EVENTS leading to ex-military president Ibrahim Babangida’s 75th birthday were not as controversial as his 70th. Since 2011, his annual interviews preceding his birthday celebrations have become much tamer, less pungent, but still idiosyncratically diversionary and superficial. Five years in the life of a septuagenarian can sometimes prove fatal and apparently significant enough to alter moods and moderate temper, even if every other superficiality is left untouched. Five years ago, IBB, as the former military dictator is fondly called, bad-temperedly joined issues with former president Olusegun Obasanjo, a truculent former military dictator and all-knowing elected president. “In my eight years in office,” began IBB testily, perhaps provoked by certain undisclosed actions or statements of Chief Obasanjo, “I was able to manage poverty and achieve success while somebody for eight years managed affluence and achieved failure.” The victim of that vicious broadside knew the cap fit, and not being one to shy away from battle, gave a swift and fierce riposte.
Hiding behind scriptures in his usual engaging but self-serving manner, Chief Obasanjo bellowed: “Well, normally when I read these things I don’t believe them. Yesterday when somebody phoned me and said this was said, I said I don’t believe it. He said check on all the papers and I said get me all the papers; they got me the papers and I read; it’s a little bit unlike Babangida. But if Babangida had decided that on becoming a septuagenarian he would be a fool, I think one should probably do what the Bible says in Proverbs chapter 26, verse 4. It says, don’t answer a fool because you may also become like him.” Chief Obasanjo immersed himself in more scriptural verses, flirted briefly with his own rhetorical gifts, and finally dismissed IBB on the gallows where fools at 40 are figuratively hung. Disinclined to leaving Chief Obasanjo with the last word, IBB described his former commander as a witless comedian.
IBB’s 75th birthday interview is considerably less provocative. There is little in it that is profound or captivating. Other than his controversial attempt to repudiate the word ‘evil’ from his nom de guerre, the sobriquet most Nigerians have attached to him since Tell magazine editors interviewed him during the Sani Abacha regime, there was little else. Indeed, with every passing year, IBB has become less controversial and less engaging. In 2012, before his 71 birthday, he had reiterated to his interviewers: “I was asked a question by Tell magazine. They said people call you all sorts of names, ranging from Maradona, a deft dribbler and all those. They asked which one of the names I preferred and I said evil genius. They asked why? And I said because of its contradiction.” He was the originator of that label, not Tell magazine, nor any interviewer. It suited him because it was a contradiction, he had said. But it is probably because it sounded poetic to him and gave an energetic insight into the secret and interwoven world of his Machiavellian convictions.
The famous Tell interview is arguably the longest he has ever given. In it, he prevaricated profusely as usual and parried quite a number of questions. But partly because of its length and the mastery exhibited by the editors who interviewed him, his leadership incapacitation showed forth brightly and brilliantly. He was not profound in the interview; he is still not profound, and indeed is no longer expected to be, on account of his age. He shirked and excused his responsibility to himself and the nation, and displayed such atrocious lack of judgement that should see him hauled before a court martial had he served in a great imperial and perhaps ideological military. He continues to defend his decisions as a military head of state, and shows none of the reflection age and wisdom sometimes confer on a leader from hindsight. Till he breathes his last, there will obviously be no remorse from him on anything or any policy, except very rudimentary and inconsequential ones such as the question on whether legislators should be part time or full time.
In the interview to mark his 75th birthday, a grand old age by any consideration, he suggested there was nothing evil about him or the administration he presided over. He said nothing about the genius part. Well, everyone is entitled to a little self-indulgence and afterthought. So, without saying it, IBB would have his audience regard him as a genius. But genius of what? Of the Machiavellian politics he fawned over and for decades continued to adumbrate at every forum he was invited to? Of the mindless policy fecundity that hallmarked his administration for eight years or so? Or of his limitless ability to pawn his generosity in the service of his private goals and image embellishment, and to the disservice of national goals, principles and values? Whatever it is, like the sage Obafemi Awolowo, IBB was for a long time a recurring decimal in Nigerian politics and governance. Many of his marks are indelible, especially in view of his policy experimentations that saw Nigeria overwhelmed with new agencies and parastatals, but the passage of time, not to talk of shifting global and national mores, will continue to corrode and diminish his influence.
When a bitter and offended Chief Obasanjo responded to IBB’s virtually unprovoked putdown on the Obasanjo years, it was to launch into a lengthy defence of his two terms in office, and of his incomparable projects and programmes. But programme for programme, and policy for policy, IBB probably had a more salutary and enduring impact on national affairs than Chief Obasanjo. IBB was a more rounded personality quite able to endure animosity without descending into the fierce vindictiveness that undermined and scarify the Obasanjo persona. Somehow, too, he managed to sustain some eternally tentative balance between his Machiavellian predilections, complete with human rights abuses, and his copious friendliness and determination to mentor others, particularly younger people. He loved to leave an impact on those whose paths crossed his, though it is not clear whether, as some say, it was to subvert their principles, or out of altruism to leave them indebted to him. In the department of humanism, neither Chief Obasanjo nor anyone who has governed Nigeria since IBB vacated office can hold the candle to him, not even President Muhammadu Buhari.
As his many interviews show, IBB is no genius. The very many programmes and policies he undertook were the products of other people’s fertile imagination. This partly explains their lack of coherence. In none of his interviews did he intellectually engage those who asked him for answers. He didn’t even have the foresight to recognise the victory that June 12, 1993 presidential election meant to him and his legacy. That election was a lifetime opportunity to lay the foundation for burying the religious and ethnic divides that had truncated Nigeria’s peace and stability. It was also an opportunity to remould democracy in a way that fairly guarantees continental greatness. But he spurned the chance and denounced his own best efforts. Now he talks frequently of the country’s virtual two-party system, as if it was a conscious and deliberate bequest from him; but the idea, as everyone knows, was not original to him. It was borrowed.
And so, whether it is IBB, or the late Gen Abacha, or Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar, or Chief Obasanjo, or President Buhari, what unites them is excess of ambition. Many years back, IBB promised his memoirs. Hopefully it will be published in his lifetime, not posthumously, so that commentators and living witnesses can join issues with him. From all indications, however, even if this magnum opus is published, there will be no remorse in it, possibly also no reflections since he does not appear capable of the analytical depth needed to produce them, and no grand ideas of nationhood in the ambitious, pan-Africanist sense. He may not even demonstrate the courage needed to reveal the conspirators that subverted democracy in 1993. For far beyond his grandstanding and the quelling of the 1990 Gideon Orkar coup, he is at bottom not really a courageous man. If he publishes at all, it will be to burnish the image of his regime and make a case for the many fruitless experiments his regime undertook. It will also be about underscoring his capacity to make friends across all divides, about how he sustains the friendships he is noted for, and about why his political and economic programmes are to him, with a little modification, the best.
IBB does not have the vigour anymore to influence public policy in the manner Chief Obasanjo still annoyingly does. But he has kept his friends and nurtured them far better than any past or living president. In death, notwithstanding his many appalling failings, he will draw more mourners than his peers can ever hope to attract. That should be his private consolation in the midst of the grief and gloom he and all Nigerian leaders since independence have caused a country much worthier than their capacity to give.
