Moshood Olawale Kashimawo, Abiola, winner of the 1993 presidential election who was prevented from taking office by a confederacy of military, civilian and foreign interests, and was done to death in captivity in 1998, would have been 86 years old on July 7. Finally and fittingly, the nation has acknowledged and honoured Abiola’s sacrifice and example through his collaborator, President Bola Tinubu, as “a true hero of democracy.”
Moshood Abiola was an unlikely candidate for political martyrdom or indeed for martyrdom of any kind.
He had entered politics almost as a pariah who regarded money as the measure of all things. He had everything that money could buy. And he was not apologetic or coy about it. He flaunted his wealth even when putting some of it to serve beneficient ends.
But his compassion was genuine. He held it as article of faith that anyone who was in a position to show compassion but failed to do so would never find favour with Allah. He would recite in English, Arabic and Yoruba, passages from the Bible and the Quran to that effect. And he lived every day by that creed.
Abiola’s compassion and public-spiritedness won him a great deal of public attention, even respect, but not much love nor significant following, as he discovered when he entered politics in 1978 as a card-carrying member of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and entered his senior wife, Simbiat, as candidate for a Senate seat from Ogun on that party’s platform, in a state that was fanatically loyal to Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN).
She lost by a huge margin.
Abiola’s position as chief executive of ITT in Nigeria did not help matters, given its notorious complicity in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Socialist government of President Salvadore Allende Gossens in Chile, and its notoriety for unsavoury business practices, which led the contrarian Afro-beat king, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, to mock the global brand as “International Thief-Thief,” or global robber.
ITT had won huge telephony contracts in Nigeria and its contractors had dug up all major streets in Lagos for telephone cables. The work was moving at a very slow pace, putting residents, especially motorists, to great inconvenience.
Abiola himself seemed to have compounded matters by distributing to members of the Constituent Assembly debating the draft constitution for the Second Republic, a sophisticated, multi-function ITT electronic calculator. Not a few Nigerians interpreted it as an attempt to buy influence.
But what galled the teeming supporters of the UPN, which governed the Yoruba states and Bendel—what used to be Western Nigeria during the First Republic, but was in the opposition in the Second Republic—was the virulently anti-UPN stance of Abiola’s Concord newspaper group.
It was as if those newspapers had it as their goal to take Awolowo and the UPN out of political reckoning. Even if they had been set up by the NPN and not by one of its well-heeled members, they could not have been more pro-NPN. A large portrait of President Shehu Shagari graced the lobby, next to a portrait of Abiola’s, in the editorial offices of the Concord Press, in Ikeja.
In short order, they published a sensational story claiming that Awolowo had improperly acquired vast tracts of landed property in Maroko, Lagos, while falsely and hypocritically parading himself as a socialist devoted to the public welfare.
They followed with another story, about another allegedly improper acquisition of landed property in Lagos, by Lateef Jakande, the UPN Governor of Lagos State, who enjoyed a reputation for probity and a Spartan lifestyle. Then, they took on the UPN Governor of Ogun State, Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, claiming that he had improperly dipped into the public treasury for a lavish private vacation in the UK.
These stories delighted Awolowo’s political opponents in the NPN and other parties and infuriated the UPN’s teeming supporters. In court hearings, the stories on Onabanjo and Jakande were held to be false and defamatory, and both plaintiffs were awarded substantial damages. Awolowo’s lawsuit was still wending its way through the courts when Awolowo died in 1987.
Abiola’s romance with the NPN did not survive the 1983 presidential election. In keeping with its claim to having a “national outlook,” the party had at its inception adopted a policy of “zoning” the presidency. In practice, this meant that if a president from one zone had served his term, the party would give its ticket to a candidate from another zone.
Abiola had sought the NPN’s ticket for the 1983 presidential election. A stalwart of the party from the North, Umaru Dikko, declared with petulant scorn that the presidency of Nigeria was not “for sale.”
So, the NPN could draw on Abiola’s wealth, but would not countenance his seeking its presidential ticket?
That was it.
Abiola stomped out of the NPN and never looked back. He also tried to mend fences with individuals and groups from whom he had been estranged by his exertions in furthering the NPN’s cause. Public appreciation for his philanthropy turned to respect for his person, and the respect turned into admiration.
But it was when Abiola declared for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) on the return to party politics in 1988 – when he finally got his politics right by embracing the progressive political tradition of the states carved out of former Western Nigeria – that he began to attract the devoted following that translated into the massive electoral support so crucial to his victory in the 1993 presidential election.
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It was this mass support that animated the struggle for the actualisation of Abiola’s electoral mandate and kept alive much of the passion surrounding the events subsumed under the evocative label of “June 12.”
If Abiola had not got his politics right, if he had, for example, cast his lot with the National Republican Convention (NRC) and run on that platform, it is doubtful whether he would have enjoyed that kind of electoral support.
This massive support, it is necessary to insist, has less to do with his being Yoruba than with his being the standard bearer of the party that was “a little to the left,’ one whose ideology accorded with that of the Yoruba. After all, Ernest Shonekan, whom Babangida foisted on Nigeria as Head of his “Interim National Government” was Yoruba. But the Yoruba rejected him roundly. General Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also Yoruba, earned the fewest votes in Yorubaland when he ran for president in 1999 under the banner of the conservative PDP. Running as an incumbent four years later, he hardly fared better.
We will never know whether Abiola would have made a good president. After Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) decimated the middle class and pauperised the mass of the people, expectations ran high that an Abiola Presidency would improve the lot of the ordinary citizen in the short term, if not immediately. Abiola had pivoted his campaign on Hope—hope for a better future, at a time when hope was in short supply. He was going to tackle poverty frontally and help eradicate it.
In the popular consciousness, he seemed uniquely qualified for the task. Born into and reared in dire poverty, he had become a multi–billionaire, with a business empire spread across the world.
By a curious coincidence, the price of imported milk, rice, and tomato puree had come down substantially in the weeks after the election. Around town, the word was that, as a gesture of goodwill to mark Abiola’s coming, importers had decided to reduce the prices of some commodities. Whether this was true or not, the average consumer took the price reductions as a sign of the good times that would roll in when Abiola took charge.
The quest for the Presidency changed Abiola in significant ways, according to some members of his campaign team and senior aides. Gone was the brashness of those days when he regarded money as the measure of all things. He learned to stoop to conquer. He became a good listener and a patient conciliator. He encouraged those around him to tell him what he needed to know rather than what they thought he would like to hear. He became less impulsive and more deliberative. Worldly pleasures counted for less and less in his preoccupations.
Before he secured the SDP ticket, so un-organised was Abiola it was a surprise he ever got anything done. The campaign imposed some order and discipline on his proceedings, and he seemed to have embraced this new approach as a better way of carrying on in the public realm he was about to enter.
Before 1993 and subsequently, the legitimacy of persons elected to the political leadership of Nigeria was always disputed. In the 1964 general election, the first after independence, the ceremonial president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, was loath to invite the incumbent Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to form a new government, persuaded that the outcome of a poll boycotted by the opposition for the most part could not be said to reflect the true wishes of the people.
In 1979, it was a mathematical sleight of hand that awarded the presidency to Shagari. Throughout his first term, his legitimacy was always in contention. The NPN went on to rig Shagari into office in 1983, in a manner so brazen that the military had to step in to stave off violent protests in many parts of Nigeria.
The 1999 general election that produced General Obasanjo was held under a constitution that had been kept a closely-guarded secret. The 2003 sequel was, according to local and international observers, the most fraudulent they had ever witnessed. The 2007 contest was more of the same.
The 1993 election delivered a clean, pan-Nigeria mandate and conferred on Abiola a legitimacy that no Nigerian president before or since has been able to claim or enjoy. Abiola showed that, in Nigeria, elections can be won without the organised rigging that has been the bane of Nigerian politics.
To the very end, he resisted every pressure, discounted every threat, and spurned every blandishment the military regime and its foreign collaborators contrived. His tenacity surprised the vast majority of Nigerians who did not know him well and those who knew him only in caricature.
They thought that, faced with the prospect of being put to the slightest inconvenience, to say nothing of being jailed, losing his vast financial empire and perhaps, his life, Abiola would cut a deal, put the best face on it, and move on.
Even some of those close to him thought him feckless, like the Concord editorial writer who told me on the eve of the 1993 election that, even at that stage, Abiola could still be bought or bribed off the race. Abiola, he said, saw the election as nothing more than an opportunity to add one more feather to a cap that was already chockfull of feathers, and would gladly drop the idea if the price was right.
The fellow was wrong, as was everyone who thought likewise.
Abiola had entered Nigerian politics almost as a pariah. He departed the political scene and the world almost sainted by his teeming supporters, with whom he refused to break faith. His influence lives on.
This profile of Abiola first appeared in my 2010 book, Diary of Debacle: Tracking Nigeria’s Failed Democratic Transition (1989-1994).
