“EVERY charitable or uncharitable attitude”, my college Geography Master at Enuda, Mr. Ikoro, used to declare philosophically, “is a boomerang”. We understand that a boomerang is a war tool that when hurled at a target and it misses, it ill come back to harm the thrower. But it does not seem to me that boomerang as a philosophical idea operates quite like the physical one. The assumption here is that, whether it finds its target or not, it will surely bounce back at the thrower.
In his days in power, Nigeria’s former military strongman, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida delighted a lot in playing political pranks with wannabe politicians. He christened his transition to civil rule programme “a learning process”. He formed and disbanded political parties for politicians, wrote ideologies for them, defined the class of politicians fit to play the game, later disqualified or banned them and eventually annulled the June 12th 1993 presidential election which was flawless by any standard. Babangida was seen as doing all this to frustrate the political class and make himself the only person in Nigeria fit to remain in power even after the umpteenth terminal date of his transition programme.
But the annulment triggered a political avalanche, which is still rolling downhill till date and taking all manners of casualties with it, which now includes Babangida himself. Almost every boomerang Babangida hurled at others during his days in power are coming back to him.
NEVER in his wildest dream could he have envisioned that the General Sani Abacha he left behind as he hurried back to Minna on August 27th, 1993, would keep him in virtual house arrest for all of five years before he died. Babangida could not have imagined that the broken family of Major General Mamman Vatsa, his old friend whose execution he ordered after a controversial coup trial, could come back, twenty years later, to drag him ragged over the alleged murder of a man who was more than a brother to him.
Obviously, when Babangida rushed to Ota to persuade General Olusegun Obasanjo to join the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and run for president, he was queuing up behind Obasanjo to take over when the former military Head of State had done his bit. Obasanjo, who had no political base, would be grateful for the rare honour of being made president twice over. But Babangida did not reckon with the boomerang he threw in the annulment of the presidential election. Rather than Babangida, it was Obasanjo that benefited from the annulment and is now paying Babangida in his own coins.
The exchange of letters between the President and IBB over the passing week was an interesting spectacle. Everybody knew that Obasanjo did not want Babangida to aspire under the PDP, a party he now absolutely dominates. The surprise, however, was that Babangida was cowed into actually writing a letter of resignation, sprucing up all sorts of cock-and-bull yarns about his reasons for doing so. Fancy Babangida saying he was leaving the presidential race on the party’s platform on grounds of morality! He told the world that even though he was the first to pick up his nomination form, the entry of General Aliyu Gusau and Umar Musa Yar’ Adua into the same race on the same platform suddenly placed a heavy moral burden on him thus his decision to seek an alternative platform to run for president.
He must have addressed that letter to the proverbial marines. Since when did Babangida convert to a disciple of political morality? Was he not the one who wrote a transition programme ousting the power of courts to enquire into any process attached to it. Then, the now disgraced Senator Arthur Nzeribe, who had been beaten roundly in the tussle for the Social Democratic Party SDP ticket, decided to play the spoiler.
HE threw his lot with an IBB continuation, forming his Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) and using it to obtain a clandestine court injunction to stop the June 12 presidential election. Babangida based his annulment of the election on Nzeribe’s court injunction despite the fact that Babangida’s decree had ousted the powers of the courts! A man who, till date, did not see anything morally or even legalistically wrong with signing his friend’s death sentence is now pleading morality!
There is no doubt about his friendship with Aliyu Gusau and the Yar’Adua family. Gusau played an important role in undermining the Buhari regime to enable Babangida succeed him in power. In fact, when Buhari threatened to dismiss Gusau from the Army over this breach, Babangida had told those who cared to listen that he was the real target of that decision.
True also, Alhaji Musa Yar’Adua the father of Shehu and Umar and the only Minister for Lagos Affairs ever, was a chieftain of the Northern People’s Congress, which recruited Babangida and others into the army and programmed them for political roles in the future. However, knowing IBB, he could not have stepped down for Umar Yar’Adua for any such moral reason. Indeed, had Obasanjo been supportive of his candidacy, IBB would have expected Umar and Gusau to step down their aspirations for him.
Many Nigerians still expect Babangida to pay more for the way he handled Nigeria’s affairs in his time. In fact, many believe that Nigeria has been rather kind to him so far!
