This week we continue where we left off with our examination of the Babangida years, the same years he did everything to glamorise in his biography.
As part of the offering last week, we brought on board Professor Steve Egbo who, a whole 24 ago, was prescient enough to devote a whole chapter of his book to the self-proclaimed evil genius. We bring him back today in a full throttled article which is, however, constricted by space.
We also bring the views of an active participant in the affairs of those evil days in Nigeria. Wale Adeoye, a multi-award winning journalist who, for his efforts, was also detained at the time, writes in his article
‘A Victim’s Review of Babangida’s Journey in Dis-Service” which I described on the Ekitipanupo web portal as a “first rate, analytical chronology of the Babangida years” wherein he wrote:
“Babangida was also silent on many critical issues of human right violations under his tenure. His regime unleashed one of the worst human right abuses on the students movement while he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent students apart from creating the nursing bed for violent cultism on Nigerian campuses. I recall 1986 and 1987, the years of clubs, daggers, guns and knives.
Four students of the Ahmadu Bello University had been killed after his government ordered ‘Kill and Go’ police to invade the campus. The invaders raped and killed some students. It became a national upheaval. At the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, we joined the national resistance.
I was in the leadership with the late Emma Ezeazu and Chima Ubani. The IBB regime recruited students, trained and armed them. Their duty was to attack, kidnap and maim students’ leaders. At Eni Njoku Hall, where we were having our rally, four students led by a student, now somewhere in the Philippines, stormed the venue and kidnapped a student, Lanre Ehonwa.
Not satisfied, that night, they stormed the hostel of Chidi Omeje and Kunu Harmony, two radical students. They maimed them. They did the same at other Nigerian University campuses. Many of these students were later recruited to join the State Security Service. At least I saw three of them later in years, who confessed to their atrocities.
At ABU, Patrick Wilmot was arrested and deported from Nigeria. What about the kidnap of Omoyele Sowore and his being injected with poison by sponsored armed men? What of Igboku Otu who was stabbed to death by unknown assailants one evening in his private Ikeja home?
His memory failed him on the disappearance of people like my friend and colleague in The Guardian, Chinedu Offoaro, Prince also of The Guardian, the murder of Tunde Oladepo, Taiwo Lukula and many others across the country as consequences of the successors he bequeathed. Oladepo was killed in the presence of his family. They took away his suits. On the day of his burial, the killers came, putting on the suits they had stolen from their victim. They audaciously stared at Oladepo’s wife who was caught by awe and trembling. He fled the country. How do we explain the controversial accident that led to the death of ASP Dare who was investigating the death of journalist, Dele Giwa? Can we easily forget the torture of many soldiers like Digifa Werenipre, now leader of Egbesu Assembly, my friend who was kept in underground cell in Kano? What of Col Gabriel Ajayi who was kept in the cemetery for many years, only to be released to the hands of harrowing, cold death? How can one forget Major Nya and others that I met while I was in detention at the Directorate Military Intelligence and reports that people were being shot and taken away for burial in secret places having been picked on the road on suspicion of being anti-government?
Babangida militarised the mentality of Nigerians through his adoption of violence and brute force, over logic and clear thought.
Under Babangida, state terrorism was elevated and idolised.
The people soon began to adopt violence as personal norm. The militaristisation of values, of culture, of politics, of debate, of the family, of the mental state finds expression in the current culture of violence in Nigeria today.
The least one can say is that the families of all these victims should band together and sue Babangida so that their estates can, collectively, make a good dent on his N17 freebie, sourced mostly from those who were made to profit, unfairly, from the national patrimony.
Still On Ibb’s Journey In Dis-service
In his own contribution this week, Professor Egbo writes:
Ibrahim Babangida’s memoir, “A Journey in Service”, has continued to generate interest across the nation. Babangida was a man who took Nigeria by storm much more than any before or after him. Forty years after his catastrophic incursion, he has simply refused to allow Nigeria rest. So much has been said in response to, and condemnation of his endless deceit. Perhaps, the launch of his memoir, and the huge cash it raked in for him, is his final act of defiance as he prepares to make his exit from the public stage.
Babangida’s atrocities have been properly chronicled by historians, analysts and commentators over the years, by those who participated in his perfidy; those who merely observed and the millions whose lives were blighted by the contempt and greed of this individual. His biography is an attempt to change the narrative, to re-write history and perhaps, perform one more act of defiance against Nigeria and Nigerians.
But whatever Babangida may have written, whatever efforts he may have exerted to twist and upend the facts, the truths of his mis-rule and the bungling of Nigeria’s destiny under his watch remain unhidden and will remain a testimony against him till eternity.
Of his numerous atrocities against the fatherland, the greatest was the annulment of June 12 – an election globally acknowledged as Nigeria’s finest outing ever. June 12, 1993, marked Nigeria’s date with history.
But sadly, a history that was cruelly aborted.
The cancellation of that election brought to fore Babangida’s design to keep Nigeria permanently enslaved to his personal whims and caprice. June 12 was the climax of a secret plot by Babangida and his cult of predators to sustain an illegitimate oligarchy that had since lost its bearing.
As I noted in my book, “Political Soldiering”, the tragedy of June 12 “marked the precariousness of the state of the union called Nigeria, a country of many ethnic nationalities groaning under an ill arrangement where the preponderance of power is arbitrary and hegemonic.” The success of June 12 election and the deliberate sabotage that followed “marked a date that exhumed the contradictions within the Nigerian contraption which the political class has worked so hard to pretend never existed”.
June 12 annulment and the upheavals that erupted “marked a culmination of years of frustration and discontent, jealousy and mischief, incompatibility, self destructive anomalies, perfidy and thralldom. It was another climax of what Ahmadu Bello famously described as ‘the mistake of 1914’.”
When the heat generated by the gruesome cancellation became unbearable, Babangida sneaked away into the night to plot and scheme for another opportunity. Despite stepping aside, he remained attuned to the vagaries of Nigeria’s political firmament and continued to bid his time. Babangida was a big man – wealthy, ambitious and cunning – and with vast resources at his disposal, he convinced himself that someday, he would be back.
But his determination to realize his dream of a come-back never materialised, despite his numerous schemings to bring it about as even the most cunning of men must someday, come to the end of the road.
Babangida’s greatest desire was to come back as a civilian president. But despite how much he desired it, schemed for it and plotted for it, he failed.
Abysmally.
The chain of events that followed in the wake of June 12 annulment has thrown Nigeria into a bottomless pit, one from which it has been impossible to wriggle out. From trepidatious ING to Abacha’s brutal reign, from the National Assembly Trade Fair to years of misrule, incompetence, ethnic supremacists, religious irredentism, nepotism, banditry, judicial panic, grinding poverty, legendary corruption by both the political class as well as the private sector, and so many ills, Nigeria has never had it so bad.
But all put together, General Ibrahim Babangida must be held supremely responsible for whatever tragedy Nigeria has suffered since he stepped in and stepped aside. This was a man who had the opportunity to do good, but deliberately, and consciously, chose to do so much evil he named himself the evil genius. And he has continued to sit in cross-legged pomposity atop the heap of his evil.
Otherwise, his memoirs would have been a true confession and an act of penance; a show of remorse and a plea for forgiveness by Nigerians, a people he has so wronged and betrayed.
Babangida would also have seen this window as an opportunity to seek the forgiveness of the Almighty God who allowed him an opportunity to do good but he rather chose the opposite.
That the cream of Nigeria’s political and economic elite gathered in the poshest hotel in Abuja last month on behalf of this badly flawed human being shows our legendary capacity to condone evil. Babangida did not deserve the honor done him by those who heeded his call.
He deserves only the courtesy and embrace suitable for a leper.
The gathering of who is who to honor a man like him shows the moral decadence of our leadership elite. In a country where the laws are of no consequence on the conduct of office holders, success and progress are measured by how much public funds one is able to steal. Here, the institutions created to guard against such grandiose larceny become accessories to the heist.
Presidential Library? What a joke. What purpose will Babangida’s library serve to generations of deprived, poverty stricken, uneducated, abused and abandoned Nigerians? And make no mistake, Babangida was never a president. He was and will always remain an impostor and a pretender. A usurper.
Babangida may be having the last laugh; and if that were actually the case, Nigerians do not have to humor him any longer.
The gap-toothed general is a chameleon and a vampire. He has no heart.
No amount of image laundering will convince Nigerians that Babangida is a new creature, that the vulture will turn away from the rotten carcass in disgust or that the he-goat will feel a pang of conscience at the prospect of mounting his own mother..
