TWENTY-THREE years after the annulment of an election that has become a watershed in the nation’s history, the stories of June 12, 1993 are still being relayed in flashes of tragic interjections – coloured now and then, with subjective biases. For those who lived through the drama of that period, the intrigues, maiming, exile experiences, murders and suspicious deaths, June 12 cast a pall of gloom on Nigeria’s socio-political development.
Today, scholars have not relented in their efforts to interrogate that era with the sole aim of unravelling the mystery that puts an abrupt end to the inspiring life of one of Africa’s greatest philanthropists, industrialist and publisher, Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, the presidential candidate of the then Social Democratic Party and undeclared winner of an election steeped in the most benign treachery plotted and executed by three jolly good friends.
As a friend or associate, Judas couldn’t have done worse. At the centre of the whole shenanigan and tomfoolery of a national election that was designed to fail, was General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, the self-styled evil genius who, with ‘Maradonic’ infectiousness allegedly took Abiola on a rigmarole that saw him ending up six feet deep in the bowels of mother earth, with unquantifiable collateral damage to his family and business empire.
For now, none of the volumes of literature on the June 12 saga has been definitive about how Abiola died mysteriously in detention at an advanced stage of his anticipated release following the death of General Sani Abacha. What we do know is that he was the ultimate victim of a high-wired conspiracy that flushed him out of the way after sipping a cup of tea in the presence of a delegation from the United States of America who had come to broker peace.
Was the tea laden with a lethal substance? Was his death a secret collaborative effort between the then General Abdulsalami Abubakar government and the USA to put an end to the standoff? Well, Abiola’s death didn’t put the final nail on the shady secrets surrounding the election. Instead, it reawakens the urge in Nigerians to know what truly went wrong. People not only raised questions.
They point accusing fingers at some notable personalities, nudging them to offer answers. It wasn’t just because so many innocent lives were sacrificed in a bid to undo the injustice of the annulment; they also wanted to know why Kudirat Abiola and Pa Rewane were murdered in cold blood. What exactly did we gain from the harvest of bloodletting? Why should a man, who was unjustly robbed of his mandate on the basis of tendentious excuses, be unfairly murdered? While answers to those questions hang precariously in the sky, there is a ray of hope that the full story would be told one day.
Chief Tony Anenih, who was the chairman of the SDP at the time, ignited that belief with the public presentation of the book, ‘My Life and Nigerian Politics’. The 221-paged biography throws fresh, even if unpalatable, insight into the Abiola personae. Written in prose couched in benevolent anger, Anenih suggests that Abiola’s inordinate ambition to become president by all means possible, sounded his death knell. In spite of his well-known native intelligence, wisdom and craftiness, Abiola was said to have been dining with the devil with the shortest of spoons. According to the writer, he was prepared to do anything to reclaim his mandate, including trading off some of the politicians who stood by him through thick and thin.
Tried as he could to dab the seething rage with tempered language, the author couldn’t help painting a shocking picture outside the image of a dogged fighter that was etched in our psyche when Abiola passed on. In our collective memories, too, is the not-so-faint public suspicion that the SDP leadership, ably led by Anenih sold away an iconic victory in exchange for God knows what. But there no scintilla of a selloff in that book. Instead, Abiola got all the flak. Anenih’s revelations were truly shocking in a sense. Okay, maybe some parts were not that difficult to understand.
At least, we were all conversant with Abiola’s legendary stubbornness, wit and ability to deploy local proverbs to aptly capture his feelings at every point in time. What we did not know, according to Anenih, was that Abiola’s populist posturing was remarkably different from his condemnable dalliances with the military authorities that were out to leave him in the sun to dry.
From Anenih’s accounts, while the military announced the obituary of June 12, Abiola was the undertaker. His action and inaction culminated in the final burial of June 12 with a wreath of infamy ferociously dancing on the graveyard. Conversely, Anenih had no such ugly commentary in the military regime that annulled Abiola’s electoral victory in the freest election Nigeria ever had.
He presented himself as the Voltron that looked eyeball to eyeball with the military, insisting that Abiola must be crowned president! Listen to Anenih in bits and pieces. “Abiola was not only dining with the devil with reckless abandon, his analogy of getting to ‘Kano’ by air instead of experiencing the painful agonies of road travel symbolized the haste with which he sought to reclaim his mandate”.
In that blind pursuit, Anenih said he went behind the decision of the party leadership to “hold discussions with General Sani Abacha who had promised him that if Chief Abiola supported, and if he, General Abacha, took over from Chief Shonekan today, he would hand over the reins of government to Chief Abiola the next day.” That naivety, coupled with several other factors bordering on untamed ambition, did Abiola in, Anenih stated.
In fact, Anenih recalled how Abiola worked against Chief Ernest Shonekan’s Interim National Government and helped Abacha to realise his ambition to become Head of State. Continuing, he said: “The ING fell due to the adroit maneuvers of Chief Abiola, orchestrated attacks from his supporters, as well as the lack of political base and support for Chief Shonekan who had good intentions for the country…..It is a pity, indeed, that Chief Abiola kept the leadership away from his arrangement with General Abacha to take over from Shonekan.
If he had brought it to the leadership of the party, he would have been well advised. The ‘agreement’ was phony and hollow. It was an agreement which was inexplicable and inexcusable in its folly and terrible in its consequences”. Of course, the metaphor became clearer when the former Minister of Works, popularly known as “Mr. Fix It”, said Abiola was truly airborne to Kano but he never landed. He was crated back to Lagos from Abuja in a body bag.
Nothing could be fixed. Anenih said Abiola trod not just a “self-destructive, but also ruinous” path. Do we then conclude that this celebrated icon of the historic June 12 election was a tragic villain with a voracious lust for power? Did Abiola blindly follow a path that destroyed him or was he betrayed by trusted friends whom Anenih said never wanted Abiola in the Presidency because of the discovery of several cases of inflated contracts in his favour? Was that an indictment that Abiola corruptly enriched himself? Like I said, the June 12 saga remains an unfolding drama. In a recent interaction with
‘The Interview’ magazine, Babangida’s view on why the contraption called ING failed was remarkably different from the blame-it-all-on-Abiola perspective in Anenih’s book. Justifying the annulment on the presumption that the military had a premonition that the democratic process was going to be short lived based on what was available to the authorities, Babangida said the ING collapsed because the media never wanted and worked against it. For him, the media created a fertile environment for Abacha to strike and, therefore, denied the Anenih-led SDP the opportunity to win a fresh election with Abiola out of the equation.
He sounded as if Abiola was stopped to save him from a tragic end. Asked if he believed Abiola died of natural causes, Babangida quipped: “I should know? I didn’t serve the tea”. And, after all the merry go round, we are right back to where it all started: who or what killed Abiola on July 7, 1998? All those who have written books on the issue, including those privileged to watch him sip the tea and probably writhe agonizingly to the very last, have cleverly dodged that question. How convenient is it for the living to blame it all on the dead? Unfortunately, Abiola is not here to tell his story.
He would never have the opportunity to tell us why he took some of those actions that his party leadership felt was against the general interest. If there was any agreement with Abacha, it would have been interesting to know the details beyond what we could glimpse from Anenih’s book. How depressing can it be when an important key to unravelling a mystery has been silenced with a fatal sip of tea in a cup offered by friendly hands? Is that what they call friendly fire? Who will tell Abiola’s own undiluted story with his usual wittiness, who?
