On thursday, February 20th, the cream of the Nigerian political and economic class gathered in Abuja for the launch of Ibrahim Babangida’s book, “A Journey in Service”. Out of curiosity, I decided to take a peek at what the grandmaster had written. If I had expected him, in his twilight years to show remorse for his misdeeds against Nigeria, or to apologize for those misdeeds, or perhaps ask for forgiveness, I was mistaken. He remained the same old fox, full of tricks and mischief, manipulations and subterfuge, polemics and pun. Even as he makes a slow march into the grave, Ibrahim Babangida has refused to change his dubious ways.
Many have reacted to Babangida’s so called autobiography. Many more will still react. As a response to his obstinacy and lies, I have decided to produce a brief excerpt from my book, “Political Soldiering : Africa’s Men on Horseback”, published published 24 years ago. This will serve as my personal response to Babangida’s false narratives. His attempt to rewrite history in his own image is just a proof of who he is.
Happy reading:
On August 27,1985, Major General Ibrahim Babangida, Buhari’s Chief of Army staff, cashed in on the apparent public disenchantment and swept away Buhari’s government in a bloodless coup. He assumed the title of president, considered unusual in military regimes, renamed the Supreme Military Council and settled down to business with a promise to “sanitize the polity, build a strong economy and organize a durable transition of power to the civilians”.
For the Nigerian people, the smile and warmth with which Babangida announced his arrival was a welcome relief from the scowls, meanness, intimidation and permanent frowns that had been the trademark of leadership in the previous 20 months.
His maiden cabinet was a roll call of the best brains in Nigeria. Men of integrity, erudition and respect drwan from the universities, big business, the media, the private sector and so on were brought into government. He assured the country that his regime would be the last military government in Nigeria’s political history and announced a gradual but elaborate transition programme designed to last several years.
He set up many agencies, bureaus, and organizations to teach Nigerians the basics of politics, discipline, patriotism and love of country. He organized the “Great Debate” aimed at giving Nigerians the freedom to decide for themselves whether they wanted an IMF loan or not.
Our purpose here is to examine some of the issues thrown up by Babangida’s regime, it’s lasting effect on Nigeria’s political and economic destiny, and as much as possible try to understand why it was possible for one man to take a country of over 100 million people for a ride and for so long. It is also important to understand the character of this man, his inner propulsions, his emotional and psychological make up and the private innate passion that drove him into doing some of the things he did.
Behavioralism, which has to do with “the study of observable human behavior” acknowledges that “men are capable of having emotions, ideas and plans which are private to the individual”. The observation of such overt behavior when manifested becomes not only the source of information concerning men’s experiences and actions but also provides generally more reliable data for conclusions about an individual’s own character, capabilities and permutations. How Babangida’s private emotions, ideas and plans were foisted on the nation, how the nation’s resources were subjected to a plethora of abuse and misuse, and how the nation remained exceptionally receptive to para-psychological manipulations for a period of eight years vastly go beyond conventions and traditional wisdom. It may be possible to have a glimpse through this optical illusion only when one is able to understand Babangida’s superficial formulas in remaking society’s outward form and organization as well as it’s rational social structure and harmony through a system of rewards, punishment, manipulations, and a spectacular outplay of sentiment borne out of trauma and transformation.
Since Babangida ascended the throne in August 1985, he was to many observers an enigma, a man of considerable complexities, who for eight years bestrode Nigeria’s political terrain like a colosus. His manner of governance, his whims and his survival instincts were unique. Babangida derived his political philosophy from the classical theories of Machiavelli and John Locke. For him, politics is not just “the art of the possible”, it is the art of ruling a people through deception, empty promises, lies and intimidation. While politics remain the process by which people compete for the control of the instruments of favor, it must involve “the use of fraud”. Babangida firmly believes that politics must be associated with permanent violence, corruption, hypocricy, broken promises and procrastination.
For the smiling General and the perfidious faithlessness he represents, the best politician is a juggler, or better still a sorcerer, full of tricks, inconsistencies, nihilism and misathropy. Babangida saw himself as the Charles De Gaulle of our time. He believes himself to be a strong man, a man of action with a strong dose of egoism, pride, toughness, and cunning. This belief best explains the reason why he took Nigeria on a jolly ride for so many years. He told Nigerians that as political nonentities, they must learn the rudiments of democracy at his feet. It was a long lecture, scheduled to last eight years, or more, or even till eternity. However, it was a very sad lecture because at the end of it all, Nigeria learnt nothing but Nigeria lost everything. The energies, the resources and the time channeled therein went down the drain. “What went wrong?” many dared to ask. The students said their teacher was a bad one. A fake. The teacher said his students were at fault. He described them as natural idiots who lacked the capacity to learn despite his great skills and stamina.
Right from the onset, Babangida made it obvious that he had a bag of tricks slung over his shoulder. A hidden agenda. When confronted with this, he denied it. Babangida appropriated vast powers for the presidency, but instead of using these powers for the good of the nation, he decided to use it for personal aggrandisement.
His immediate predecessors, Buhari and Idiagbon, sought to strengthen the fibers of the nation with tyranny and heavy government and Nigerians were not amused. But whatever their short comings, the two men were wise, selfless, ethical, incorruptible and propelled by a singleness of purpose – love of country. This much Nigerians were able to see in the 20 months they spent in office. Ibrahim Babangida’s replacement of these two men has been disastrous. It is no doubt the greatest tragedy ever to befall Nigeria at peace time. It was as bloody, corrosive, tragic and dehumanizing as the 30 month civil war. It certainly wasn’t an exaggeration when Douglas Amadough stated that “Babangida dug an open grave not only for Nigeria as a nation, but for generations to come”.
His warmth, smiles and lovable personality was a shell hiding the most devious and atrocious mind. Babangida came to power brandishing a long list of goodies including human rights and freedom. For Nigerians, it was a breather from the sternness and unsmiling demeanor of his predecessors. Unfortunately, his gift was a Greek gift, a fake jewel with which he sought legitimacy and acceptance. Once this was achieved, he went ahead to unleash a blitzard of atrocities aimed at taking Nigeria back to the Stone Age.
Babangida portrayed himself as having genuine emotional sympathy for the common man and mankind in general. But his empathy were fraudulent and his emotions were abstract and atomistic. It had no solid base. In reality, it was mere posturing. He felt nothing about the common man except that they provided him the reason to indulge his comforts, unmindful of the misery, degradation and human suffering under which they exist. Said Amadough, “in every society, a leader aims progress; but in the case of IBB, he increased his years of reign by corpses”.
Although Babangida had no original idea on how to cycle Nigeria’s wheel of progress, he surrounded himself with men of excellence and intellect, men whose resourcefullness would have created a functional socio-political and economic resuscitation for the country. Only if he had looked beyond immediate personal gain to weave those ideas into a consistent fabric. But he lacked the capacity to attain that goal in the shimmering diffusions of his opportunism and matchless appetite.
With his defective understanding of simple economics, Babangida turned Nigeria into a guinea pig for all sorts of bizarre experiments. At every point and on every issue, his policies were irresolute, long on rhetorics but short on facts, objectives and results. Babangida’s deceptiveness set him apart as the most dangerous ruler Nigeria has had. He was the misgotten offspring of extrapolation. Some of his policies were good and even well intentioned, but a persistent lack of credibility and consistency were the two evils that worked against all his policies. Although he declared a worthwhile transition program, he placed every conceivable obstacle on its path. The result was that all his policies – economic, political, social – became well modulated fiction, long on hyperboles and short on facts.
Babangida had a grandiose dream of creating a political masterpiece with his two party imposition. Nigerians were willing to play along with him. The idea perhaps, was not a bad one, not for him, not for the country. But the contradictions of his personal cravings worked assiduously against him. Like a glutton, he has a voracious and insatiable appetite for food, money, power, publicity, ecstasy, tangentiality and immorality. His policies and programmes reflected political and economic acrobatics. His political character was aptly captured by Irving Stone’s description of the humming bird “reversal in mid air without first stopping the forward movement, the great whirring of wings without moving an inch in any direction.”
Babangida was a streetwise soldier who maneuvered himself through treachery and murder to the highest office in the land, and embarked on a cold blooded and premeditated destruction of millions of lives and families. But like a small time pimp, his heart was always in the street, just above gutter level where he properly belonged. His method was one of frustrating others, filibustering them and like a mild oryx, eroding the remnants of hope and vestiges of faith left in the system. Babangida’s aspian politics inflicted severe pains on Nigerians. This pain was physical, psychological and spiritual.
Babangida revelled in intrigue, manipulation and confusion. Even though he preached democracy, and promised Nigerians what he called “an enduring democratic legacy”, he was an enemy of democracy, the rule of law and human rights. He branded himself an evil genius. He was indeed evil and ingenious. But he was a genius without a conscience. He was a king who ran his kingdom with the triple B – bribes, blackmail and brutality. His profligate generosity was bribery. It’s stench clung like a miasma to those who were tainted. He not only institutionalized corruption as a state policy in Nigeria but planted its seed in the hearts and soul of every Nigerian. Babangida performed a lobotomy on every Nigerian. The surgery was both physical and spiritual. The entire complexion of the Nigerian society was tragically and irrevocably altered by Babangida’s hocus pocus. This he achieved to the detriment and shame of even the unborn generation.
Make no mistake, those born long after Babangida’s era will feel the pain of his misdeeds and perceive the stench and secretions of his legacy. And many will walk in his footsteps. Babangida understood the psychology of money and used it to great personal advantage and even greater national disadvantage. Decent and dignified Nigerians were reduced to helplessness, begging to feed on the crumbs that fell from Babangida’s table.
The extent to which Babangida betrayed the trust of the Nigerian people was so bottomless it would never be reached. Here was a man who stole from orphans and widows, from the sick and infirm, from the old and feeble, from the wounded and dying to fill his own coffers. This was a man totally, completely, fatally without conscience.
In one of the monumental epitaphs to Babangida’s era of perfidy, Chidi Amuta ‘praised’ him as a man who “pursues stability through a process of organized instability”. One may also add violence for good measure. Many Nigerians fell victim to the form of organized violence and orchestrated instability which Babangida fostered. He created a spectacular form of violence on all fronts – physical violence, moral violence, spiritual violence and economic violence. His era clinically removed morality from the art of governance.
For him, there was no frankness, there was no moral courage, there was no sincerity and there was no devotion to high principles and conscience. In the words of Peter Oparah, “Babangida personified corruption and all that is bad in the Nigerian state. Babangida and his minions ‘those characters of ill defined pedigree’ despoiled Nigeria and dumped the carcass in the bottom of the pit.”
Arthur Nwankwo further identified the sycophancy and praise singing which became a national culture under Babangida. He hired praise singers to sing his praises and those who refused to join the chorus were marked down as enemies.
“Much emphasis was placed on croynism. State resources were shamelessly and recklessly used as carrot to appease relationships and cultivate new friendships, creating an unprecedented cult of sycophants and hangers on in the corridors of power.”
Babangida enjoyed the dubious distinction of being a Maradona. The tragic irony however was that while Maradona, the Argentine soccer legend, dribbled his opponents, scored goals, achieved results and brought glory to his fatherland, Babangida never did. Instead, after all his dribblings, acrobatics somersaults and macho politics, he brought defeat, misery, loss of hope, tragedy and disaster to his fatherland.
Babangida’s involvement with BCCI (The Bank of Credit and Commerce International) provided a legal conduit for him to expedite his systematic looting of the nation’s treasury. The bank, a sleek, rogue financial institution known for its peculiar relationship with drug barons, money launderers and all sorts of financial criminals all over the world, became Babangida’s most trusted ally in his quest to steal Nigeria to extinction. Peter Truell and Larry Gorwin, in an expose on the BCCI in 1986, alerted the world to the dirty deals going on between Babangida and the BCCI.
Despite what anyone may say, today or in years to come, General Ibrahim Babangida must be held supremely responsible for the Abacha atrocities, for handing over to Abacha in 1993 instead of the man who won a free and fair election. From all accounts, Abacha was a better man than Babangida. Whatever evil Abacha has done, Babangida would remain the most loathed and the most guilty figure in Nigeria. It was his maneuverings of Stalinist resourcefulness that created an enabling environment for the likes of Abacha, Gwarzo and Mustapha to unleash a reign of sorcery, witchcraft and terror on the Nigerian people. Without Babangida’s treachery, Abacha would have been best remembered as the man who announced Nigeria’s fourth coup.
Babangida is a man so possessed by evil that he has managed to burn guilt and shame out of his system. In a country of greater prospects and conscience, Babangida would have stood trial as a traitor, saboteur and a desecrater of the general will. Babangida should have been sitting in gaol today doing penance for the atrocities he perpetrated against Nigeria and it’s people. But he is a free man, a prince and a blue blood, living in an orgy of affluence in his hilltop paradise in Minna, from where he continues his games of polemics and subterfuge against Nigeria.
(culled from the book, “Political Soldiering: Africa’s Men on Horseback.” Published by John Jacob’s Classic Publishers Ltd. Enugu. 2001. Pp 84 – 94)