June 12: Barbers At Work

By Banji Ojewale
"You cannot shave a man’s head in his absence"

—MKO Abiola, winner of 1993 Presidential Election

*Late MKO Abiola

Nigeria: Gen Bamaiyi’s Heroes And Villains

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

When the odd-defying English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking quipped that “we spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly history of stupidity,” he did not do justice to the relevance of history to a people’s development. But if he had people like a former Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Ishaya Bamaiyi in mind when he said that, hardly can we find his postulation impeachable.

Babangida, Obasanjo and Buhari 

For in most cases, history panders to the dictates of power. Such history unabashedly transforms the foibles of its originators into virtues.

This accounts for the centuries of the denigration of the black population as a benighted segment of the human race, without history, culture and philosophy, and thus their appropriation as hewers of wood and drawers of water for their white counterparts. But we need not go far to understand the manipulation of history to suit the purpose of its writer. We find enough evidence in the history of the Nigerian civil war as different participants and observers in the crisis tweak the history of that period to suit themselves.

This trajectory of the manipulation of history has been replicated in the case of the June 12, 1993 election crisis that has defined the nation’s subsequent democratic experience. What we have witnessed is a preoccupation with a Manichean bifurcation of participants in the crisis into heroes and villains. But the tragedy is that there is hardly an agreement on whose perspective is right since the real masterminds of the crisis have refused to apologise and tell the nation the truth. The further danger is that the generation who did not witness the crisis would be left with a welter of perspectives from which they may not be able to sift out the truth.

June 12, Not May 29, Is Nigeria’s ‘Democracy Day’

By Mike Ozekhome

On Sunday, June 12, 2016, leading lights in the human rights and pro-democracy movement in Nigeria, gathered at the late M.K.O. Abiola’s house, to mark “June 12”, 23 years after this talismanic, watershed and cornerstone of a people’s election. I was one of them. We paid tribute and sang solidarity songs. We x-rayed the state of the nation. We laid wreath at his tomb. We did not forget his lovely wife, Kudirat, who was martyred with him. We prayed by her graveside. An amazon that carried aloft the liberation torchlight after her husband’s incarceration in military dungeon, she epitomised women’s potency, fervour  and ardour.

June 12 is very stubborn. It is simply indestructible, ineradicable, indelible, imperishable and ineffaceable. It sticks out like a badge of honour, the compass of a beleaguered nation. It cannot be wished away. Never. Aside from October 1, when Nigeria had her flag independence, June 12 remains the most important date in her annals.

Nigeria and June 12 are like Siamese twins. The snail and the shell. They are inseparable.  Like six and half a dozen. Like Hamlet and the Prince of Denmark. You cannot discuss May 29 without its forebear and progenitor, June 12. To attempt that is comical, droll chucklesome, even bizarre and freakish. June 12 is not just a Gregorian calendar date. It is Nigeria’s authentic democracy day. That was when genuine democracy berthed in Nigeria. Nigerians had trooped to the polls to vote for Abiola. On June 12, 1993, Nigeria stood still. Nigerians became oblivious to religious sensibilities and ethnic nuances. They did not care that Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, Bashorun and Aare Onakanfo of Yoruba land, was a Moslem who was running with another Moslem, Alhaji Babagana Kingibe. The gods and goddesses of ethnicity, tribalism and religious bigotry were brutally murdered and interred.

The apparitions of gender, culture and class discrimination, were sent back to their graves. Abiola, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) candidate, squarely won the election under Babangida’s option A4. He trounced his challenger, Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC). He had campaigned with “Hope 1993” (a message of possibilities later adopted by Obama in 2008). His was “Farewell to Poverty” manifesto. Both resonated well with Nigerians. Abiola, who had joined politics at 19 under NCNC, in 1959, had used his stupendous wealth to water the ground and build bridges of unity, understanding and acceptability across the length and breadth of Nigeria. He had Concord newspaper and airline to help propel his ambition. He regarded money as nothing but manure with which, like plants, human beings are nurtured. Abiola had defeated Bashir Tofa, even in his Gyadi-Gyadi Ward, Kano.