June 12: If Abiola Won, Is He Now A Posthumous President?

 By Olu Fasan

Exactly 32 years ago, the presidential election of June 12, 1993 was annulled by the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida that conducted the poll. Over three decades after that seismic decision, the truth, the whole truth, about why the election was annulled and who actually annulled it remains unknown.

*Abiola 

General Babangida’s long-awaited memoir, A Journey in Service, failed woefully to settle the whodunnit question because he passed the buck and named a long-dead colleague, General Sani Abacha, who can’t defend himself, as the chief culprit, and resorted to doubtful conjectures about the motives of those he described as “the nefarious ‘inside’ forces opposed to the elections”, but mentioned none of them except Abacha. Thus, 32 years after the epoch-making decision, Babangida still could not bring himself to name any living culprit, as if none exists! 

2023 Poll And Lessons From The Masters Of Journalism

 By Banji Ojewale

I have in front of me the 396-page book, SEGUN OSOBA: The Newspaper Years. It is the 2011 work by the pair of Mike Awoyinfa and Dimgba Igwe on former newspaperman Osoba who went on to become the elected governor of Ogun State in Nigeria’s southwest. Osoba himself is silent in the biography.

But he is present everywhere, garlanded chapter after chapter by those who knew him as a friend, professional colleague, community figure, politician etc. Both those who mentored him and the young ones he trained are allowed to straddle the pages to say a word. That the eponymous personality of the work isn’t brought in to say something about himself doesn’t enfeeble the book. The writers’ approach, somehow, glamorizes their delivery.

We can also count on the relative objectivity of the witnesses summoned by the duo of Igwe and Awoyinfa to tell Osoba’s story on account of their proven candour.