Of transitions and dissent

(An excerpt from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (expanded edition): Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021.)

WOLE Soyinka made a serious and disconcerting allegation about General Sani Abacha, possibly Nigeria’s worst ever dictator, on Radio Kudirat, a pirate radio station during the height of his dictatorship. General Sani Abacha was called a “clone” of Ibrahim Babangida, the former dictator from whose heinous misrule the beleaguered Nigerian nation is, arguably, yet to recover. Soyinka’s clai1 at the time, was taken seriously because of some compelling historical antecedents and a number of what appeared to be carefully orchestrated coincidences the Abacha regime had engineered. Abacha’s elaborate stratagems did not seem entirely new to the skeptical when not apathetic Nigerian populace. The magic-realist grotesqueness that had once characterised the political landscapes of the banana republics of Latin America some time ago was now being replicated in the nation-states of Africa with what appeared to be a brutally exact historical determinism. As a result, different conflicts of attrition began to permanently disfigure the political history of the entire continent as the tortured landscapes of Liberia, Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Rwanda attested. 

It is important to evoke the figure of General Sani Abacha to remind ourselves just how close Nigeria was to disintegration and also just how persistent this threat is as the present democratic culture continues to evolve. Abacha reminds us of the flexibilities of the banality of evil as a political concept, of the terror ordinary mortals can think up, encourage and condone. It is also important to note that his spirit reigns more powerfully in those that were most directly affected by his terror and also in the very institutions that were employed in the project of democratic consolidation. Abacha died mysteriously in 1998 by a stroke of luck and not through the thrust and surge of civil society. 

Nigeria did not quite reach that violent point of no return but the state of affairs within the nation evinced spiralling hopelessness, chronic insecurity and different layers of division within the polity. Since the annulment of the June 12 presidential elections of 1993, there has been the widespread feeling that just about anything can be “annulled” including the country. Various separatist agendas continue to emerge within the current political dispensation. The question, at this juncture, is, who is prepared to do the annulling? Who would promulgate the ever-threatening decree that looms in the hidden and obviously disturbed recesses of the national psyche?

Once the step is taken to actualise this persistent fear, then, an interrupted but steady cycle of violence would have been completed in all its ramifications: political, psychological and even possibly, genocidal. It is this incomplete cycle of violence that produces up to this moment, what is surely a false sense of nationhood. The crises in the Niger Delta, the vehement debates over resource control are in part manifestations of aborted collective violence and also the crippling thirst to consummate it. What is clear is that the despair and sense of terror Sani Abacha left in his wake cannot be dispelled by the ephemerality of a democratic culture that is still in its infancy.

If Sani Abacha was indeed a more tyrannical clone of Ibrahim Babangida as history has proved, a few factors may be singled out for this view. For one, he was the de facto number two in Babangida’s structure of hierarchy and played a prominent role in entrenching and prolonging the regime. Second, in his heyday, he was the longest serving officer in the Nigerian army, so he had been party to many coups which ensured his hold on power. With virtually no officer courageous enough to challenge him, he held the Nigerian nation in thrall for the period he remained in power.

At this juncture, it is necessary to affirm that Abacha was no mere replica of Babangida as Soyinka claimed. He was clearly a more inhumane and a more brutal dictator. During the confusing era of the transition to democracy, Nigerian officialdom weaved a great deal of elaborate and digressive rhetoric around the more gullible strata of the Nigerian populace and also the international community. In many instances, this corrupting verbiage deluded many Nigerians and derailed quite a number of genuine initiatives on the part of civil society geared towards the consolidation of the processes of democratisation (Obadare, 2005). It was sometimes difficult (until the final days of his reign) to perceive the Abacha regime for precisely what it was; an inhuman authoritarian junta that was bent on the discredited and anachronistic quest of hanging on to power for its own sake.

Ibrahim Babangida, Abacha’s erstwhile master understood better international opinion concerning issues such as democracy, human rights and freedom of the press, so he attempted to play a double game. He had to maintain power through typical dictatorial means – repression and patronage – but he also tried to present a front of benevolence and sincerity to the international community. No other Nigerian leader has displayed such a disconcerting Janus-like personality (especially at the beginning of his reign). Through Babangida, many alien and corrupt political practices have gained widespread currency. This is not to claim that Nigeria lost its political innocence with the emergence of Babangida. Indeed, it is doubtful if it had any political innocence in the first instance. Nonetheless, Babangida destroyed the legitimacy of the military, and so it could no longer claim to be committed to correcting the ills of society. Militarism itself became, after him, a Janus-like entity; a cancerous evil with capabilities for brutal social (dis)order but it was also a political evil that the Nigerian populace seemed to tolerate and even accept.

Babangida achieved initially a seductive blend of brute power and a latent democratic ethos which had a compelling appeal for many Nigerians. His nemesis, which is something of a paradox, was the annulment of the June 12 presidential elections which proved too costly for him and more importantly the nation. June 12 remains a problematic watershed in the socio-political evolution of the nation. Short-sighted political opportunists have sought to reduce the significance of this landmark event. However, it is such a morally loaded event that even the strategy of ignoring it does not diminish it. Any politician at some point needs to confront the intractable moral impasse created by June 12. Chris Ngige’s ordeal- with holding onto his political mandate after being kidnapped and assaulted on the orders of his political godfather, Chris Uba- in Anambra State as the governor which began in 2003 bears some correlation with June 12. Ignoring its magnitude is akin to removing the ground beneath one’s own feet. The simple reason is this; until the issue of June 12 is addressed, every aspirant for political office necessarily is a potential victim of that double-edged militaristic weapon, political annulment. All efforts of political activity face the possibility of annulment until the initial catastrophe is revisited and the annulling agency put permanently in check. This unfortunately, is a challenge the Nigerian political class has not convincingly overcome. Chris Ngige’s political fortunes – which have mafia-like dimensions of political corruption – are inextricably linked to the event of June 12.

Undoubtedly, the origins of ridiculing the political class began with the wily Ibrahim Babangida. In the bid to prolong his reign, he created an unnecessarily bloated bureaucracy, an incompetent class of political opportunists and hangers-on and an astonishing variety of ill-intentioned government agencies to oil his machinery of dictatorship. The Babangida regime established the Political Bureau in January 1986, which was given the mandate of collating the opinions of Nigerians on the political future of the country and which made appropriate recommendations against the background of the 1979 experience of democratic transition. The consensus of those within the Political Bureau was that the military should disengage from governance in Nigeria by 1990. However, the Babangidaadministration adopted the choice of 1992 which was unpopular and which betrayed its true political intentions. Even the choice of 1992 was eventually changed to August 1993 after a protracted and monumental struggle in which both the military and the political class were affected and which ended in the June 12 crisis. The truth is, Babangida had no intention of relinquishing power.

• Sanya Osha works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa, (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.