Fragments out of the Deluge
Sometimes in 1981, Alhaji Shehu Musa, the secretary to the Federal government of the ruling National Party of Nigeria, warned President Alhaji Shehu Shagari that a close eye should be kept on Ibrahim Babangida who was then a brigadier in charge of Planning at Army Headquarters. Babangida was in the Armoured Corps with tentacles in the Army and a seemingly disarming mien that belied a ferocious ambition and cunning will to power. A habitué of Fela’s Africa Shrine in the company of the late Mamman Vatsa who was the best man at his wedding and fellow military colleagues, he was a jolly good fellow. He became a member of Muritala Muhammed’s Supreme Military Council and played a prominent role in ousting the doddering regime of Yakubu Gowon. He however came into national prominence on the 13th day of February 1976 when Muritala Mohammed was felled in Bukar Dimka’s abortive and hare-brained coup.
From his Calabar military formation, Mamman Vatsa had denounced the coup attempt after hearing the incoherent rantings of Dimka on air and dissociated himself; ditto all other military formations. Fortuitously, Alani Akinrinade, the GOC of the Kaduna 3rd Division was in Lagos and lent his unqualified support for quashing the uprising. But it was the then Army Chief of Staff, T.Y.Danjuma who issued a chilling and unambiguous order to Colonel Ibrahim Babangida to move troops to the premises of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), Ikoyi, and level the place to the ground where Dimka was holed up broadcasting his drunken speech intermittently with martial music supplied by the brutally executed Zakari Mohammed, a junior brother of the wife of the deposed Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon. Meanwhile, Olusegun Obasanjo the second in command to the fallen leader, was prudent but cowardly in hiding at the residence of Chief S.B Bakare in Ikoyi after surviving by the skin of his teeth a call on his residence by the insurgents.
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Babangida led troops to NBC in a display of raw courage. He leveraged his past relationship with Dimka when things were quiet and informed the inebriated fellow that he would not mind death from his bosom friend. Dimka’s co-plotters, red-eyed, told him to do just that without compunction. Inexplicably, there was no bloodletting but Dimka was allowed to escape via a barbed wire to be arrested at Afikpo in East Central State and flown to Lagos to face military justice. What transpired at NBC and how did Dimka escape from the scene? All these hair-raising scenes provide psycho analysts with enough materials to gauge the character of the first maximum leader who styled himself, President, after a palace coup cemented by the dubious execution of his bosom friend and best man. All these in the womb of time.
Olusegun Obasanjo succeeded the slain Muritala Mohammed and supervised the transition programme of the regime. He told the nation that the best candidate was not guaranteed to win the race. The man whose ambition was to be in the Senate won the Presidency and ‘one nation one destiny’ became the slogan of the winning party. Its victory was tainted and its leading actors felt that it was their turn in the sun after years of bloody military interregnum. Alas, they have not learned from the debacle of the First Republic. By their crass incompetence and unbelievable gluttony, they messed up the hopes of the nation and their forlorn compatriots when they were booted out four years and three months into a doomed experiment. The new ‘messiahs’, under the guise of forced patriotism also alienated the citizenry by their insensitivity and lack of political nous. It paved the way for an ambitious and steely resolved fellow: the first political general and the man on horseback who believed that every man and everything has a price.
On the 25th day of August 1985, the Buhari government was toppled in a palace coup engineered by Ibrahim Babangida. Three young majors effected his arrest while his no-nonsense deputy was in Saudi Arabia on the lesser hajj. One of the majors said later in a fairly different context that the majority in the army was ready to follow Babangida into battle blindfolded. Unknown to elements who fronted for the coup, a plane was in Minna to fly Babangida into an Egyptian exile with the blessings of President Hosni Mubarak if the power bid misfired. Just in case! The picture of the recent victor entering a waiting car with Colonel Shagaya, Brigadier Dongoyaro et al in a victorious mood was revealing. Babangida talked about the insensitivity of yesterday’s regime, its know-all attitude to affairs of state, and virtually all the ills plaguing the nation. It had been the mandatory ritual of justifying the reasons for the coup and demonizing the ousted men who had provided ample reasons for their removal, the mood in the streets was jubilant. Like the fickle Roman mobs of old, the people were simply tired and fed up.
Babangida styled himself President to rule by the Armed Forces Ruling Council. The power cognomen was significant in many ways. Nigeria was to be ruled by a man who understood real power and its nuances. He knew the gullibility of his compatriots was limitless and cynically played on them at first. He removed the seemingly obnoxious and suffocating decrees of Buhari which most members endorsed when they were members of the Supreme Military Council. Decrees 2 and 4 were removed. The prisons were thrown open to release the hostages of the Nigeria Security Organization (NSO) whose physical appearances belied tales of bestiality under Rafindadi. The cases of political prisoners given long and vindictive terms were to be reviewed and a court was set up for this purpose.
Tellingly the regime promised to rule with a human face. Few cynical Nigerians wondered if any regime had to promise to rule with a human face. One of the most fetching scenes occurred when Babangida refused an umbrella offered to him in the pouring rain on the 25th Independence Day parade. The press was fulsome in its fawning and adulating praises of the man with a Midas touch. It seems as if the honeymoon will go on forever. The anti-establishment Nigerian Tribune coined the sycophantic acronym IBB. The columnist Femi Osofisan cautioned softly softly. The debonair star journalist, Dele Giwa with its trail-blazing Newswatch, was taken in by the initial razzmatazz. It seemed that the man could do no wrong what with the nation’s recent ordeal under Buhari?
The first alarm bells rang barely five months into the life of the regime when it announced that an attempt to topple the young government was unearthed and scorched. The intention was to bomb strategic infrastructures and return the country to the dark and discredited immediate past. The brain behind this supposedly dastardly project was a bosom friend and best man at the marriage of the leader–Major General Mamman Jiya Vatsa in cahoots with some middle level officers. The accused’s fellow officers were some of the most vocal and uncompromising men who could see through the shenanigans of the new men in power.
Of sad irony was Folorunso Martin Luther, a veteran presidential pilot who Babangida joked with a few days before his arrest. He was believed to be the chap waiting in the wings at Minna with a plane to fly Babangida to Cairo in case the power grab misfired. He was said to have spilled the beans after the success of the coup; Vatsa himself warned that any institution that demystified itself on the basis of spurious and ridiculous allegations against its members was on the way to defenestration. The men knew that they were doomed. Three Nigerian authors pleaded for a reprieve of the death sentence to no avail.
While the appeals for leniency and clemency were still pouring in, the chairman of the powerless Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Domkat Bali, calmly informed the nation on national television that the men had been executed ‘an hour ago’. Subsequent revelations had it that the men were very much alive ‘an hour ago’. Domkat Bali himself told The News after relinquishing power that there was no sufficient evidence for the executions. But the message was clear to future jostlers for power—if a best man could be executed on unproven charges, nobody in the officer corps was safe from a vengeful power craftsman. The gloves were off but the iron fist was still in the cloak.
The regime settled into the business of governing. Men who should have been alert to the clear and present danger were taken in by the ever-smiling gap toothed general. Chief Obafemi Awolowo and General Olusegun Obasanjo visited the general in the seat of power thus endorsing him in a way. The general was even politic enough to escort the men to their cars. Nigeria became a vast laboratory for hare brained and self-serving schemes—MAMSER, DIPRI, NOA et al. Eggheads were recruited from institutes of higher learning to lend an intellectual flair to the programmes of the regime: some for a price and a little for altruistic and patriotic reasons.
In the end all came to grief with the extraordinary exception of Olikoye Ransome Kuti who served with distinction in the health sector. Kuti recounted his first meeting with Babangida at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPPS) Kuru Jos where Babangida listened raptly to his lecture on primary health care, taking copious notes in the process. When he seized power, he invited Koye to come and put into action his ideas on primary health care. Shunning all ostentations of power, Koye Kuti served the nation selflessly despite the murky surroundings he operated in.
Signs that the honeymoon was at an end came when Nigeria joined the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) through the back door. The then second in command, Commodre Ebitu Ukiwe, said unambiguously that joining the organisation was never tabled before the AFRC. For his bluntness he lost his job. Next was the case of one Gloria Okon who was arrested for drug trafficking and was said to have died in custody. A corpse was duly produced but busy bodies said they saw Gloria Okon dancing away at a disco party in London. Believed to be married to a powerful retired military officer, it was believed that she was beyond the law. Some believed that she was fronting high ranking military officers in the highly lucrative drug smuggling business. Did Dele Giwa stumble on this uncomfortable fact with incontrovertible evidence and paid with his life? Haliru Akilu and Togun, both colonels in the military intelligence arm of the army, said that Dele Giwa moved in front of a moving train and paid the ultimate price for his contumely impertinence despite his close connections and access to privileged information from the powers that be.
It was in the political and economic spheres that the nation came to a cropper. The regime rolled out a transition to civil rule scheduled to terminate in 1990. Politicians were banned, unbanned and banned. What had been described as ‘test tube’ political parties were decreed into life, ‘a little to the left and a little to the right’. No ‘undue radicalism’ please. Party offices were built in all local governments in the nation for the parties named the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and National Republican Convention (NRC). Desperate and spineless politicians bought into this shenanigan. Detentions and newspaper proscriptions became the order of the day. It was Buhari all over again but with velvet gloves. Buhari and his deputy were meanwhile still in detention without charges until Obasanjo and some Nigerians called for the duo’s release.
In the economic sphere, the choice of the nation via a Political Bureau to reject the IMF and World Bank conditionalities was brusquely brushed aside, and what was known as the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was introduced. There was to be no alternative despite Professor Aluko’s assertion that only death had no alternative. The high priests of SAP in the persons of Chief Olu Falae and Prof. Kalu Idika Kalu, stuck to this ruinous policy prompting Professor Niyi Osundare to ask what sort of medicine would kill before curing! Nigeria erupted into an orgy of protests and violence against SAP and its effects on their lives. Undue radicalism fuelled by the universities was blamed for this uprising. In the rare moment of a Freudian slip, Babangida wondered why the economy had not collapsed, saying it had defied all logic.
Was this a repudiation of the voodoo economics of his economic sorcerers and their IMF/World Bank remote controllers? Meanwhile, the $12.8b oil revenue windfall from the Gulf War had been frittered away in foreign adventures like the ECOMOG (Ecomorgue) wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone with Nigerian soldiers coming back home in body bags to be secretly buried in the middle of the night. Tayo Awotunsi and Kris Imodibe’s lives – Nigerian journalists covering the war – were not spared either not to talk of Nigerian civilians who were killed by vengeful rebels for their country’s intervention. The rebels prevailed rendering Nigeria’s efforts wasteful and uncalled for.
Some disgruntled middle-level officers using ex-servicemen as spearheads launched a bloody and severe critique of the regime. They penetrated the seemingly impregnable sanctum of power in Dodan barracks to kill Babangida and seize power. The coup day broadcast accused the regime of many misdeeds, but its greatest undoing was to excise five states that they deemed as parasitic from the federation. The coup failed and was drowned in vengeful and unprecedented executions of the plotters. According to Seye Kehinde, then writing for the African Concord, the only journalist who smuggled himself into the Kirikiri prison to witness the executions, the doomed men sang to their inevitable deaths. According to the report, the very ground of Kirikiri was heaving with foaming and frothing blood and hardened prison warders were weeping openly for they had never witnessed such bloodletting.
It was in the political transition that the regime overreached itself and scored its own goal which was grievous for the polity. Called Maradona by the late Chief Bisi Onabanjo aka Aiyekoto for his glibness and amoral political dexterity, Babangida’s attempt to score with the hands of God failed woefully. It was an open secret that the man would not relinquish power willfully even after the severe Gideon Orkah coup that led him to scamper to Abuja and bunkered in an Aso Rock fortress to embark on the most enduring political chicanery ever visited on a weary and exhausted people. They trooped out on the 12th day of June 1993, when the elements were unusually merciful to vote for the presidential election programmed to fail in Babangida’s endless manipulative schemes to stay in power forever.
Despite the last-minute maneuver to stall the election in a court of law, the people voted overwhelmingly for a Muslim/Muslim ticket. Chief MKO Abiola defeated his major opponent Alhaji Bashir Tofa in his state of Kano and even garnered the votes of Babangida’s primary constituency in military barracks across the length and breadth of the country. The man then committed political suicide and plunged the country into an unimaginable cul de sac by annulling the elections! He could not bear the thought of resigning after street-wide protests erupted, hence hestepped aside exactly eight years of seizing power at the barrel of a gun suffered and endured an inglorious exit. Nigerians prayed that ‘May his type nerve come again’. Alas as the Americans are wont of saying: ‘they ain’t seen nothing yet’.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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