Dele Momodu : dele.momodu@thisdaylive.com

Fellow Nigerians, let me confess that I had planned to write on a different subject this week. In fact, I had gone very deep into writing the article when something more exciting caught my attention. I’m sure you know how journalists hunger for the big story. And it often comes with breaking news. It is usually an extraordinary occurrence that hits you like thunderbolt, and so shocking that it cannot be ignored. It reverberates like an earthquake and carries with it some aftershocks. Such was the effect of the story you are about to read.
As you are probably aware, I love simple tales that not only inform and educate but entertain and titillate the readers. Part of my stint as a reporter, and probably the best, was on the gossip beat. Unknown to most readers, nothing is as difficult as investigative journalism. You are a spy of sorts, and must possess enormous contacts. Without being immodest, I was widely-acclaimed as someone who wrote some of the most accurate reports on the celebrity class, from Weekend Concord, to Classique, to Fame, and to Global Excellence. I enjoyed capturing the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The only time I was ever challenged and harassed was when I reported that Rebecca, the wife of the then Vice President, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu (who passed away this week after a protracted illness, may God accept his soul) was paying nocturnal visits to a prophetess in Aramoko-Ekiti to pray for a family member who had a medical condition. And I was arrested from our Classique office on Allen Avenue, Ikeja, by security agents who drove me to an interrogation centre on Milverton Road, Ikoyi, where I saw some coup plotters who were led by Gideon Orkar. I was later charged to court but the case dragged on forever until their counsel, Mrs Theresa Ikimi gave up on my matter. I have been able to blend serious journalism with the not so serious and enjoy my ambidextrous capabilities, a God-given talent I would always treasure.

It is only natural for me to jump at the most salacious story of the moment. I had waited patiently for this news to break for so long. It was always a matter of time before the bubble would burst between the two sworn enemies who pretended to be friends. I had monitored the body temperature of both leaders and knew that it would reach a boiling point sooner than later. That is the way the cookie crumbles. We must thank God for this day. Little did we suspect that the occasion of Ex-President Ibrahim Babangida’s 70th birthday would supply such a major scoop, a rare opportunity to hear septuagenarians address themselves as fools, and other interesting aliases! What a treat?

There can be no comedy sweeter than the latest outbursts of our two former Presidents, Generals Olusegun Matthew Okikiolakan Aremu Obasanjo and Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida. The former leaders share a lot in common. And this is where my interest lies. It is pertinent to examine both leaders critically since they have deliberately provided us the unique opportunity of seeing their dirty linens in public. Many of our youths who hardly have a good knowledge of Nigerian history would ultimately benefit from this unfortunate saga. I pray they would and seize this opportunity to know how Nigeria landed in this intractable mess. These two Generals are the luckiest Nigerians alive. Both have managed the biggest chunk of our resources with little to show for it. It would be nice to have them tell us where all that money has disappeared.

There is no better chance than now. It is strange and uncommon to find two army Generals exchange verbal fisticuffs in public. It is even stranger to find a junior military officer attack his senior as savagely as we’ve witnessed in our incredible country. This absurdist theatre would make the Irish playwright and Nobel laureate, Samuel Beckett, pale into irrelevance because of its intense and intriguing plots. For me, everything appears like a bad dream, a nightmare of the worst kind. If we had any doubts in the past about why Nigeria is in this squalid state, this divine intervention is designed to unveil what the masquerades have been hiding from us.

I always knew a day like this would come. There must be a reason and purpose why God has kept most of the dramatis personae in Nigeria’s tragicomic episode. We need to go as far back as possible to appreciate the spectacle before us. The military incursion into the Nigerian political landscape and the truncation of the First and the Second Republics has brought us more woes than blessings.  These miseries include several bloody coups (successful and unsuccessful), a most catastrophic civil war that claimed millions of lives, unprecedented corruption that stinks to high heavens, a bastardisation of our collective psyche, the crippling of our economic base, the destruction of our education, religious bigotry, nepotism, political brigandage, extra-judicial murder, electoral malpractices, mass unemployment, general insecurity, total collapse of our infrastructure and despicable backwardness. Despite this apparent and abject incompetence displayed in governance and government, the military class, with the active connivance and collaboration of its ubiquitous cronies, has continued to hold Nigeria by its jugular.

It is noteworthy that out of the 50 years we’ve had since independence, three of our retired Generals, Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida, each spent an average of over eight years in power. As a matter of fact, Obasanjo alone spent about eleven years cumulatively between being a military ruler and civilian President. No one in Nigeria’s history has equalled that supernatural feat which he even attempted to elongate. Other military rulers, like Aguiyi Ironsi, Murtala Mohammed, Mohammadu Buhari,  Sani Abacha and Abdulsalami Abubakar ruled from about five years to six months. On the whole the military has ruled under one guise or the other for nearly 40 years. Most of these years of misrule plunged Nigeria into darkness yet these military rulers still want to control everything and everyone. 

This is the crux of the matter. The craze for political office in Nigeria was always a matter of big ego. Apart from General Abubakar who voluntarily relinquished power in less than one year, all the others had shown an insatiable lust for power. Gowon was tempted to stay on in power but for the Murtala Mohammed coup that kicked him out. Even years after he was forced out, and fled to exile in Great Britain, he tried to stage a comeback by surreptitiously dropping political hints and by testing the waters. Major-General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua was Obasanjo’s deputy after the coup that killed General Murtala Ramat Muhammed for about three years. After his retirement he dived headlong into politics and used his stupendous wealth to build a humongous political network all over Nigeria. But for the hands of fate, he would easily have won a presidential election. The major hands that scuttled his awesome ambition were those of Babangida, who banned him, and Abacha, who jailed him, before he eventually died in prison.

The deft political player was exceptionally good at attracting a star-studded team to his government and they included big fishes like Professor Wole Soyinka, Dr Tai Solarin, Chief Olu Falae, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, Prince Bolasodun Ajibola, Mrs Maria Sokenu, Chief Duro Onabule, Chief Alexander Akinfolarin Akinyele and many others. In fairness to him, he demonstrated a finesse that was uncommon in military circles. But his greatest albatross was that many Nigerians did not consider him a credible leader whose words could be trusted. He was believed to have largely corrupted the system by compromising citizens with monetary and material gratifications. He seemed to have courted favours in under to perpetuate himself in power, and altered his transition programme almost perennially. At that time, he had one vociferous critic in Olusegun Obasanjo who described him as the worst scourge that ever afflicted our nation. I recall Obasanjo describing him with many expletives in so many media interviews.

As a man desperate for the image of a quintessential statesman, Babangida bore all the insults with equanimity. He never traded invectives with his traducers. Rather he wore his toothy smile and disarmed them effortlessly. But he met his waterloo when he decided to annul the best election that ever held in Nigeria, on June 12, 1993. Till this day, no one has offered any reasonable explanation of what went wrong except the mumbo jumbo of how the military would have killed Abiola within six months if power had been handed to him. But this rigmarole is impossible to justify when put under searchlights. General Sani Abacha still did his own coup barely several months after General Babangida abdicated authority.  Not only did a coup take place, both Abacha and Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola died as a result of this imbroglio.

That annulment produced many casualties of which Obasanjo himself was one. He was hauled into detention by Nigeria’s maximum ruler, Sani Abacha. By the time Obasanjo was miraculously set free from prison, he had emaciated so pitiably. Ironically, it was members of the military class who came to his rescue. It is on record that Babangida spearheaded the plan to rehabilitate Obasanjo and return him to power as compensation for the cancellation of the June 12 election and the death of Abiola in detention. If indeed Obasanjo was a veritable swap for Abiola, one would have expected him to favour the people of the South West in many ways but that was not the case. He had a running battle with the Governor of Lagos State at the time, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and hounded the biggest Yoruba businessman, Dr Michael Adeniyi Agbolade Isola Adenuga into exile. Obasanjo victimised Lagos State and froze its revenue allocation in total violation of court order because of his faceoff with Tinubu who boldly called his bluff.

He killed the dominant Yoruba political party at the time, Alliance for Democracy, and sacked most of its governors. What was worse, the greatest beneficiary of Abiola’s misfortune blatantly refused to honour a dead man who could no longer compete with him from his grave. He frustrated every effort to immortalise the name of our true martyr for democracy, a man who lost his all, including his beautiful wife, Alhaja Kudirat Abiola.

Many of us had wondered when Babangida and Obasanjo became such bosom friends but the rumour then that there was a deal between the two and Obasanjo was to pave the way for Babangida’s second coming. The chummy relationship soon evaporated as soon as Obasanjo settled in power. Babangida’s dream of a rapturous return to power was turning into a mirage. Before his very eyes the man he helped back into power was using its paraphernalia to intimidate and oppress him. If Babangida thought it was a joke, he soon realised how ruthless Obasanjo could be when as soon as he made his intentions known to contest, his son, Mohammed, was instantly arrested, detained and later released on a case yet to be determined till today. Babangida quickly dropped his voluble ambition… (To be continued)