On Thursday this week, it will be 32 years of that June 12 phenomenon. On 9 July 1998, the lifeless body of a young man adorned the front page of the Nigerian Tribune. The tear-jerking, bloodied body decorated the front pages of many other Nigerian newspapers like manacles in the hands of a convict. He had been shot dead by the police in Abeokuta, Ogun State. It was during a Southwest-wide protest against the perceived murder in detention of Chief MKO Abiola, winner of the 12 June 1993 election. The lifeless young man was one of the countless lives Nigeria propitiated at the grove of military despotism. It was the sacrifice to have the freedom of today.
According to Nigerian newspapers’ edition of that day, students, workers, apprentices, bystanders were felled by police bullets. It was like the June 1976 protest by black school children in Soweto, South Africa which led to minimum of 176 dead and estimated 700 felled, with over a thousand people injured. The report said, in Lagos, about 40 lives were lost. Fourteen in Idi-Araba, 4 at Oshodi, 3 at Oworonshoki, and 2 at Ojodu. Unconfirmed sources told reporters that ten lives were lost at Mushin and ten at multi-million Naira Lagos abattoir area at Oko-Oba. In Ibadan, police dispatched five persons to their untimely graves at the Bodija estate area and three at the Bodija market. Perceived military apologist, Arisekola Alao’s Bodija building was in turn damaged by the protesters, leading to the death of two of them. In Abeokuta, the palace of the Alake of Egbaland was looted and torched. The monarch’s staff of office, beaded crown and royal umbrella were looted as well. A tyre warehouse belonging to one Alhaji Fatai Gbemisola was set ablaze with vehicles vandalized in their hundreds.
The above should remind one that life usually comes in binaries – good/bad; poor/rich; live/die and so on. Orlando Owoh, Yoruba Kennery music singer, perhaps had this binary in mind when he sang that beneath the sweet apple of the pineapple lies its lacerating pine. ‘Opon oyinbo fi dundun se’wa, oro inu e t’o egbeje” he sang. Owoh could as well have been talking about Nigeria’s binary, of yesterday’s 12 June struggle and today’s civil rule.
The repercussion of the election annulment by General Ibrahim Babangida was colossal. Hundreds of Nigerians were murdered while uncountable suffered collateral deaths. Many got imprisoned; livelihoods were lost, destinies got truncated and many never recovered their well-being, even till today. Many children and dependant of the dead had their destinies stymied by the crisis. On 7 July 1998, with General Sani Abacha obdurately soldiering on, in spite of widespread calls on him to release Abiola from prison and honour the people’s electoral wish, Abiola’s death was announced.
The casualties of 12 June were legion. Business colossus, Alfred Ogbeyiwa Rewane, was one of them. Nicknamed Osibakoro by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Rewane was a staunch member of the Action Group political party and chairman of the AG-controlled Western Region Development Company. In the 1990s, as the military bared their fangs, Rewane was the refuge and sponsor of politicians and activists who desired what we eventually have today. His Lagos home was NADECO’s meeting venue. At Rewane’s memorial in 2000, late Chief Bola Ige recalibrated an earlier funeral oration he delivered in Warri at Osibakoro’s burial when he said, ‘The freedom we actually enjoy in Nigeria today must be credited, in good measure, to the self sacrificing disposition that (Rewane) displayed consistently…Osibakoro provided the progressive Nigerian politics with the sinews to fight the good fight…he stood up as a comforter of the family of the detained, those under house arrest, those in jail or those forced into exile…he never missed a chance to support all who were on the barricades. He had unwritten pact for instance with the guerrilla press’. On 6 October 1995, shortly after celebrating his 79th birthday, Osibakoro was brutally assassinated by agents of General Abacha at his residence in Ikeja, Lagos. They were never found.
In 1994, armed gunmen stormed activist and human rights lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi’s Lagos law chambers at Anthony Village. Two of his guards were defaced with bullets but unbeknown to the messengers of death, Fawehinmi was away. Beko Ransom-Kuti was also about this time programmed to be eliminated. His 8, Imaria Close home was torched when he could not be found. Same fate befell Ayo Opadokun. His Yaba home was raided and burnt. But for providence, NADECO chairman, Air Commodore Dan Suleiman would have been dead. His Chevrolet car was sprayed with a hail of bullets which shattered its windscreen but he miraculously escaped unhurt. In February 1996, affable publisher of The Guardian newspaper, Alex Ibru, was shot and lost an eye in the process. Earlier, his newspaper house had been burnt by yet unknown arsonists.
Either self-imposed or providence’s grim retribution, on 17 January 1996, a plane carrying Abacha’s son and 13 others developed engine fault and crashed in Dausayi village in Kano. Thereafter, bomb blasts began to boom in Nigeria like rockets. On 29 January 1996, NTA news alleged that Wole Soyinka was the mastermind of terror activities in Nigeria with Today, Kaduna-based newspaper, accusing NADECO activists of being behind the terror. Many got killed by the coldblooded military regime of Abacha. The list is exhaustive and includes Rear Admiral Babatunde Elegbede, Dr. Sola Omatsola, Toyin Onagoruwa, Alhaja Suliat Adedeji and Mrs. Bisoye Tejuosho. Chief Abraham Adesanya escaped death by the whiskers when his car was sprayed with bullets while the likes of Chiefs Olu Falae, Olabiyi Durojaiye were detained.
Earlier, on 25 October 1993, a Nigeria Airways Flight WT470 was hijacked by four Nigerian boys who were riled by the annulment of the 12 June election. They were Richard Ogunderu (19), Kabir Adenuga (22) Razaq Lawal (23) and Benneth Oluwadaisi (24). They called themselves members of the Movement for the Advancement of Democracy (MAD). Three members of Ernest Shonekan’s Interim National Government (ING) were on that flight. They were Brigadier-Gen Hafiz Momoh, Prof Jubril Aminu and Rong Yiren, the vice president of China. They initially planned to divert the plane to Frankfurt, Germany but shortage of fuel made them to detour to Diori Hamani International Airport in Niamey, Niger after the planned landing at N’Djamena, Chad and Gabon was disallowed. In Niamey, they made their demands: de-annulment of the 12 June election, re-investigation of the murder of Dele Giwa and the mysterious crash of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules that claimed 160 lives. It was believed to be a deliberate killing of the soldiers by the Babangida government.
Nigerian journalism also suffered casualties of the 12 June war. Apart from millions lost to shutting down of newspaper houses’ operations for months, many journalists were detained and jailed by the Abacha regime. They fell victim of the Detention of Persons Decree No 2 which allowed for indefinite, incommunicado detention of citizens; the Offensive Publications Decree No 35 of 1993 which gave the military government latitude to seize any publication it deemed likely to ‘disturb the peace and public order of Nigeria’ and the Treason and Treasonable Offenses Decree No 29 of 1993 which was later used in 1995 by a special military tribunal to convict Kunle Ajibade, Chris Anyanwu, George Mbah and Ben Charles Obi as ‘accessories after the fact of treason’.
Their crime was reporting an alleged coup plot. Niran Malaolu, Deputy Editor of The Diet newspaper was also imprisoned on 28 December 1997 after being convicted in July 1998 to 15 years in prison, alongside 95 others, for ‘participating in a coup to topple the Abacha government’.
Chief Frank Kokori, former General Secretary of The Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) was also a major force in the 12 June election struggle. But for him, Abacha would have possibly succeeded in his life presidency ambition. Kokori locked down Nigeria during the crisis by deploying his NUPENG in pursuit of democratic struggles. He was detained by Abacha and died miserably and dejected in Warri on 7 December 2023. There are a thousand and one other casualties of the 12 June crisis that this piece cannot possibly capture. I went into the above chronology to remind Nigerians, especially the youths of today, that the civilian government we have enjoyed in the last 26 years came with weeping, wailing, deaths and gnashing of the teeth.
The sacrifices of 12 June remind me of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo’s The Casualties. It was a poem written about the Nigerian civil war that raged between 1967 and 1970. Record has it that an estimated 100,000 military casualties and between 500,000 and 2 million Biafran civilians died. It was a period of tragedy and atrocity. Clark began this famous poem with the lines, ‘The casualties are not only those who are dead./They are well out of it’; nor are casualties ‘only those who lost/Persons or property, hard as it is’. Rather, he said, the casualties are the ’emissaries of rift/So smug in smoke-rooms they haunt abroad/They do not see the funeral piles/At home eating up the forests/They are wandering minstrels who, beating on/The drums of the human heart, draw the world/Into a dance with rites it does not know’.
The casualties, as Clark lyricized in that poem, are not those who died in the 12 June war, either as ancillary or intended victims. They are the hidden and multifaceted victims of the war who extend beyond the frontiers of those directly affected. The casualties today are the Nigerian people. They include Nigerians who are unlucky (yes!) not to have died from the war but are today grappling with the castles they built in their minds about a democratic rule which, 26 years after, has turned into myths.
Fast-forward to 32 years after. Last week, Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, responded to sons, brothers, sisters, kinsmen and countrymen of those casualties of the 12 June war who voted him into office. They had asked for accountability on the trillions of Naira of their money being spent on construction of the Lagos-Calabar highway. In a tone similar to Babangida’s ‘we’re not only in office but in power’, at the heat of criticism of his inhuman rule, President Tinubu also said last week: ‘Don’t listen to those critics. They don’t know what they’re talking about. If they don’t like the road or if it’s too expensive for tolling for them, they could go to Idumota’. While Abacha and Babangida scoffed at us, victims of 12 June, with guns, President Tinubu does with Nebuchadnezzar arrogance.
The question all of us, the casualties, should ask is, is what we have today all our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and contemporaries fought and died for? Did Rewane die to have a government that would spend N15.6 trillion ‘to tame the Atlantic’ for a road project which did not go through any competitive bidding, and the contract awarded on a single-source basis, thus contravening the Public Procurement Act and Environmental Impact Assessment Act? Did he die to have a beneficiary of his death speak glowingly about Sani Abacha’s business partners, the Gilbert Chagourys and their Hitech Construction company, as a ‘symbol of courage and commitment’ and openly acknowledge them as ‘my partner in daring?’ Did those young boys risk their lives to hijack a plane for a democratic Nigeria, only to have Nigerians, 32 years after, have a government that carries on as if hunger, anger, starvation, hopelessness that rule the airwaves are not unusual?
More importantly, a very apposite question to ask is, 26 years after we got civil rule, is Nigeria a democracy? Leading scholar in democratic studies, Prof Larry Diamond, in a keynote at the conference ’20 years of democracy in Nigeria: 1999-2019′, held at the St. Antony College, University of Oxford, on 6 December 2019, said Nigeria, as it is today, is a semi-democracy. Or anocracy. Prof Wale Adebanwi, in his Introduction to the book, Democracy and Nigeria’s Fourth Republic ( 2023) which he edited, described semi-democracy and anocracy as ‘a form of government that mixes democratic and autocratic attributes’. Robert Mattes has also described semi-democracy as a ‘hybrid regime’ while some scholars call it ‘flawed democracy/regime’. The description of such government by the Economic Intelligence Unit is that, it is a ‘poorly functioning government, often with corrupt elected officials and officials otherwise unaccountable to the citizenry’.
Following in the saying that the one on whose head a coconut pod is smashed to access its milky fruit often doesn’t partake of its eating, how many of the children of Rewane, Ige, Opadokun, Ransom-Kuti, Ndubuisi-Kanu, Elegbede, Omatsola, Onagoruwa, Suliat Adedeji, Tejuosho, Abraham Adesanya, Falae, Durojaiye and many more who gallantly fought the military to a standstill in the 12 June war, are beneficiaries of this government? Rather, the toads of the war fought by those Nigerians above 32 years ago are Nigerians’ tormentors of today in power. Are the lives of children of these 12 June warriors even better? If the dead can see, will the casualties be happy with Nigeria where they are now? If there is another 12 June war to be fought today, will anyone stick their necks in a fight against establishment?
Anyway, happy 12 June, Nigerians. Like the boring refrain of a dirge, government will again declare a public holiday on Thursday and we will be fooled with voodoo statistics showing us as a happy people. But, are we really happy?
