PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Babangida, The Man Who Re-Engineered Nigeria

ndajika@yahoo.com

General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (GCFR), aka IBB, aka Maradona (of Nigeria’s politics), former army chief and former self-styled military president of Nigeria (August 27, 1985 to August 27 1993) is 70 today.

When, as army chief, the man ousted his boss, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, in a palace coup 26 years ago, he promised in one of his early broadcasts that he was going to be a bold leader, bolder than any we have seen before. He would, he said, rather go down in History as a leader who took the wrong decision than one who procrastinated.

Twenty six years on few Nigerians, I am sure, would dispute the fact that the man kept his word on both the domestic and external fronts. As I argued nearly twelve years ago on these pages, no Nigerian leader has sought to change the face of the country’s politics and socio-economy in as thoroughgoing way as Babangida. Whether he succeeded or failed in his attempt was, as I said, a matter for debate. Few, however, could dispute the fact that his eight-year rule had become a defining period of Nigeria’s history.

Here I’ll like to reproduce much of what I said about the man in the article in question published in Daily Trust of November 1, 2000 and The Comet (The Nation’s precursor) of the same date, because what I said at the time is as valid today as it was then. The article was a review of a well attended and well publicized symposium by The Open Press Limited in Jos in mid October 2000 which was in assessment of the man’s regime.

The most definitive proof of Babangida’s unsurpassed boldness, I said in the piece, was President Olusegun Obasanjo himself who, before his second coming as Nigeria’s leader, was the severest critic of Babangida, bar possibly the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi.

“Many years after condemning Babangida’s  economic policies of privation and deregulation as lacking a human face,” I said, “he adopted them lock stock and barrel, the major difference being that he seems to be doing worse than Babangida in implementing them.

“As for politics, not only has Obasanjo been a willing beneficiary of Babangida’s creed of the two party tendency, ha has hardly indicated any desire to deregulate party formation so that we can become a multi-party system, even if only in principle – something which he could do by initiating a bill that would remove INEC’s power to register political parties using stiff, if not impossible, guidelines.

“The  fact that seven years after Babangida ‘stepped aside’   we still conduct our politics and socio-economics in the mould he had set, makes it justified for him to claim at the end of the Jos symposium that he had indeed ‘re-engineered Nigeria’.

“This claim has, predictably become a matter for scorn among many analysts and much of the press for whom Babangida has become a, if not the, favourite whipping boy...Those who pour scorn on Babangida’s claim to have re-engineered Nigeria fall into at least two categories. First, there are those who concede that Babangida did indeed re-engineer Nigeria but they insist that in doing so he left Nigeria worse off and therefore he has no moral right to boast about his re-engineering feat. Second, there are those who argue that Babangida did re-engineer Nigeria for good and things would have remained so but for his seemingly unpardonable crime of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections which his friend Chief M.K.O. Abiola looked set to win.

“Analysts can debate the merits of these two schools of thought till Thy Kingdom Come. For me, however, whereas the first has some justification, the second is merely based on sentiment and little or no logic at all. No one, not even Babangida, can dispute the fact that SAP (Structural Adjustment Programme, the centre-piece of his economic policy) was bound to inflict, and did indeed inflict, pain on Nigerians. That was why programmes like the National Directorate of Employment, NERFUND, Peoples Bank, DIFFRI, etc were created to lessen the pains. Even then those programmes hardly achieved their objectives.

“However, to dwell on the pains alone and ignore the potential of Babangida’s economic policies to turn things around is not only short-sighted, it completely misses the point that his Structural Adjustment Policy was merely a necessary but not sufficient condition for things to actually turn around. I am a critic of the IMF-type SAP which seeks to impose completely unregulated market forces on Third World countries when elementary economics suggests quite clearly that no economy, not even United States’, the mother of capitalism, is completely unregulated and without a huge public sector.

“However, the inefficiency of and the corruption in most Third World public sectors, including Nigeria’s, is such that no development can possibly take place without deregulating it to a great extent and making the private sector to take over its role of being the engine of development.

“Babangida was, of course, not the first to see this point. He was, however, the first Nigerian leader to have had the courage to do something about it. If, in showing this courage, Babangida had succeeded in spreading the burdens of SAP among the rich, the middle class and the poor rather than restrict the sacrifice largely to the middle class and the poor, he probably would have been able to secure the long term support his policies needed to succeed. Thus he probably would have been saved the SAP riots of 1989 which provided an excuse for the bloody coup attempt of 1990, which in turn made him too paranoid to give matters of state, as opposed to his self-preservation, the priority he had accorded it up till then.

“Yes, Babangida’s SAP, like IMF’s SAP that it resembled somewhat, may have left Nigerians worse off than they were, but the same SAP given a human face was a necessary condition for turning things around. Surely Babangida deserved credit and not vilification for having the courage to embark on it. Chances are, if he had not embarked on it 14 years ago, bad as things are today, they would have been a hell lot worse.

“Now, whereas the argument that Babangida should not boast about re-engineering Nigeria because it inflicted a lot of pain on Nigerians has some justification, the argument that whatever good resulted from his re-engineering feat was annulled by his annulment of June 12, 1993 election has little or no merit. The reverse of this argument is that if Babangida had allowed the election to stand all his other perceived sins would have been forgiven if not forgotten. How the irrationality of this argument would escape the many otherwise intelligent people who make it, never ceases to amaze me.”

Next to his annulment of “June 12” probably his worst crime in the eyes of his many critics was his alleged complicity, at the least, in the murder via a parcel bomb of the celebrated columnist and editor, Dele Giwa, on October 19, 1986. But in this, even more so than in that of “June 12”, the critics’ views had been driven more by emotions than by the facts of the case. And these include the fact that Giwa’s personal lawyer, the indefatigable Chief Gani Fawehinmi, could not successfully pursue his private prosecution of the two Babangida intelligence chiefs, Colonels Halliru Akilu and A. K. Togun, that Fawehinmi has accused of the murder. On the contrary, he had in the end lost a libel case which the two has instituted against him.

Then again other than the possibility of Giwa being a victim of extra-judicial murder, there were two other possibilities, namely, (1) marital grouse on the part of his then estranged wife, Florence Ita-Giwa, whose driver, Olufemi Oyeleke, was identified by Giwa’s guard, Musa Zibo, as the person who delivered the parcel bomb, and (2) business grouse on the part of Mr. G. Coumantarous, the global flour mill magnate and Chairman of the huge Nigerian Flour Mill, Apapa.

Both Ita-Giwa and Coumantarous were interrogated by the police but Babangida’s critics were never interested in any consideration of these possibilities, having clearly made up their minds that Giwa had to be the victim of extra-judicial murder.

Much water, as they say, has passed under the bridge since Babangida “stepped aside” as military president 18 years ago. The man has tried to step back into power as a civilian twice since then, first in 2007 and then this year. On both occasions I had argued on these pages that it was unwise of him to have tried. I had argued that it was best that he played the role of a statesman and kingmaker after eight years in power and over 17 years in its corridors following the brave role he played in aborting the 1976 Dimka coup attempt in which the Head of State, General Murtala Mohammed, was gunned down in broad daylight in a Lagos traffic.

In any case his attempts, as we all know, have been unsuccessful. Those failures may have now diminished his reputation as the invincible grand master of Nigerian politics - from whence he got his sobriquet, Maradona – but it will be difficult to deny him the fact for good or for ill he has, more than any leader of this country to date, been responsible for re-casting the mould in which the politics and socio-economics of this country had been conducted since the First Republic.

Here’s Happy Birthday to the man who re-engineered Nigeria. And many more years of service to your country outside partisan politics.