportedly beaten to death by angry Ogoni youths during a meeting in Gokana, Ogoniland. The murders occurred during a period of heightened tension and political division within MOSOP.
The deaths of the Ogoni 4 were a significant event in the Ogoni crisis, leading to the arrest and subsequent execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists. They were accused of masterminding the murders, an allegation that was vociferously disputed.
The incident highlighted the deep divisions within the Ogoni community and the brutal tactics used during the conflict with the Nigerian government over oil exploration and environmental damage in Ogoniland.
Their execution, widely viewed as a travesty of justice, sparked outrage within the international community because the Ogoni 9 were believed to have been unjustly killed for their relentless campaign against environmental pollution and degradation occasioned by oil exploration in their land. The execution was widely condemned as extrajudicial murders and became a global symbol of the struggle against environmental injustice and repression. Nigeria was consequently suspended from the Commonwealth group of nations.
Then, the June 12 election was a watershed, a defining moment in the nation’s chequered history because it literally tore down the walls of religious and ethnocentric fissures that had been wracking the nation for too long. It was a day that Nigerians spoke eloquently as one with their votes
The business mogul, the late Bashorun MKO Abiola, and his running mate, Ambassador Baba Gana Kingibe, who flew the presidential and vice-presidential tickets of the defunct Social Democratic Party(SDP) were both Muslims. But Nigerians, against the grains of bookmakers’ predictions, brushed aside that religious hurdle and overwhelmingly voted for them.
It was such a profound pan-Nigerian mandate that Abiola defeated his opponent, Alhaji Bashir Othman Tofa, who contested on the platform of the defunct National Republican Party (NRC), in his Kano stronghold! That election remains the freest and fairest presidential poll ever conducted in our nation. That explains the pervasive national and international outrage that greeted the criminal annulment of that election by the administration of the Military President, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida.
It was, however, a despicable, ironic twist that former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was handed power on a silver platter in 1999 on account of the titanic June 12 struggle to which he contributed nothing, did everything within his magisterial powers to bury the election and vitiate its memory.
Obasanjo, who often exhibits a cussed and mullish character, swanked his way through power for eight years, totally unfazed by the admonitions to recognize June 12, the literal, sacrificial ‘horse’ that gave him a cushy ride to power. He refused to recognize Abiola as winner of that election by distancing his administration from anything June 12, out of ostensible envy.
If one could excuse Obasanjo’s successor, Alhaji Umaru Musa-Yar’Adua, who had a dicky life, battling a terminal condition that eventually put paid to his presidency midday, the subsequent administration of Goodluck Jonathan and the then ruling People’s Democratic Party(PDP) too failed to make even a perfunctory attempt to do anything about a mandate that paved the way for them the opportunity to taste power.
It, however, took the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration of former President Mohammadu Buhari to literally exhume the ‘ghost’ of June 12 on June 6, 2018 by conferring on Abiola, the late winner of that poll, the posthumous award of the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR), the highest national honour reserved for Nigerian presidents. He also conferred the second highest national honour of the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON) on Abiola’s running mate, Baba Gana Kingibe.
The conferment represented a symbolic recognition and immortalization of Abiola as the winner of the election for the first time in 25 years. The administration, in addition, declared June 12 as Democracy Day, displacing May 29.
President Buhari, a year later, precisely June 10, 2019, assented to the Public Holiday Act Amendment Bill, formally making June 12 Democracy Day in Nigeria and a public holiday to commemorate the election every year henceforth.
This political masterstroke stood the otherwise unpopular Buhari administration in good stead, as it was widely received with a rapturous applause by pro-democracy activists and other segments of society. Of course, the progressive action had all the imprimatur of the current president, Bola Tinubu.
In fact, one of his media aides, Tunde Rahman, confirmed that the whole idea was recommended to Buhari by Tinubu, who was an Abiola’s right hand man and one of the main protagonists of the June 12 de-annulment campaign. He later became the rallying force behind the coalition of parties — the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and a faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), the political octopus that eventually shoved PDP out of power.
Last Thursday, Tinubu, now as president, elicited another mellifluous ‘eureka’ by consolidating on the streaks of June 12 recognition by honouring the late Prof. Nwosu and Kudirat Abiola, both hero and heroine respectively, among dozens of others conferred with various honours awards.
These are highly commendable gestures from Mr. President. Nwosu more than deserves the award because the professor of Political Science demonstrated uncommon gutsy inclination, risking his life by resisting all the subterfuges allegedly concocted by the military authorities to stop the June 12 poll. He went ahead to hold the election as scheduled, before he was eventually forced to stop further announcement of election results midway.
Kudirat, on her part, was a quiet, dutiful housewife of MKO, who was never a politician until the criminal annulment of her husband’s mandate and his subsequent incarceration by the Abacha military junta brought out the activist in her. She was gunned down in cold blood by agents of the military on June 6, 1996. The honours award conferred on her marked another ingenious move to gradually heal the deep emotional gash that has long been inflicted on the Abiola family by the June 12 mesh.
Both MOSOP and Ohanaeze welcomed the pardon/awards conferred on the Ogoni 9 as well as Prof. Nwosu’s recognition with great plaudits and exhilaration, but like the literary character, Oliver Twist, they want more. The Ogoni umbrella union said an outright exoneration of the Ogoni 9, not pardon, will completely drive home the wheels of justice in their case because, according to the body, the men were innocent of the offence for which they were hanged.
Ohanaeze, in its own case, demanded that the late NEC boss be further immortalized by naming the INEC headquarters in Abuja after him to keep his memory alive. We agree with both submissions. Indeed, the Ogoni 9 deserve total posthumous pardon because there was no concrete evidence linking them with the murder of Ogoni 4, for which they hurriedly and secretly tried and killed.
We believe there is merit in the claim that the men were killed for being a pain in government’s neck with their vociferous protests against environmental damage due to oil exploration in their land. Similarly, we believe also that Prof. Nwosu deserves that the INEC headquarters or any other befitting national monument be named after him, so his memory would be boldly embossed on the national consciousness.
We salute President Tinubu for these intrepid gestures to heal primeval wounds in the land. But we admonish him to complete the immortalisation of Abiola by formally declaring him an ex-president and placing his portrait among those of other ex- presidents in Aso Villa. The Federal Government should also refund whatever government may be owing the business mogul, as being demanded by his family.
That is the least that could be done to further redress the incalculable damage that the June 12 imbroglio has done to his family. The late billionaire, whose uncanny courage, uncompromising tenacity and resilience in fighting formidable adversaries gave life to the June 12 struggle, lost his verse, multi-billion business empire in the process and a lot of the family’s interests have been irretrievably sundered, in addition to losing their bread winner. Settling the debt, if eventually confirmed, would be a soothing succour to the family.
However, the presidential gallant step in immortalizing some special heroes was tainted by an embarrassing error of including the names of two living statesmen, Pa Reuben Faroranti, Afenifere leader, and Dr Edwin Madunagu, in the posthumous awards category.
This kind of error occurring at the pinnacle of government is clearly too careless, inexcusable and unpardonable because there ought to be layers of gatekeepers in the Media Department of The Presidency vetting the text copies of presidential speeches with the finest of eagle-eye editing comb to make it completely error-free before handing them over to the President.
To this extent, even though the presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, has duly apologized, whoever committed that blunder deserves to be fired’. Otherwise, the embarrassing error will continue to recur.
Again, the tendency for the federal lawmakers to be singing President Tinubu’s campaign mantra at such a serious event as the state-of-the nation presidential address is grossly infantile. Our overzealous senators and representatives should stop denigrating the hallowed legislative chambers with their increasing propensity to turn every serious event involving the president into a political campaign. This is gross irresponsibility. Perhaps, they need to be reminded to always distinguish between serious state-of-the-nation assignments and APC events!
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