Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, winner of Nigeria’s presidential election held on June 12, 1993, died 19 years ago last Friday, on the cusp of his widely anticipated release from the brutal detention into which he had been clamped in 1994 by the regime of the loathsome dictator Sani Abacha, for proclaiming himself President of Nigeria after the election was capriciously annulled.
Abacha’s death some four weeks earlier, reportedly in an orgy of concupiscence, had given “June 12” a new life and a heightened salience. It gave a new urgency to the status and the future of Abiola, and to the unresolved issue of “June 12.” All of them had to be addressed immediately,
The military authorities faced a daunting choice. Remain in power, though exhausted and hugely discredited, hoping to muddle through somehow, or release the President-elect from detention with the expectation that Abiola will have some role in negotiations to end the political debacle but unsure of how he would proceed.
Suddenly, Abiola, who had for four years been denied access to his family, his attorneys, and only grudgingly allowed occasional visits by his personal physician, became the man of the moment, the political prisoner whom the leading Western nations and the international institutions wanted their representatives to meet. Yet these were for the most part the very bodies that had been loath to come down heavily on Nigeria for the election annulment and the gross human rights violations that had followed it.
With the sudden departure from the scene of “a beacon of brutality” as The New York Times called Abacha in an editorial, they were more concerned to get Abiola to renounce his claim to being president-elect than to help secure his freedom and ensure at the very least that he would have a prominent seat at a table where Nigeria’s immediate future would be discussed.
The UK Government dispatched Foreign Office Minister Tony Lloyd to Abuja, where he met with the Head of State who knew that he was at best a caretaker, but not with Abiola. The Commonwealth followed with its Secretary-General, our own Chief Emeka Anyaoku.
In notes of the meeting smuggled out of prison, and in which Abiola had named me among others as addressee, Abiola said Anyaoku told him that, counting from June 1993, the four-year term Abiola would have served had expired and that, consequently, Abiola could no longer lay claim to any mandate. Whitehall’s imprimatur was stamped all over Anyaoku’s visit.
Abiola said he rejected the proposition on the threshold.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan turned up in Abuja to meet with Abiola, with the same perverse end in mind as Anyaoku, if not the same argument. It was not clear then, nor is it any clearer today, whose interest Annan was serving.
Certainly not that of the United Nations in its fullest sense. Nor could it have been at the behest of the UN Security Council, since the situation in Nigeria had not been declared to constitute a threat to global peace, in which case Chapter VII of the UN Charter would have been invoked.
It is a measure of the cruel and inhuman conditions under which Abiola had been held that when Annan introduced himself as the UN Secretary-General, Abiola was puzzled and asked about “the Egyptian”, a reference to Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, who had held that position until 1996.
Such, indeed, were the pressures piled on Abiola by Abdulsalami Abubakar, and by the UK and the United States acting directly or through proxies that The Times (London), no admirer of the populist tendencies that were stamped all over Abiola’s political behavior, felt obliged to weigh in.
Abiola, it said in its June 29, 1998, leading article, possessed a quality rare in Nigerian politics, “undoubted legitimacy,” derived from the 1993 election and from his conduct in captivity – specifically, refusing Abacha’s offer of freedom in return for retracting his claim to a mandate and retreating from politics “when all indications were that ill-health and further imprisonment would kill him.”
“It would be shabby of the international community to press him to accept such an offer now,” The Times continued. “His stand for democracy has given him the aura of statesmanship, a quality not evident in 1993. The form of administration he might head – transitional, national reconciliation, or conventional – is a matter for negotiation. But he cannot negotiate as a prisoner. . . Only if he is released forthwith, and without conditions, should sanctions be lifted.”
This flurry was the context in which members of Abiola’s immediate family who had been allowed to see him only fleetingly, at long intervals, and always in the presence of security minders, were cleared without fuss to visit him, on July 7, 1998.
The party comprised two of his wives, Bisi and Doyinsola, and his eldest child Lola Edewor. Abiola’s senior wife Kudirat, an unyielding protagonist of the June 12 mandate, had been murdered by Abacha’s goon squad three years earlier, in 1996.
Four years in solitary confinement, they found, had taken a heavy toll on Abiola’s health. But he was upbeat and looking forward to being reunited with them as a free man, confident that his release was imminent.
As the party headed to Abuja airport to return to Lagos, Bisi and Doyinsola had just two things on their minds: getting Abiola’s sprawling mansion in Opebi spruced up for his return, and catering to the multitudes that would throng the neighbourhood when Abiola returned.
They were halfway to the airport when Doyinsola’s phone rang. The caller asked them to head back to Abuja, to the Presidential Villa.
Could it be that the authorities had decided to release Abiola so that he and his family could fly to Lagos together? Having lived through so many disappointments and heartbreaks, they suppressed the thought. But they saw the summons back to Abuja as a good sign.
What confronted them when they were ushered into the Clinic at the Presidential Villa was Abiola’s lifeless body on a stretcher, nostrils stuffed with cotton balls. Not four hours had passed since they saw him hearty, if not hale.
Abiola had slumped and died, literally across the coffee table from a United States delegation comprising Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, special envoy Thomas Pickering, and United States Ambassador to Nigeria William Twaddell, in Abuja with the specific goal of persuading Abiola to renounce his claim to a presidential mandate, hard on the heels of Anyaoku and Annan.
With a peremptoriness that would have been considered flagrantly indecent in the United States and indeed in any country claiming to subscribe to higher ideals, Twaddell declared literally on the spot that Abiola appeared to have died from “natural causes.” That declaration seemed suspiciously tailored to foreclose questions about the tea Abiola had been served just before his sudden terminal collapse.
An international autopsy failed to establish the cause of Abiola’s death definitively. But suspicion lingers powerfully to this day it resulted from some substance with which they had laced the tea, a final solution of sorts, to “the problem of June 12.”
To the end, Abiola resisted every pressure, discounted every threat and spurned every blandishment the military regime and its local and foreign proxies contrived. His tenacity surprised the vast majority of Nigerians who did not know him well or knew him only in caricature. They thought that, faced with the prospect of being subjected to the slightest inconvenience, to say nothing of losing his freedom, his vast business empire and his life, he would cut a deal, put the best face on it, and move on.
“June 12” and Abiola’s martyrdom made May 29 — the day officially celebrated in Nigeria as “Democracy Day” — inevitable.
Perhaps one day, the feckless beneficiaries of the struggle that had cost Abiola his life will rouse themselves to accord him posthumous recognition as President-elect, with all the rights and privileges of that position going back to 1993.
Therein lies the path of honour.
