Since Thursday when his autobiography, A Journey In Service, was launched, former military president, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, has taken center-stage of national attention. The autobiography reminds me of James Hadley Chase’s Make the Corpse Walk. It is the story of eccentric millionaire, Kester Weidmann, who in his weirdest best, believed money could buy everything, life and death inclusive. So, one day, Weidmann woke up with the crazy idea that his dead brother could be brought back to life. He then enlisted the services of a voodoo specialist to perform this crazed task. Rollo, crooked nightclub, owner was his perfect find to act out this massive con artistry of a lifetime. Things however went awry with the cast of this weird task who soon told themselves that Weidmann’s wealth was more attractive a pie than his absurd voodoo fabrication.
A couple of weeks ago, I recall citing Dr. Nina Mba’s description of biographers as “People who knead people.” It was in the process of taking a bird’s-eye view of Chief Bisi Akande’s autobiography, My Participations. My interpretation of Mba’s phrasal coinage was that biographers knead their subjects like bakers make raw flour into edible pancake, doughnut or bread. I also found my own label for autobiographers. Many a times, I submitted, they are self-conjurers. A Journey In Service didn’t just attempt to knead an edible dough out of an IBB Nigerians would love to hate, it is a re-conjuration, a Nigerian Kester Weidmann retired Army General, ex-Head of State and military dictator’s attempt to knead a compelling dough from his raw self-perception in the estimation of history.
While the last 25 years of civilian rule have paraded accidents as leaders, Babangida wanted power, romanced power, was besotted by power and prepared for power, mentally and physically. While in office, his statecraft and style of leadership were a total lift from and replica portraiture of the precepts in The Prince, 16th century Italian writer, diplomat and politician, Niccolo Machiavelli’s famous but deadly portrait of and prescriptions for tough leadership.
To reinforce this and create a look-alike model of Machiavelli’s quintessential ruler, IBB garnished power with the deadly image of a lethal ruler. In the same vein, he decorated the cottage of power with the sweet icing of a patrimonial leader. Like Machiavelli, Babangida concentrated and centered power round himself. This gave semblance of a leadership that was people-centered, under the pretence of running a government that carried the people along. He was also unpredictable and eccentric with power, like the Machiavelli Prince, springing surprises at the drop of a hat, a portraiture that is also a dip into the playbook of Machiavelli. In the same way, like a concentration camp, he gathered people of contravening persuasions into government, sucking them in via gifts and purchase of their loyalties. Respected academics fell to his suasion through appointments while his smiles acted as facade to hide the graffiti of a sadistic rule.
Like Machiavelli, IBB believed in the withdrawal of force from his scabbard and unleashing it to silence opposition. In the same vein, his smilingly harmless look turned his opposition into jelly. For instance, he swayed hitherto unbending critics like Tai Solarin who he brought into the People’s Bank and subsequently humiliated. Babangida ran a government that was unpredictable and which he maneuvered to sustain his hold in office. He was a genie of a genius, deservedly earning the sobriquets of “evil genius” and “Maradona.” But, as a replay of the epic downfall of Emperors, rulers and suzerains of old has shown, wisdom kills the wise. Many times, they die in graveyards dug by the unwise. My people render this as “Ogbón pa ọlọgbọn ”.
Very few Nigerian leaders built institutions that endure like Babangida. In A Journey In Service, Babangida gave an impression of a ruler who was not driven by self to serve. Which was not completely true. By the time he vacated power in 1993, allegations of frittering off more than $14 Billion 1992 Gulf War oil windfall hung on his head like a Sword of Damocles.
While A Journey In Service contains the histrionics of Babangida’s eight-year rule, it sidestepped some basic realities that Nigerians had to grapple with within this period. Of all these, Babangida’s handling of the political transition programme of his administration would seem to be the hugest pain whose hurt has refused to disappear from the Nigerian backbone. This makes Chapter 12 of his memoir, which comes under the title “Transition to Civil Rule and the June 12 Saga” the most contentious of the autobiography. Therein, IBB made spirited efforts to explain off his clear mindedness and intention of bequeathing a civilian government to Nigerians. Data on ground however point at a self-vaunting ambition for life rule. He started off by rationalizing his government’s political agenda, beginning with the political bureau. The more he explained, the more he revealed gaping holes fraught with his demonstrable intention to transmute into a civilian president. His romance with diarchy is a clear example.
During the twilight of his rule, with the June 12 fiasco becoming a whirlwind, it was as if Babangida was shopping for justifications for the annulment of the election, right, left and center. At another time, he said the annulment of the election was due to the fact that some military officers had sworn that Abiola would never be president of Nigeria. He then glibly called for a new election which would still lead to the handing over of power on August 27, 1993, setting new criteria for eligibility to contest. The whirlwind eventually swept him off, with a quixotic admittance that he was “stepping aside” form power.
A Journey In Service, while collating some of the events above, attempted to rationalize Babangida’s decisions for taking fatal decisions of state but fell face flat, and fatally, too. For instance, he attempted to state that he was not a power-besotting ruler, which was a wrong self-appraisal. As he retreated to Minna in August, 1993, palpable fears hovered in the polity that he would yet take over the reins of office of Nigerian president in the shortest time. On August 15, 2006, in an interview he granted the Financial Times, he gave inkling of his intention to fulfil this fear. He had vaguely told the newspaper that in 2007, he would run for office “under the banner of the Nigerian people”. Less than three months after, specifically on November 8, 2006, he showed up to pick the party nomination form of the PDP which the then chairman, Ahmadu Alli, personally issued him. Not long after, IBB timidly fled like a frightened cat, from his aspiration, citing as reason for the withdrawal which people found untenable. He had said that his withdrawal was due to a “moral dilemma” because the younger brother of Shehu Yar-Adua, his late military boss, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, was also in the race. The speculation was however that he ran inside his hole as a result of mounting opposition. Again, in September, 2010, the retired General expressed the desire to run for the 2011 presidential election but withdrew the intention almost immediately.
The book is also a fatal deconstruction of a Babangida whose heroism and valour were almost a legend before now. It would have been better if Babangida had continued playing the ostrich on June 12 by not talking about it at all. Nigerians, and indeed the world, would have continued to be beguiled by the facade picture of a tough hombre Babangida. In that wise, Babangida would have gone to his grave with the impression of a man of valour. Recall that, at some point in his rule, he had told a news-magazine that he loved dreaded military Generals, 19th century Shaka the Zulu, often depicted with a long throwing assegai and heavy shield; and Hannibal, a Carthaginian military general and statesman who led the forces of Carthage against the Roman Republic. When the interviewers reminded Babangida that both were ruthless and dreaded, he flashed his gap-tooth in a weird grin.
What we have in A Journey In Service is a pusillanimous army General that didn’t resemble the picture of General Babangida we had. The General in that book, on the outward, merely wears the epaulette of a valiant five-star General but was a buck-passer. How does the world reconcile the picture of a Babangida who fought valiantly in the civil war and got wounded in the process; one who smilingly and fearlessly almost disarmed Lt- Col Bukar Suka Dimka inside the Radio Nigeria studio; who had the steely heart to order the execution of his best friend, Mamman Vatsa, now selling himself the portraiture of a Sani Abacha bootlicker? The book is a portrait of a military General who didn’t want to die after Gideon Orkar fiercely dealt him a mortal blow inside the Dodan Barracks. It appears to every reader, back-grounded by what we heard in April 1990, though he refuted it, that aftermath his rescue by Abacha, a blood oath was made between the duo to hand over power to the Kanuri-born psychopath General. All the fatal decisions Babangida later took were predicated on this assumption. He was sore afraid of Abacha and his sadism and in the process, cost Nigerians their lives in their thousands, vicariously triggered the disequilibrium Nigeria witnessed thereafter and was responsible for the trillions of Naira Nigeria wasted in the process. Babangida is also vicariously responsible for the ghastly rule of Abacha, the many people he killed and the stagnation of reason during the period.
That chapter on June 12 was just a buck-passing script. It drowned the other revealing and intellectually stimulating chapters of the book which are very useful for historical corroboration of facts and fictions. Unfortunately, virtually all the dramatis personae of the election are now diseased. Did Babangida wait for this auspicious moment to unleash his revisionist chapter of his memoir? Or, was it merely to make peace with history and his creator when he passes? Whatever it is, that chapter was poor artistry. It is akin to eccentric millionaire, Kester Weidmann’s weird attempt to make a corpse walk, a clear Babangida absurd voodoo fabrication of sainthood for himself. Thirty two years after, the anti-hero of that grisly political drama which almost splintered Nigeria and was on the verge of tossing the country into a huge internecine war, chose to canonize himself.
However, A Journey In Service has shown the path of a road to travel wide open to travelers in government. Babangida traced his geneology from grandfather, Malam Ibrahim, a prominent Muslim cleric and wanderer who migrated from Sokoto to Kano and Kontagora and settled in Wushishi. He also wrote about how Ibrahim married his pretty wife, Halima. He traced the family roots up to his father, Malam Muhammadu Badamasi, ostensibly to explain how he got his middle name, ‘Badamasi’ which many confused with ‘Gbadamosi’ a Yoruba name. Now, or in the future, we will expect President Tinubu, VP Kashim Shettima’s and others’ autobiographies. They must all write their memoirs, so that we can indeed meet the characters who govern us.
Lastly, many have disdained the gathering in Abuja for the book launch and the huge billions of Naira announced as donations. No one remembered to even offer a minute silence for the dead of June 12. The gathering has been explained off as elite regrouping and this class’ clear disconnect from the everyday issues of the average Nigerian. It should serve as a lesson to the Nigerian people. In Osun State now, power-mongers are seeking state capture, the same way IBB sought to, over three decades ago. The APC is baring its fangs, using Bola Tinubu’s hold on federal power as Malacca cane with which to grope in the dark. The Attorney General of the Federation is rudely descending into the arena with partisan and needless threat laced in the garb of harmless advice, while the IGP is flexing his muscles with impunity. As they all gathered by the feet of IBB last Thursday, they should have learned a fundamental lesson from the senescent General: that it is only an allotted time that power-wielders use; no one wears the apron of power forever until it becomes a tattered rag (Ìgbà l’oni’gba n’lo, ẹnìkan o ló ilé ayé gbó). It speaks to the temporality and ephemerality of the power they use to harass Nigerians.
Festus Adedayo is a columnist with Nigerian Tribune
