People & Politics By Mohammed Haruna

Soyinka,  Babangida, and “June 12”

kudugana@yahoo.com

Four years ago the late Abidina Coomassie, veteran journalist, public relations expert and newspaper publisher, published his somewhat controversial Democracy and Political Opportunism in Nigeria. The blurb of the book described it as “the most penetrating expose of the conduct and contradicting utterances of prominent Nigerian political figures ever published”.

This claim may be somewhat exaggerated but no one who has read the book will deny that the documents Coomassie assembled in it from newspaper libraries, archives and the courts exposed the political opportunism of many a Nigerian public figure.

Among the seven subjects of the book was Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Another was the late Chief Bola Ige, also known as the Cicero of Agodi, on account of his way with words.. Soyinka’s recent widely publicized statement that General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) is free to join the next presidential race provided he apologizes to the Nigerian people over his cancellation of the results of June 12, 1993 presidential elections, reminded me of Coomassie’s book, as I shall explain presently.

Predictably Soyinka’s statement has provoked controversy in the local media and on the internet. Among those who have joined the controversy is a group calling itself Coalition for Democracy (CD) which Thisday of July 31, described as a pro-Atiku (i.e. the Vice-President Atiku Abubakar) group. “Pro-Atiku Group,” screamed the paper last Saturday “Slams IBB”. The CD, said the paper, disagreed with Soyinka that it was enough that Babangida should apologize to Nigerians over June 12 before he can join the presidential race in 2007. In addition, it said, Babangida must account for the controversial $12 billion oil windfall from the 1991 Gulf War.

While the CD apparently thinks Soyinka is too easy on Babangida, one frequent contributor to NaijaPolitics website, one Kayode Familoni, has been stoutly defending Babangida on the subject. No one, least of all the Nobel Laureate, Familoni says, has any right to ask Babangida to apologize over June 12. In this Familoni was joined last week by Alhaji Wada Nas, a leading opposition figure and a regular media commentator on Nigerian affairs.

Soyinka, of course, has every right to demand for an apology from Babangida  over June 12. But demands are one thing, their reasonableness and justifiability, another. Soyinka’s right to free speech guarantees him the right to demand almost anything. However, whether he gets it depends on how reasonable or justifiable such a demand is.

There are, to be sure, many Nigerians who would agree that Soyinka’s demand of an apology from Babangida is reasonable and justifiable, no doubt, the CD among them. This reporter is certainly not one of them.

The CD says not only should Babangida apologize for June 12, he must also give an account of what he did with the $12 billion oil windfall from the 1991 Gulf War. If I were the CD, I will be very careful on this windfall thing for at least two reasons. First, the government in which its supposed mentor, Atiku Abubakar, is No. 2, has a potential scandal on its hands regarding what it has done with the on-going oil windfall from the latest Anglo-American/Iraqi war. Nearly two years after the statutory Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) petitioned the National Assembly about a missing 300 billion plus Naira oil windfall from the latest Iraqi war, no answer has been forth-coming. The Vice-President may know nothing about it, but as Vice-President he will find it difficult to extricate himself should RMAFC’s petition return to haunt President Obasanjo.

Second, I’ll go easy on the 1991 oil windfall because the onus for doing something about it lies not with Babangida but with President Obasanjo as the current custodian of all government papers. It was not Babangida who set up the Okigbo panel to look into the disbursement of the 1991 windfall. This was done by General Sani Abacha long after Babangida “stepped aside” in August 1993. After Okigbo submitted his report, Abacha set up a White paper panel under the late Lt. General M.A. Haladu to recommend what to do about Okigbo. Four years after President Obasanjo was supposed to have taken custody of the Okigbo and Haladu reports, he has told the world that he cannot find them. No fair-minded person can blame Babangida for their purported disappearance.

In any case, unlike the RMAFC’s petition to the National Assembly which talked about a missing oil windfall, the Okigbo report never said the 1991 windfall was missing. It only spoke about a mixed-up priority in its expenditure. "The difference between monies being misspent and monies dissappearing altogether is akin to the difference between translusence and darkness."

No, the responsibility for finding and doing something about the Okigbo report along with the consequential Haladu report belongs to the present government not Babangida.

But I digress, somewhat. Our subject this morning is Soyinka’s demand for an apology from Babangida over June 12, not the 1991 Gulf Oil windfall. As I said, although I agree Soyinka has a right to make almost any demand, he should get it only if it is reasonable or justifiable. Again as I have said, I do not think his demand on Babangida is reasonable or justifiable. I have at least two reasons for saying so.

First, the demand assumes that June 12 is Babangida’s one and only error of judgement - to the extent that it is indeed an error of judgement - in his eight-year transition programme between 1985 and 1993. This assumption is completely false and Soyinka himself and his good friend, the late Ige, provide the reasons why in Coomassie’s well documented book.

Some of us have said it before and will say it again; the significance of June 12 was rooted more in hype than substance. The claim that Babangida cancelled June 12 as the “freest and fairest” election in Nigeria’s history in sheer propaganda. June 12 was built on a very dubious foundation and, as I said on these pages on June 27, 2001, “a weak and flawed foundation can hardly produce a sound super-structure”.

Soyinka himself provided an excellent evidence that the foundation for June 12 was a fraudulent one and therefore its collapse was inevitable. In Coomassie’s book in question, there is an extract of an interview Soyinka gave Newswatch (September 27, 1993) in which he has this to say of Babangida’s transition programme: “I didn’t vote. I did not even register because I abhorred the whole system, from the moment Babangida wrote the manifestoes  and the constitutions of the parties, from the moment all these voodoo politics nonsense began, I refused to register. I didn’t have a voting card.”

Soyinka’s good friend, Ige, had indeed put it even better than I did in my article of June 27, 2001. “The universal truth,” he had said in an article in The Guardian on Sunday of November 24, 1991 “can never be successfully denied – not even in Nigeria: You do not plant peanuts and reap coconuts. Never.” Accordingly, the best thing those of them critical of Babangida’s transition programme would do, said Ige, was to “SIDDON LOOK” until the army handed over to a “rigged-in-president” and “awardee-governor,” after which they will call a National Conference.

On the basis of Soyinka’s and Ige’s beliefs that Babangida’s transition programme was fundamentally flawed, it was illogical to claim that June 12 as its outcome could be the freest and fairest election in Nigeria. Logic apart, the facts also speak to the contrary. June 12 had one of the lowest turn-out in the history of Nigeria’s elections partly because most Nigerians didn’t believe it will hold at all following the court case by Senator Arthur Nzeribe and his notorious Association for a Better Nigeria in which he secured a judgement to call it off. The turn out then was less than one-third of the voters. Compare this with the February 1999 presidential elections in which the voter turn out was over 53%. Voter turn-out, needless to say, is an index of the integrity of an electoral process.

Now, back in 1987, Soyinka supported the violent overthrow of President Shehu Shagari in December 1983. Coomassie’s book documented his interview with Sunday Times (July 5, 1987) in which he said, among other things, “We went to the polls in 1979 and 1983 and a so-called democratic government was elected, but you and I know, I hope you do, anyway, but I believed that was never a democratic government. The believers of revolution in this country had a moral duty to have overthrown Shagari’s government violently; to actually seize power … For me that (was) acceptable.”

The question is why was it acceptable to Soyinka for soldiers to overthrow Shagari but not acceptable to him for the same soldiers to cancel the result of an election whose foundation he himself, and for that matter, most so-called progressive, had condemned as fundamentally flawed? A programme whose two political parties were described by some as government parastatals and by even less charitable critics as “Babangida Babes”? How one may ask, was the 1993 election any better than that of 1979, or even the less credible one of 1983?

Clearly if Babangida owes Nigerians any apologies at all for his eight-year rule, it cannot be over June 12 alone. In any case his apology for June 12 would be an exercise in futility, and this is my second reason for arguing that Soyinka’s demand for it is neither reasonable nor justifiable.

Babangida’s apology would be an exercise in futility for the simple reason that he is no longer the president of this country and he cancelled the elections as the military president of this country. Perhaps Soyinka was inspired to demand for the apology because during his recent 70^th birthday bash in Abeokuta, General Yakubu Gowon apologized for putting him in prison during our civil war. But then Gowon was wrong to have done so, because Soyinka’s incarceration was nothing personal. For such an apology to have any meaning it should have come from the incumbent leader - and that would really be the day when President Obasanjo would apologize to anyone for what happened during the civil war. And he would be right not to.

I do have my reservations about Babangida joining the race for the 2007 presidential election, but his cancellation of the June 12 elections is certainly not one of them.  It is either he apologizes to all for all his errors of  judgment during his tenure, or he apologizes to none.