A few weeks back, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, arguably Nigeria’s most consequential post-independence military leader, turned eighty. Although the applause and celebrations have been muted on a national scale, his remaining core supporters and many of his compatriots who still hold the Minna-born past master of political dribbling in awe and admiration rolled out the drums in his honour.
Snooper wishes the general, an old foe from the battle of wits and will that ensued between the military and the wider society after the annulment of Abiola’s president mandate, very well. Now that another presidential election of consequence is upon the nation, it useful to deploy the occasion of the general’s birthday to reflect on the historical, sociological and political factors which predispose the nation to such self-disabling debacle.
In recent years, General Babangida’s national visibility has shrunken dramatically. Hobbled by domestic misfortunes and natural infirmities, he has been largely confined to his Minna Hill castle from where he continues to make occasional strategic forays and momentous interventions in the political process of his country.
It is a measure of his enduring strength of character and sheer psychological stamina that almost thirty years after leaving office in controversial circumstances, Babangida is still considered by many of his compatriots as a major player and games master in Nigeria’s turbulent and convoluted post-military politics. If anything, Babangida’s political ardour and appetite to dominate, or at least influence, the direction of his society remain unassuaged.
Although these days General Babangida is viewed with less hostility and his tenure more evenly appraised by his compatriots unlike in the immediate post-annulment period, the deliberate sabotage of the freest and fairest election in the electoral annals of the country is still regarded by historians, sociologists and political scientists alike as the most terrible democratic disaster to have befallen the nation in its postcolonial history.
The annulment led to the termination of a nascent democratic republic, re-militarization of the political process and a descent into untrammelled tyranny and a vicious military dictatorship which ended in a historic comeuppance and humiliation of the Nigerian military. When Nigerians finally emerged from the rubble, it was as if they have been to hell and back.
Given the ease and facility with which Nigeria’s harshly unitarist and congenitally deformed political structure must willy-nilly throw up autocrats in or out of uniform, one can understand why the passage of time has dulled the pains and trauma of the annulment despite its prohibitive human toll. But what must not be condoned is our seeming inability to internalize the lessons of the annulment and learn from its scary and scarifying legacies.
General Babangida left office almost thirty years ago. He might not have succeeded in imposing himself as a civilianized president. But his imprimatur could be found in Nigeria’s post-military imperial presidency in all its Ottoman complexities and contradictions. When in a moment of political epiphany, the general decided to assume the title of military president, he was already offering a template and organogram for Nigeria’s post-military rule, irrespective of whether he was there or not.
We may no longer have a military president. But we have a militarized presidency whose wide untrammelled powers loom so large that it predisposes the holder to despotic whims and caprices which fuel delusions of divine immunity and the impunity that cohabits with it.
One of Babangida’s military predecessors who became his civilian successor also tried his hand at self-succession while another was only recently thwarted by superior forces in his bid to impose his successor on his party. Yet these were the same people who had accused Babangida of playing politics with everything and of deficit of honour and integrity.
One of the lessons to be learnt from this is that annulment and its twin evil of self-succession either directly or by more oblique manipulation of the political process is as much a function of dominant personality and hegemonic politics as it is of extant political structure and environmental culture. Democracy is never given or granted on mere verbal request.
As the political landscape transforms, direct annulment is replaced by the abolition of the electorate, the centrality of the selectorate and the rise of the judiciary as the ultimate vote counter and electoral umpire until the nation is roused from its historic slumber.
Almost three decades after the historic annulment, the sky appears to be darkening once again and the auguries filled with fear and foreboding. Something nasty is hanging in the air. Despite the vast differences in circumstances and actors, there is something about this conjuncture eerily reminiscent of the period leading to democratic meltdown. The unruly political mob has arrived at the table once again.
As it ever so happens in human societies in the grip of a fundamental rupture, the formal outlet of politics can no longer contain its turbulent contents. The annulment was the ultimate outburst of the hegemonic politics of permanent domination which could no longer be bottled within the context of Babangida’s state-party parastatal politics of succession or self-succession.
Dear readers, the piece you are about to read was written about four weeks before the annulment. The stocky general from Minna was still standing and grandstanding. But it was obvious to the discerning that his transition programme had all but unravelled and what remained to be worked out were the terms of his own dismissal and how the nation would pick up the pieces from that point on. It was to lead to another five-year wild goose change which would consume Abacha and the entire military establishment.
When the piece was published, The News magazine was summarily proscribed and its staff hounded on the streets of Lagos. But shortly thereafter, General Babangida himself beat a hasty retreat from what would have been a violent denouement. The parade ground dismissal was a joyless and soulless affair; a state obituary disguised out as a pulling out parade.
It was a mournful anti-climax and Babangida had barely left the stadium for his Minna Hilltop redoubt before the fierce fireworks of real succession commenced. Eight years earlier, this writer had heralded General Babangida’s momentous arrival on the scene with the prologue, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Published in Newswatch, October, 1985). Now, he was being quietly ushered out in the chilly solitude of the marathon runner who had finally outpaced himself.