What Does Babangida Want To Repair?

What was the addressee's response? Nobody would ordinarily attribute this statement to General Ibrahim Babangida, except those who know his history very well. It was on the occasion of his 65th birthday last Monday. He had a well-selected and willing audience. And the quotes, how wonderful! Here is another sampler: "We should not allow national discourse to degenerate to a level where we begin to see a difference between our past and present in terms of absolute. Evil versus good, corruption versus holiness, soldiers v ersus civilians, saints versus sinners we are sharpening the edges of conflict in the society." Anyone who does not know IBB very well will fall for this beautiful speech. Like a friend told me, it was like a coup speech.

Sure, IBB began to rule Nigeria at a very difficult period in 1985. Crude oil price, which shapes our life and times in Nigeria, was abysmally low. Foreign debts had piled up as a result of the recklessness of the Second Republic. Foreign reserves, built from oil windfall by the government of General Olusegun Obasanjo in the late 1970s, had been inevitably depleted as a result of growing fiscal deficit as the Shagari government continued to bite far in excess of what it could chew. The list of woes was a mile long, and the Buhari government was still trying to come to terms with the enormity of the problems when IBB struck just before dawn. To be fair to IBB, by the time he left power, or "stepped aside", in 1993, he had recorded a few achievements, some of which have not been erased till this day. But that is where the story ends. Attempts by him to re-write history will not solve his problem. He should be assured that any attempt by him to exonerate himself from the evils p laguing Nigeria today will be resisted by those who cannot be easily deceived by beautiful speeches. Some Nigerians still have their memories intact and it will serve IBB well not to come up with lines about "repairing Nigeria" or "making whole" again.

What does IBB want to repair? We may need to refresh our minds so that we can understand him very well. When Buhari overthrew the civilians in 1983, he promised to fight corruption and recover what had been stolen by the politicians. He set up tribunals that tried the politicians without fear or favour, in the true sense of it. Those who were convicted were made to forfeit their property to the government. Some of the recovered funds were utilised to settle some of the debts incurred by the reckless politicians. You may accuse Buhari of highhandedness and overzealousness, but, like he later explained in an interview with The News magazine in 1994, "we made mistakes, but they were genuine mistakes because we were in a hurry to change Nigeria". IBB, on August 27, 1985, betrayed Buhari by staging his lifelong dream of a coup, and one of the first things IBB did was to release the jailed politicians and return their loots to them. This is one of the most solid and enduring founda tions ever laid for corruption in Nigeria. Is that what IBB wants to repair or resurrect? To return Tafa Balogun's loot to him? To return DSP Alamieyeseigha's loot to him, like he did to Second Republic politicians?

Secondly, I am not aware of any major Muslim/Christian clash, to the extent of killings and destruction of property, until IBB polarised Nigeria with the issue of Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) in 1985. Before then, there were a few skirmishes here and there, but usually between sects of the same religion. I stand to be corrected by historians on this. IBB's insensitive handling of the issue has put a permanent mark on religious tolerance in Nigeria. His regime had the dubious distinction of introducing religious riots to Nigeria. The polity is now defined along the lines of Muslims and Christians. You now have people placing adverts in newspapers to list the religion of every government appointee. Yet, this was the same country where Yakubu Gowon was head of state and Chief Obafemi Awolowo, as Finance Minister, was effectively his deputy. Nobody complained about Christian-Christian "ticket". Buhari was head of state and Tunde Idiagbon was his deputy and nobody spok e of Muslim-Muslim "ticket". In the Second Republic, the governor of Lagos and his deputy were both Muslims; the governor of Ogun and his deputy were both Christians; the governor of Oyo and his deputy were both Christians. Nobody raised an eyebrow. The damage IBB did to our innocence is still with us today. We now spend more time investigating the religion of every politician than what he or she has to offer.

It must also be remembered that during the time of IBB, cocaine pushers had a swell time. They were openly celebrated by Fuji and Juju musicians. They were flaunting obscene wealth provocatively. Only feeble attempts were made to caution them through NDLEA. Allen Avenue became known as "Cocaine Avenue" as the drug barons and money launderers took over the society. That was also the period that "419" became a full-fledged profession. What drug pushing and "419" have done to our image worldwide today cannot be erased for a long time. In fact, most of the problems Obasanjo is battling with today were created by the IBB government and consolidated by the Inimitable One, General Sani Abacha. The standards of education started to drop without any significant attempt to stem the slide; power supply was in decay without any major initiatives to modernise and increase power generation and distribution; refineries were inadequate and poorly maintained-and although IBB commissioned the second refinery at Port Harcourt, he was not forward-looking enough to know that it was not going to be adequate to meet our needs; his government embarked on some economic reforms that were either ill-conceived or poorly executed, resulting in stagnation for years. I can go on and on. Of course, we all remember the endless transition programme that gulped billions of naira and was ultimately annulled. That has paved the way for all sorts of ethnic agitations that we are battling with today. So what is IBB coming back to "repair"?

I dare not mention the issue of corruption. The best sentence that describes eight years of IBB was invented by Ike Okonta and I have quoted it several times: "IBB democratised corruption and corrupted democracy." It is unfortunate that since 1999, we have been calling on President Obasanjo to probe IBB, but he refused blatantly because, obviously, IBB was in his good books. Obasanjo once insulted Bayo Onanuga, the MD of The News, on national television over this issue. "Bayo Onanu or whatever you call your name, if you have any problem with Babangida, go and resolve it," Obasanjo said in response to Onanuga's question on why IBB had not been probed. On the Gulf War windfall, Obasanjo has always refused to accede to requests to publish the Okigbo report which reportedly indicted IBB. But because IBB worked against third term, EFCC has finally found evidence to nail him (or is it his son?) If the anti-corruption war was genuine, IBB would have been in jail for years now, and h e would not have the effrontery to be telling us he wants to make Nigeria "whole again".

He should please stop disturbing our peace, for goodness sake, while we await the day he would be brought to book.