LAGOS, NIGERIA. The year was 1993 and it was the 12th of June, election day. Months of presidential campaigning had gone by. Campaign posters and billboards lined the streets. Televisions had aired debates between SDP’s MKO Abiola and NRC’s Bashir Tofa. And to many Nigerians the outcomes of today’s voting, whether an MKO victory or a Tofa victory was a welcomed improvement.
In a documentary by Channels Television about MKO’s campaign, you can almost feel how electric Lagos was ahead of the election.
One thing was clear, for the first time in a very long time, Nigerians felt like they were gaining control over their destiny. For centuries, that promise of agency is what has always drawn societies to the democratic system of government. And in 1993, that appeal was evident. To the lay observer, the vibes were, as the kids say, immaculate. Everything was going to be perfect. There’s an iconic photograph of MKO voting by news agency AFP’s Francois Rojon. In the photo, MKO has a big smile. He’s wearing a green Agbada with white embroidery, reminiscent of the Nigerian flag. He has a white stallion stitched to the chest of his agbada, galloping through the letters M, K, and presumably O, as if referencing our coat of arms.
Nigerian politicians have historically been expressive with their dressing. Think of the first Nigerian finance minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh whose flamboyant dresses often had an entourage so long it was tied to the neck of a young boy; or the Western Region’s premier Obafemi Awolowo with his glasses or even present-day politicians like Bola Ahmed Tinubu with his infinity monogram.
In the Southwestern Yoruba states particularly, politicians like to express themselves through their headgear, their fila. In Francois’ photo MKO is wearing a green fila, with his initials M K O stitched in white. In the image though what we see is the fila and a giant K in the middle of it, referencing his name Kashimawo. It is a striking photograph. You see MKO’s palpable optimism but the crowd around him shows a mix of joy and anxiety. The New York Times would later report and I quote, ‘The exhilaration many Nigerians felt in 1986, when Gen. Ibrahim Babangida promised a swift return to elective civilian rule, has been supplanted by rising anger and anxiety over the sluggish pace of change.’ But who can resist the allure of change? On election day, Lagos, already by then the chaotic city we know and love, ground to a halt. In fact, Channels described June 12, 1993, as and I quote, ‘The Day Lagos Stood Still for Abiola’.
This is entirely retrospective so—spoiler alert—we know that Nigeria didn’t get a fairy tale ending. The June 12 election had gone through so many false starts since 1990. So, the controversy around the eventual election makes some morbid sense. For people who now have lost hope in Nigeria, we can draw a straight line from Nigeria’s present disappointments to everything that materialized in the June 12 electoral cycle.
This is the The Republic, a podcast about pivotal African figures and historical events. Our first season looks at Nigeria’s controversial June 12 1993 election. I’m your host, Wale Lawal.
We’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to make sense of June 12, Nigeria’s controversial 1993 presidential election. We know that June 12 emerged in the context of IBB struggling to hold on to power amidst Nigerians desperate for political and economic change. We know that NRC and SDP, the parties IBB strategically permitted to contest during the election were borderline identical. On today’s episode we are going to look at what all of this meant for voting on election day.
EPISODE 4: ‘FREEST AND FAIREST OF THEM ALL’
ELECTORAL MANAGEMENT
Arthur Nzeribe was a known IBB stan and the leader of the Association for a Better Nigeria. The ABN was for lack of better words a funny group. They failed to see the irony in their own name by being some of IBB’s staunchest supporters. But that’s not even the issue: Nothing about them adds up. There’s some debate about whether the group was formed in 1991 or 1993. No one knows exactly how many members the group had. Given how badly Nigerians wanted democracy, the ABN was so unpopular that anyone who associated with them kept it a secret. And yet at one point they claimed to have as many as 25 million members who
were supposed to be from the private sector.
What we do know though is that the ABN was active in the 90s after IBB’s government set up NRC and SDP. The ABN was like the ancestral version of Big Brother Naija’s fan love. A 1994 report by Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board described the group saying and I quote:
The primary objective of the ABN was to keep Ibrahim Babangida in power and maintain the military administration that has governed Nigeria for so long. The ABN demonstrated its determination to achieve its objective by putting up billboards in the Nigerian capital Abuja that carried the message “Four More Years”, which means the military government should stay in power for another four years. The intensity of the ABN’s pro-government campaigns led many observers to conclude that the federal military government was behind the activities of the association.
Just two days before the June 12 election, Nzeribe got an injunction against the election from the High Court, citing corruption and irregularities. The injunction was dismissed by Henry Nwosu, the National Electoral Commission chairman, on the grounds that the high court had no authority on electoral matters. And so the show went on.
Years later, in 1999, Nzeribe was elected senator for the Imo Orlu constituency. In November 2002, he was suspended by Senate President Anyim Pius Anyim following accusations of being involved in a 22 million naira fraud case. Nzeribe’s suspension lasted until 2003, when he was re-elected. There have
also been reports that Nzeribe was trying to push for Anyim’s impeachment but we won’t get into all that. Nzeribe died in 2022 and was a controversial figure in the June 12 election cycle. An ARISE News tribute described him saying:
ARISE News Reporters: Some remember him as the man used by the military to truncate Nigeria’s transition to democracy through the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential elections.
The ABN wanted IBB to remain in power for another four years and some Nigerians believe this was because they underestimated just how important the June 12 election was. It wasn’t just your random election where you could erect a few propaganda billboards, pat yourself on your back and say your watch has ended. This was the largest Black democratic exercise of its time. It wasn’t just locally significant; it had a global audience. Anyone who was anyone was watching.
Mr Gbenro Adegbola: But the 93 elections were quite very exciting. For the exact reasons that I outlined earlier. People were just desperate for the military to go. And in that sense, it brought a lot of hope, it was exciting. Quite a bit of money, I imagined, must have been spent. So, it was quite a carnival.
The election intrigued observers worldwide: journalists, delegates from the Commonwealth and other international bodies; observers from the Election Monitoring Group specifically trained by the Centre for Democratic Studies. Remember, this was Nigeria’s first election in over 10 years. The electoral commission really had something to prove.
Humphrey Nwosu: Remember, we were promised that if that election was conducted to be free and fair, accepted by international and local observers that we would be given international honours. So, my colleagues were also working hard as Nigerians.
That was Humphrey Nwosu, the Chairman of the National Electoral Commission, the body that organized the June 12, 1993, election.
In that recording from the BBC which you’ve just heard, the reporters estimate that about 40 million people were eligible to vote in the June 12 election. Some reports put this figure at 39 million. And while the BBC reporter noted heavy turnout in the polling stations she visited, other newsrooms like the Washington Post reported turnouts of less than 40 per cent at several polling stations, even in Lagos. This is not surprising though. Just as people were excited about the prospect of Nigeria returning to democracy, attempts like Nzeribe’s and the ABN to stop the election caused a lot of confusion. A large number of people had begun to suspect that the IBB government was playing games and decided to stay at home. Some didn’t even register in the first place, considering that IBB had been promising and delaying the election for several years.
Mr Adegbola: As I said, I started out being an IBB supporter in all my foolishness. And I actually did not register for the elections of 1993. So, I didn’t vote. If I were going to vote, I would have voted for Abiola, because he was a better known quantity. His opponent, the NRC candidate, was a totally unknown quantity. And there was no point experimenting with the presidency of Nigeria.
Some Nigerians couldn’t vote because of the kind of admin issue only possible in Nigeria. During my research for this podcast, a footnote I found funny about the June 12 cycle, was this report from the Washington Post, which claimed, and I quote, ‘The other candidate, Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention, was not allowed to vote because his registration card had expired. The report continues with Tofa quoted as saying, “All I know is that I had a voter card. I don’t know whether it was old or new”.’
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