SELF-styled Nigeria’s first and only military President, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, who ruled the country between 1985 and 1993 and only had to step aside after the electoral fiasco at the end of his absurd political experiment of June 12, 1993, seems to still savour his legendarily repugnant repasts. Their well-known recipe of deliberate falsehoods and caprices in various sizes of dollops may still be effective garnishing for the meal, but its taste is now sour, even bitter.
Though he successfully bruised his friend’s face in the 1993 presidential election, rubbing his face in the mud for full effects as Hope 93 was effectively trounced and dashed, thus denying billionaire businessman, Chief MKO Abiola his political ambition, it would, however, seem IBB is not done yet.
While commiserating with the family of the late Mubashiru Abiola, the younger brother of MKO, who had died at 74 after a protracted illness, IBB sent a personally signed condolence message in which he revealed that the late Mubashiru was an accomplice in the annulment of the results.
IBB wrote in his condolence message that “despite the annulment of June 1993 elections, presumed to have been won by his elder brother and irrespective of the backlash, our relationship still blossomed, largely because he understood the circumstances that necessitated our action. He was a very frank family man who abhorred malice to a great extent.”
Approximately 15 years ago when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by the late revered Justice Chukwudifu Oputa was assigned to soothe the bruised nerves inflicted by the country’s national history and ethnic grudges, IBB pointedly ignored all entreaties to appear before it with a contemptuous and disdainful attitude.
IBB in his so-called letter of condolence conveniently reduced the national tragedy, which the annulment of the 1993 presidential elections results represented, to a family misfortune as if it was only the Abiola family that suffered the loss of an election that was run on the national purse. This is nothing but blatant, deliberate mischief. How can a former president of Nigeria possibly fail to recognise the national significance of his own misguided experiment which culminated in the death of several Nigerians in its aftermath?
How can he reveal the late Mubashiru as an accomplice of such a national tragedy only after the man had died and as such could not refute it if indeed it was, as suspected, a lie? IBB, truth be told, owes the country as a whole an apology for the tragic events to which he is fond of returning at will for relevance. If the late Mubashiru knew — as IBB claimed – “why he annulled June 12 election”, don’t other Nigerians also deserve to know?
On the other hand, IBB thinks his military antecedents may absolve him of his responsibility to both history and the country’s sovereignty; therefore he treats the matter with an offensive levity that easily galls decent people. For how can any leader, by any stretch of definition, be so capricious as to reduce a national tragedy to a family feud? And in the same breath, how can he turn a man he described in his letter of condolence as “a very frank family man who abhorred malice to a great extent” into a traitor who, like him, betrayed the national conscience?
In any event, the June 12, 1993 saga was a historic national event, not confined to the Abiola family because the country’s citizens trooped out to cast their votes including those innocent souls who eventually died in its aftermath that were not even remotely connected to the Abiola family. So why did IBB choose to involve a dead man who was neither alive nor in a position to confirm or deny his assertions? This is a Freudian slip that shows the underbelly of the concept of leadership in Africa which presupposes that political positions should be appropriated as family patrimony.
Did IBB also intend to cast an aspersion on the late Mubashiru Abiola in order to confuse the whole family that he was indeed the reprehensible mole who sold his elder brother out in that tragic and regrettable June 12, 1993 saga? IBB had an opportunity during the tenure of the Truth and Reconciliation Panel to explain before the whole country what transpired during the annulment of what, till date, remains the most peaceful and credible election in the annals of the country’s political history, but he blew it.
His recourse to elegy at the graveside of a dead man in order to paper over his historic gross treasonable felony, which any military intrusion into the civil political life of any country is by definition, clutching at the straws of sentiments so as to garner attention or relevance was certainly indecent and in poor taste. But then, how else would he have proved that he is, indeed, ‘the evil genius’?
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