By Abiodun Awolaja
As I begin these lines, I remember 1998 like yesterday. An old man on the street where I lived in Ondo town, exasperated by General Sani Abacha’s bloodthirsty rule, shrugged and said the following: “Well, at least he will leave the position in his old age.” Those were the days when it was almost an anathema to think of democracy.
Had God Almighty not taken Abacha out of the way just a few days after the man I have just referenced made his doleful comment, there would have been no democracy in 1999. The way Abacha and his colleagues carried on, it was as if they owned this world. They could kill and jail people at will. They looted the country dry and, in the words of the poet Tanure Ojaide, “threw questioners to hyenas.”
