By the time I was done with the book, I said to myself, wao! This is a book of extraordinary revelation. Yet Honour For Sale, an insider account of the murder of Dele Giwa, by Major Debo Bashorun, ret., is for me a great book not because of the narratives of the murder of Dele Giwa alone. If I were the author, I would give a title covering a wider canvas. The title of the book, in spite of its tease and grand promise, delivers less on the riddle of Dele Giwa’s murder than its periscope of the grandiose mediocrity of an era, of a single man and his nest of dedicated felons, who wanted to ossify the definition of Nigeria as an army with a state rather than a state with an army.
It is a narrative of megalomania, vanity, intrigue, fear and trembling. It is also the story of a roiling civil society more at peace with its impotence than the importance of subverting tyranny. The army becomes the metaphor of this active surrender to a destiny carved by a few, anointed with guns, spiced by intrigues, gutted by sycophants, buoyed by brigands, protected by bigots, financed by thieves and consecrated with sacrifices.
Yet when you begin the book, you are not introduced early to the heart of lion and the cunning of the tortoise that is Major Bashorun. He loses his father early, enters the city of Lagos almost a destitute, has to cut away from an exploitative uncle and never contemplates a career in the army until a swashbuckler of a soldier snatches his girl friend when he celebrates a new job.
We also note that he disdains the life of inaction during the Nigerian civil war and leaves his battalion to the furnace of battle. We also note that this man, in spite bloodstained face and arms, bullet in the legs, a half a mile walk to safety, his escape while others die in the hands of Biafran soldiers is a precursor to a life with nine lives.
We cannot also escape his sometimes volcanic rage at the fact that the Hausa Fulani language becomes the lingua franca of the army and his fellow southerners are ready to sacrifice each other in order to please their entitled superiors in the vortex of power.
The reader waits while his personal odyssey develops to be introduced to the principal of his narrative, Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, whom he meets as principal staff officer to the chief of army staff, general Wushishi. IBB is Bashorun’s rescuer, and that is the beginning of irony in the engrossing narrative. This is an atmosphere where as a press officer of the chief of army staff he does not have an office, is ordered out of the office of Aliyu Muhammadu Gusau because he cannot speak Hausa and the present National security adviser Sambo Dasuki would not have him around.
IBB spots his value because IBB does not see loyalty to tribe as the ultimate. But he is going to let us know that IBB who is his salvation also promises to be his damnation. He is his heaven and also his hell.
The IBB story covers every dimension of evil. According to Bashorun, the aspects are Treachery, intrigue, drugs and murder. For treachery, examine the coup that ousts Wushishi. IBB is told in confidence by Wushishi how he plans to crush the coup that ushers in Muhammadu Buhari as head of state. But how come IBB, a fellow kinsman, and confidant turns out to be the lynch pin of that overthrow?
For drugs, can you recall when he overthrows Buhari and the seedy cells of Buhari’s gulag become a source of public outrage? Especially when the pictures darken the pages of the newspapers? We also learn in those days that some of the tenants of the jail are drug traffickers. Bashorun says he is one of three panelists appointed to look at the cases. But an order comes from above that some of the men be released without investigations. Alas, notes an astounded Bashorun, some of them are recognizable faces because he is ordered to personally usher them into the country through the airport when IBB is chief of army staff. He wonders if they are discovered, how could he have exonerated himself?
We also hear of the story of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, where the principal of this narrative is believed to have a special relationship as a major investor and of course his wife, Maryam Babangida. We learn that when the BCCI is exposed and closed down from all countries in the world as a conduit for money laundering, IBB would rather change its name to something else and retain its activities.
Apart from his own intrigues, don’t we read about the story of why poet Mamman Vatsa is posted away from a powerful and lucrative position of quartermaster-general to the false grandeur and sinecure office of the minister of the Federal Capital Territory, and how the author believes that he is implicated in the coup because of a personal rivalry with boyhood friend IBB?
You will read also how the southerners are targets of ethnic politics. The premier position is for the northern muslim. As for the southerners, the muslim southerners come before the Christians. Yet we note that many southern soldiers, especially in the east convert to Islam in a cynical pilgrimage to belong to the circle of favour.
Who would not hold his breath about IBB’s dalliance with marabouts from Mali, their prayers, fasts, animal sacrifices? One ram is also buried alive in the state house.
Don’t we also read about some powerful personalities in the book? The most striking is Haliru Akilu whose frail frame is a decoy from his sinister power play as the upholder of the wickedness of office and the clannishness of the army. He once instructs the author that loyalty to the army supersedes loyalty to country, and that is how he defines loyalty to the president, IBB. He bawls, curses, smirks. He is the ruthless macho man, the regime’s Rottweiler.
The other personality is Sambo Dasuki, a scion of the caliphate who is portrayed as a man with not only a patrician entitlement but one without patience in dealing with non-hausa Fulani, especially southerners. We also encounter Muhammadu Gasau who is in cahoots with IBB in everything, a stealthy, ruthless man who visits Lawyer Alao Aka-Bashorun at night to order him to quit defending Bashorun over the latter’s battle with the junta over the Dele Giwa saga. Aka Bashorun ignores him.
Then we encounter Maryam Babangida, the peacock and emblem of vanity and privately a scourge to everyone else. She is the she who must be obeyed, even by the husband, the head of state. Her appetites for attention, genuflection, money, jewelry, sartorial fashion, are so adroitly presented and I wonder if I ever encounter this elaborate manifestation of flamboyance since the familiar Imelda Marcus obsession with shoes. If generals bowed to her and a man like Dasuki, in all his royal bona fides, could quit because of her, then the extent of her power leaves little to the imagination.
But the story of the murder of Dele Giwa provides a heart-stopping narrative, and it can imbue any reader with wonder. How does a message to whitewash the image of a regime turn the messenger into a plotter to overthrow a regime? That is the question that the reader will have to ask. Ray Ekpu is bound for New York with other editors to receive an award as international editor of the year. Bashorun is asked to meet a certain PR consultant to help launder the regime’s image and show its innocence in the murder of Dele Giwa.
But Bashorun is uncomfortable and does not carry out the mission because what he sees is not what he anticipates as he gets to the city. He returns to Nigeria and tells his bosses he cannot accomplish the task. So he is arrested, and that begins a story of first contempt, then alienation, then persecution, then attempts on his life.
The story of his relationship with IBB and his regime, especially Akilu, reads like a thriller. Word after word overwhelms with its promise. I do not however see in its 345 pages any smoking gun on who murders Dele Giwa. Yet the book is smoking. It is smoking with institutional guilt? Are they after Bashorun because the army and the government murder Dele Giwa or because Bashorun does not do a Pr job. Again is Bashorun paranoid over the task? IBB himself tells Bashorun that the government does not murder the Journalist. The reader can be the judge. But we get through the story of his escape through the now famous NADECO route and his manoeuvre from a check-point to checkpoint until he boards a flight from Ouagadougou to the United States where he has to escape three attempts on his life.
This is a book that evinces deep personal knowledge of the working of an important era of Nigeria, the tale of government of intriguers and cesspit of corruption. He paints an atmosphere of despots and narrow-minded felons unaware of a larger society beyond their kens of greed and larceny.
IBB comes across as a calculating impresario, cunning, deceptive and ruthless. Yet, Bashorun also quietly believes that he is held hostage by forces sometimes larger than him and he bows because of his thirst for power. He is the ultimate contradiction as tyrant, kind now, brutal now. His belief that money can buy everything is a constant motif of IBB’s power theory. I cannot but believe that, in spite of the villainy of IBB in the book, he comes across as a failed messiah, a man who could have done good but whose love of life and power could not but compromise such high ideals.
Professor Wole Soyinka once asserted that, “event in literature is experienced according to the level of treatment.” This book is well treated and has the ability to relocate the reader in time and space and even generate empathy, if, sometimes, sympathy.
Yet the book leaves some holes. One, we do not see the relationship between IBB and Buhari throughout the book. When Buhari is head of state, we do not see any characterization of their meetings, his views about him and vice versa, as well as Brigadier Idiagbon. We learn later that IBB coup might have failed if Idiagbon is in the country.
In spite of Bashorun’s heroics he comes across as too clean considering he is cosy with and a partisan of the regime. He also is close aide of Mrs. Babangida and all her lurid stories of vanity and corruption. Even when he collects bribe sent to him in the hey deys of his persecution, he couches his acceptance as a man of honour who must survive.
All through his travails, we are deprived of any substantial insights into the private storms of his family. We don’t get any sense of his wife’s panic, vulnerabilities or aplomb.
Wole Soyinka fielded a question on this subject over his You Must Set Forth At Dawn, he replied that such curiosities and fantasies are Western. But our society’s increasing individualism and urbanization have torn open our communal seals.
Again, he reports his Civil war soldiery as an adventure. We learn nothing about his news of the circumstances of their fratricidal chapter, the pogrom, the military politics. He rarely mentions Biafra, and we hardly encounter the names of Gowon or Ojukwu.
For all his umbrage over knowledge of Hausa Ianguage as ticket, he never tells us if he ever attempted to learn the Ianguage.
Apart from a few typos and rhetorical stumbles, this is a well-written work and adds to the unfolding saga of the murder of Dele Giwa. As Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka writes in the preface, “the theories that attach to Dele Giwa’s murder are yet to be laid to rest in a cast-iron, impregnable casket.”
But Bashorun has made the case for guilt without evidence and guilt works on conscience. And as Charles Dickens writes in The Great Expectation, “conscience is a terrible thing if it accuses man or boy.” If the IBB regime pursued Bashorun because of guilt, then it must have the Dickensian conscience, and if that is true, it is, if ever, the only redeeming quality in a brutal era. But what did it do with that conscience? That is the intriguing part of this book of intrigues.
