April 10, 2010
He is a darling before the members of his clan. He has this toothy smile his admirers love. It is said his charisma can make his gun-totting adversary drift or do a u-turn. During the eight years he served as Nigeria's military president, he nearly succeeded in entrenching democracy in the nation's polity but for a hiccup along the way. And the ovation became so loud he had to hand over power to an Interim National Government.
But circumstances beyond his control cannot allow him shun the number one leadership position in his country, Nigeria.
The hottest (for some, most scandalous) political news item in Nigeria today is that Nigeria's ex-military president, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) did on his way to Asaba confirmed his intention to vie for Nigeria's highest political office in 2011. Before now, groups in Nigeria and abroad are said to be prodding him to rise, and take up once again, the number one leadership position in Nigeria. Job seekers seeking to profit from 'IBB for President' deep vaults had already started to insinuate that the challenges facing us in the choice for a new president in 2011 be changed from getting a leader who can guarantee the well-being of all Nigerians to getting a president with enough charisma, personal recognition and respect and ability to travel unhindered to every part of Nigeria. And like in a kingdom whose king was forced into exile, if the rest of Nigeria goes to sleep, or is hoodwinked by the antics of Ibrahim Babangida's rented crowd, we may witness an enactment of a nightmarish movie: "The Lord of the Dirty Rings, The Return of the Evil King".
In a Nigeria awash with world-class technocrats and political pundits, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) who merely trained in the art of soldiering has continued to believe he is a Nigerian genius as well as the country's king and king-maker; and above all, that his reign over us in Nigeria is "till death do us part".
Lest We Forget
IBB's continuous stranglehold on Nigeria is enhanced by two maladies of the Nigerian political establishment:
(i) A flawed and unworkable political structure that thrives, and can only thrive on selection, rather than election of the country's political leaders. (ii) A national anti-corruption outfit whose managers chose demonstrable ex-corrupt leaders and their collaborators as their blind spots, but would rather go to mount the rostrums in advanced democracies to talk about fighting corruption in Nigeria.
The last four decades have witnessed giant strides by nations to democratize. From Europe to the Latin American countries, and to the nations of the sub-Saharan Africa, military rule and militarized democracy (as is practised in Nigeria today) have been amply denounced and demonstrated retrogressive. Closer home, Ghana is a good example of where the people of a West African nation successfully took over political power from the itchy fingers of unyielding military dictators and their succeeding militarized politicians.
But in Nigeria, one man and his clan's inordinate ambitions have continued to put a wedge on the nation's march toward democratization and subsequent democratic choice for a suitable political system for its people. There is this belief among Nigeria's elites that but for Ibrahim Babangida's continued interference at the apex of Nigeria's political ladder, the likes of Olusegun Obasanjo, Muhammadu Buhari, Odumegwu Ojukwu, etc, would have quit the scene long ago.
Nigeria's attempt in the late 1970's to jump-start its democratization process was thwarted by Ibrahim Babangida when he and his co-conspirators in 1983 violently sacked the country's democratically elected government headed by Shehu Shagari. Since then, Babangida has not hidden his intention to reduce Nigeria to a banana republic before he answers the last call from yonder.
After IBB's success in his gory palace coup of 1985, he reigned over Nigeria like a colossus. For the eight years he was in power, he had every opportunity to introduce any political system he deemed inevitable for Nigeria. Were there not calls then for True or Fiscal Federalism on whose crest Babangida now wants to con to power? It is only a nit wit that can now believe that IBB would not abandon his new found love for True Federalism as soon as he grabs political power.
In every nation, the middle class is the power house of economic growth and social engineering, eliminate this class and the nation is faced with economic and social crisis. Furthermore, the youths are to a nation what the vertebrate column is to the human body, impair this column and the body is paralysed. Babangida's sordid economic policies traumatised these two social classes in Nigeria. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) proposed its trade liberalization policies as the panacea for the poorer nations' economic malaise, many brilliant leaders in various Third World nations bought the idea with much scrutiny. Many of those leaders that applied the IMF prescriptions in their countries simultaneously introduced some checks and balances to attenuate the negative fallouts from the policy on their populations. But in Nigeria, the beret-wearing Babangida, then fresh from his second or third military coup against the Nigerian establishment, and still struggling for international acceptance for his regime had to grab the IMF's prescriptions lock, stock and barrel. Without setting up adequate buffers to protect the Nigerian population, Babangida implemented the IMF's trade liberalization and currency deregulation policies in a manner Nigeria's poor was scorched, its middle class nearly wiped out and millions of its youths and other professionals forced abroad to search for greener pastures. Today, those forced out by IBB's IMF-induced voodoo economics are getting old and are itching to return with their kids to their fatherland. But IBB and his co-conspirators are still hatching plans to visit more evil on them and their fatherland.
The internecine religious conflicts that have engulfed Northern Nigeria today is a by-product of Ibrahim Babangida's myopic adventure into religious politics in a nation like Nigeria with a delicate balance between the two major religious faiths in its population. Before IBB's clandestine smuggling of Nigeria into the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), in the mid 80's (remember Ebitu Ukiwe's "did we discuss this at the AFRC?"), few Nigerians knew or bothered to know the difference between Christianity and Islam. The fractious debate following IBB's OIC act sensitized the average Nigerian and thus the dividing line drawn between the two major religions in the country. Today, the fire of religious intolerance is raging in some localities in Nigeria and the grievances arising therefrom running deep in the veins of the divided masses. Is Babangida coming back to power to douse the fire or to add fuel to it?
Apart from religious crisis, the dearth of foreign investors in Nigeria's economy today is also not unconnected to the huge credibility problems created by the menace of advanced-fee fraudsters who had their field-day during the eight years reign of Ibrahim Babangida. IBB was said to have wined and dined with those con men in and out of office. While in power, IBB neither made serious efforts to curb the activities of these economic saboteurs nor to prosecute them. A closer examination shows that in the majority among those now drumming for IBB's return to political power are the kingpins of advanced-fee fraud and their protectors during the Babangida regime.
Institutionalized corruption and graft were the regular features of IBB's administration. Critics - university professors not excluded - were often lured or 'settled' with political appointments (many phantom) that often resulted to putting square pegs in round holes.
Babangidas's economic sins against Nigeria are legion. A $12.2 billion Gulf War Oil windfall was guzzled by IBB through a 'Dedicated Accounts' system facilitated by the then Governor of the Central Bank, Alhaji Abdulkadir Ahmed, and operated between 1988 and June 1994. IBB was appropriately indicted by a government investigative panel set up in 1994 and led by late Justice Okigbo which stated in very clear terms that IBB corruptly misappropriated the oil windfall. Wonders of Nigeria now have it that the Okigbo panel's report is missing in government archives. Talk of Nigeria held on the jugular by IBB and his people.
IBB's regime sunk billions of Naira into nurturing two political parties during a lengthy transition to civil rule programme. But in a manner only attributable to lunatics, IBB truncated that transition programme after a huge monetary expenditure, when, in 1993 he annulled the results of the emanating elections adjudged the most free and fair ever conducted in Nigeria's electoral history. Today, the two parties' huge headquarters his regime built - wait for it - in all the then local government headquarters in Nigeria, are crumbling, and mostly inhabited by rats and reptiles. Of course, before IBB's forced exit from power, he wittingly or unwittingly prepared the path for the late General Sani Abacha to take over power shortly after him.
As Nigeria's youths and middle class were leaving in droves to other lands driven by harsh and abysmal Babangidanomics, IBB embarked upon a hurried and expensive transfer of the Nation's political capital from Lagos to Abuja. Abuja, of course, is a few kilometres from his home town of Minna, from where he has since been meddling in Nigeria's political affairs. The fallouts from that hurried transfer are continuing to exact their toll on the economic life of the average Nigerian. While Babangida was sinking the Nation's oil revenues into building a mega city at the speed of light, laying new or sustaining the nations economic and social infrastructures took a back seat. The oil producing area from which Nigeria was getting more than 90% of her income was left desolate and its people pauperised and consequently militarised. The numerous federal government infrastructures abandoned in Lagos were left to rot. And as the Abuja spending spree raged, Babangida in a chat with journalists told them he was wondering why the Nigerian economy had not yet collapsed.
Human-rights abuses characterised Babangida's reign. Apart from the numerous executions of his opponents on oft unfounded charges of coup-plotting, the killing in 1986 through a parcel bomb of Nigeria's first-grade journalist, Dele Giwa, in what apparently was a State-sponsored murder, was the climax of the Babangida regime's human rights abuses. Till today, Babangida has continued to frustrate every effort of investigators to unravel the mystery surrounding Giwa's murder. IBB's regime lasted about another seven years after the Giwa murder; that the Babangida-headed government was unable to unravel the circumstances surrounding Giwa's murder implies that Babangida can never again be entrusted with the security of lives and properties of Nigerians.
If by any hook or crook Babangida grabs Nigeria's number one position again, he would set aside or rewrite the country's constitution to achieve his ultimate ambition - becoming the country's life president. His early 1990's crude experiment on diarchy attests to this.
Generations of Nigerians shall never forgive the country's political class if it acquiesces and lets Babangida use his ill-gotten wealth to bribe his way to power this time.
But what is democracy all about without free and fair elections? It is injurious to our senses to write about IBB and his lurid bid to contest presidential elections in today's Nigeria notwithstanding our conviction that in any free and fair presidential election here, Ibrahim Babangida can never come any where nearer to victory. On this score, we are imploring lovers of Nigeria's development and democratization process in our legislative houses to grasp the importance of the citizens' demand that the INEC chairman be appointed by a neutral body, or at worst, they maintain an eagle's watch on how the next umpire of the electoral body is appointed. Ibrahim Babangida and members of his cabal must not be allowed to extend their tentacles on the process of appointing the next INEC chairman. IBB must NEVER be allowed to exploit the dirty selection legacy he bequeathed to Nigeria's political leadership succession process to hoist himself upon Nigeria again.
*This article (revised) was first published in June 2004 on nigeriaworld.com by Advance Africa (Nigeria Interests Section)
Udoh Obumselu and Adekunle Kevin
Advance Africa (Nigeria Interests Section)
But circumstances beyond his control cannot allow him shun the number one leadership position in his country, Nigeria.
The hottest (for some, most scandalous) political news item in Nigeria today is that Nigeria's ex-military president, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) did on his way to Asaba confirmed his intention to vie for Nigeria's highest political office in 2011. Before now, groups in Nigeria and abroad are said to be prodding him to rise, and take up once again, the number one leadership position in Nigeria. Job seekers seeking to profit from 'IBB for President' deep vaults had already started to insinuate that the challenges facing us in the choice for a new president in 2011 be changed from getting a leader who can guarantee the well-being of all Nigerians to getting a president with enough charisma, personal recognition and respect and ability to travel unhindered to every part of Nigeria. And like in a kingdom whose king was forced into exile, if the rest of Nigeria goes to sleep, or is hoodwinked by the antics of Ibrahim Babangida's rented crowd, we may witness an enactment of a nightmarish movie: "The Lord of the Dirty Rings, The Return of the Evil King".
In a Nigeria awash with world-class technocrats and political pundits, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) who merely trained in the art of soldiering has continued to believe he is a Nigerian genius as well as the country's king and king-maker; and above all, that his reign over us in Nigeria is "till death do us part".
Lest We Forget
IBB's continuous stranglehold on Nigeria is enhanced by two maladies of the Nigerian political establishment:
(i) A flawed and unworkable political structure that thrives, and can only thrive on selection, rather than election of the country's political leaders. (ii) A national anti-corruption outfit whose managers chose demonstrable ex-corrupt leaders and their collaborators as their blind spots, but would rather go to mount the rostrums in advanced democracies to talk about fighting corruption in Nigeria.
The last four decades have witnessed giant strides by nations to democratize. From Europe to the Latin American countries, and to the nations of the sub-Saharan Africa, military rule and militarized democracy (as is practised in Nigeria today) have been amply denounced and demonstrated retrogressive. Closer home, Ghana is a good example of where the people of a West African nation successfully took over political power from the itchy fingers of unyielding military dictators and their succeeding militarized politicians.
But in Nigeria, one man and his clan's inordinate ambitions have continued to put a wedge on the nation's march toward democratization and subsequent democratic choice for a suitable political system for its people. There is this belief among Nigeria's elites that but for Ibrahim Babangida's continued interference at the apex of Nigeria's political ladder, the likes of Olusegun Obasanjo, Muhammadu Buhari, Odumegwu Ojukwu, etc, would have quit the scene long ago.
Nigeria's attempt in the late 1970's to jump-start its democratization process was thwarted by Ibrahim Babangida when he and his co-conspirators in 1983 violently sacked the country's democratically elected government headed by Shehu Shagari. Since then, Babangida has not hidden his intention to reduce Nigeria to a banana republic before he answers the last call from yonder.
After IBB's success in his gory palace coup of 1985, he reigned over Nigeria like a colossus. For the eight years he was in power, he had every opportunity to introduce any political system he deemed inevitable for Nigeria. Were there not calls then for True or Fiscal Federalism on whose crest Babangida now wants to con to power? It is only a nit wit that can now believe that IBB would not abandon his new found love for True Federalism as soon as he grabs political power.
In every nation, the middle class is the power house of economic growth and social engineering, eliminate this class and the nation is faced with economic and social crisis. Furthermore, the youths are to a nation what the vertebrate column is to the human body, impair this column and the body is paralysed. Babangida's sordid economic policies traumatised these two social classes in Nigeria. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) proposed its trade liberalization policies as the panacea for the poorer nations' economic malaise, many brilliant leaders in various Third World nations bought the idea with much scrutiny. Many of those leaders that applied the IMF prescriptions in their countries simultaneously introduced some checks and balances to attenuate the negative fallouts from the policy on their populations. But in Nigeria, the beret-wearing Babangida, then fresh from his second or third military coup against the Nigerian establishment, and still struggling for international acceptance for his regime had to grab the IMF's prescriptions lock, stock and barrel. Without setting up adequate buffers to protect the Nigerian population, Babangida implemented the IMF's trade liberalization and currency deregulation policies in a manner Nigeria's poor was scorched, its middle class nearly wiped out and millions of its youths and other professionals forced abroad to search for greener pastures. Today, those forced out by IBB's IMF-induced voodoo economics are getting old and are itching to return with their kids to their fatherland. But IBB and his co-conspirators are still hatching plans to visit more evil on them and their fatherland.
The internecine religious conflicts that have engulfed Northern Nigeria today is a by-product of Ibrahim Babangida's myopic adventure into religious politics in a nation like Nigeria with a delicate balance between the two major religious faiths in its population. Before IBB's clandestine smuggling of Nigeria into the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), in the mid 80's (remember Ebitu Ukiwe's "did we discuss this at the AFRC?"), few Nigerians knew or bothered to know the difference between Christianity and Islam. The fractious debate following IBB's OIC act sensitized the average Nigerian and thus the dividing line drawn between the two major religions in the country. Today, the fire of religious intolerance is raging in some localities in Nigeria and the grievances arising therefrom running deep in the veins of the divided masses. Is Babangida coming back to power to douse the fire or to add fuel to it?
Apart from religious crisis, the dearth of foreign investors in Nigeria's economy today is also not unconnected to the huge credibility problems created by the menace of advanced-fee fraudsters who had their field-day during the eight years reign of Ibrahim Babangida. IBB was said to have wined and dined with those con men in and out of office. While in power, IBB neither made serious efforts to curb the activities of these economic saboteurs nor to prosecute them. A closer examination shows that in the majority among those now drumming for IBB's return to political power are the kingpins of advanced-fee fraud and their protectors during the Babangida regime.
Institutionalized corruption and graft were the regular features of IBB's administration. Critics - university professors not excluded - were often lured or 'settled' with political appointments (many phantom) that often resulted to putting square pegs in round holes.
Babangidas's economic sins against Nigeria are legion. A $12.2 billion Gulf War Oil windfall was guzzled by IBB through a 'Dedicated Accounts' system facilitated by the then Governor of the Central Bank, Alhaji Abdulkadir Ahmed, and operated between 1988 and June 1994. IBB was appropriately indicted by a government investigative panel set up in 1994 and led by late Justice Okigbo which stated in very clear terms that IBB corruptly misappropriated the oil windfall. Wonders of Nigeria now have it that the Okigbo panel's report is missing in government archives. Talk of Nigeria held on the jugular by IBB and his people.
IBB's regime sunk billions of Naira into nurturing two political parties during a lengthy transition to civil rule programme. But in a manner only attributable to lunatics, IBB truncated that transition programme after a huge monetary expenditure, when, in 1993 he annulled the results of the emanating elections adjudged the most free and fair ever conducted in Nigeria's electoral history. Today, the two parties' huge headquarters his regime built - wait for it - in all the then local government headquarters in Nigeria, are crumbling, and mostly inhabited by rats and reptiles. Of course, before IBB's forced exit from power, he wittingly or unwittingly prepared the path for the late General Sani Abacha to take over power shortly after him.
As Nigeria's youths and middle class were leaving in droves to other lands driven by harsh and abysmal Babangidanomics, IBB embarked upon a hurried and expensive transfer of the Nation's political capital from Lagos to Abuja. Abuja, of course, is a few kilometres from his home town of Minna, from where he has since been meddling in Nigeria's political affairs. The fallouts from that hurried transfer are continuing to exact their toll on the economic life of the average Nigerian. While Babangida was sinking the Nation's oil revenues into building a mega city at the speed of light, laying new or sustaining the nations economic and social infrastructures took a back seat. The oil producing area from which Nigeria was getting more than 90% of her income was left desolate and its people pauperised and consequently militarised. The numerous federal government infrastructures abandoned in Lagos were left to rot. And as the Abuja spending spree raged, Babangida in a chat with journalists told them he was wondering why the Nigerian economy had not yet collapsed.
Human-rights abuses characterised Babangida's reign. Apart from the numerous executions of his opponents on oft unfounded charges of coup-plotting, the killing in 1986 through a parcel bomb of Nigeria's first-grade journalist, Dele Giwa, in what apparently was a State-sponsored murder, was the climax of the Babangida regime's human rights abuses. Till today, Babangida has continued to frustrate every effort of investigators to unravel the mystery surrounding Giwa's murder. IBB's regime lasted about another seven years after the Giwa murder; that the Babangida-headed government was unable to unravel the circumstances surrounding Giwa's murder implies that Babangida can never again be entrusted with the security of lives and properties of Nigerians.
If by any hook or crook Babangida grabs Nigeria's number one position again, he would set aside or rewrite the country's constitution to achieve his ultimate ambition - becoming the country's life president. His early 1990's crude experiment on diarchy attests to this.
Generations of Nigerians shall never forgive the country's political class if it acquiesces and lets Babangida use his ill-gotten wealth to bribe his way to power this time.
But what is democracy all about without free and fair elections? It is injurious to our senses to write about IBB and his lurid bid to contest presidential elections in today's Nigeria notwithstanding our conviction that in any free and fair presidential election here, Ibrahim Babangida can never come any where nearer to victory. On this score, we are imploring lovers of Nigeria's development and democratization process in our legislative houses to grasp the importance of the citizens' demand that the INEC chairman be appointed by a neutral body, or at worst, they maintain an eagle's watch on how the next umpire of the electoral body is appointed. Ibrahim Babangida and members of his cabal must not be allowed to extend their tentacles on the process of appointing the next INEC chairman. IBB must NEVER be allowed to exploit the dirty selection legacy he bequeathed to Nigeria's political leadership succession process to hoist himself upon Nigeria again.
*This article (revised) was first published in June 2004 on nigeriaworld.com by Advance Africa (Nigeria Interests Section)
Udoh Obumselu and Adekunle Kevin
Advance Africa (Nigeria Interests Section)
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