By Akin Osuntokun

“He came and he said, ‘I just annulled June 12.’ We both looked at each other and we looked at him, and said: why would you do that? And he said ‘you are too young to understand the intrigues of governance.’ And we said, but it is about you and your administration. And he said, ‘well, perhaps, this is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life….So, you could see that his hands were tied. He was limited. He couldn’t do what he would have wished to do. And this is probably a story most Nigerians don’t know”

–Mohammed Babangida

“It is a decision we took. I had to take that decision, I did that to the best of my knowledge, in the interest of the country… ‘I did the right thing. I can sit back and say some of the things I said manifested after I had left. We had the coup and that coup lasted for five years.’ According to the ex-Nigerian leader, the citizens complained that they were tired of elections, thus paving the way for Sani Abacha who ruled the nation for five years”…“If it materialised, there would have been a coup d’état – which could have been violent. That’s all I can confirm. It didn’t happen thanks to the engineering and the “Maradonic’ way we handled you guys in the society. But that could have given room for more instability in the country”

–Ibrahim Babangida

The two excerpts above constitute a critical resource for any obligatory and sympathetic assessment of former President Ibrahim Babangida. It is always difficult to write dispassionately about a father figure let alone one who looms so large and controversial in the Nigerian public space. I generally cringe from hagiolatory and believe that the true test of goodwill and friendship is the extent to which one can offer critical acclaim without pandering and sycophantic ingratiation. As we are all human, this is easier said than done and kindred sympathy would readily supplant objective detachment. Great ambitions are often inspired by a commensurate sense of inadequacy and insecurity. Think of the short man syndrome and what has come to be known as the Napoleon complex-’where a man feels inadequate because of his short height and may try to overcompensate it with overly aggressive behaviour’. It is what the Yoruba call okùnrin kúkúrú bìlísì roughly translating to the slang ‘short man, plenty wahala’.

The most dominant deity in the Yoruba pantheon, Orunmila, is called akéréfinúshogbón (the all wise tiny man) and okùnrin kúkúrú òkè gètí (the diminutive man who resides in òkè gètí, ilé Ifè). With reference to the famous world historic military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte the more human variant is called the

Napoleon complex. Like the latter, Babangida is of short stature and has earned a Nigeria-wide fame as an accomplished military officer. Before he acquired the defining reputation of foremost military politician he had acquitted himself as a brave soldier in the battlefied. ‘Earlier in his career, he had on the battle field risked his life to save his colleague Duba who was mortally wounded unless evacuated. Babangida, risking his own life volunteered to go and carry Duba’. And while he was hospitalised on account of the deep injuries he sustained, he demanded a quick discharge and return to the battlefied even before his injuries healed. And if you are a zodiac sign believer, he is meaningfully a Leo.

I have taken recourse to this (psychoanalytical) personality profiling because it is otherwise difficult to be fair and charitable towards the former president without a subjective knowledge of his personality. Above any other character trait the one that stands out the most is wanting to be liked by people and the closer you get to him the more difficult it equally becomes not to like him. It is the reason why he is such a perfect family man and a passionate godfather.

If the Maradona appellation suits him like second skin, it is because it derives from a trademark inability to say no to any personal request. Finding himself, quite naturally, unable to fulfil the father Christmas dimensions of this trait, he had to perfect the art of wriggling out of difficult situations.This trait can be a great flaw within the context of governance and statecraft where decisions should be taken solely on the merit of public interest with little regard for personal considerations. For me, the abiding paradox of his life is how to reconcile his charming, pleasant and inoffensive nature with being in the thick of the sanguinary environment of military campaigns; how he was so strong and brave in the line of real life fire but not so brave in the seat of military president and when it mattered the most in his public life.

There cannot be an adequate accounting of his military career (and that of his generation from the North) without allusion to the role of the Northern regional political leadership. Joining the Army was a decision made for them by the regional patriarchs who envisioned, like Chairman Mao and Secretary Josef Stalin, that power flows from the barrel of the gun. And the vision has proven to be quite predictive and ample in the rewards of the strategic anticipation of the role of balance of terror in Nigeria’s power politics. In contrast to its rivals, this was at a time the ‘the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) had a limited vision for the security services and the Action Group (AG) wanted to disband the military altogether and set up a more modest paramilitary force’. To this day it still befuddles me how an astute and visionary political leader like Chief Obafemi Awolowo could have missed out on the fundamental instrumentality of this potent instrument of power politics in his political calculations.

The folly of this omission would sooner play out in the run up to the civil war when the dominant Northern faction of the Nigerian Army refused to cede the occupation of the Western region in compliance with the agreement reached at the conference of Nigeria’s leaders of thought.

In the opinion of the Shehu Yar’Adua Foundation ‘Joining the army in 1962 was a statement of political faith. A politically better informed Northern elite had come to recognise the neglected significance of the military in independent Nigeria. According to President Muhammadu Buhari, “The Emir of Kano told one of us that if soldiers could overthrow a line of kings descended directly from the prophet, it could happen anywhere. So we should go and join the army”. In corroboration, General Garba Duba recounted that.. “I had never deamt to be a soldier. But when I finished my secondary school, my uncle, the Emir of Gwandu, had received a letter from Sardauna requesting him to give one of his sons to join the army as an officer. And that is how I was taken”. In their flair for military intervention in Nigerian politics it is useful to recall that the major players of the Nigerian Army were politicised rather than socialised into the Army. Babangida is a personification of this pedigree.

Still how do you reconcile the revelation of Babangida’s true and intimate feelings that the annulment of the June 1993 presidential election was a mistake (to his children for instance) with his public posturing of persistent justification and tortuous rationalisation of a conspicuous wrongdoing? In what way could the annulment possibly be in the best interest of the country? How did his voluntary submission to being held captive and held to ransom by a cabal of pampered power hungry military officers be rationalised as doing the right thing? If this selfish and bad company would not let him honour the result of the election today, what is the guarantee they would allow him to do so in five months or five years time? The pity here is he keeps repeating the same self-destructive error of snatching defeat from the potential biggest victory of his life. This corrosive self-abnegation is what he keeps doing to himself by declining to admit to the conspicuous error and choosing, instead, to insult the intelligence of Nigerians with obtuse and escapist non arguments. Could it be that he is sworn to an oath never to admit that white is white and black is black where it concerns the annulment?

At 80 years and given the contextual extenuation provided by the comprehensive failure of his rival, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, there is hardly a better politically opportuned moment to secure a less hostile reckoning of posterity. To the contrary, he appears oblivious of ceding the initiative to his adversaries on the narrative of the annulment debacle. Which was what all the insincere razzmatazz of the symbolic reinstatement of June 12 as Nigeria’s icon of democracy by the incumbent administration was all about. His loss on this occasion is the gain of his fellow contender. Indeed, “how does IBB feel today, now that Buhari has recognised June 12 and MKO Abiola?” Ironically, let us not forget that while the personification of the June 12, 1993 watershed election, Chief Moshood Abiola, was languishing in Abacha’s gulag, General Buhari was serving as his right hand man as the executive chairman, Petroleum Tax Fund (PTF). And so enamoured was he of Abacha, that up till now, not even the Swiss and Cayman Island banks can convince him that “Abacha stole any money”.

Perhaps more than any area of comparison and contrast, it is in his liberal cosmopolitan adherence to the reflection of federal character and geopolitical balancing (nation building prescription) that Babangida towers above an antithetical Buhari. He once sat me down to explain how he couldn’t be adjudged as running a regionally discriminating administration. It may have been an exaggeration but there was the element of validity to his claim that his kitchen cabinet, headed by the chairman of his Presidential Advisory Council, Professor Ojetunji Aboyade, was predominantly Southern in composition. In the end, explanations for his ‘I did right and did no wrong’ posture in the annulment of the 1993 presidential election can be found in such ruinous sychophancy as one encapsulated in this rendition by Chief Duro Onabule “the most uncharitable critic of IBB, after experiencing four other administrations (Shonekan, Abacha, Abubakar and now Obasanjo) readily concedes that but for the annulment of June 12, 1993, IBB would have been an untainted hero.”

Originally published at Thisday