Abacha Wouldn’t Have Taken Over If I Was Allowed To Resume As Sonekan’s ADC – Bello-Fadile

If retired colonel Babatunde Bello-Fadile was allowed to resign as the interim president’s aide-de-camp (ADC), he claimed the late General Sani Abacha wouldn’t have wracked power from the late businessman Ernest Sonekan.

“I was posted ADC to Sonekan. I don’t know why I was not allowed to resume. Still, if I had been ADC, it (the takeover) probably wouldn’t have happened,” Bello-Fadile said on the Friday edition of Inside Sources with Laolu Akande, a socio-political programme aired on Channels Television.

“Why didn’t I resume? The Chief of Army Staff advised me to wait until Senekan returned from Malta, where he attended the Commonwealth Head of State meeting that year. So, I was hanging around. By the time he returned, everything had already happened. ”

The return of democracy in Nigeria followed a series of events, some bloody and undesirable. General Ibrahim Babangida, who oversaw the coup that led to General Muhammadu Buhari’s ouster in 1993, resigned and established an interim government with businessman Sonekan as president and Abacha as chief of defence staff and minister of defense, following a contentious annulment of an election whose winner was later determined to be the late MKO Abiola.

On November 18, 1993, three months into his administration, Abacha overthrew Sonekan in a… Read the full article.