PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

June 12, Me and Dare’s Diatribe 2 of 3

kudugana@yahoo.com

Whereas the editorial of the Nigerian Tribune in question reduced June 12 to a purely Yoruba affair, an earlier editorial in The Guardian of June 23 had cautioned against doing just that. Titled “Arresting the drift”, the editorial argued that the struggle for June 12 was not just between Abiola and Tofa or between the North and the South or between Islam and Christianity. Rather, it was, as the newspaper said quite correctly, a struggle “between the democratic political current nationally constituted…and the anti-democratic current, also nationally constituted.”

Unfortunately The Guardian’s exhortation was ignored by the “June Twelvers” and, in time, by even the newspaper itself. Several leading supporters of the cause like Alhaji Balarabe Musa, the late Chief S.B. Awoniyi and Col. Dangiwa Umar, who would eventually lose his commission for his stand on June 12, were kept at arm’s length by the inner caucus of the “June Twelvers” simply because they were either non-Yoruba, or, in the case of Awoniyi, the wrong type of Yoruba.

No one put this unfortunate reduction of June 12 into an essentially Yoruba affair better than Professor Sam Aluko, a quintessential Awoist if ever there was one.

At the risk of once again annoying Dare, I will quote Aluko extensively in his interview with the Lagos based The Country weekly newspaper (May 20 – 26, 2002), since rested.

Aluko said he was once tried by the UPN hierarchy for reading the National Concord and for even talking to its reporters because Abiola, its publisher, was then regarded in UPN circles as “the greatest enemy of the Yoruba race because he didn’t allow Awolowo to become president.” This was partly in obvious reference to the propaganda war that raged between the Tribune, as the veritable voice of the Yoruba, and Concord in the early eighties, a war which Concord won hands down.

Everything suddenly changed after June 12, said Aluko. “Then we had June 12 and Abiola suddenly became a martyr. They found Abiola useful as a rallying point for Yoruba cause and he suddenly became a martyr. The Bishop of Akure led us into a procession in Akure that it was Abiola who went and sank a ship that was bringing Bibles and Christian hymn books to Nigeria. We demonstrated in Akure against Abiola in those days. Yet the same Bishop became one of the greatest advocates of Abiola after June 12 because he was a Yoruba… If Abiola were a Northerner, they would be happy that his elections were annulled. If he were Igbo, Yorubas would be happy that his election was annulled. When Abacha deposed the Sultan of Sokoto, there was celebration in Yorubaland. They praised Abacha as a good and a strong man who could deal with the Caliphate. I told them it was wrong because if Abacha had deposed Ooni, would they be happy? They said no, that the Caliphate needed to be dealt with. That again is ethnicity.”

Not only did the “June Twelvers” reduce the struggle into essentially a Yoruba affair, Abiola himself who should have gone to equity with clean hands did so with his hands soiled, in a manner of speaking. This, however, was not altogether surprising because of his antecedents as one of the closest business associates of the country’s military top brass.

One of the worst kept secrets of the June 12 struggle was that Abiola worked with Abacha as the most senior military officer left behind after Babangida stepped aside on August 27, to actualize June 12. So enamoured of Abacha did Abiola become that he had nothing but praises for the general before November 17. On a visit to the Kaduna State headquarters of his party, the SDP, on September 28, 1993, he praised what he said was Abacha’s patriotism. “I really commend General Sani Abacha,” he said, “because out of his love of the country, he puts his commonsense, experience and intellect to ease out former president, General Ibrahim Babangida. I have no doubt that it is that commonsense, that patriotism, that intellect, that will enable him to ease out his (Babangida) surrogates… but for people like Sani Abacha this country would have plunged into bloodshed.”

If any evidence was needed of a pact between Abiola and Abacha, this was it. But even more evidence were to surface later on of the dependence of the “June Twelvers” on military conspiracy instead of the admittedly slower and more difficult nationwide mobilization of the civilian front to actualize June 12. Early in November, two leading “June Twelvers”, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi and Chief Gani Fawehinmi, categorically called on Abacha to throw out the Ernest Shonekan interim government Babangida had cobbled together upon his departure. Even before their call, when Citizen went to interview Abiola for a cover story in the heat of the June 12 crisis, there was a large picture of Abacha in mufti in his living room and none of Babangida whose pictures used to adorn the living room that was virtually like a town hall as a venue of his business and politics.

On November 17, the general finally answered the prayers of the “June Twelvers” and threw out Shonekan. However, instead of handing over power to them as they had envisaged, the man predictably kept it for himself.

Then on November 22, the chief himself went to Dodan Barracks, then the seat of the military government, and met his co-conspirator in what amounted to a propaganda coup for Abacha. The night before, at an acrimonious meeting in Abiola’s residence the “June Twelvers” who wanted him to cooperate with rather confront Abacha had prevailed. And so when he met the general it was essentially to give him a list of his nominees for ministers – and lament about how the general had let him down.

The rest, as they say, is history; in the twinkle of the eyes of the “June Twelvers” - who, by generally accepting to be part of Abacha’s government, obviously wanted to eat their cake and still have it - Abacha went from hero to the chief villain of the piece, just as Abiola had gone from villain to hero with the same speed.

What became crystal clear from all this was that, contrary to all their highfalutin claims, June 12 for the “June Twelvers,” was more about power than about democracy. Still Citizen initially supported June 12 because we thought the chief could see that his problem was with his military friends and not with the ordinary northerners who massively rejected his rival, who was their own son, at the polls. We thought he had learnt his lessons that anyone who rode on the back of a tiger was likely to end in its belly. His reliance on the military instead of the political class to get his chestnut out of fire so soon after Babangida annulled the presidential election, showed that he hadn’t.

One of the things Abiola became famous for in time was his very down to earth and graphic proverbs. Among them was one about coconuts and heads. “No one whose head is used to crack a coconut,” he often said, “lives to partake in eating it.” It was obvious that the “June Twelvers” were merely using Abiola’s head to crack the coconuts that had been so difficult for them to crack since the colonial times, basically because of their superiority complex. Abiola seemed more than happy to let them.

Not surprisingly he did not live to partake in eating the coconuts that many of the “June Twelvers” cracked with his head. Instead his vast business empire collapsed even before his death and none of the “June Twelvers” who made huge political and personal fortunes out of his martyrdom ever tried to help sustain his legacy, most notably The Concord Press which, in time, became his most well known legacy. Any regular commuter between the domestic and international terminals of Murtala Mohammed Airport, Ikeja, Lagos, must have felt scandalized by the way weeds, and, I suspect, all manner of reptiles and rodents, completely took over the Concord premises that lies between the terminals even before the man died.

In confusing himself about whether or not I ever called for the cancellation of the general elections, Dare said I was disingenuous and dishonest to have “conflate(d)” the presidential primaries with the presidential election proper.” One, he said, was a party affair, whereas the other was “a national affair in which over 14 million Nigerians trooped to the polls against contrived odds.” The two were of course not the same. But if any thing was disingenuous and dishonest it was Dare’s attempt to justify Babangida’s interference with one and condemn him for doing the same with the other.

One of Dare’s accusations against me is that I am a master of regurgitation who is incapable of arguing or expounding from first principles. It is, he will agree with me, a first principle of democracy that people, regardless of the level of their activity, should be free to choose their leaders. In other words there should not be one set of rules for internal political party democracy and another one for the wider society. Indeed if anything, political parties should be held to a higher standard than the wider society because as the courts said recently in one of the election petitions before them, a party like the PDP which lacked internal democracy cannot give you democracy since no one can give another what he does not have. If, as Dare himself said, Babangida’s transition programme was a sham how sensible was it then to have expected it to give the country true democracy?

For someone who has pontificated about expounding from first principles, how could he fail to see that it was wrong to prescribe one set of rules for one level of democracy and a different set for another level? This is simply practicing double standards. And it is for this reason that I have said time and again and will say so again and again that June 12 cannot have any better claim to be the symbol of the struggle for democracy in Nigeria than May 29, or for that matter, any other date.