Babangida And The Quest For Absolution

By Sunny Awhefeada

A favourite statement among my contemporaries at the University of Benin in the heady 1990s was “history will absolve me” attributed to Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader. We were fascinated by that utterance. Castro uttered those unforgettable, dense and profound words on 16th October 1953 as part of his defence when he was charged for treason after his attack on Moncada Barracks. That impassioned declaration was to become the manifesto of the Cuban revolution which led to the fall of the ruinous regime of Fulgencio Batista. The 1980s and 1990s saw Nigerian students becoming acutely conscious and hyperactive in their patriotic engagements with their beloved country. Inspired by ideologically rooted teachers Nigerian students looked dictators in the eye and told them that those who “make peaceful change unattainable make violent change inevitable”. Those decades were among our disastrous years of the locusts when ruthless soldiers, Buhari, Babangida and Abacha, plodded through the land and plundered it like marauders. One of them, Ibrahim Babangida, attempted to rewrite our history and threw an offensive hagiography in the name of autobiography in our face just last week.

My generation did not know about Ibrahim Babangida until he became Chief of Army Staff in January 1984. Less than two years later, he emerged as Nigeria’s president in khaki, the first and only one of its type in our chequered history. Babangida brought so much hope in the early days of his administration. His warm and often smiling visage was in sharp contrast with that of his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, who with his deputy earned the unflattering appellation of “the dour duo”. Babangida repealed the notorious Decree Number Four which “tampered with press freedom”. He opened the gates of prisons across the land for the detained to return home. He assembled a brilliant team of ministers and special advisers, most of them among Nigeria’s best brains who had taught him eight years earlier at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPPS), Kuru. He literally sat at their feet and learnt the rubrics of statecraft. He mimicked them in speech as he echoed their thoughts in discourses be it politics, economy or diplomacy. He sounded too good to be a dictator. To cap it all, he took on the benign title of president which sounded more mollifying than that of head of state. Nigerians applauded him. I still hear the echoes of the debates to or not to take the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, membership of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Political Bureau headed by Dr. S. J. Cookey. The newspapers faithfully carried the stories and we read them without ceasing hoping that a new era was afoot for Nigeria. We were made to believe the worse of the Shagari administration and the Buhari regime, so we saw the emergence of Babangida as the compass that will point Nigeria in the direction of Eldorado. Sadly, we were wrong!

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It did not take long for Babangida to unravel and show his hand as an ardent pupil of Niccolo Machiavelli. There was nothing in the rule book of disaster that Babangida did not force down the throat of Nigerians. Economically, socially, morally and politically, he threw the nation into a disaster from which we are yet to recover. Chroniclers of the Nigerian narrative rank him and Sani Abacha, his fellow conspirator, as the worst to have happened to Nigeria. Babangida once pronounced condemnation on his stewardship when in an unguarded moment in 1992 he confessed to African Concord journalists that he did not know why the Nigerian economy was yet to totally collapse saying that his economists have failed him. Despite surrounding himself with some of the nation’s best intellectuals and technocrats, Babangida’s deviousness led him down the path of personal and national ruin. There was no sector where his destructive stride did not leave a ruinous crater. What ought to have been his saving grace was the June 12 presidential election of 1993. That incident, if he got it right, could have absolved him of his more than many sins against Nigeria. Again as it is typical of him, he botched the election and wrote his name in the hall of infamy. In A Journey in Service, the reader is shocked to read that it was Sani Abacha who annulled the June 12 presidential election. Yes, other previous narratives attested to Abacha’s opposition to the emergence of MKO Abiola who won that election. However, it is unthinkable that someone else other than Babangida annulled the election. It is most cowardly for Babangida to so accuse Abacha in death. And he was revealing this after thirty-two years!

Having destroyed Nigeria and enrolled himself in the annals of infamy, Babangida in his old age now seeks to get absolution and in doing so thought it was best to offer the nation balderdash in the name of an autobiography. Titled A Journey in Service, the book sets out to not only re-write history, but to deliberately reframe the Babangida persona and offer him to the present generation as one leader who served Nigeria well, but became a victim of circumstance. Thankfully, many of those in the generation that suffered Babangida’s maniacal rule are still alive and they are able to punch innumerable holes in the story. Babangida must have laughed at himself while narrating the story and thinking of the perspective to adopt. It would have been better for the book not to have been written. This is not the place to go into Babangida’s multiple sins against Nigeria. That would take tomes and tomes to depict. Babangida was evasive on the lives lost under his watch. From Vatsa and his comrades at arms, to Dele Giwa, the one hundred and sixty soldiers who perished in a plane crash, Nigerian students and pro-democracy agitators murdered in Lagos, Benin, Ibadan and other places, the book should be dripping with blood had Babangida written the truth.

A more disturbing scenario was the obscene gathering where about seventeen billion naira was raised. Looking at the roll call of those in attendance easily yields a list of Nigerians who should be behind bars or should have been guillotined a long time ago if only Jerry Rawlings was a Nigerian. Sadly, Nigeria is not Ghana and it might never be. Among those in that assembly are economic leashes and agents of political destabilization. What was reemphasized from that scene is that the ruling class is the same. Its members might belong to different parties or aligned in different interests, but they are one and do look out for one another. Many of those who showered encomia on Babangida would have sworn by Jove some thirty-two years ago that they would treat Babangida like a leper were they to meet him. Now, they not only met, but hugged him and worshipped at his feet to canonize him a great leader. My grandmother always lamented that if only the dead could see from erivwin, they would be astounded by what they would see among us. If only MKO Abiola, Kudirat Abiola, Alfred Rewane, Frank Kokori and countless others undone by the order Babangida foisted on us could look from the world beyond and see what happened at Transcorp last Thursday, they would have burst the vault of their graves and like Old Roger storm the hall where that sacrilege took place to give the participants knocks. Despite the humungous amount they contributed to whitewash Babangida, his attempt at absolution has failed. History cannot be bought and to think that his perfidious class proscribed the subject from our education curriculum.