Tag: IBB

Shortly after he emerged from the August 25, 1985, coup as leader of Nigeria’s new military regime,  General Ibrahim Babangida was asked why, departing from precedent going back to 1966, he chose the title of “President.”

He had told his colleagues that he would like to go by that designation.   They thought the choice curious but had raised no objections, according to General Domkat Bali, then Chief of Defence Staff.

Asked the same question on national television by news correspondent Inalegwu Odeh as Babangida was settling into his new role, Babangida said he would explain later.  With his accustomed doggedness, Odeh put the question again a day or two later, at a chance opportunity.

This time, Babangida was ready.  He said he had chosen the title in keeping with the Constitution. The very Constitution that spelled out clearly the methods by which power could be obtained and exercised legitimately.  Those methods did not include a coup which is at bottom a crime against the Constitution.

Going strictly by the Constitution, the official next in rank to Babangida should have answered to the title of vice president.  But Ebitu Ukiwe answered to the rather nebulous title of Chief of General Staff.

Babangida was in effect invoking the Constitution to justify his subversion of the Constitution.

His self-assigned title “President, Commander-in-Chief (no ‘and’ between; it denotes one and the same person) left the military in whose name he took power as well as the nation in no doubt that he had come to exercise supreme control over the Nigerian state and its armed forces.   And this, too, was presumably in keeping with the Constitution.

The same kind of thinking runs through his recent interview with Channels Television.  He wondered why he had over the years been criticised, abused even, for annulling the presidential election of June 12, 1993, but had rarely been given the credit for organising and supervising the “freest and fairest” election ever held in Nigeria – the same June 12, 1993 election, aforementioned.

Plus, did these critics realise; did they know that the winner of that election, Bashorun MKO Abiola, was his bosom friend?

It is almost impossible to fathom the cast of mind of one who organised and supervised the ”freest and fairest” election ever held in Nigeria, mobilised the population against the outcome, drove the country to the edge of disintegration in the process, robbed his bosom-friend of the ultimate prize, then glory in the election, the friendship and the annulment without any mental discomfort.

By and large, the public sees Babangida as the perpetrator of crimes against the Constitution, and against the sovereign will of the Nigerian electorate.  But he sees himself as a victim, the bugbear of an undiscerning and unappreciative people.  In his psyche, there is no room or capacity for remorse or contrition, only self-pity.

If it ever got off his memo pad, if it ever made the transition from an idea in his head to an actual writing project, however tentative, the tell-all memoir Babangida promised Nigerians more than two decades ago and said was near completion much more recently will not now see the light of day.

Why?  Because no one would read it, he said.  Once word gets out that Babangida is the author, the book is finished.

I suspect that he has lived with that thought for long, and it may be the reason he abandoned plans to publish a daily newspaper in Abuja.  Before he was swept out of power, a casualty of his own overweening machinations, he had set up a state-of-the-art printing press in Abuja and reportedly             tapped Eddie Iroh, one of the best in the business, to run it.

Contrary to the law, the plant took over from the Government Printer the printing of official government papers.  Babangida was the law, anyway.  It was there that all those crazy decrees were churned out in the dead of night, in the dizzying, closing phase of Babangida’s tenure.

It is also probably the reason Babangida abandoned plans to build a university, for which he had acquired a vast tract of land in Kaduna State. What if parents refused to send their children there, on learning that Babangida was its proprietor?

There is indeed an Ibrahim Babangida University, in Lapai, in Niger State.  But if those who have their children and wards studying there ever suffer from buyers’ remorse, they should remember that its proprietor is Niger State Government, not the resident of the Hilltop Mansion in Minna.

It is sad that Babangida ended up in this manner.

He had started out with great promise.  He enjoyed perhaps the longest honeymoon of all who have governed Nigeria.  He abolished the notorious Decree Four and pardoned two journalists, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, who had been jailed under it.

He flung the prison doors open to release hundreds who had been detained arbitrarily under the previous regime, and to expose the squalid conditions in which they were held.  He unbanned the university students’ body NANS, the Nigerian Medical Association and the National Association of Resident Doctors and many other associations.

He set up a judicial panel to review unconscionable prison sentences that had been handed down to Second Republic politicians convicted in trials that made a mockery of the rule of law. He discovered Nigeria’s neglected countryside and established, with substantial funding, various agencies (remember the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructures, the Directorate for Social Mobilisation, and the People’s Bank) to bring them into the mainstream of national life

Freedom of the press and of speech and thought flourished.   Nigeria became a vast debating platform with the government itself an active participant.  It set up panels to review or propose one policy or another, to pronounce on the desirability, viability or affordability of one course of action or another.  The poet and columnist Odia Ofeimun called the practice “panelocracy.”

One of my favourite cartoons from this era depicted a child with guilt written all over his face asking his mother to set up a panel to determine who had filched a chunk of beef from the family soup pot.

By the time it came to light that Babangida has insinuated Nigeria into the Organisation of the Islamic Conference surreptitiously, the public had begun to view him warily.  The Administration’s intolerance of dissentient views over its controversial Structural Adjustment Programme, the parcel-bomb murder of Dele Giwa, in which the Administration remains a prime suspect to this day, quickened his rejection by the people. The duplicitous framing and the execution of the political transition programme, culminating in the election of the presidential election, virtually consigned him to infamy.

It would be hard to find a more eloquent monument to the collapse of his tenure and ambition than the one captured for the ages in his ragged, lachrymose retreat from Abuja en route Minna and retirement.

There will be no memoir, Babangida says; not even one that seeks to tell the story from his point of view, to explain the joys and pleasures of the office, the challenges and constraints of the office, and to hit back at his numerous detractors.   But few will be surprised if he comes out with such a memoir next month, caring nothing about whether it is read or not.

Memoir or no memoir, there is abundant testimony by aides who chose to write the history of the period and stamp it indelibly with Babangida’s imprint rather than leave the matter to chance.  I am thinking of seminal volumes with such captivating titles as Portrait of a New Nigeria:  Selected Speeches of IBB, and Foundations of a New Nigeria:  The IBB Era.