The revisionists have regrouped again. We should not allow them, for the sake of history and the generations behind. The other day, their king held court in Abuja to launch a book that is no longer needed. Tons have been written about the man and his book in under two weeks but I must add my voice to it. What has happened is nearly equivalent to what happened in April 2013 when Margaret Thatcher, a former Prime Minister of United Kingdom, died. I happened to be in the United Kingdom at that time and saw first hand how the British literally peed on her dead body. The volume of attack on her in the media was unimaginable. There were series of demonstrations against her death; well, actually against her deeds as British Prime Minister. But Thatcher did not live to see the attacks and hates she generated.
Thankfully, our man is still alive. He will regret penning that book; that is if he wrote it himself! I had thought that I would not have cause to write about his tenure anymore but he has provoked me to revisit a very dark time in the history of our country; which is not to say that things are any different. Former President Ibrahim Babangida on Thursday 20 February 2025 in Abuja launched his autobiography titled A Journey in Service. The mistake started with the title of the book itself. The correct title should have been A Journey in Disservice to Fatherland.
Forget about his life before he seized power from Mohammadu Buhari on 27 August 1985. Just consider his inglorious eight years’ rule as a maximum military dictator. I will come to that shortly; which is what this article is all about. Surprisingly, many who have commented about his book mainly look at his feeble attempts at exonerating himself from the disaster that was his annulment of the 12 June 1993 election.
During his eight years misrule, I was first a university student and later a young reporter. Though I enrolled to study Mass Communication at the University of Maiduguri, I ended up studying more or less Babangidaism, the art and science of laying a solid foundation for the underdevelopment of a country. I paid more attention to literally every maneuvering of his government than what took me to Maiduguri. It is not surprising that today I still remember more vividly what he did while in power than what my lecturers laboured to teach me.
And it came very early in his regime. Immediately he killed his bosom friend Mamman Vatsa, a literary mind in uniform, in a fantom coup on 5 March 1986, I quickly marked Babangida down as the man who would not do the nation good. The corniness of the man was set from the beginning but the usually gullible Nigerians did not notice it. Vatsa was killed days (was it hours) after Wole Soyinka and J P Clark had met with Babangida to secure a reprieve!
Babangida’s government is the architect and builder of this very corrupt and broken house called Nigeria. Successive governments have only helped worsen the situation. Before his regime, there was corruption but very tolerable and certainly not a national problem. Under his government, corruption became a national ethos. The first thing his government did was to impoverish the middle class which was made up of mainly university lecturers and senior government officials who were comfortable with earning somewhere around N1,000 a month. First was to dribble Nigerians into believing that his government was not going to take the International Monetary Fund loan but ended up imposed more stringent economic measures such as the continuous devaluation of the Naira, the rapid increase in the prices of petroleum products and the sale of government business assets to cronies at giveaway prices.
An immediate effect of the harsh economic conditions was that the middle class concentrated on survival rather than creative mode. Many lecturers could not afford their basic needs. Many expatriates in our universities had to return to their home countries as they could not cope with life.
His government then went after the ardent critics who were in the universities and the media. The government had a two prong policy: offer them juicy jobs and stain their reputations; and hound down those who reject the job offers. His civilian cabinet was made up of some of the best brains in the country at the time. People like Tam David-West, Olu Falae, Chu Okongwu, Jibril Aminu, Rilwan Lukman, Senas Ukpanah, Bolaji Akinyemi, Tony Momoh, Kalu Idika Kalu, Tunji Olagunju, Olikoye Ransom-Kuti, Babs Fafunwa, Samaila Mamman, Abubakar Alhaji, Bunu Sheriff Musa and others were there. But the head of the military government who later made himself a President, ensured little or no progress.
As is the culture in our clime, many of these appointees ended up promoting and defending the horrible things that happened under that government; while some became turncoats. Those who still had their voices were either shoved aside (as in the case of Ebitu Ukiwe whose only crime as number two man in power was that he said that the issue of Nigeria being a member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation was not discussed by the government) or even tried for alleged wrongdoing as in the case of Tam David-West.
I will remember Dr. Patrick Wilmort, a Jamaican, who lectured at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (at the time the hotbed of radicalism in Nigeria). He had adopted Nigeria as his home and poured out his knowledge and expertise on young Nigerians. He was a thorn in the flesh of the Babangida regime. It didn’t take long for him to be deported.
The likes of Sam Oyovbare, Johnathan Swingina, Tai Solarin, Bala Usman and others who were the leading lights in Nigeria holding government to account were taken into government and their mouths effectively shut. The gadfly they couldn’t get was Gani Fawehinmi. Everything in the book was done to trap Gani but he refused to budge. Even Babangida himself testified that Gani was the only genuine and patriotic Nigerian he knew.
Having trapped many critics, Babangida’s government descended on Nigerians with an iron fist. Human rights were being violated easily under him. In fact it was under his watch that Nigerians knew that they could be so easily tortured and their rights, which they took for granted, could be so violated. It will interest many to know that it was during his government that the first human rights organization was founded; thanks to the untiring works of the likes of Olisa Agbakoba and Ayo Obe who founded the Civil Liberties Organisation in 1987, a testament to the cruelty of the Babangida regime.
Because his regime abhorred criticism, the media was pounded upon with ignominy. Before now, newspaper houses were seen as sacred places but the Babangida government had little regard for such places. Newspapers that refused to align with his regime were proscribed with ease. The Guardian, The PUNCH, Newswatch magazine and such other publications were proscribed. His government pierced an arrow through the heart of the media when Dele Giwa, one of Nigeria’s finest journalists and pioneer editor in chief of Newswatch magazine, was killed by a parcel bomb, an innovative way to kill a person in Nigeria. Thankfully, that arrow meant to kill independent media in Nigeria turned out to sharpen the very institution.
Under ‘President’ Babangida, Nigeria made so much money in few months than it had made in few years but the money, as to be expected, developed wings and flew into the desert. During the brief Gulf War when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, the Babangida government made a cool $12 billion from the sale of crude oil. Till today no one can account for such huge amounts by 1991 standards.
Having informed the nation that he was the Evil Genius and Maradona (a dribbler of the nation, in a dry attempt at mimicking the Argentine football legend), Babangida led the country to a wasteful and an endless political transition programme. Anytime a leader was going to emerge (oftentimes Shehu Musa Yar’Adua), Babangida would cancel the entire exercise and ask politicians to go back to the starting line. It was clear that the forty something year old maximum ruler did not want to hand over power to civilian government.
When it had become obvious that he had been outfoxed, he made the infamous statement: ‘I know those who will not succeed us but I do not know those who will’. He then proceeded to proscribe all political parties and ban those who had participated in the electioneering process just to keep Yar’Adua, who by then had become larger than life, away from the contest. Next was for him to dribble Nigerians again by forming and funding two political parties and asked Nigerians to become equal joiners! He wasted state money on building the secretariats of the two parties in each of the local government areas in the country, in addition to the state and federal secretariats in each state of the federation and in Abuja.
That’s where 12 June 1993 came in. From the get go, Babangida did not want to hand over power but having dribbled himself into a corner, he allowed the election that threw up Moshood Abiola (then Nigeria’s richest man) as the winner. He annulled the election before Professor Humphrey Nwosu, the umpire, could announce the winner. The crisis the annulment ensued consumed him as he had to “step aside” on 26 August 1993.
Thirty two years after he annulled the election, Babangida has eventually found courage to tell Nigerians he was all these years a coward by finding a dead man in Sani Abacha to blame for the annulment of Nigeria’s most peaceful election since independence. He deserves to be tried for truncating democracy and stunting our growth and development.
Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan
Just one sentence: The beautiful lady is armed with just one wooden matchstick to light up a very dark chamber of our national life.
