It was June 15 1993, three days after the June 12 election and the National Electoral Commission had released results from 14 states, including the Federal Capital Territory. From the results, MKO Abiola was in the clear lead. It seemed like MKO had won the election. All around Nigeria, people were hopeful and eager for a democratic future with a leader they had chosen.
But on June 16, the Abuja High Court called for the suspension of the remaining results. Shock rippled through Nigeria. To many Nigerians, the election had been fair and unproblematic, so the suspension immediately raised some red flags. Protests took over the streets. Lawyers got busy preparing to contest the suspension. Then on the 23rd of June, just eleven days after the election that had inspired so much hope, Nigerians had their fears materialize when IBB announced he was annulling the election.
Reporter: Here is a special statement Ibrahim Babangida: It is true that the presidential election was generally seen to be free, fair and peaceful. However, there was in fact a huge array of election malpractice in virtually all states of the federation.
Reporter: What the military government of president Babangida has done is annul the elections and scrap all the decrees that would have taken Nigeria to civilian rule on August the 27th.
People didn’t take IBB’s announcement very well. Especially, the presidential candidate and depending who you ask, the second democratically elected president of Nigeria, MKO.
MKO Abiola: The people of this country went to the polls on Saturday June 12 1993 and without hindrance chose me as their president, didn’t they?
INTRODUCTION
This is The Republic, a podcast about pivotal African figures and historical events. Our first season looks at Nigeria’s controversial June 12, 1993 elections. I’m your host, Wale Lawal.
So let’s set the stage: IBB had annulled the election, Nigerians felt betrayed, MKO felt robbed and the people who believed IBB never truly wanted to concede power had their suspicions confirmed. Years later, IBB still claimed the annulment was a necessary evil for the greater good, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. What was this supposed good IBB was aiming for and did the annulment actually achieve it? The protests that followed the annulment suggested otherwise.
In this week’s episode, we are finally facing IBB’s most controversial act as military president: his decision to annul the June 12 election, despite it being, in his words, free, fair and peaceful.
EPISODE 5: HOPE DEFERRED
Where were you when you found out that the elections had been annulled?
Mr Gbenro Adegbola: Where was I? I really can’t remember, I just remember that my friend, Nduka Irabor, was the press secretary, who was given the assignment to make the announcement. And I just thought this was such a casual announcement. You know, just put a press release in the hands of a press aide and say, go and talk to them. You know, I thought this can’t be true, this can’t be true. And I think that was the attitude of many people, especially in my generation.
THE ANNULMENT
It would be easy to look out of a window at the state of Nigeria today and say IBB’s big plans didn’t work. But to do that we need to know what those ‘Big Plans’ were and the rationale that led him to annul the June 12 results, a decision that changed the course of Nigeria’s history. So, let’s go back to when the news of the annulment first broke; when IBB explicitly claimed he was cancelling the results due to election irregularities.
IBB brought up reasons like vote buying and the need to ‘protect the judiciary’. Except, nobody bought this. Even back then, the June 12 election was considered THE standard; people had gone on record noting that everything had run smoothly. Plus, several people believed IBB never wanted to give up his power. Simply put, he sold many reasons for annulling June 12 but no one was buying. Like we mentioned in the last episode, it wasn’t the first time these so-called ‘electoral irregularities’ had come up. From the last episode, remember Arthur Nzeribe, the leader of the Association for a Better Nigeria, ABN or IBB’s fan club.
ARISE News Reporter: 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.
And yet, according to publisher, Mr Gbenro Adegbola…
Mr Gbenro Adegbola: But the 93 elections were 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 must have been, I imagined, must have been spent. So it was quite a carnival. So you know, the annulment of it was really a daring move.
Did the election have issues? Of course. For one, voter turnout was low at only 35 per cent. Still, the election was considered peaceful and well organized. There was no violence, no ballot snatching; certainly none of the thuggery we saw in our last election. Some felt it was also a time Nigerians put the good of the public first, instead of being hung up on issues like ethnicity and religion.
Reporter: Nigerians irrespective of their religious or ethnic leanings went to the polls in what remains the freest and most peaceful elections in the nations’ history.
But let’s go back to June 15. That day, the ABN came back with a new court injunction and this time, the National Electoral Commission accepted it. On June 16, the NEC then announced that the election results had been suspended. To the public, this decision made no sense. As such, High Courts all over Nigeria sent in their own contradicting suits to Abuja, demanding the release of the results. And on the 18th of June, after threatening the government, the civil society group, Campaign for Democracy, took matters into their own hands.
The Campaign for Democracy leaked the election results, which presented MKO Abiola as the presidential winner with a 58 per cent majority. Since the Campaign for Democracy was considered reputable and the results were in line with general expectations, people began demanding official recognition of these results. Everyone from regular civilians to unions to politicians wanted the government to do the right thing and recognize the results. Many, however, felt this heat did not matter to IBB.
Protesters: We don’t want Babangida again, we want MKO. Reporter: Who is MKO? Protesters: Abiola!
The only people on board with the annulment were IBB, IBB supporters like Nzeribe and members of the losing NRC and NRC supporters who believed there had been election fraud from the jump. Everyone else was incensed. To Nigerians, the issue was cut and dry. They voted for MKO, he won the election, but the military government had pulled the rug from under them, end of. No one was taking this lying down. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, was quoted in an interview on July 3rd with the BBC regarding the drama saying, ‘To wait until elections have been completed and are halfway announced and then take all sorts of tedious steps which culminated of course in his coming out openly and annulling the results is most ridiculous.’
The international community was also vocally against the annulment. The UK was among the first international countries to voice their disapproval. The UK decided to suspend training for the military and restrict visas for members of the armed forces and their families. The US on the other hand, had already been accused of interfering in the election by Nigeria’s Foreign Ministry. Though ten points to anyone who can mention an election the US hasn’t been accused of meddling in. This time though, to disgruntled Nigerians at least, the meddling seemed valid. Calling IBB’s annulment an ‘outrageous decision’, the US responded by cutting Nigeria’s 450,000 dollars in military aid.
Local reactions were no less dramatic. The Lagos branch of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) planned to boycott courts starting June 30th; labour unions announced workers strikes; student unions flooded the streets denouncing IBB’s government and a bust of IBB was vandalised in Ondo state during the student protests. No one wanted to be left behind in this resistance. Everyone planned their own demonstrations against the ruling government and called for the recognition of the election. Even members of the military were not fans of the way the election was being handled. They were officially over the military being so involved in politics and at least 30 mid to high-ranking officers said that they planned on retiring because of everything that was going on.
Protesters: All we are saying… ‘Give us MKO’
The Campaign for Democracy filled a void left by the Nigerian Labour Congress’s initial reluctance to get involved in the resistance that followed IBB’s annulment. Baba Aye, a student activist at the time, explained.
Baba Aye: And one of the, this is interesting, one of the immediate responses that was very well one kind but I think I dear say was also useful was by the students of the University of Lagos Student Union. I think two three days after the annulment, after calling on the NLC to speak, and the NLC was not speaking clearly about it, students of the University of Lagos Students Union marched to the headquarters of the Nigeria Labour Congress, which was in Yaba not far from their school, with the intention of inviting the president Pascal Bafyau to University of Lagos to reason with him on why they were not standing with the masses. But what I’m pointing out here is it was not just the students going to the NLC, it was to show our anger at the Trade Unions not rising up to what many felt should be the most organized expression of the working class. This took place in several shapes, don’t forget when the NLC also didn’t move and it was banned and all that, the Campaign for Democracy had to try to fill that shoe. And that was when we started with the sit-down strike.
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