PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

2011: In Defence Of Babangida

ndajika@yahoo.com

Of the five top seeds – to borrow a lawn tennis metaphor – in next year’s presidential contest, namely, President Goodluck Jonathan (it’s pretty obvious from the man’s equivocations that he will contest), former military rulers, Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Ibrahim Babangida, the National Security Adviser, General Aliyu Mohammed, and former vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, none has drawn as much flak from the country’s commentariat as Babangida.

His chief crime seems to be his annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election whose putative winner was the business baron and newspaper publisher, Chief M.K.O. Abiola. His other alleged crimes include claims that he made corruption the guiding principle of his state policy and that his regime murdered Mr. Dele Giwa, the great columnist and a founding editor and publisher of Newswatch, who was killed in his Lagos residence in 1985 through the novelty of a parcel bomb. The list goes on and on.

Take, for example, Dr. Olatunji Dare, the Tuesday back page columnist of The Nation and one of the country’s most rigorous and eloquent. Babangida, he said in his column of April 20, must never be allowed to rule this country again. “Babangida: Never again,” he thundered in the headline of the article.

The man, he said, “destroyed the nation’s value system and left the country on the verge of ruin when he was swept out of power by an unarmed but fully mobilized civil society.” He said worse.

Nine years ago when Babangida first tried to run for the presidency I thought it was a mistake and said so in the Daily Trust of January 17, 2001. However, in contrast to his implacable critics like the veteran columnist, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, and the late radical lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, who said the man must never be allowed to run, I only said he shouldn’t because if he did it would not have been in breach of any of our laws or of our constitution.

Babangida, it may be argued,  has been convicted in the court of media, if not public, opinion of several sundry “crimes”, but that was precisely why public opinion in the shape of the ballot box, and not his critics, ought to have been – and still should be -  the judge of his fitness to rule us again.

He did not, of course, run in the end. He himself said it was because he did not want to contest against Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’adua whom he regarded as his younger brother. Few people, I suspect, believed him. Most people probably believed he knew, sibling loyalty or not, that he could not overcome President Olusegun Obasanjo’s ruthless determination to keep any one he could manipulate from taking over.   

Obasanjo’s departure as president three years ago may have since cleared the coast for Babangida. Or so he presumably reckons. Of course, as the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the ruling party and as the benefactor and self-imposed counsellor of President Jonathan, Obasanjo can still create problems for Babangida and for anyone else he doesn’t like. But obviously both roles combined do not have anywhere near the power of being president.

Not surprisingly this time Babangida has been absolutely unequivocal about contesting next year’s presidential elections. I still believe he shouldn’t. And as with 2007 my reasons are different from those of most of his critics.

Most of critics list his annulment of “June 12” as his No. 1 crime. Dare, for example, listed three crimes against Babangida. The man, the columnist said, “destroyed the nation’s value system,” foisted a dubious eight-year transition program on Nigeria which he aborted in the end, all in a pretext to hang on to power.

Dare, however, dwelt extensively only on the annulment of “June 12.” Babangida, he said quite rightly, quoting extensively from the man’s June 26, 1993, annulment speech, cannot now claim credit for “June 12” as the “freest and fairest” election in the country’s history when, back then, he said it was full of incurable flaws.

Which, indeed, it was. Until Chief Abiola coasted to an apparent victory, virtually all Babangida’s critics condemned his program as essentially self-serving. Fawehinmi, for example, called the two parties Babangida created after he threw away the 13 or so Professor Humphrey Nwosu, as chairman of the national electoral commission, said qualified for provisional registration, “The Babangida Babes.”

 The late Chief Bola Ige was even more scathing of the program. “The universal truth,” he said in an article in The Guardian on Sunday of November 24, 1991, “cannot be denied, not even in Nigeria. You do not plant peanuts and reap coconut. Never.” That was why, he said, he decided to “Siddon look” and have absolutely nothing to do with Babangida’s program.

Equally damning was Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka, who described the program as “voodoo politics” in an interview in the Newswatch of September 27, 1993. He found the whole thing so abhorrent, he said, he did not vote and never even registered, to begin with.

Dare is right to say Babangida should not be allowed to claim credit for an election he annulled. The fact, however, was that the election was not, and could not have been, the “freest and fairest” in Nigeria’s history. To rephrase Ige, you cannot plant “voodoo politics” and reap free and fair elections in the true sense of those words.

It therefore amounts to stretching logic beyond its elastic limit to say Babangida should be barred from power simply because he annulled “June 12.”

A more solid ground for barring him from power would be the claim that he made corruption the guiding principle of his state policy. The problem is, no one as yet has offered proof of this beyond such circumstantial evidence that the man, for example, lives in retirement in opulence in his native Minna, or that many of his friends are among some of the richest in the land.  

When Dare, for example, said Babangida, presumably single-handedly, “destroyed the nation’s value system...” he did not offer the quality of proof he did when he accused the man of being clever by half in claiming credit for an election he himself annulled. We are only left to assume that Babangida’s culpability is so proverbial no proof is ever needed.

The assumption here, of course, is that the nation’s value system was sound until Babangida came along in August 1985. Nothing could be more fallacious. Not even Obasanjo who has been more cunning and ruthless than Babangida in exploiting our weaknesses and who has done more damage to our political-economy than all previous rulers combined, considering the difference between the oil windfall his government enjoyed throughout his eight years and what he left on the ground, can be accused of single-handedly destroying the nation’s values.

Babangida may have exploited our greed and other weaknesses to hang on to power for eight years but you cannot, in all fairness, blame the man for our weaknesses or for allowing him to exploit them. After all in those eight years there were several Nigerians like Professor Attahiru Jega who, as president of Academic Staff Union of Universities, resisted the man’s charms in the long war that raged between ASUU and government but suffered no adverse consequences whatsoever.

We have, of course, heard of Halliburton and the Gulf War Oil Windfall of 1991. The problem with these more specific cases of corruption against the man is that 17 years after he “stepped aside” from power no government has been willing to bring any charges against him. Until they do and get convictions against him, surely we must presume him innocent even in the court of media opinion.  

Yes, Babangida should stay away from any elections for good, but not because he annulled “June 12” or because he is simply accused of spreading corruption in the land. Nor should he keep away because, as The Guardian said in its editorial of May 12, the man is too old at 68. Awo, Zik, Ige, Obasanjo, the lot, they were all over 60 when they still contested presidential elections or said they would, and no one seriously suggested they shouldn’t have.

For probably most Nigerians Babangida’s biggest crime was his introduction of Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in 1987. For me, however, the problem was not so much SAP itself; in a way it was inevitable given our profligacy of the decades before. The problem was that in implementing it he did not show the will to exact as much sacrifice from those at the top of society as he did from those at the bottom.

In one word, there was no equity in his implementation of SAP. Seventeen years after the man steeped away from power, I don’t think he has the blueprint, even less so, the will, to do so.

This is reason enough only for the man to opt out. It is certainly no reason to bar him from contesting for the presidency if he so wishes. Otherwise we would have to bar all the other contestants in next year’s presidential race because none, including the incumbent, has shown any signs that he has the blueprint and the will to bring equity to the land.