By Dan Amor
To live on this sinful earth for 80 years (whether it is original or official age) is no mean achievement, especially in these terrible times when conditions have sapped real life out of comparative existence leaving the average lifespan of a Nigerian at just 55.
But here is General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (retd.) celebrating 80 years with pomp and pageantry in the midst of family members, friends, associates, former colleagues and country men and women. Since Tuesday August 17, his date of birth, Nigerians from all walks of life have paid tributes to this former military President, from varied perspectives.
It is only natural that we greet such a human dynamo with overwhelming gusto. Happy 80th birthday anniversary to General Babangida. I have read big, meaty, skillfully conceived and carefully executed tributes to the gap-toothed former maximum ruler, constantly relating them to the larger story.
Some have treated his story with compassion and with a critical probing pen and have achieved brilliantly their aim of following Babangida's long journey out of the innocence of his turbulent years. Yet, since men must do their work in warmer temperatures, cold light may not be a sufficient condition for the study of men's lives.
Bookmakers call him the Maradona of Nigerian politics. For he dribbles with crafty fanaticism and zestful mien like the late legendary Argentine football star, Diego Armando Maradona. But in an interview with TELL Magazine, he called himself the "evil genius", who thinks he is too smart and too intelligent not to indulge in the starry-eyed notion of self-immolation, since he is gifted with the machinations of evil.
Yet, as a maximum sadist whose life thrives on the surreal or its fringes, Babangida the erstwhile dictator who ruled Nigeria for eight years still relishes controversy. In spite of his eight-year reign adjudged as having ended in a historic fiasco, the General is said to have rewritten recent Nigerian history even at 80. Read his elaborate interviews with the media and juxtapose them with what happened between 1985 and 1993, to understand our point of departure.
This saga, verging on the bazaar, and which would have made Albert Camus, the celebrated modern master of the absurd genre, green with envy, should not astound Nigerians already shocked to the nerves by the sheer absurdity of these terrible times of Buhari's mis-governance. Here is a gentleman whose eight year reign not only approximates to a plague and a scourge but is still being perceived as an incubus under which we are smarting.
Indeed, in spite of the miasma he arouses, in spite of his widespread unpopularity, especially in the South West and in spite of the bitterness towards what most Nigerians see as his baleful legacy, Babangida who annulled the most placid election in the country's annals has granted interviews to the media on his 80th birthday to rewrite Nigerian history in the evening of his life.
Two factors are said to have spurred and galvanized his life. Astutely concerned about his place in history, the man who invented Nigeria's adversity and barbarism in the face of growing global enlightenment, is ironically crusading for historical relocation but cannot own up to his immense atrocities. And this is not new.
His numerous "settlement" schemes and the vending binge of public property at give-away prices to influential Nigerians are thought to be devices to buy over the people's loyalty, lull and deaden their sense of outrage at his excesses and pave way for his perpetual domination of the political landscape.
An index of his desire to govern in perpetuity is said to be the
unusual umbrage the former military president took at a report filed to the
erstwhile National Defense and Security Council, NDSC, by a former naval
bigwig. The officer, along with other compliant generals who were shortly after
General Sani Abacha's demonic seizure of power, asked by the then NDSC members
to feel the pulse of military officers in various formations and to find out
whether continued military rule was desirable in the aftermath of Chief M.K.O.
Abiola's electoral victory. The conclave of educated military officers in Lagos
was not only vehemently opposed to a continued military rule, it spoke in tones
that verged on the unusually impudent.
When asked about his assessment of the situation, the naval chieftain who led the group was said to have told General Babangida: "the boys are not only asking us to go, they are saying we should run!" A few days after, to his consternation, his retirement was announced on radio and television. When he sought to know what informed his precipitate retirement, General Babangida was reported to have said: "Well, you said the boys want us to run. Perhaps, it's time you started." So anguished at his failures was Babangida that he was reported to have broken down and wept, wondering ruefully at how history would view his tenure. This is exactly what has happened since last week.
Twenty eight years after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Babangida still speaks in tongues and nobody understands his hyperbole. In fact, the late Prof. Omo Omoruyi, one of the intellectual jesters who authored the now infamous "stepping aside" speech is said to have mollified and assuaged the former dictator's sense of grief almost to no avail.
General Babangida is also concerned about how a successor to the coveted throne who is not amenable to him would view him. He is said to dread the prospects of the advent of a successor who would not want to do his bidding. His fear is that such a ruler would either lacerate his legacy or subject the inequities of his tenure to close scrutiny.
Even while he feigned to be transiting to "democracy" under one of the costliest political transitions in the world, Babangida reportedly lured many a presidential candidate from his cocoon and provided him ready cash. He succeeded in doing this by giving the impression that a presidential ambition announced by such gentlemen would invest the transition programme with enough credibility.
No sooner had such personages indicated serious commitment than he erected obstacles on their path. One of the most painful damages Babangida did to the corporate existence of Nigeria is taking the nation to the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) thus undermining the secular paradigm that undergird Nigeria from inception. It is this baleful legacy that General Muhammadu Buhari is capitalizing on to want to Islamize a country of diverse religions like Nigeria. Given the odds against him - the bitterness, the hatred and the disdain he inspires, it would seem that his attempt to rewrite Nigeria's history, is akin to swimming against the tide. But Babangida still has supporters and a sturdy bulwark.
He is said to be counting on his huge resources said to be in the region of billions in hard currency to draw support from Nigerians to rewrite our history. With such an outlay and with a generous budget against the backdrop of massive poverty among Nigerians, the General hopes to distribute his largesse (a tendency he is adept at) to curry the favour of Nigerians to agree with him to pave way for his son to join the reactionary faction of the ruling class and to become president much later. But Nigerians harbour no fear about Babangida's enormous questionable wealth.
They are no fools. They would be educated enough to collect back what was taken from their national treasury. Yet they are generally chattered at the sorry state in which the nation is today. Although Nigeria has been turned into a pariah state in which subsidized illiteracy is now part of an elaborate power game, Nigerians will no longer tolerate barely educated murderers to toy once more with the collective destiny of the nation.
Babangida's sundry excesses and the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, will continue to haunt him like ghouls in a nightmare. So also shall the ghosts of General Shehu Musa Yar'Adua who died like a rat in Abakaliki prison and Chief Abiola, who had been reduced to dust by the venomous conspiracy of the Evil Genius and his late Khalifa, General Abacha. But if he still doesn't want to repent, as we have seen in his 80th anniversary interviews, since, as they say, all manner of knives are invited to an elephant's funeral, let him continue.
Babangida must know that without genuine expiation of sin, it is
impossible to get atonement. Such are the intractable apologies for a man who
had the rare opportunity to right all the wrongs of the country but failed to
do so due largely to ethnic jingoism. There are the apologies a traumatized
nation has to offer a man whose guile and cunning have triggered her agonizing
trip to Golgotha.
*Dan Amor, a public affairs analyst writes from Abuja
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