By Azu Ishiekwene
You cannot quarrel about how a man tells his story. It is his business. However, the pseudo-autobiography of the former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, is more than the retired general telling a story of his own life. A Journey in Service is a long, tortuous journey to penitence, which arrives at its destination, if it does at all, leaving its memory behind.
After 32 years of deflecting, dissembling, dodging and denial, the former military president finally gets as close as possible to remorse, then stops short of saying sorry for his betrayal of his country by blaming several dead and a few feeble living.
And yet, Babangida, being Babangida, reserved the best part of his book for himself. He left the worst for those who might have challenged his account and others he believes should have forgotten by now. Babangida will not change, but that’s okay. He shouldn’t also make the mistake of thinking we have all forgotten.
Whitewash
The prologue says the book is “not about finding blame, inventing excuses or whitewashing known facts.” However, apart from chapters 1 and 2 on his early childhood, chapters 11 and 13 on his home front and retirement, and perhaps one or two other chapters in between, where he struggled to restrain himself, nine of the 12 chapters of the 440-page book are filled with blame, inventions, and whitewashing.
I start with his relationship with the press. In chapter 6, entitled, “Mounting the Saddle, Defining a Military President,” after throwing Major General Muhammadu Buhari and Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon under the bus for miscarrying their “initial rescue mission,” he praised his government for abolishing Decree 4, passed by Buhari, and granting state pardon to two journalists, Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson of The Guardian, who had been sentenced under the decree.
Babangida said his heroic act of press redemption warmed his relationship with the media.
The other side of the story
That’s one side of the story, done, like many things Babangida did, with a hidden agenda. Here’s what a report by the media watchdog Media Rights Agenda (MRA) said: “The regime of General Ibrahim Babangida (August 27, 1985 to August 26, 1993) has the dubious distinction of having closed down or proscribed more newspapers and magazines than any other government in Nigeria’s history.
“Forty-one newspapers and magazines were victims of this practice under the administration; some closed down or proscribed on two different occasions. Twenty-five newspapers and magazines were shut down or proscribed by the Babangida administration in 1993 alone following public agitation for a return to civil democratic rule…”
The clampdown
The clampdown didn’t start in 1993. It began in 1987, roughly two years after Babangida came to power. The first target of this press saviour in shining armour was Newswatch magazine, which was banned for six months for publishing a report deemed injurious to the government’s political bureau. This was barely one year after one of the founders of Newswatch, Dele Giwa, was killed in a parcel bomb.
Press freedom went downhill from then on, with the government shutting down PUNCH, Concord, Guardian, and Sketch, among others. Another matter is how the military president, even out of office, manipulated the election of newspaper publishers.
MRA reported that three newspapers owned by John West publications were shut down for publishing the Jennifer Madike stories that “embarrassed the president’s wife.” And when William Keeling, a British journalist with the Financial Times, dared to publish a story alleging that about $5 billion windfall from Gulf War 1 was diverted, Babangida’s government wasted no time bundling him out of the country.
Seduced by power
Those too young or indebted to Babangida to see clearly may believe what they choose. But it would be defamatory of reptiles to call the man a chameleon. When General Yakubu Gowon said in the Foreword that being a soldier and a politician was a virtue in Babangida, the old man was being economical with the truth. As Marshal Davout, one of Napoleon’s most outstanding soldiers, said, the best soldiers abhor politics. They take a professional stand. Many who are seduced lose their way.
A Journey in Service reminds us of how Babangida sucked in the crème de la crème of the academia to boost the legitimacy of his regime. Regrettably, this handshake across the Ivory Tower, which later extended to the judiciary, labour and sections of civil society, became a deadly stranglehold. Babangida’s book doesn’t contain a hint of the poisonous liaison.
We read nothing, for example, about how Babangida inflicted further damage on academia. Under Gowon, the field was already dented by awful interference as military administrators began appointing university visitors.
Our Gorbachev?
But it got even worse. In 1988, Babangida, who framed himself as Nigeria’s answer to Mikhail Gorbachev, ordered the deportation of Patrick Wilmot, a sociology teacher at the Ahmadu Bello University, for teaching “what he was not paid to teach.”
Yet, if you think Babangida’s attempt to rewrite history was limited only to the press and academia, then you underestimate the disservice of the book. Chapter 12, “Transition to Civil Rule and the June 12 Saga,” is at the heart of the book: it reveals Babangida for who he is – duplicity, the milder version of which is an evil genius. However, anyone remembering this trying period in Nigeria will pinch himself at Babangida’s convenient attempt to take responsibility by shifting the blame.
In this chapter, he blamed the Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) for going to court on the eve of the election. Then, he blamed Justice Bassey Ikpeme, an agent of his own Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Clement Akpamgbo, for granting the order to stop the election.
Then, he blamed the National Electoral Commission (NEC) chairman, Professor Humphrey Nwosu, for stopping the announcement of the election result. He blamed Nduka Irabor for announcing the annulment of the election from a rough sheet of paper, claiming it was without the knowledge of Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, his second-in-command.
Abacha as scapegoat
Finally, he blamed General Sani Abacha for leading the fifth columnists in his government to sabotage the process. This comprehensive blame account indicts everyone around the boss. Still, it leaves the boss a generous latitude to accept responsibility for the glaring and monumental lapses without apologising to the country he had betrayed.
“These nefarious ‘inside’ forces opposed to the elections have outflanked me”, Babangida said he remembers saying on Page 275. He didn’t say to whom he was speaking. A whitewash by the whitewasher-in-chief never looked whiter.
What did he do to “outflank” the “nefarious forces?” By his own account, he convened the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) after he claimed announcements stopping the elections were being made without his authority.
He admitted knowing when Nwosu stopped announcing the result without his approval and when Irabor made the so-called unauthorised announcement. Even before that, his minister Akpamgbo, at whose behest he insinuated that Justice Ikpeme may have acted, attended the AFRC meeting with him. Yet, the commander-in-chief present amidst the chaos lacked the courage to call the shots.
He did something, though. He yielded to the law of self-preservation, the love of self, and then, only later, like a scoundrel, claimed he was stepping aside for the love of country. He left behind the Interim National Government, a contraption he knew wouldn’t last.
More questions than answers
Writing off the book as a triumph of cowardice and dissembling would be harsh. There are a few strands of consistency. For example, Babangida admitted that Dele Giwa was his friend but didn’t say and has never said what became of the multiple investigations into how Giwa was killed by a parcel bomb decades after the tragic event. Yet, Giwa was his friend.
Babangida said 159 persons, mainly middle-level military officers, were killed in the C-130 NAF aircraft crash in Ejigbo, Ikeja, because of poor aircraft maintenance, but failed to say whose responsibility it was to maintain the aircraft or what happened to the negligent officers in charge.
His Mamman Vatsa coup story was also conveniently consistent. Vasta had always envied him from secondary school, even though they sometimes shared bed spaces and clothes. He wasn’t surprised Vatsa would bribe soldiers—one of them with N50k—to put his head on a plate despite the consequences of such a treasonable act.
Plea for Vatsa
Why didn’t he commute the death sentences on Vatsa and others despite the cloud of suspicion around their sentencing and his promise of a review after strong appeals by many, including Nigeria’s leading literary lights, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and JP Clark? Again, he was conveniently consistent. It’s an elementary fact, he says, that plotters don’t live to tell the story, except if, like him, they succeed.
But Babangida conveniently forgot at least two notable exceptions of commutation: Kukoi Samba Sanyang’s failed coup against Gambia’s President Dawda Jawara in 1981 and Olusegun Obasanjo/Shehu Musa Yar’Adua failed coup against Abacha in 1995.
Perhaps the book’s most surprising accounts included his admission that his friend MKO Abiola won the June 12, 1993, election hands down and his rare praise of Buhari for cleaning up his mess by acknowledging Abiola as “a former head of state” 25 years later. This is surprising because when I interviewed him nine years ago, he said the presidential election result was “inconclusive.” He knew he was lying at the time.
The five-letter word
It would be remarkable if Babangida took responsibility for his mistakes and apologised. He is right that life can only be understood backwards. However, to complete the quote by the Danish philosopher and existentialist Soren Kierkegaard, whom he did not name but quoted in part, honesty in living forward is essential for understanding life backwards.
Instead of the five-letter word – sorry – Babangida tried vainly to use 111,281 words to exorcise the demon within. He failed. In his book On Writing, Stephen King, one of my favourite authors, said honesty is necessary for good writing. Babangida’s pseudo-memoir fails that test.
A heartfelt thank you…
My profound thank you to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a man of all seasons, and all who sent messages and prayers on my 60th birthday. I’m overwhelmed. May your kind wishes and prayers return to bless you and yours.
Ishiekwene is the Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book Writing for Media and Monetising It.
