In the run-up to the February 25 General Election, I hear echoes of the June 1993 presidential election and the debacle that followed, a debacle that shook Nigeria to its fragile roots, and from which it is yet to recover.
That election, remember, was billed as the culmination of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s political transition programme, eight years in the making, that the eminent political scientist, Dr Richard Joseph, called “one of the most duplicitous and sustained exercises in chicanery ever visited upon a people.”
Against Babangida’s machinations, the election delivered a pan-Nigerian mandate to Bashorun Moshood Abiola and his running-mate and fellow Muslim, Ambassador Babagana Kingibe, the type Nigeria has never known and may never witness again.
Unable to live with his own unintended success, Babangida annulled the election, turning what signalized a bright new morn for Nigeria into a waking nightmare that haunts the country still.
The echoes I am hearing are faint but persistent, and they grow louder and more ominous with each passing day.
At this conjuncture, there is of course no Babangida. The self-styled evil genius is skulking in the sterile opulence of his Hilltop Mansion, his malign influence confined there. There is no Augustus Aikhomu, no Arthur Nzeribe and his Association for a Better Nigeria, no Clement Akpamgbo, no Ernest Shonekan, no Justice Bassey Ikpeme, no Justice Dahiru Saleh, no Uche Chukwumerije, no Sam Ikoku and his Council of Elder Statesmen, collaborators all, or dupes, in subverting the popular will. No known mutinous officers.
But that club is large and hardy, and its denizens are lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to do what they do best. Never count them out.
The echoes I am hearing are as of now faint, but ominous nevertheless. And they call to mind the signals which indicated powerfully that the 1993 presidential election would result in national convulsion.
Right now, nothing on the ground makes February 25 inevitable.
In the face of mounting general insecurity and election-related violence and the threat of more of the same, INEC chair, Professor Mahmood Yakubu has said that the election might not hold as scheduled. His hard-headed realism is more reassuring than the woolly-headed optimism one hears from some quarters.
Hakeem Baba Ahmed, director of publicity and advocacy for the Northern Elders Forum has hinted at something darker: the possibility that an “unconstitutional contraption” — shades of June 12, 1993 – “may be forced on Nigerians in May.”
Speaking for Northern Elders last week in Abuja at Trust Newspapers Forum, he warned “those planning to interfere with the conduct of credible elections and peaceful transition of power to another administration” to desist.
The plot, in outline: To pivot on difficulties simultaneously imposed, if not deliberately contrived, to wit – general insecurity, fuel scarcity, crushing inflation, and the exchange of old currency notes – to “inflame passions and trigger unrest which may poison the election environment or threaten its conduct.”
These are not the prognostications of an alarmist or a purveyor of conspiracy theories. He described the thrust of his submission as “conjectures.” Whatever their character, his charge to the attentive audience is poignant: “Nigerians should reject any plan to produce a successor to President Buhari through unconstitutional means.”
A week before that, my colleague and general editor at The Nation, Adekunle Ade-Adeleye, had in his unfailingly percipient column for the paper’s Sunday edition, written that the future was “boobytrapped,” what with a “blitzkrieg” of major political appointments by a presidency approaching lame-duck status, seeking a jumbo loan to cover almost a decade of extra-budget pending, staging a population census hard on the heels of a divisive election, and planning to end the corruption-ridden oil subsidies the day after a new administration takes office.
The nation’s last military ruler, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, co-chair with the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar of the National Peace Committee, has also rebuked political actors ahead of next month’s elections, saying at a roundtable with the leadership of nation’s political parties, that it appeared they had learned no lessons from the past.
Abdulsalami spoke during a one-day roundtable meeting his committee had with the leadership of the nation’s 18 registered political parties and their presidential candidates.
“It is evident,” he told them, “that some of our actors have not learnt any lessons from the past. There is an increasing tone of desperation, if not incitement, among some of the contestants and members of their parties.
“Intra and inter-party wrangling persist, with occasions of violence. In desperation, some selfish political actors use these strategies to pursue their frivolous ambitions in the courts.”
I was not a little alarmed by his claim that the political class had learned no lessons. This has been the excuse, the pretext that a long line of coup-makers had used to justify their incursion into politics, only to leave matters far worse than they had found them.
When he declaims that the political class had learned no lessons, the pat retort has to be this: “What lessons were they taught?
What specific lessons did Abdulsalami and his cohorts teach? What restitutions have they made? Few among them and the institutions they presided over have stood the test of time.
Was it not in Abdulsalami’s custody that President-elect Moshood Abiola was done to death as a “final solution to the problem of June 12”? Was it not his regime that surreptitiously foisted on Nigeria the Constitution that lies at the heart of our disquiet?
This posturing gets irksome, especially in somebody who has been vested with saintliness he does not deserve. The National Peace Committee’s intervention is appropriate, to be sure, but its chair must keep the sanctimony out of it.
Amidst the encircling gloom came news that the Governor of the Central Bank, Godwin Emefiele, had finally yielded to public outcry and extended the deadline for turning in the old currency notes by 10 days. Even if the new notes had fully entered the system, bleeding ink and all, the original deadline was still impossibly short. And it says how little he knows about the institution he controls.
In many local government areas, there is no banking outlet to speak of. Even where they exist, the pervading insecurity and the dearth of appropriate logistics would still have made it well-nigh impossible for them to comply with the deadline. Our, after all, is still a cash-and-carry economy.
In whatever case, it is astonishing that one unelected official can inflict so much pain on the public, be so deaf to pleas for a change of course, and be so heedless of the consequences. Emefiele maintains that he was merely following the letter of the law. What of its spirit?
We can only imagine how he would have wielded the awesome powers of the presidency if the Svengalis operating from the shadows of the Aso Rock Villa had succeeded in their scheme.
The longer deadline will still not make for a pain-free transition from the old to the new currency notes. Still, we must be thankful for Mefi’s mercies.
No thanks, however, to the spectral Department of State Services which issued during the yuletide, a bellicose order to the actors in the oil industry to flood the market with the commodity or face severe consequences. Eight weeks later, it is, if anything, scarcer.
The DSS squandered its authority and credibility by issuing an order it could not enforce. The oil people called its bluff, and it will now have to rue the consequences.
For all practical purposes, the transition remains booby-trapped. It remains for the public to watch and pray.
