Fifteen Years after "June 12"

Part 2

The June 12 crisis raises many questions which are yet to be answered, either partially or in full. Why did Ibrahim Babangida (aka IBB) encourage his friend M.K.O Abiola to contest the elections when he was probably inclined to seek to retain the office beyond the democratic transition? While IBB’s motivation (staying put in office), and Abacha’s (inheriting an office he had been eyeing for many years) was clear, what was the motivation of the military “cabal” that pushed through the annulment of the elections? Why did IBB leave Abacha in the army and government as he was leaving in August 1993, while retiring other service chiefs? Wasn’t it fairly predictable that Abacha would at some point move against the toothless interim government which IBB had installed in his stead?

Why did the seeming national consensus that manifested in Abiola’s overwhelming victory on June 12 collapse so easily in the days after June 12? Why did the mainstream northern and eastern political elite so easily abandon MKO leaving mainly his Yoruba home base to be “standing on June 12”? Why did the Nigerian people who expressed righteous indignation at Abiola’s initial escape abroad and demanded his return to reclaim his mandate abandon him to his fate when Abacha clamped him into detention? How on earth could the leaders of NADECO and even MKO Abiola himself have trusted Abacha to return the Presidency to Abiola? In what way had Abacha earned such trust? How did Abacha die? Was it purely fortuitous or was there a human “hand of God” facilitating things? How did MKO himself die?

I can not claim to have definitive answers to these questions-only God and the main actors do. What I present in the following lines are interpretations and analysis based on known facts, and in some cases my personal projections from such facts. It was clear like I asserted in the first part, that IBB did not wish to leave office. He sought to “succeed himself” as civilian president. However as “maradona”, he was not going to announce his intention to the whole world, especially as he was intricately familiar with Nigerian history, and knew that such a declaration that “1976 is no longer realistic” may amount to the final straw. So his strategy was to wear out the political class, and eliminate all the key contenders until everybody understood his body language and left the office for him.

So the extensions of the hand-over date, banning and un-banning and long winded transitions were all part of a pattern of behaviour that confirmed IBB’s real strategy. By the time of the June 12 election, the first and second tier of politicians had been eliminated (Yar’adua, Falae, Ciroma, Shinkafi, Saraki, Bamangar Tukur, Lai Balogun, Nzeribe, Abel Ubeku etc) and Abiola, Kingibe, Atiku and Tofa etc were probably the last group of people with financial, political and social capital to embark on a venture as costly and risky as the presidency of Nigeria. I can assert that if IBB had gotten away with disposing of the June 12 election like the previous party primaries he annulled, he may have had a smooth ride to a civilian presidency. IBB encouraged Abiola along as part of the intricate scheme to eliminate all viable contenders to the presidency, except that things spun out of control.

Abacha clearly wanted the presidency for himself. He had cherished the appellation “Khalifa” (the next one or successor) for many years. Some indeed believe that he may have had some kind of pact with IBB to this effect as a consequence of his role in bringing IBB to office and retrieving his presidency (and life as well, perhaps) during the Orkar coup of April 22, 1990. Again if IBB made such a promise, I have no doubt that he had no intention of honouring it confident of his evasive skills, but again he underrated Abacha. I believe IBB left Abacha in the army, not because of such a promise, but to protect himself from a possible back-lash in the unstable and unpredictable terrain of those post-annulment days. In spite of the risks, IBB must have believed that it was only Abacha he could rely on to cover his back. He must have believed that Joshua Dogonyaro and Aliyu Muhammed Gusau could checkmate Abacha if he had any funny ideas. In any event, Abacha had sold everyone a dummy that he was in a hurry to go back to civilian life and business.

I found it inexplicable that IBB, “NADECO”, General Diya and even Abiola fell for Abacha’s dummy. As a purely private citizen, I recall warning in conversations with friends and family that if IBB (and later Shonekan) was pushed out of office prematurely without a clearly designed alternative, Abacha would take office, and Nigeria would live to regret that eventuality. Till today, I wonder why I could take such a position based on information in the public domain, yet very senior leaders and politicians did not sufficiently analyse the facts and act rationally. The other decision the pro-June 12 forces took which I found emotional and not strategically sound, was the insistence that MKO must return home to claim his mandate, without any clearly articulated plan for realising that objective. As we know from the game of chess, once the King is captured, the war is over!

There were many in the military, apart from IBB and Abacha who coveted the Presidency and the offices around it. The 1990 Gulf War had made the country momentarily rich again, and those close to the corridors of power were unwilling to walk away from the honey pot. The truth is there were also many politicians even in Abiola’s Yoruba base and evidently the rest of the country who relished another try at the office if Abiola’s election was nullified. Even in the core of Abiola’s camp, traitors and saboteurs abounded. In Eastern Nigeria, support for Abiola was half-hearted and whatever support there was may have been due to a sense of inevitability about his victory. At the first signs that Abiola’s presidency was not quite inevitable, the support base dissipated. In Northern Nigeria, senior politicians, including Yar’adua who gave apparent support to MKO saw the annulment as another opportunity to grab the presidential prize.

Senior Northern leaders who initially supported Abiola re-evaluated the situation and decided there was nothing wrong in keeping the Presidency in the North. Ciroma derided the Yorubas for acting like “rain-beaten chickens” while Abubakar Rimi sensationally declared that he was not in politics because of MKO! So how did first Abacha and then MKO die?-happenstance, co-incidence, enemy action or just an act of God? What is clear to me is that Nigeria’s military and power elite and the “international community” (meaning US and UK) were by June 8, 1998 convinced that Abacha stood in the way of the nation’s development. A final solution may also have been viewed as requiring either an Abiola who would forsake his mandate, or one that was dead. It was thus very convenient for the “stakeholders” that Abacha and Abiola passed away within days of each other!