Showing posts with label Ernst Mayr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ernst Mayr. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Nigeria: Apologies For Gen. Sani Abacha

By Dan Amor
Friday this week indubitably marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s most treacherous tyrant and who ranked with Agathocles and Dionysus I of Sicily, as the most notorious dictators, not only of the age of antiquity but of all times. He died in Abuja on June 8, 1998 as a sitting military dictator. It is true that the degree of cruelty and loathsome human vulgarity that the Abacha era epitomized is already fading into the background due largely to the mundane and short character of the human memory. But his timely exit ought to have been marked by Nigerians just as the United Nations marks the end of the Second World War not only for posterity but also as a thanksgiving to God for extricating mankind from such epoch of human misery.
*Gen Abacha 
Abacha emerged as head of state from the ashes of the June 12 crisis. The General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida military administration had annulled the June 12, 1993 presidential election with a clear winner. It was the most placid election ever conducted in the annals of our country. The contest was between Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the billionaire business mogul, Chief MKO Abiola of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Abiola was coasting to victory when the Babangida military regime halted the announcement of the election result superintended by the Professor Humfrey Nwosu-led National Electoral Commission. The Federal Government eventually announced the annulment of the result on June 23, 1993. This action triggered a violent protest especially in the South West which led to Babangida stepping aside.