EVEN Muhammadu Buhari, an affliction on Nigeria during the eight years of his presidency – 2015 to 2023 – was there in Abuja last week. Represented. His choice not to attend in person but rather through a proxy was immaterial. That Buhari participated in any form or shape during the public presentation of a book titled “A Journey in Service”, was a shouting testimony to the unity of the ruling elite and their serial jokes on us. The book was the memoirs or author biography of Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, the military president who ruled the country between 1985 -1993. He was a comrade – in- arm with Buhari until he was not. Babangida or IBB as he’s fondly called by his admirers was reported to be a key player in the coup of 1983 which sacked the first democratically elected executive president of our country, Alhaji Shehu Aliyu Shagari, and installed an usurper, Maj.-Gen. Buhari. It was also the same IBB that inspired the sacking of Buhari and installed himself as military president about two years later. He subsequently imprisoned Buhari without trial for many years. Since then Buhari had not pretended about his being a ‘sworn enemy’ of Babangida until they stopped being enemies last week. At least so it seemed.
My Igbo people would say that “ezue ka aha eri udele, atotuo ngiga”. I doubt that this Igbo adage has an equivalence in the English language so I will attempt a poor transliteration. The basket of vulture meat preserved just above the fireplace is brought down when those who partake in the eating of vulture gather together. In much of Africa, probably all of the continent, the meat of vulture is not a delicacy that people hanker after. Indeed, it’s a taboo. So picture in your mind’s eye the type of men who gather to savour the meat of a vulture. They must be less than honourable men. I won’t say they are usually evil and horrible.
For the life of me I will never contemplate saying that the gathering last week in Abuja was that of vultures, not just the eaters of the meat of vultures. Branding people as vultures in Africa has a history behind it. And that history was bone-crushing and bloody. In spite of commendable efforts at national healing the scars are still evident including jarring artefacts in a museum dedicated to that nightmare. The Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994. It was devastating and tragic, and resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. There are two major ethnic groups in Rwanda – Hutu and Tutsi – who had long-standing tensions between them. The story was that as with colonialism everywhere, the Belgian overlords during the colonial rule created a system of ethnic classification which favoured the Tutsi minority. In 1994 political instability ensued following the assassination of the president, Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu. The president’s aircraft was shot down. The country’s Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) began broadcasting hate messages, inciting the majority Hutu to kill the Tutsi whom it branded as vultures. Between April – July 1994, about one million people had been killed in widespread violence, rapes, and destruction of property. The world stood askance and watched the carnage. On July 4, 1994, a Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) captured Kigali, the country’s capital, and seized power. Paul Kagame has been president of that country since 2000. Now you probably will appreciate why I will never brand last week’s gathering in Abuja for Babangida as that of vultures in spite of the strong attraction to do so. No fewer than 95% of the people at that conclave were rulers and ruiners of this country, past and present. More like ruiners.
The man who was ‘celebrated’ in Abuja did more things than the vexatious abortion of the 1993 presidential election which the late Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola was post-humourously recognised as the winner. Babangida introduced the punishing International Monetary Fund-inspired structural adjustment programme ostensibly to address economic challenges; creation of the national directorate of employment to tackle unemployment; creation of the mass mobilisation for self-reliance, social justice and economic recovery; and, transition to civil rule which turned out to be interminable, and indeed a ruse. But for the employment directorate, none of the key programmes of Babangida endured to this day. This could be a pointer that the programmes were useless or that continuity has not been the hallmark of Nigeria’s successive administrations. At the height of his delusion Babangida was given the appellation of Maradona, a global football icon from Argentina, Diego Amando Maradona, whose exploits included scoring a goal with his hand (the hand of God) in a World Cup match between Argentina and England. The real Maradona ultimately dribbled himself into shame and disgrace through drug addiction. The fake Maradona also ended up in odium and pariah by annulling what was described as the freest and fairest election in the country. He was subsequently forced from office and into a life of isolation from decent society. When he was forced from office by the one he feared most, the late Gen. Sani Abacha, Babangida claimed that he was “stepping aside”. It has taken one generation for him to take the tentative steps to step back into the limelight. That was what happened in Abuja last week, aided and abetted by his friends and ‘foes’. I will wager to the annoyance of some readers that if Abiola, who Babangida should be vicariously held responsible for his detention and death, were to be alive he would have been part of the Abuja conclave. That’s how the elite roll. They have no permanent friends. They have no permanent enemies. They only have permanent interest-the hold on power both political and economic. One of them said as much the other day. Kayode Fayemi was governor of Ekiti State. He had also been a federal minister. He said the quarrels amongst them (politicians) were social media creations to titillate and distract the rest of us. He said they were not real, never skin deep.
And the assertion by Fayemi that the joke was on the rest of Nigerians was in full display in Abuja during the attempted canonisation of Babangida. Those that we were once made to believe were hunters and the hunted came together, under the same roof backslapping one another, grinning from ear-to-ear, clinking wine glasses, and shoving them in our faces. Those are the same people over whom we cause divisions in our families, become sworn enemies of our longstanding friends, cut ties with acquaintances, and vow never to have anything to do with otherwise good people who belong to our class. The persons we are making enemies for, and defending with our lives are the same people celebrating their oneness and unity in the open, and conspiring behind closed doors on how to keep their knees on our necks. In which other jurisdiction would a Babangida be positioned to be hoisted in the pantheon of great, visionary and missionary leaders? That’s what is about to happen. The man who said he was “stepping aside” about 30 years ago is ready and being aided to step back into decent society by the people of his class. And we are being made unconscious enablers in the revision of history and rehabilitation of one of our oppressors. How? Why?
Babangida has just tossed a book into our national conversation. We are now supposed to be pre-occupied and busy discussing aspects or all of his author biography. What he dropped is like that elephant in the midst of blind people. The animal is as big and huge as the part that each blind person in the room feels. Every segment of our country is gloating or grieving over aspects of his offerings. There’s a red meat for everybody. Some amongst the Igbo are over the moon that a participant in Nigeria’s many military coups had finally written that the January 1966 coup was not an Igbo coup. Who didn’t know that except for those who were eager to be sold a lie to keep the Igbo down? He wrote that the symbol of that coup Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu was only Igbo in name and that he was as Hausa as they come. He also gave Ndigbo another red meat when he wrote that Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s excision of Biafra from Nigeria was almost unavoidable given the failure of the Head of state, Yakubu Gowon in securing the life and property of the Igbo in the north during that period of national crisis. Another one for the Igbo was his assertion that the so-called Igbo coup cost the lives of some Igbo officers at the hands of fellow Igbo, and that the coup was stopped by an Igbo officer. The red meat from Babangida, the Maradona, to the north and the west was his full-throated and strident condemnation of the cold-blooded killings of their prominent political figures in spite of the leaders’ non-resistance to the putsch. Also for the two defunct regions was the objection to what he described as non-coup activity in the former eastern region and the non-loss of lives of their political leaders.
However, the one aspect of the book that will keep Babangida in the front burner of national conversation for sometime is the subject of June 12, 1993, and the belated acknowledgement by the principal character during that crisis that Abiola won the presidential election of that year. That singular incident has, rightly so, become a sore point in Nigeria. It evokes extreme emotions and passions. I was a reporter in the heat of the crisis and everyone became a ‘war’ reporter. Sometimes we came back from the theatres of the crisis to craft our story, and then shooting breaks out right in front of the newsroom. You sprang up from your seat to behold through the glass windows of the first floor newsroom of Champion Newspaper House, Ilasamaja, Lagos, the shooting dead by the military of mostly young and defiant men protesting the annulment of the election. It was a bloody and chilling spectacle, the type that any young beholder will take to their grave. A few of the people who were killed in the aftermath of the election annulment in 1993 had names and were mourned. Many of the victims had no names, so to speak. Their respective families bore the brunt for the victims whose remains were recovered. Some parents didn’t have the opportunity for closure by recovering the corpses of their children. About the same fate befell some Igbo who lost their lives and property during “oso Abiola”. And that’s why in the light of the recent conclave in Abuja and the canonisation of villains, the question of whether it was worthwhile to die for Nigeria has resurfaced. Will you still die for this country? The answer might as well be yes, if you consider Nigeria as a value greater than you.
