Introduction
Almost twenty years ago this month, on January 29, 1995 to be precise, I delivered a paper as the Guest Speaker on the occasion of the celebration of the conferment of an honourary DSc degree on Major General Muhammadu Buhari by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi. The occasion took place against the background of the “June 12” crisis. It was organised by the Katsina State Forum and held at Liyafa Hotel, Katsina. Among those on the high table that day was the General himself, his Chief of General Staff, the late Major General Idiagbon, and the Katsina State Governor, Navy Captain EA Acholonu.
My speech that day dwelt on the “June 12” crisis as a cross road. This year Nigeria is at another crossroad as the year in which the Americans have predicted the country will breakup. Hopefully their doomsday prediction will prove false – that is if we do certain things right because, as the Good Lord says, He will not change a people’s condition until they too do their own bit.
Several of the key players in the “June 12” crisis, notably General Sani Abacha, Chief MKO Abiola, Mazi SG Ikoku, Dr Umaru Dikko and Dr Sola Saraki, have passed on. But many more, notably General Ibrahim Babangida, Brigadier General David Mark, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai and Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, are alive and well – and very much active in the current dispensation as is, of course, the honouree of twenty years ago.
I think what I said then has some lessons for today’s cross-road – hence my request to the editors of this publication to reproduce it. Hopefully you will not find the almost 4,600 word speech boring.
Let me start by first of all thanking the Katsina State Forum, the organisers of this event, for inviting me to be the guest speaker. I don’t know why they chose me to speak on this occasion, which is in honour of General Buhari, for the conferment on him of an honorary D.Sc. degree; I don’t know a lot about him, except of course that he tried to run an honest administration which, alas, turned out to be too draconian. Not only do I know little about the general, many of you gathered here may also know that I am protégé of former president General Ibrahim Babangida, who overthrew General Buhari and between the two of whom, alas, there does not seem to be any love lost.
Clearly, I am in a bit of a dilemma; I mean how do I speak well of Buhari without sounding like speaking ill of Babangida? Fortunately, my brief for this occasion is not to assess the special guest of honour, but rather to speak on the problems facing this country since June 1993 and the prospects of solving these problems.
I mention June 1993 because it is arguably the most important cross-road in our history. Of course, there have been other crucial cross-roads since our independence, among them, (1) January 15, 1966 which saw the first military intervention in politics and (2) January 1967 which saw the first military attempt at breaking this country. Of all such cross-roads, however, June 1993 is unique if only because it is the first time that it would be shown that it is possible for a non-northerner to become an elected president of this country, in spite of the numerical superiority of northerners.
As with all cross-roads, June 1993 imposed a choice of options on the Nigerian leadership and the choice it made of annulling the results of the June 12 presidential election, whatever its justification, landed us in to the political crisis of the last two years. We all know how this crisis manifested into near total anarchy in at least one section of the country — the South-West — where the putative winner of that election, Chief MKO Abiola, comes from, and how the crisis paralyzed the rest of the country. Again we all know that it took the intervention of the military, once more, to contain the crisis even though, paradoxically, the same intervention did heighten tension in the middle of last year to the point where the break-up of the country seemed a distinct probability.
I use the word contain, advisedly because it is obvious to all that the crisis of June 1993 is far from over. True, life has since returned to normal even in the south-west, what with the chief proponents of that date either in government, or in exile or in disarray. Even then with Chief Abiola still in jail and under trial and with the Western world, upon whom we have so much come to depend, insisting on a democratic solution to the crisis as a condition for resuming normal business with us, no one can pretend that the crisis is over and done with.
Clearly, the immediate challenge we face today is of how to actually get June 12 over and done with. The question is what are the prospects of meeting this challenge? I am afraid the prospects seem rather bleak, at least in the short run, and by short run I mean at least the next fifteen to twenty years.
There are several dimensions to the challenges of June 1993. There is the political dimension as well as the economic. Again, some of the challenges are immediate in nature while some are long term. The factor common to all these dimensions is the fear of domination of one section of the country by another. At the national level this fear is popularly seen in one respect as that of the permanent political domination of the south by the north mediated by the fear of the domination of minority ethnic groups by the three majority ethnic groups, namely Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo. In another respect this fear is of the economic domination of the north by the south.
The ultimate challenge facing us is how to cure these fears of political and economic domination of one section by another. These fears are by nature not easily removed because they have roots way back into our colonial or even pre-colonial past. The fears are, however, merely difficult but not impossible to cure. Nothing, after all, is impossible so long as there is the will and the ability and an honest commitment to do something about it. The question is, is the Nigerian leadership willing, able and committed to remove these fears? Recent events do not suggest a positive answer. On the contrary such events suggest that the Nigerian leadership prefer to feed on such fears in order to get and retain power.
Needless to say, the problem is of course not solely of leadership as the much respected novelist and social critic, Chinua Achebe, has said in his pamphlet “The Problem with Nigeria”. True, leadership is a problem but then so is the followership. As Mr. Audu Ogbe, one time minister of communications in president Shagari’s government once argued, popular demands and popular expectations often make it almost impossible for public officers to live an honest life.
However, valid as Ogbe’s point is, the truth remains that although the problem of Nigeria is not SOLELY one of leadership, it is mostly one of leadership. By definition leadership means doing what is right and proper even when it may not be popular. If it is right and proper and popular at the same time, all well and good. However, any leader who is guided merely by what is popular, even when it may not be right and proper, is obviously not a leader in the proper sense of the word because he merely “leads” from behind.
If the defining characteristics of true leadership are propriety and rightness of public policy, how can we judge our leaders since those of the independence generation? No doubt we have had leaders who have demonstrated integrity and competence, but if the quality of life of Nigerians is the yardstick for judging the performance of our leaders as a group — and there can hardly be a better yardstick — then our leaders have failed us as a group. They have failed collectively because the quality of life of Nigerians has progressively declined since independence, to the extent that today Nigeria has become a metaphor for abject poverty in the midst of enormous natural resources.
We all wonder, don’t we, why Nigerians should live wretched lives when we have so many natural resources. The simple answer is that no section of the leadership, whether it is military, political, traditional or religious, has collectively demonstrated a willingness to make sacrifices so that their followers can climb out of their wretchedness.
As I have said there have been individual exceptions to the rule that Nigerians aspire to leadership positions more for self-aggrandizement than for public service. The gentleman we are honouring today, General Buhari, is one of them. In some respect, he too did lead from behind; he did sack many people and put many others away without due process. It was, of course, a popular thing to do, given the popular disaffection with the politics of the Second Republic and an equally popular impatience with due process which is often seen as too slow and too full of holes to catch all but the smallest crooks. Yet it is only in due process that there lies the guarantee that the innocent would not be made to suffer along with the guilty.
Despite giving in to popular sentiments, it can be said of General Buhari that he demonstrated a level of personal integrity which is vital for leadership but which, unfortunately, is in short supply at all levels of society. Most importantly this quality seems to be acutely deficient in all categories of the country’s leadership whether they are politicians, soldiers, traditional rulers, academicians, religious leaders and journalists – – most especially journalists.
Mr. Chairman, sir, this is the main reason why I have argued at the beginning of this lecture that the prospects that we will meet the challenge of transforming this country into a better tomorrow is rather bleak. The point is when you look at all the options for true leadership, you are forced to the conclusion that there is little to chose from among politicians, soldiers, traditional rulers — the lot.
Let me quickly say here that by arguing that the prospects are bleak, it does not mean we are in a hopeless situation. Far from it. In the long run, I am confident that Nigeria and Nigerians will overcome. However, as we face the challenge of making Nigeria better, it is important that we entertain no illusions that anyone or group can solve our problems in any significant way for perhaps the next 15-20 years. This is a very important point to note these days when the campaign for the military to stay on seems to be gaining currency. I will return to this crucial issue of the military in politics presently.
Before I do so, however, we may briefly examine our concept of leadership to see whether or not part of our problem is not the way we perceive leadership. I suggest that our concept of leadership is part of our problems.
We see leadership, mostly, as only the chap on top of the heap — the president, the governor, the local council chairman, the military or police chief, etc. We refuse to see or accept that each and every one of us who has authority or influence over others, no matter how small their number, is also a leader. And unless each of us exercises such authority and influence in a way which is proper and right, not only do we have no moral right to criticize those above us, we also cannot expect the positive actions of those above us to make any significant difference in improving society.
If I may illustrate this point by an anecdote. Sometimes last year I was in Minna to pursue the payment for a job Citizen Communications Limited had done for Niger State. As is my usual practice, I took time off to see General Babangida. On my way to his house I met a friend for whom Babangida is hardly an idol. In the course of our conversation I told him I was going to Uphill (the popular name of Babangida’s resident presumably because it is perched on the highest hill in the town). The way my friend reacted to my mention of Babangida, you would think I had waived a red flag before a bull. “Aah, that man ruined this country! He did this and did that.”
Of course I did not bother to respond to his outrageous charge that one man alone can ruin a nation. But as God would have it, he himself showed, perhaps without knowing it, that if indeed Babangida ruined this nation he too, like hundreds of thousands of Nigerians in leadership positions, helped in no small measure.
At that time the petrol shortage in the north, which is refusing to go away in some states even though petrol is now eleven Naira per litre, was particularly acute in Minna. In the course of our conversation my friend had told me how he was having a whale of a time engaging in fairly big time petrol black marketeering. Wasn’t it ironical, I pointed to my friend, that while he was railing at Babangida, there he was seeing nothing wrong with profiting from the misery of hundreds of thousands of car owners and mass commuters? Of course he did not cause the shortage, but as a leader in his own right, did he not think he had a responsibility to see that he did not compound the shortage? The double irony of his anger with Babangida was that the price of petrol at that time had just been increased to 3.25 Naira and the black market appeared to be receding. My friend sounded bitter with this development because, he said, the new price increase was ruining his lucrative business!
I am sorry if I bore you with this anecdote, but I narrate it because it is important that as we accuse our leaders of all manner of evils, that we should each examine ourselves and see whether as individuals we are behaving any better. Society, after all, is the sum total of our individual behaviour, which is why it is often said that society gets the leaders it deserves.
Once in a while, society, of course, gets the leaders it needs as opposed to the ones it deserves. June 1993 as a cross-road posed a challenge to our society in general and our leaders in particular, to throw up the leaders we need to overcome the decay of our political economy. So far all categories of our leaders – political, economic, traditional, religious, academic, etc – have failed the challenge.
As a rule academicians in power have turned out to be no better than the politicians and soldiers they often criticised. Both religious and traditional rulers have since forfeited their moral authority to command respect as they have come to join the fawning group that is often derisively referred to as AGIP — any government in power. As for the politicians, whether of the mufti or khaki variety, events before and since June 1993 has shown quite clearly that their pre-occupation is power for self-aggrandizement rather than for improving the lot of their people.
Unfortunately, it is to this political class, whether they are civilians or soldiers, that we must turn to for the solutions to our problem. This is because, among all categories of leaders it is to them that society entrusts the instruments of public policy and state violence, voluntarily in the case of civilians and by force in the case of soldiers.
So far both soldiers and civilians have shown themselves to be unworthy of this public trust and nothing has happened since June 1993 to give one the confidence that they are about to change for the better. On the contrary events in the last several months tend to suggest they have actually become even more untrustworthy.
Once upon a time, a soldier’s word used to be his honour. Not anymore. Since he first intervened in politics, his words have become increasingly more unreliable than those of politicians. The latest manifestation of this unreliability is over the on-going Constitutional Conference.
When General Sani Abacha came to power in November 1993, he promised his administration would be brief and his tenure would be determined by the Conference. Although he did not spell out how brief his brief would be, the common understanding was that the military will go after two years on the outside. After all by then they would have spent more or less 10 years in power since overthrowing the Second Republic. However, since the Constitutional Conference determined January 1, 1996 as Abacha’s exit date it has become apparent that the military never really intended its latest intervention to be brief.
When Brigadier-General David Mark, one of the so-called “Babangida boys” to be retired by Abacha, first revealed to the world in a Newswatch interview that Abacha actually had a hidden agenda which was to hang on to power for five years, many people, including myself, dismissed his allegations as the ranting of someone who felt aggrieved at being used and dumped; Mark, after all, participated actively in the sacking of Ernest Shonekan to the extent that he was instrumental in neutralizing potential opposition to the coup from the Senate. I happen to know that it was Mark whom Abacha used to speak to the Senate president, Ameh Ebute, a kinsman of Mark’s, to persuade the Senate not to condemn the coup.
Of course, the ranting of even the disaffected can be true, and personally I suspected that there was much truth in Mark’s interview with Newswatch, but anyone who believed that Mark was doing it for the good of Nigerians and not because he was sacked from the army, must be a fool. However, events since the Constitutional Conference decided on the January 1, 1996 exit for Abacha have tended to make Mark’s motives less and less important than the truth or otherwise of his allegations.
First, barely a day after the decision was taken, soldiers moved in to seize the official vehicles given to chairmen of committees of the conference. Second, even before the ink had dried on the paper on which the decision was written, leading members of the Conference like Dr. Sola Saraki, Mazi S.G. Ikoku and Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, were predicting that the decision will be revised. And all these honourable gentlemen are known to be working hand-in-glove with the military administration. Third, an orchestrated campaign to discredit the January date took off, led at times by politicians themselves who are prominent in Abacha’s regime, politicians like Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, the federal minister of industries, and Chief Ebenezer Babatope, the minister of transport and aviation.
Forth and worst of all, leading politicians themselves started a campaign of the denigration of their own class. For instance, Alhaji Wada Nas, a prominent son of these parts and the minister of state in the federal ministry of education told The Democrat on January 23, that it was only when politicians wanted votes that “they go (to the public) and tell them lies. That is why they (the public) insist on a cash and carry and pay before service in dealing with insincere politicians.” Nas has since said because politicians are dishonest, he is through with politics for good. Hearing him speak, you would think politicians were angels until recently.
Even more self denigrating was Alhaji Hassan Yusuf, once a PRP presidential candidate and now a Conference member. Hassan told the Federal Government owned Sunday New Nigerian (January 22) that our democracy has been one of rigged elections. “If that is the kind of democracy people are agitating for,” he said, “it is better for the people of Nigeria to remain under military regime forever”!
Of all these strange campaigns by politicians for the military to continue forever none beats me hollow like that of Alhaji Umaru Dikko, the self-proclaimed scourge of the military. Only two years back Dikko was asking readers of Citizen magazine in its cover story of January 2, “Who has given any military the mandate to intervene in the political affairs of any nation?” In a fit of anger at the military, he told Citizen that the military in politics had absolutely no redeeming feature. “Let me ask you,” he said, “since the military overthrew us in 1983 ending, mention to me one programme which they brought to Nigeria and the thing ended happily and everybody was glad. There is none. Not one.”
Angry as he was with the soldiers, he was angrier still with his fellow politicians. “What is happening today in Nigeria,” he said, “gives me the impression that politicians do not really know where they want to go,” None of them he said ever challenged anything. “If,” he went on, “they (meaning military) say election tomorrow, they say alright election tomorrow. If it is 1990, alright 1990. If it is 1992, oh, that’s alright. What is the idea?”
In the light of all this, surely it is incredible that Dikko would actively join, as he has, the group of those campaigning for the military to stay on well beyond next year. Dikko, of course, has a good reason to wish Abacha well, since the general brought him back from a ten-year self-exile straight into the Constitutional Conference. Even then, Abacha’s gesture does not justify Dikko’s about-turn. If someone who once swore that he was an implacable enemy of the military can turn around to support them simply because they did him one good turn, what it means is that for politicians power is an end that justifies any means to grab it. It means they believe in democracy only when they are not in power and democracy can go to hell once power is in their hands.
Mr. Chairman, as I have said, there does not seem to be much to chose from between politicians and soldiers when it comes to their abuse of power. For me, however, that cannot mean, as Alhaji Yusuf Hassan argues, that it is better for Nigerians to remain under military rule. As my religion advises, when faced between two “evils,” one has an obligation to chose the lesser one and, Mr. Chairman, I make bold to say the politicians are a lesser evil than the soldiers. First, they don’t go shooting their way into power. Second, they are amenable to popular pressures in a way that the soldiers are not by virtue of relying more on the gun to retain power. Third, as a group, the politicians seem less rapacious than the soldiers; I suspect a census of our billionaires and millionaires will show that as a group there are proportionately far more soldiers than politicians in that special class.
Last but by no means the least, the single most important condition for solving our national problems is that the military must simply stay out of politics. This matter of domination of one section by another is simply the consequence of our running a unitary government in all but name since the soldiers first meddled in politics. There is one and only one solution to this problem, and this is that we must run Nigeria as a true federation. Needless to say it is impossible to run such a federation when the military is in charge of politics. The military by definition has a command structure and willy-nilly will impose that structure on any country it rules over.
Therefore, those who wish this country well should stop lecturing us on why Abacha needs more than one more year to ensure a stable democracy. We have been given all sorts of reasons by people like Ikoku and Yakasai on why we should not be in haste for democracy. Some of these reasons sound reasonable and even sensible. Most of them, however, are nonsensical and none of them can justify military rule beyond this year. Ikoku and Saraki for instance, argue that the transition programme is such that it cannot be fully implemented before January next year. “The military”, says Saraki in an interview with Today (January 22) “cannot go in 1996 because what we have asked them to do is so enormous.” What Saraki is not telling us is who asked the Conference to ask the military to do so much?
Given the June ’93 crisis which Abacha ostensibly intervened in November ’93 to resolve, his was supposed to be a one-item agenda, namely either to reverse the military’s decision to cancel the June 12, 1993 election or create an atmosphere as quickly as possible that will make it possible to conduct fresh elections into all levels of government. Abacha chose, sensibly I think, to do the latter because the majority of the political class indicated that it was better to go forward from June 12 than to go back to it. That was why he told the world that his stay will be brief.
Instead of being brief, now leading politicians are saying the military must do this and must do that before they go. They are telling us new states and local governments must be created before Abacha hands over. They are telling us that Abacha must be allowed to fix the economy before he goes as if anyone can fix the country’s wretched economy in a few years. They are also telling us that two years is too short to heal the wounds of June 23. Of course two years is too short to heal those wounds, but who said it is only the military that can heal the wounds? Indeed, how can a wound heal when the very knife that inflicted the wound is still being twisted in the wound? Let us be frank with ourselves, any senior military officer who tells you that General Ibrahim Babangida alone took the decision to annul the June 12, ’93 election is, let us say, being economical with the truth. Many of those in leadership positions today who declaim responsibility either actively took part in the decision or quietly acquiesced to it. So whatever revisionism may be going on now, the truth is that the June ’93 crisis was created by the military and until they leave politics, the wounds of the crisis cannot begin to heal.
Those who say it is unrealistic to ask the military to go next year are hardly fair to Nigeria or even to themselves. They are not even being fair to Abacha, if only because they are encouraging him to break his word. Abacha, and by extension the military, can leave in six months if they focus their minds on dealing decisively with the June ’93 crisis. They can do so either by simply releasing Abiola and handing over power to him or by focusing their minds on fresh elections.
Personally, I think the second option is to be preferred. Chances are that the elections may be boycotted in the South-West, where Chief Abiola comes from. But again chances are they may not. Already NADECO, the main opposition group, have indicated, through Chief Anthony Enahoro and Chief Cornelius Adebayo that it is willing to dialogue with Abacha for a way out of the crisis. Even before NADECO, it is significant that the Awolowo dynasty has never been overly enthusiastic about June ’93 and that dynasty still commands a significant following in the South-West.
Again, in assessing the chances of a successful election it should be remembered that the Western world has predictably become cool towards June ’93. Predictably because the commitment of the West to democracy outside their own world is only skin-deep, all such posturing in places like Haiti, notwithstanding. Those who are wont to quote Haiti as evidence that it is never too late for Americans to restore Chief Abiola to power, should remember that the US sent troops to restore Father Aristides to power last year in that hapless Caribbean Island, not because they cared about Haitians, but because the military that overthrew Aristides two years before were creating too many boat people for the US. The obvious implication of this is that the interests of the South-West are better served by South-Westerners cooperating in organizing fresh elections.
So if Abacha is willing, the military can oblige the Constitutional Conference and leave by January 1996. Of course their departure would not mean that all our problems will go away automatically. They will not. But to the extent that only a true federation where the units are truly autonomous can resolve the fear of domination existing among the various sections of this country, to that extent must the military leave politics. The sooner they do so, the better. They have been around for nearly 11 years now since they overthrew President Shehu Shagari and no one can honestly claim even for one moment that life is any better today than it was 15 years ago.
Mr. Chairman, Special Guest of Honour, the Military Administrator, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much
