I am writing these lines at 7:30 in the evening of Thursday, June 10, 1993, just 48 hours to the presidential election. But it is by no means clear that the election will actually take place.
The High Court in Abuja is yet to determine whether the National Electoral Commission (NEC), Federal Attorney-General (Clement Akpamgbo) and Military President Ibrahim Babangida have furnished compelling reasons as to why the election should not be stopped, as demanded by Arthur Nzeribe’s Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN). The association has followed up its petition with a huge demonstration in Kaduna, urging Babangida to stay on for four more years.
S. G. Ikoku’s self-styled Council of Elder Statesmen is still busy calling for what amounts to a scuttling of the transition process. Curiously, its advocacy, dripping with contempt for the two official political parties and their presidential candidates and indeed for the entire political class, is described not as a proposal but a “Report.’’ The ‘’Report’’ is received in Abuja with all the pomp and circumstance of a commissioned job.
Newspapers are awash with unsigned advertisements excoriating the SDP candidate, Moshood Abiola, and the NRC candidate, Bashir Tofa, for all manner of misconduct, ranging from alleged purloining of an opponent’s letter to religious fanaticism. The country is awash in rumours of dark plots and dire warnings.
From his base in London, fugitive Second Republic minister Umaru Dikkko, no longer fearful of being shipped home in a crate, is reported to have written to the Kaduna Mafia, warning that under no circumstance should a Southerner be allowed to win power.
As if to add poignancy to the rumoured Dikko epistle, allegations surface that Abiola and a conclave of Yoruba elders have completed plans to transfer the federal capital back to Lagos if Abiola won the election. And if he did not, Igbo property in Yorubaland was marked for destruction.
Such were the doubts and distrust sowed in the week before the election and watered assiduously every passing day. Long and disorderly queues formed by panic-stricken motorists in the wake of a strike by petroleum workers strengthen doubts about the election. A breakdown in electricity and water supplies further reinforces the doubts.
NEC Chairman Humphrey Nwosu comes on the television screen as I write these lines, ebullient as ever, and reeling out in a sing-song, combative voice, a trainload of things that must not be done on election day and assuring a national audience that all was set for the historic poll.
I am immediately reminded of what someone who should know told me long ago: Never mind the histrionics. Good old Humphrey is not actually in charge, and does not know what is really going on.
At any rate, no polling booths have been erected, and no voters’ list has been put on display in Lagos 48 hours to the poll. It requires a degree of credulity bordering on naiveté to wager that the poll will indeed hold on June 12.
NTA’s network news has just ended. There is no indication at all of developments in the ABN’s legal battle to scuttle the election. The doubts remain. The electoral laws state categorically that no court action can stand in the way of the election. If this means anything at all, it means that no court can entertain any petition that seeks to stop the election. The Abuja High Court has not only entertained the petition, it allows it to drag on for one full week, and to cast grave doubts on whether the election will be held.
At this point, I break off and go to bed, hoping to complete this piece the next day, Friday, June 11, to meet my copy deadline.
At 11:05 p.m., the doorbell rings.
Who can it be at this late hour?
It is Femi Kusa, The Guardian’s director of publications and editor-in-chief. He has a message, and it is for my ears only, the night guard tells me. I go downstairs to meet Kusa.
Without the slightest trace of agitation or surprise, Kusa tells me, first, that the Abuja High Court has ruled that election scheduled for Saturday, June 12, must not hold as demanded by the ABN; second, that the court has reserved ruling for one month on NEC’s counter-motion, and third, that the police had granted the ABN a permit to stage a Babangida-Must-Stay rally in Abuja. He says he thought I should not have to read the newspapers the next day before learning of these developments.
Even those of our countrymen (and women) who have maintained all along that the transition programme bears the markings of a cruel hoax and of a prologue to tragedy could hardly have believed that matters would come to such a desultory pass. But such, alas, is the level of triviality to which the final phase of the transition programme has been reduced.
No sooner were thepresidential primaries concluded than rumours spread that the candidates of both parties would be disqualified. Damning dossiers on both candidates were said to have been compiled, with generous help from the intelligence services of Western nations. Since then, it has been one dark hint of gloomy portents after another.
Was this the ‘’hidden agenda’’ finally unravelling?
A hidden agenda exists all right, weighs in Vice President Augustus Aikhomu. But it belongs to the self-appointed messiahs and their confederates who held a widely publicized meeting at General Olusegun Obasanjo’sfarm the other day, not to the Babangida Administration.
As I conclude this piece at 1:05 a.m. on Friday, June 11, 1993, NEC has not indicated whether it will go ahead with the election as planned, the Abuja injunction notwithstanding. The authors and managers of the transition programme have made no statement.
Perhaps they are satisfied that the transition is still ‘’on course,’’ and that the ‘’solid foundation’’ they have been laying for democracy these past seven years is, if anything, stronger than ever. Or it may well be that they regard the latest developments as just another phase of the “learning process’’ that is the transition.
Others of a different cast of mind cannot be blamed if, on waking up today and hearing the news, they felt, like Jacob in the Old Testament, that they had for seven years been sleeping with an illusion.
For the next 16 hours or so after Justice Ikpeme’s ruling, there is no clear indication that the election will hold. It is well past lunchtime on Friday, June 11, when NEC finally announces that the election will go on as scheduled, Justice Ikpeme and the ABN notwithstanding.
The Federal Government’s affirmation that the election will hold comes only indirectly, in response to a statement issued by the United States Government through the United States Information Service in Lagos to the effect that any postponement of the election would be “unacceptable” to Washington.
The election holds as scheduled. Minor hitches are reported here and there, the type that can be expected even in the best-ordered poll. For the most part, NEC and everyone connected with the election gets high praise for a job superbly executed.
Nine days later, when results already proclaimed or authenticated and only awaiting official release indicated that the SDP ticket of Moshoold Abiola and Babagana Kingibe had swept the poll, the regime of military president Ibrahim Babangidawhich had been thrown into panic by the results finally dropped all subterfuge to announce through an unsigned and undated memo issued on plain paper by Nduka Irabor, chief press secretary to Vice President Augustus Aikhomu, that it had annulled the election.
Why?
“To rescue the judiciary from inter-wrangling . . . to protect our legal system and the judiciary from being ridiculed and politicised both nationally and internationally,” according to the memo, and to ensure that a judiciary built on sound and solid foundation was not “tarnished by the insatiable political desire of a few persons.”
By that instrument, the Babangida regime terminated all court proceedings on any matter touching on the June 12 1993 presidential election, and for good measure repealed all laws relating to a political transition programme that had been eight years and some N40 billion in the making.
The consequences of this brazen evisceration of the sovereign will of the Nigerian people, executed with the active complicity of the political class, sections of the judiciary and the news media, political merchants, revanchists and quislings, live with us still.
This piece, slightly revised, was first published in this newspaper on June 11, 2013. It is adapted from my June 15 and June 22, 1993, columns for The Guardian, where I was editorial page editor and chair of the Editorial Board.
Desperate censors at work
There is a strong chance that patrons of the paper edition of The Nation may never get to read the Tuesday issue in which this column is scheduled to appear.
For three days running, military officials claiming to be acting on orders have blockaded the routes of newspaper vans across the country and taken over the distribution points, resulting in late deliveries and sometimes no delivery at all.
The officials said they were acting on intelligence that some unidentified persons were going to use newspaper distribution vans to carry explosives to areas of Boko Haram activity. Could the officials not have alerted the newspaper houses and urged them to ensure that their vehicles were not employed for subversive activities?
The Abuja office of ThisDay was severely damaged some two years ago in a bomb explosion. If the security services have forgotten, the news media have not. It cannot be in their interest to be witting or unwitting accessories to any plot to employ their vehicles for terroristic purposes.
Besides, the selective nature of the blockade, especially after the first day, suggests powerfully that what is unfolding is not a scheme to frustrate the designs of potential terrorists but to paralyse a section of the press and prevent Nigerians from receiving the news and information so vital to making informed decisions and choices in a democracy.
In whatever case, why detain the vans after searching them and finding nothing compromising? Why impound their cargo?
This shamefully disingenuous recourse harks back to the darkest chapters of military rule in Nigeria.
