By Afam Nkemdiche
When I first heard
about President Muhammadu Buhari’s surprise posthumous honour to Chief M. K. O.
Abiola, the widely acknowledged winner of the 1993 presidential election, my
instinctive thought was, “My God! How could he nerve his conscience to do that
– he was a principal confidant of the maximum ruler who denied MKO his well
deserved mandate, until the mysterious death-in-detention???”
 |
| *Abiola |
It cannot be gainsaid,
even in fiction, that Buhari was the closest public figure to the Kano-born
general in Nigeria’s
darkest years. Soon after Abacha sacked Ibrahim Babangida’s contraption
(Shonekan’s Interim Government), he decreed that all monies that accrued from petroleum
be pooled into a Fund, the Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF. The humongous size of the
envisaged pool qualified the PTF to be immediately referred to as a “parallel
government”; even the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, had to
look to it for funding. Buhari was the first and only executive chairman of the
PTF. This was a measure of the unique camaraderie that the duo enjoyed when Nigeria teetered
on the brink of disintegration from November 1993 until June 1998 when Abacha
suddenly succumbed to death ahead of his detainee.
