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IBRAHIM Babangida, Nigeria’s former military tyrant, and self-styled “evil genius”, has long evaded accountability for the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, the most heinous betrayal of Nigeria’s democratic aspirations. Rather than serving as a long-overdue confession, his recently published memoirs – A Journey in Service: An Autobiography of Ibrahim Babangida – are a deliberate attempt to whitewash history, justify injustice, and absolve himself of responsibility for a decision that derailed Nigeria’s democratic development. He cannot succeed.
While Babangida attempts to portray himself as a leader whose hands were tied by forces beyond his control, history confirms that ultimately, the decision to annul the June 12 election was his.
The deceptive attempt to shift blame onto the late Sani Abacha, the Association for Better Nigeria, and other elements seeking to extend military rule is nothing more than a cowardly deflection from the truth.
Babangida’s failure to act decisively and his political ambitions ultimately led to the tragedy of June 12 and its devastating consequences for Nigeria’s political landscape.
The annulment of the election – widely regarded as the freest and fairest in Nigeria’s history – was not just an assault on democracy but a catastrophic derailment of the country’s political evolution.
Nigerians trooped out on June 12, 1993, to elect their president between Moshood Abiola of the Social Democratic Party and Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention.
With Abiola leading widely, Babangida annulled the polls. Nigeria has not recovered from that criminality and might never recover.
The annulment dashed hopes of a better future for many Nigerians, including rank-and-file military personnel tired of Babangida’s unending rigmarole. He betrayed his friends, especially Moshood Abiola, to save his skin.
It is shameful that it took 32 years for Babangida to admit what all Nigerians already knew—that Abiola won that election in a landslide. Babangida and his military cabal wilfully destroyed an overwhelming people’s mandate. They ought to face retribution for their crimes.
Traders unilaterally crashed prices in urban centres in jubilant anticipation as results pointed to Abiola winning the election, but Babangida’s Machiavellian schemes dashed such hopes.
No book, especially one riddled with revisionist whitewash, will afford Babangida the slightest redemption even in his twilight years.
The transition to civil rule programme was supposed to be Babangida’s defining achievement, guaranteed to stamp his name as one of Nigeria’s leading statesmen. However, his regime thrived on deception, which earned him the dubious sobriquet – Maradona.
Beginning with the establishment of the Political Bureau in January 1986, mandated to lay the groundwork for the transition programme to the establishment of the Constitution Review Committee in 1987; the subsequent constitution of the Constituent Assembly in May 1988; adoption of a draft constitution and creation of the two-party system all through to the presidential elections, Babangida played Nigerians like the legendary Argentine football maestro.
A charismatic leader who surrounded himself with technocrats and intellectuals, Babangida learned nothing about decency and wasted the time of eminent citizens and state resources even when he knew he was on the road to nowhere.
The transition was supposed to end in 1990 but his contrived twists and turns pushed the terminal date four times up to 1993 when it was eventually derailed.
Having overplayed his hand, ‘Maradona’ was ensnared in his web of lies and mischief. He had scored an own goal that eventually led to his ignominious downfall. Babangida’s reign was evil, but he was no genius.
By Babangida’s admission, senior generals, including Olusegun Obasanjo and Theophilus Danjuma saw through his folly and described the transition process as “silly experiments and gimmicks”.
He confirmed this by feigning shock and indignation when the so-called ABN led by Arthur Nzeribe went to court to obtain a midnight order to stop the election when it was obvious that Abiola would win.
Instead of resisting this blatant subversion of democracy, Babangida allowed it to stand, using it as a pretext to cancel the election. Babangida contradicted himself in claiming to have invited Abiola to head an interim government which was rightly declined while in the same breath posturing as being powerless to uphold his popular mandate.
The aftermath of June 12 was a gale of deaths, detentions, and destruction arising from the several protests and ruination of Abiola’s family and business and those of many others.
Babangida’s memoirs attempt to paint a picture of a leader caught between powerful forces beyond his control. He implies that Abacha, along with other hawks in the military, was determined to retain power and that he had no choice but to navigate a difficult political landscape ostensibly to save his own life, that of Abiola, and stop Nigeria from disintegrating. This is a self-serving distortion of reality.
Babangida had every opportunity to neutralise the anti-democratic forces around him if he was sincere about the transition programme. He claimed that some elected governors and other elements had encouraged the military to stay and confessed his doubts about Abiola being an “effective president”.
Yet when things came to a head and the election was annulled “without his knowledge”, via an unsigned statement from the Vice President’s office, he did nothing to reverse it. Instead, he stamped his imprimatur in an infamous nationwide broadcast on June 26, 1993.
Babangida completed his treachery by retaining Abacha in the military as a favour rather than from fear while retiring other service chiefs when he installed the so-called Interim National Government.
He set the stage for Abacha’s eventual seizure of power and plunged the country into one of its darkest periods of dictatorship and repression.
The consequences of Babangida’s actions continue to haunt Nigeria. The annulment of June 12 was a national betrayal that undermined confidence in democracy, weakened institutions, and created a culture of impunity and grand corruption.
Yet, in the true Nigerian style of sweeping even the most grievous sins under the carpet, the country’s topmost political and business elite, including President Bola Tinubu, a one-time fugitive during the Abacha years, fawned over the Minna demagogue as he raked in over N17.5 billion in donations for a “presidential library project” at the book launch.
The sordid spectacle was the ultimate reward for a military dictator who betrayed his country to save his skin.
It was payback time for the many beneficiaries of the renowned largesse of a man under whose watch corruption was enthroned in government in Nigeria.
This same elite class abandoned Abiola at the most crucial moment, including his political comrades who took office under Abacha.
In later years, they sustained Babangida’s warped sense of self-importance by trooping to his Minna residence to endorse their political ambitions such that the dictator himself contemplated a return to power ahead of the 2011 elections.
As Babangida held court in Abuja last week surrounded by Nigeria’s rich and powerful, two-thirds of citizens were unsure of their next meal – victims of years of misrule that Babangida had an opportunity to end.
Among those who gathered to serenade the duplicitous general were persons of his ilk – rapacious politicians with a disdain for the ballot box and ordinary folk, money worshippers, gluttons, and dubious denizens of Nigeria’s murky politics. Shamelessly, they all gathered to laugh over Abiola’s grave.
This is why it was obvious that Babangida was not interested in contrition with his “I take full responsibility” monologue.
If Babangida truly seeks to right his wrongs, it is not through half-truths in a memoir but by tendering a full and unreserved apology to the Nigerian people. Anything short of that is just another chapter in his legacy of deception.
What is certain is that despite his strident attempts at sanitising the past, Nigerians remember that Babangida acted deceitfully, dishonourably, and despicably to ruin the hopes of millions of countrymen. History will not absolve him.
