‘It is true that the presidential election was generally seen to be free and fair and peaceful. However, there was in fact an array of election malpractices in virtually all the state of the Federation…’
What you’ve just heard is part of a speech General Ibrahim Babangida made shortly after the June 12 1993 democratic election. At the time, Babangida or IBB, as he was more commonly known, had been military president of Nigeria for about eight years. And he had spent a good part of his regime under pressure to transition Nigeria from years of military rule to a democracy. Until the June 12 election, IBB had repeatedly promised to yield power to a civilian president. But by the time of his speech, it was already clear he had broken his promises to witnesses like Baba Aye, who was a student activist during the IBB Era.
Baba Aye: I think what was clear was Babangida didn’t want to go. But it increasingly became impossible for him to avoid not going.
IBB became the president of Nigeria in 1984, after overthrowing General Muhammadu Buhari in a military coup. The country IBB took over was in a disastrous state. As president, IBB faced the dual pressures of a domestic climate that agitated against military rule and an international community that increasingly made the loans Nigeria’s declining economy needed, contingent on Nigeria becoming a democracy. On becoming president, IBB had sold himself as the military leader who would usher in Nigeria’s democracy; but what continues to puzzle historians is why he repeatedly delayed the democratic transition.
Nearly two years into his presidency, on January 13, 1986, IBB announced that Nigeria would hold democratic elections by October first, 1990. In July, the next year, he changed his mind and pushed the date to October first 1992. In January 1992, IBB postponed the date again to December fifth, 1992. That same year, in November, he moved the election date to June 12 1993; and just when it seemed settled, after the election actually held in June and had produced a winner, the wealthy businessman Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, IBB made that speech annulling the results.
IBB blamed the annulment on widespread electoral malpractices. Years later, in an interview with Mo Abudu, he would expand on his reasons for annulling the election.
Babangida: When the process was going on, we did swear that ours was going to be the last military coup that we were going to have. So we wanted to make sure that we handed power to a democratically elected government. To be honest, the situation was not right to hand over at that time.
But throughout IBB’s regime, he seemed to have a convenient reason every time he postponed the democratic transition. Over the years, he has been called misunderstood, a manipulative dictator, a political Maradona and even an evil genius, titles he was very much aware of, disapproved of and even, in some cases, encouraged. But what he didn’t know while giving that speech is that the annulment, that single decision, was a time bomb.
Hello and welcome to The Republic, a podcast about pivotal African figures and historical events. I’m your host, Wale Lawal. Over the next six episodes, I’m going to walk you through one of the most significant events in Nigeria’s political history. The June 12 1993 presidential election shaped the modern Nigerian state. But, why was it so controversial? Who were the main actors and what roles did they play? Most importantly, can we draw any parallels between then and now?
EPISODE 1: IBB, THE EVIL GENIUS
Baba Aye: ‘…..he was a smart person, he himself said he’s an evil genius.
….you know, he actually described himself as an evil genius, which also is kind of narcissistic. And how did he get about this, I think it partly has to do with being through several coup d’etat.’
How do you stage a coup? Well, for one, you need manpower. Then, you need meticulous planning. And if you were IBB in the 80s, you needed to be entrenched in quote-on-quote the system; you needed to build trust among the already powerful and you needed to have proximity to power. But they didn’t call IBB Maradona for nothing.
In Nigeria, we cannot talk about democracy without first talking about and understanding Nigeria’s legacy of coups. We cannot talk about MKO Abiola or the June 12 election without talking about Muhammadu Buhari and IBB and the coups they led. The story of Nigeria’s sixth coup, the coup that brought IBB into power, can be traced all the way back to 1966
That may sound a like a reach, but let me land. In Nigeria, like much of West Africa, the early days of post-colonial nation-building saw coups lead to more coups.
Reporter: There has been a wave of this in West Africa in particular, Central Africa Republic, Dahomey, the Congo, all kinds of places. Why is this?
Some political historians have argued that the common thread across these coup-prone countries was colonization and the legacy of weak state institutions that European colonizers left behind. During the colonial era, Europeans haphazardly created African colonies through artificial borders. The very purpose of these colonies was to allow Europeans extract resources and then following years of liberation struggles the colonizers were forced out. But they left behind ‘elite’ Africans with aspirations of nationhood and power. Nigeria for one was in a very fragile position: we had a federation that was really a mesh of over 200 ethnic groups that would potentially jostle for resources and political representation. Population size became the key determinant of access to resources and this fell to the three most populous ethnic groups, Hausas in the Northern Region, and the Southern Region split between Igbos to the East and Yorubas to the West. But with very little investment made into creating unified nationhood across all our ethnic groups, even this resource split between the most populous ethnic groups was unsustainable.
So, in 1966 when a young Lieutenant Babangida, witnessed the events of the bloody 1966 coup while he was stationed in Kaduna, his perception of Nigerian politics and the role of the military would be forever altered.
General Odumegwu Ojukwu: This coup seems to be at the centre of subsequent problems in Nigeria.
And Ojukwu had a point, because seven months later, when Lt. Colonel Murtala Muhammed, led a counter-coup young military officers , Lieutenant Ibrahim Babangida, Lieutenant Muhammadu Buhari, Lieutenant Mamman Vatsa and Second Lieutenant Sani Abacha, were all active participants. A not-so-fun fact: during the counter-coup, Buhari served as the motor transport officer at Ikeja barracks.
To anyone with the slightest knowledge of Nigerian history, these names are familiar and you will recognize that in almost every coup that came after the July counter-coup, these men would be critical actors. It was like a roster, after each officer helped the other get into power, they would check that name off the list and in the next coup, some other deeply involved military actor from Nigeria’s early military set would follow suit.
In 1985, 19 years after the 1966 coup, IBB’s name had now come up on this roster, making him a critical force in what would become Nigeria’s most important and most controversial election till date.
NIGERIA IN CONTEXT
In 1983, Major General Muhammadu Buhari emerged as the Head of State after Nigeria’s first elected civilian president Shehu Shagari was deposed in a coup. On New Year’s Eve 1983, Brigadier Sani Abacha, a crucial member of the 1983 coup plot, announced the dissolution of Shagari’s government.
In his speech, Abacha used words like ‘sqaundermania’ to describe the excesses of the Shagari government. He ended his speech by famously saying ‘I will like to assure you that the Armed Forces of Nigeria is ready to lay its life for our dear nation but not for the present irresponsible leadership of the past civilian administration.’
The military justified its takeover blaming the civilian government for ineptitude, corruption and economic mismanagement. Shagari had just won a second term, but, for the military, the harsh economic realities were proof enough. Somewhere in the background of the 1983 coup plotting and planning was Major General Ibrahim Babangida. At the time, Babangida served as the director of Army Staff duties and plans.
Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, also known as MKO Abiola allegedly supported the coup both financially and ideologically. MKO had built a strong relationship with the military largely because of his business enterprise but also his growing interest in politics. We will talk about this a bit more in the next episode.
You know how in international history, people always ask: ‘Was World War 2 inevitable due to the failures of World War 1?’ Well, the Nigerian spin on this would be, ‘Was the 1985 coup inevitable because of the structures created by the 1983 coup?’ One could argue, it was. And this argument is largely due to the character of coups in Nigeria but on closer inspection we can see how the December 1983 coup kickstarted the August 1985 coup.
When Buhari inherited Nigeria it was in economic disarray. Here’s a reporter from the UK’s Independent Television News describing Nigeria at the time:
Reporter: New years eve twenty months ago when the military deposed civilian democratically elected civilian Shagari with the aim to remove the scourge of years of corruption where Nigeria’s oil rich economy was kept afloat by billions of pounds of kick backs and slush money while much of the population live in poverty.
The story of Nigeria’s economic glory days in the 70s is a common feature of parlour politics talk.
Rufai Oseni: Let me just take you through a picturesque of that 70s era. 72, 73, Yom Kippur happened, crude oil prices rose from 3 dollars per barrel to 12 dollars per barrel. There was a boom in Nigeria’s economy, We had just come out of a war, Nigeria had money. That same Yakubu Gowon said, the problem was not money but how to spend it.
But in the early 80’s, Nigeria had come out of the oil-induced economic boom of the 70s and now it was time to pay the piper.
Reporter: Crippled by the oil slump, a 15 million dollar debt, spiralling prices and immense economic problems, his regime rashly promised a massive restructuring programme especially in agriculture.
In this era, oil revenues tanked due to an oil price crash in the international market and Nigeria faced an acute economic crisis. Unable to shift gears in the face of changing economic fortunes the country resorted to external borrowing. Instead of devaluing the naira, the government adopted a policy of deficit financing.
Reporter: Well Buhari has not delivered the goods, he has not been able to decide what to do with detainees from Shehu Shagari’s previous regime, he has not come up with a comprehensive economic policy, he has built himself into a corner by refusing any thought of devaluation of the local currency, the naira, which in turn has meant it quite impossible for negotiations with the IMF to proceed and that in its turn has really made Nigeria’s international trading relations almost impossible.
The economic cards were stacked against President Buhari. But beyond that, his regime was deeply unpopular for many reasons. First, he announced a government that largely excluded the military officers that helped put him in power and in some ways, weakened the military and isolated himself. According to a 1984 LA Times article, senior-ranking military officials accused President Buhari of having ‘betrayed and discarded’ the original aims of the 1983 coup.
IBB was a senior officer at the time, and President Buhari had him serving as the Chief of Army Staff. This made IBB the third ranking member of the junta. At the same time, President Buhari made Tunde Idiagbon, IBB’s junior, the Chief of Staff, and Idiagbon effectively became the junta’s second in command. This set up put control of the entire army at IBB’s disposal and IBB spent his time amassing allies across army bases. The story goes that a well-placed Defence Attache in Lagos was overheard in a conversation about President Buhari saying, ‘Apart from Idiagbon, who is on his side?’
The Buhari government reduced the Shagari budget by 30 per cent, and shortly before the 1985 coup, IBB had been heard saying that those who favour reduced spending cannot win. The coup de grasse was a-foot.
On the 26th of August 1985, it was Eid El Kabir and Nigerians across the country were celebrating. The head of state Muhammadu Buhari had just come back to Lagos from his hometown Daura and was marking the festivities in Lagos, the country’s capital. The second in command, his Chief of Staff, Tunde Idiagbon was in Mecca with an army delegation that included General Mamman Vatsa and MKO Abiola. There had been rumours about a planned coup, but there was very little the Buhari regime could do to quell it since IBB had drawn significant support from within the army.
At 6:00 am on 27 August 1985, after the military had taken control of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, Major Joshua Dogonyaro announced that General Muhamadu Buhari’s, military party, the Supreme Military Council (SMC) had been dissolved and that a new military party, Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) had been formed with IBB as the new leader and Head of State.
Major Joshua Dongoyaro: The government has started to drift, the economy does not seem to be getting any better as we witness daily increases in inflation.
The Concord group, a newspaper company founded by MKO Abiola was reportedly in on the coup against General Buhari. It was common knowledge at the time that the Buhari regime seized a consignment of MKO’s newsprint and that had been the final straw triggering MKO’s support of IBB’s planned coup. Karl Maier, the author of This House Has Fallen, a book on Nigeria’s history, managed to track down IBB for an interview.
In the interview, IBB confirmed the popular belief that MKO had supported coups against Shagari in 1983 and later against Buhari in 1985, with money and publishing from his Concord newspapers. Shortly after the coup, Concord Newspapers ran with the headline ‘Buhari’s Government, Most Inhumane’.
But Nigeria under the IBB regime would prove to be more of the same. IBB didn’t improve much on Buhari’s economic approach and the debt stock grew rapidly from 17 billion dollars when he took over in 1985 to around 33 billion dollars in 1990–just three years before the 1993 elections.
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