The Forgotten Take-Aways From June 12

 By Adekunle Adekoya

Yesterday was June 12. That date has become something else in the history of our dear country. At the risk of telling you what you what you already know, the presidential election of June 12, 1993 was adjudged by Nigerians and watchers of Nigerian politics worldwide to be the freest, fairest ever held in the country.

But sadly, the country was denied the benefits of enjoying the dividends of their freest and fairest election through a most callous annulment of that election, a development that I still cannot understand till tomorrow. Not that I was a child in 1993; far from it, in fact I had fathered two of my own children long before that election, and as a university graduate, was fully equipped to discern and witness the train of events that happened one after the other, as a practising newspaperman, till the nation was told that the election stood annulled. I still don’t understand it.

But more than 32 years after, you give up on what you can’t understand and move on. Especially after a cocktail of book launches on the June 12 saga, beginning with Olawale Oshun’s Clapping With One Hand, and General Ibrahin Babangida’s memoirs, titled A Journey in Service. Needless to say, General Babangida was the Military President under whose watch the election was held and he it was also who annulled it.

As I now understand, it was a tragedy, reminiscent of the legend of “Akogba-tugbaka” in Yoruba folklore. That legend was about a diligent farmer, who always went to till the land on his farm at dawn, as early as the cock crowed. By daybreak when other farmers were just arriving their patches of land, Akogbatugbaka would have made  at least two hundred heaps (ebe) from the land he tilled. He was such a hardworking farmer and the produce from his farm was evidence that he worked hard to attain the wealth that was beginning to show. Until one day.

Akogbatugbaka arrived his farm at dawn on this fateful day, and set to work as usual. After making the first 200 heaps or mounds as the case may be, he felt the need for a stimulant and reached into his pocket for his container of snuff. It was not there. Looking round, he surmised that it must have dropped from his pocket and he might have heaped a mound (ebe) on it. He used his hoe to scatter the heap he just made; no snuff box. He scattered the next, nothing. He did the same to all the heaps he had made until he got to the very first one, only to discover the snuff box under the first heap. Meanwhile the loss of his labour stared him in the eyes; the 200 heaps he had made lay scattered by his own hands, and he would have to start making the heaps all over again.

General Babangida did not do any repair job of the June 12 debacle; instead, he put in place an administrative contraption called the Interim National Government, headed by a corporate chieftain, the late Chief Ernest Adegunle Oladeinde Shonekan. It did not last. Eighty-two days after, Babangida’s Chief of Defence Staff, the redoubtable General Sani Abacha sent the Shonekan and his Interim Government packing, and mounted the saddle as military Head of State. That was November 17, 1993. Abacha lasted all of five years till he suddenly expired in 1998, just as the winner of the election, Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola would inexplicably expire in detention a month later.

Yesterday, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu addressed fellow countrymen and women through a joint session of the National Assembly. By now, you, the reader must have read and digested his speech. From there, you can draw your own conclusions. But for me, the issue is that we have forgotten the takeaways from the June 12 debacle. For instance, how did we achieve the freest and fairest election? Simple: Through the innovation of then chairman of the National Electoral Commission, NEC, the late Professor Humphrey Nwosu.

He was the political genius that proposed the magical Option A-4 as a method of voting. I remember very well. Voters arrived at polling stations and simply queued behind the ballot boxes of the parties of their preferred candidate. Then, in the presence of all, the number of people on the queues were counted and the tally recorded. After, those same people cast their votes, and the ballots were also counted. It must tally with the earlier number, and from there, to the collation centres where final tallies were taken.

If it worked in 1993, who is saying that it cannot work now? At the root of our economic miasma is our political system. If we don’t get the politics right, we might never get the economy right. What is stopping us from revisiting and adopting Option A-4? I can guess most of today’s political elite, largely unknown by the people they lord it over, cannot win elections by Option A-4. And that is why they will never legislate it into being. Instead, they prefer to ally and align with masters of the game who have the electoral system in their pockets and the judiciary at their beck and call to ensure that petitions against their manipulated victories go nowhere.

From where I am sitting,  I hereby call for a total overhaul of the electoral system to ensure that we come up with a process that sees to it that only the people who win elections will get into office. The new Electoral Act that will result from the overhaul must also make defection from one party to another such a rigorous process as to make defection very difficult, if not impossible. Goings-on in the political arena, to quote a bombast, is simply an “odoriferous saga!” 

*Adekoya is a commentator on public issues