Ignored lessons of a struggle

June is here! The 12th day of the month is Democracy Day in the south west, a work-free day when pro-democracy activists, academics and political leaders join millions of Nigerians in the region to mark a significant day in the nation’s calendar. It has been the ritual since 1993. That year, Nigeria barely escaped a catastrophic plunge when the military government of President Ibrahim Babangida cancelled an election, the product of a painstaking political engineering for which government spared no expenses. Among others, government decreed two political parties, one, a little to the right and, the other, a little to the left, and proceeded to build and furnish offices for the political parties from local council to the federal level. There were hiccups here and there but, on the whole, the transition-to-civil-rule programme proceeded fairly well and President Babaginda was on a roller coaster to put sceptics to shame. Then came June 12, 1993, the last major milestone in the transition calendar, but which turned out to be the longest, never-ending, day in the country’s history. The dam literally broke and at the end of the day, all that President Babangida laboured to achieve simply went up in smoke!

For Nigerians, June 12, is not a day to be forgotten in a hurry. It was a year of hope because one man who defeated poverty to become one of the richest persons around had vowed to banish poverty from their country. As a politician and presidential candidate of his party, the Social Democratic Party, Moshood Abiola travelled across the country just like his opponent, Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention, in search of votes. Rights groups also look upon 1993 with nostalgia because the year won them a major trophy in their campaigns to see the back of the military. In every sense of the word, 1993 is a long time even in the history of nations. It looks and sounds like yesterday but 1993 is not exactly yesterday. June 12, 1993 brought out the worst in Nigerians, a time you never knew who to believe. In the heat of the crisis, a professor of law at the University of Lagos, a man who was later appointed vice chancellor in one of the universities in the south west, caused a stir in his analogy of Newswatch, once Africa’s best quoted newsmagazine, with Ikebe Super, once Nigeria’s best-selling comic on the laughable excuse that Newswatch refused to join the sensational journalism and the high-wire politicking that characterized the period!

It was indeed was a period when Newswatch recorded high unsold copies, an alarming situation that was informed by the wise judgment of management of the newsmagazine that, June 12, a transient event , should not befog the magazine’s editorial focus. Apparently, our professor friend and many Nigerians were not impressed. Few countries can survive the type of events that came with the cancellation of the June 12 presidential election. Miraculously, Nigeria successfully negotiated a dangerous bend, the type that overwhelmed drivers elsewhere to crash vehicles of state. On a personal note, the year is made even more historic because the second of my three daughters, a toddler at the time the country was thrown into an avoidable political impasse ignited by the cancellation of the presidential election, has just been mobilized for the mandatory one-year national service! How time flies!

Still talking about time and its propensity to fly, June 12 reminds Nigerians of the extra mileage some of their opportunistic compatriots could go for self and group-serving purposes. In the thick of the confusion that surrounded the cancellation of the election, Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who eventually became the main beneficiary of the impasse, told Nigerians, not with his tongue in his cheek, to seek their messiah elsewhere not in the person of Moshood Abiola, his townsman who was duly cleared to contest the election and who many believe was the undeclared winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. Unfolding events in the aftermath of the cancellation of the election were to suggest that Obasanjo’s shocker, execrable as they come, was the least that awaited Nigerians as they grappled with the crisis of an inconclusive election is capable of provoking. And the deluge of shockers came in torrent.

By November of the year, the creaky interim arrangement put together by President Babangida before he had stepped aside three months earlier, no longer able to suck in sustained attacks from rights and pro-democracy activists, was eased out by the military. Before the military struck, lives put at more than one hundred and sixty had been lost after Nigerians trooped out to demand the actualization of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. These were precious lives of Nigerians who hearkened to the voice of prominent Nigerians, among them Nobel honouree, Wole Soyinka, late Gani Fawehinmi and Moshood Abiola who, unable to stomach the usurpation of powers by the interim government, goaded the military into overthrowing it to pave way for the ascension of Abiola. For instance, Professor Soyinka applauded the Movement for the Advancement of Democracy, MAD, a crazy group for advancing ‘a valid reason’ (Swear in Abiola!) to hijack a domestic flight. On his part, Gani Fawehinmi openly canvassed for the progressive wing of the military, whatever that meant, to overthrow the interim civilian government. The military did strike on November 17, 1993, an action which the coup plotters rationalised by accusing President Babangida of unilaterally annulling the election, an action which the coup leaders, being senior members of the Babangida administration, had canvassed. The coup leaders failed its first test when, rather than doing the bidding of the pro-democracy activists, they began to entrench their positions by promising to steady the country for a shadowy return to democratic rule in the not-too-distant future. To pertinent Nigerians, this signalled the abortion of a dream, an indication to Abiola, the unannounced winner of the election, that the coup plotters did risk their necks to cede power to him.

Earlier in July, Moshood Abiola after the leakage of a letter he wrote to President Babangida to re-affirm his commitment to their decades of friendship did say that he had taken his case to the court of God. But within a week, he was propped into exhuming a hatchet he had buried when, at the end of the consultative meeting of his party, the SDP, in Benin City, he picked the gauntlet and subsequently internationalized the struggle to force the government of President Babangida to announce full details of the election. The same manipulative hands, ever- present and ever-devious, were at play again to prop Moshood Abiola when the military returned in November, 1993. Nigerians did not have to wait for too long for proof of the double-dealings, appropriately tagged the betrayal of the century, of the pro-democracy activists. After all, they have lined their pockets through waging a well-oiled, foreign-funded but mainly hypocritical campaign to restore democracy and when it mattered most, especially when the return of the military threatened the source of those funds, most of them dashed, with the speed of lightning, to jump on the military train to feather their own nests; not that of Moshood Abiola. And, typically, the spineless pro-democracy activists, typical of barefaced ingratiating talkers, flaunted reprehensible excuses, glossily-coated and sweet-scented from the outside but excessively malodorous from within, for jettisoning June 12; an idea they hitherto claimed was as inviolable as it is sacrosanct! That was the better-forgotten but painfully recurring era of justifying ethical paralysis with untenable excuses ranging from a dubious urge to serve one’s country, helping to push the frontiers of democracy from within, contribution to the process of national healing to such epidermic claims as pandering to calls of people back home and desire to stop charlatans from hijacking the country. Nigerians cannot rely on such uninspiring men and women, people who are incapable of comprehending the message of June 12, not to talk of promoting its painfully-ignored ideals.

Despite the hollowness that characterized the era, June 12 still holds a major lesson but which, for some curious reasons, the country has continued to ignore. And this is how to replicate the magic that made the June 12, 1993 presidential election the most credible and most transparent election so far conducted in the country. At a time the world is towards electronic voting, Option A4 as President Babangida called it or, whatever name it might be given after it is re-branded, may sound and look like the stone-age electoral idea that it was derisively called by critics who later turned round to applaud it. Yes! Option A4 is archaic but it has distinguished itself as the antidote for the façade of elections in the country! And because it works, Option A4 should suffice for a country which, to all intent and purpose, still shows traces of the stone- age! For now, the way forward is not to appropriate billions of Naira for electronic voting machines especially at a time bush lamps are employed to collate election results.

* Abdulrazaq Magaji is based in Abuja, Nigeria