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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Buhari and Co’s Revisionism?
Since we last met on these pages nearly a month ago, a lot of water, as they say, has passed under the bridge. Of all the events that occurred during the interval, I feel obliged to visit two if only because they touch me personally. The first was the headline news in our media that claimed three former heads of state, Generals Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, have said the late former head of state, General Sani Abacha, never looted the national treasury, contrary to widespread stories about his famed venality. They reportedly said this at his family residence in Kano on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of his death on June 8, 1998.
The second event was the diatribe against me that my last article apparently provoked from my good friend and professional colleague, ace columnist, Dr. Olatunji Dare. In my article of June 11 on these pages, I argued that neither May 29 which President Olusegun Obasanjo imposed on Nigeria nor June 12 which Nigeria’s co-called progressives want Obasanjo’s imposition replaced with, deserve to be celebrated as Nigeria’s Democracy Day.
In stating my case, I focused on several of Dare’s articles as a principal advocate of June 12. Apparently that angered him no end and he decided to really knock me out for six in his column in The Nation the following Tuesday. The reader should be able to judge how well he succeeded when I respond to his diatribe next week.
Today, we shall concern ourselves with the media claims that Generals Buhari, Babangida and Abdulsalami said General Abacha never looted the national treasury. The first time I read the reports as published by most of our leading newspapers, my initial reaction was incredulity. Gradually this changed into anger, especially against General Abdulsalami whose chief press secretary I was.
Of all people, I said to myself, how could he deny that Abacha stole from the public purse? How could he deny all those huge sums of monies I announced on his behalf as having been recovered from the Abacha family? Did it mean the pain I suffered in silence for refusing to retract my briefing of the State House correspondents on March 22, 1999, was all in vain? Let me explain.
The background to my March 22 briefing was what I thought was a gratuitous press conference by General Sani Abacha’s minister of finance, Chief Anthony Ani, in November 1998. During the press conference in Lagos he regaled reporters with stories about how his boss, in cahoots with the then National Security Adviser, Alhaji Ismaila Gwarzo, made irregular withdrawals of over 1.3 billion dollars from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) over a long period, first without his knowledge and then against his advice after he found out. Ani then claimed that his efforts following the demise of his former boss had led to the recovery of about 700 million dollars out of the withdrawals.
Ani’s press conference took place shortly after I became Abdulsalami’s press secretary in mid October. Naturally several senior officials of Abdulsalami’s regime took a very dim view of Ani’s attempt to wash his hands off the many cases of corruption under the Abacha regime that had came to light soon after his sudden death. Worse, these officials saw Ani’s attempt to claim credit for reversing the financial damage done to the country by the regime’s venality as an insult on everybody’s intelligence.
At the time Ani spoke, the new government was still battling hard to get several of Abacha’s associates and members of his family to even acknowledge that they had done anything wrong. The battle was made even harder for my boss because of his belief as a Muslim that you should speak, hear or see no evil of the dead. This much became clear to me when he routinely deleted even the slightest criticisms of Abacha from each and every draft of his speeches.
After months of negotiations, several of which were led by Abdulsalami’s NSA, Major-General Abdullahi Mohammed, Ani, who had claimed innocence of Abacha’s financial irregularities, was made to pay back some 30 million dollars he said his boss had given him as a gift. Other officials and members of Abacha’s family either paid back various sums in both local and foreign currencies or gave written pledges to do so.
I suppose it was to put all this behind him and get on with the more immediate business of bringing military rule to an end that my boss summoned me and the NSA for a meeting in his office on Sunday March 21, 1999 for the two of them to brief me on what to tell Nigerians about the progress he had made in getting to the bottom of the stories of Abacha’s venality that had become a staple of the country’s rumour mill.
The following day I duly briefed the State House press correspondence on that and several other issues. Naturally I started with the issue of the moment, i.e. the recoveries. I had just moved on to the other issues when the NSA rushed into the press conference room looking somewhat worried. He then called me aside to ask if I had already spoken on the recoveries. I said yes, I had. Was there any way I could retract what I said? There wasn’t I told him categorically. Why the retraction, I asked. He wouldn’t tell me.
In time however, I found out that one of Abacha’s key ministers, Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu, had an audience that morning with my boss. Dalhatu was Abacha’s minister of power and steel and had several allegations of financial irregularities against him. The minister was a tough lawyer and he proved probably the toughest nut for Abdulsalami’s regime to crack.
I never knew what transpired between him and my boss but I had a sneaky suspicion it was why the NSA requested me to retract my briefing. Of course I refused knowing fully well that I did not misrepresent my boss and that such a retraction would, in any case, do irreparable damage not only to my reputation but also to that of the government. If my boss had any problems with the Abachas and with Dalhatu, I said to myself, that was his headache.
My refusal to retract my press briefing nearly cost me my job. I told the NSA who was the boss of Abdulsalami’s personal staff and who had taken me under his wings that I intended to resign. I would do no such thing, he said. My boss had asked him to suspend me for not getting a final clearance from him first thing in the morning before talking to the press but he had advised against it.
The following Tuesday, my boss was to travel to Saudi Arabia for the year’s Hajj which was significant as one of the few in which the holy day of Arafat falls on a Friday. Like every Muslim it was a pilgrimage I would have loved to go on, but knowing that my boss was still angry with me, I told the NSA I will not even go to the airport since I was supposed to have been on suspension. The NSA persuaded me otherwise and so I went to the airport and boarded the presidential jet. However, shortly before take-off, someone the late Colonel Aprezhi, his ADC, I think, came to me and whispered that, the boss said I must disembark.
Naturally I felt angry. However, for some inexplicable reason I felt even more sorrow for my boss. Even though I never knew what transpired between him and Dalhatu on his own behalf and on behalf of the Abacha family, something told me he needed to show them he had punished me for embarrassing them. It cannot be a happy thing for a head of state, and a four star army general to boot, to look so helpless before anyone.
In spite of how my boss let me down in the twilight of his regime I always defended him anytime I felt he was being unduly maligned. I defended him when Obasanjo set up the Oputa panel as essentially a battle tank to deal with Abacha and anyone he felt did not stand up for him when Abacha sentenced him to death for alleged coup attempt. I defended him when some “June Twelvers” unfairly dragged him to court in America over their incredulous claim that he, of all people, killed Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the presumed winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. After all wasn’t he the one who released all political prisoners and made it possible for two of Abiola’s wives to see him in jail ahead of his plan to release him? I also defended him when his name was unfairly dragged in the mud for chairing Energo, an energy sector company falsely accused of non-performance by the National Assembly committee investigating energy contracts.
I am not one of those obsessed with personal loyalty. Even then I felt if I stood by my boss in his times of need he should at least stand on what he instructed me to tell the world about corruption under the Abacha regime. Hence my anger at what the press claimed he said.
I have since spoken to him about the issue and he has categorically denied he ever said Abacha’s regime was not corrupt. How could he say so, he asked, when the whole world knew so much has been recovered from Abacha’s family?
As I said, my anger was not only against my boss. I also felt angry with my benefactor, Babangida, and his predecessor, Buhari. How, I asked myself, could they not see that attempting to revise the sordid record of Abacha’s regime was dangerous for the unity and even the very survival of Nigeria? How could they not see that such a joint indefensible defense of Abacha could tear the country down the middle into North against South, Muslim against non-Muslim?
As with my boss, I have also since spoken with Buhari and he too has denied he ever said there was no corruption under Abacha. How could he have said that, he asked, when just three days before June 8, an official of the Swiss Embassy in Abuja had announced to the world that his country had returned the last dollar of Abacha’s alleged loot having waited in vain all these years for his family to come forward with proof that the monies in their Swiss accounts were legitimate?
I have not been able to speak to Babangida since then but I would be surprised if he said what the press said he said. For, was it not only eight years ago last month that he told Newswatch he was shocked at the scale of venality that had been attributed to Abacha whom he thought he knew very well as his comrade-in-arms in the country’s long history of military coups? You can accuse Babangida of anything but no one can accuse him of senility.
Compared to President Obasanjo, Abacha has turned out to be like a saint in this despicable and almost universal business of venality. But no one in his right mind or with even the shallowest memory will say Abacha was truly a saint. The Buhari, Babangida and Abdulsalami I know are men of sound mind and of long enough memory. Certainly they could not have forgotten so soon that gargantuan as the scale of corruption had been under Obasanjo in the last eight years, it was not exactly an small time under Abacha. |