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.
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| 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.
