KWENU! Our culture, our future

Still on General Ibrahim Babangida: My response

MAX GBANITE

New Jersey, U.S.A.

Monday, December 16, 2002

The reaction by a few to my last article titled “Cashing in on Babangida Bashing” has vindicated the fact being articulated therein: The fact remains that the mere mentioning of his name invokes a passionate response (positive and negative) from many quarters. And, if the respective Internet publishers got paid for the many times people went to the sites to read anything that has to do with the most popular name in Nigeria, then they will even tell you that they made a financial killing publishing that particular article and the attendant negative and positive responses.

I would not have responded to the tag-team, learned professionals who attacked me for defending His Excellency, General Ibrahim Babangida, GCFR (rtd.), but for the following reasons:

· First, I received well over thirty emails on my article, and only eighth disagreed with me and called me ugly names. I equally thanked the chronic bashers while understanding their frustrations, and I accepted the other emails that were very commendable.

· Second, the learned writers’ attempt to perforate the truth

· Third, a visitation while sleeping from ‘Angel OBJ,’ who was peeved that I have not responded. His beef is that these learned intellectuals used the term ‘ordinary general’ to describe General Babangida, and he (‘Angel OBJ’) inadvertently falls into that category of ‘ordinary.’ How could these intellectuals and the 120 million Nigerians they purportedly represent allow the ‘ordinary’ to become presidents and lead Nigeria?

· Last, but not the least, the perfidious and pejorative equating of General Babangida to the Almighty God (The Merciful). Thanks to the reformation of Christianity; otherwise, these learned tag-team intellectuals would have had a Spanish Inquisition instituted to try them for blatant blasphemy.

General Babangida is not God by any stretch, and he has never claimed to be a prophet for that matter in his whole life. The man is simply very devout to his chosen religion, and is known to pray constantly as prescribed by his religion. Therefore, for someone to allude to my defense of his name to be ‘God worshipping,’ or ‘hero worshipping’ is very sad indeed. It simply adds to the truism that a caveman’s acquisition of academic knowledge and degrees does not exculpate his primate tendencies. A caveman lacks table manners when eating in a formal dinning settings; this is true. If I am being accused of being loyal and faithful to General Babangida, then I can understand, and I can easily tell my accusers to hate me for that because that will not change in their favor. However, Babangida’s upbringing or parental inheritance has no bearing on his chosen profession, and the mentioning of his coming from an unwealthy parentage by one of the writers is clearly an indication of infantile intellectualism. A shame indeed!

One of the intellectual writers opined that Bill Gates could attest to his wealth, whereas General Babangida cannot. But this same writer has refused to take up the challenge offered by His Excellency President Olusegun Obasanjo seeking information from any person(s) on where Babangida stashed his money to come forward with such information. President Obasanjo also promised to prosecute with immediate effect. But nobody has actually come forward. The writer even chronicled all the corporations and houses in Europe and United States supposedly owned by General Babangida without any scintilla of evidence, names, or addresses supporting his arguments. The writer is probably deluged in, or deluded by, mythology; or, most probably, he operates in hybrid hearsay. I pity his love of shallowness.

The Internet intellectuals even failed in their respective attempts to vilify Babangida’s policies; instead, they made him and me the issue, a clear demonstration of retroactive hatred. One of the respondents insists that the exulted name of the late Pa Obafemi Awolowo must not be mentioned in the same breath as Babangida because Pa Awolowo was a statesman. Although, I do agree that Pa Awolowo was a statesman by his own right; however, he forgot to mention that, whereas Pa Awolowo was a Yoruba leader and undeterred champion of ethnocentric politics, General Babangida on the other hand was President of Nigeria and an avowed champion of national unity. He also forgot to tell his readers that Pa Awolowo may be loved by his Yoruba people, but Easterners (Ndiigbo) – will not forgive him for initiating and implementing policies that transferred all their fiscal assets to the federal government after the war. This writer’s family collectively lost close to half a million pounds because Pa Awolowo allowed Ndiigbo who had money in the bank a paltry twenty pounds! Also, with the assistance of the living Chief Anthony Enahoro and the late Chief Bola Ige (thank God no one has accused Babangida of his death) conducted the blockade of the East, preventing fellow countrymen from receiving food from international relief organizations, a clear-cut war crime that resulted in the death of a million little children and women. The trio called their actions ‘Act of war.’

Sorry for digressing.

THE ISSUES RAISED

(a) Taking power by force:

The practice was enunciated in 1963 by the late sage Pa Awolowo, and he was subsequently tried, convicted, and jailed for the crime. Luckily, he was not executed and, thanks to the Almighty God, he was released by Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu (an Igbo) from the Calabar penitentiary before the Nigeria-Biafra started. Then in January 1966, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu (without the knowledge of his close pal, Captain Obasanjo…or so he said) executed the plans of Majors Ademoyega, Ifeajuna, and others. They brutally murdered innocent civilian leaders. In the same 1966 July, the late General Muritala Muhammed with the current Defense Minister General T.Y. Danjuma (rtd.), Lt. General Jerry Useni (rtd.), Brig. General A Kyari (rtd.), and General Yakubu Gowon, GCFR (rtd.) and a collection of younger officers carried out what was called then and today a countercoup d’état, killing many more officers, this time mostly from the east of River Niger. In 1975, the same General Muhammed and his colleagues removed General Gowon. General Muhammed became the Head of State; and, in 1976, he was assassinated in a coup attempt that brought in General Olusegun Obasanjo, GCFR (rtd.).

His Excellency President Shehu Shagari was handed over the baton of power as the elected president in 1979, as a winner over Pa Awolowo. In 1983, after successfully masterminding his self-succession in a landslide (reminiscence of what the current PDP-led government is doing today), Shagari was removed from office and replaced by General Buhari, GCFR (rtd.). General Buhari did not cover his flanks and probably did not understand his constituencies; hence, he was edged out and replaced by General Babangida. I touched on these historical facts to remind the intellectuals who accuse Babangida of taking power by force that he Babangida did not start the program, though he may have benefited from it. It is also imperative to mention that those who attempted to take over unsuccessfully knew very well of the risks involved, in the event they failed. Therefore, Babangida cannot be accused for executing those who plotted to remove him from office, when his administration was simply abiding by the already established guidelines signed into law by General Obasanjo after the death of General Muhammed. It is also important to note that all the actors were from the same fabric of ‘ordinary’ generals.

My question to the intellectuals is: Where were they when these ‘ordinary’ generals were/are leading them? Of course, they were busy collaborating with the same ‘ordinary’ generals, giving them such programs like Operation Feed the Nation, Poverty Remediation, Creation of States and Local Governments, Privatization, ECOWAS, ECOMOG, MAMSER, NDE, DFFRI, Center for Democratic Studies, Debt equity swap, Debt buy-back program, Federal Road Safety Corp (Wole Soyinka), Peoples Bank (Tai Solarin), Agricultural Bank, National Intelligence Economic Commission (Aluko), annulment, and many more useful and useless academic programs. At no time did these well-educated ‘extraordinary’ intellectuals put their lives on the line for the good of the country, yet they covet the courage to criticize a person without really looking into the failed policies and why or when they failed. What are the intellectuals like the tag-team that responded to my article doing to help the same masses they claim to represent?

(b) Dele Giwa

My condolences go to the family of this brave and intelligent writer and pioneer of investigative journalism. In the United States, for instance, it is easy to discern true and prestigious practice of journalism from the shameful hired pen-assassins practicing the same trade. All you need to do is read The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today Newspapers and, for magazines, Time, Newsweek, The Economists, Business Week, Forbes, and a host of others. These are the frontrunners of good journalism, and they present great stories. One might also find similar stories in publications such as Star, The Enquirer, and others of the same caliber; these are referred to as junk publications, but the same stories would in most cases have twists and some special additives added. In a country like Nigeria, the distinction between fine, true, and prestigious journalism and the awkward, dangerous, and hired-assassin journalism often practiced is almost undefined; they have, unfortunately, become fused together.

Unfortunately, Dele Giwa and his partners, according to those who knew them very well, were alleged to have been involved in all kinds of activities unbecoming of professional journalism. It was even said amongst their friends that a new kind of jealousy and rivalry reared its ugly head within the group to a level of dangerous liaisons. Now, one of the intellectual critics in his response to my earlier article averred that Dele Giwa’s death was attributed to a secret that he was about to leak or uncover. I wish the critic and Dele Giwa’s business partners could tell the world what the secret was about. They cannot. Why, you may ask? Simple: There was/is nothing to uncover, nothing to leak! Are they saying that the fine journalists at Newswatch have no clue of the secret and could not go to the police? Are they (our Internet intellectuals) incapable of summoning the chutzpah to leak the so-called “secret” with incontrovertible details… even f anonymously?

One would think that Dele Giwa’s partners, as sympathetic as they claim to be, would be the first to tell all they know to the police and, failing to act, they would have splashed it all over their paper --if it is the last thing they do. Well, they claimed that their attorney Chief Gani Fawehinmi advised them not to talk to the police. I talked to Rev. (Dr.) Chris Omeben, the then Deputy Inspector General of Police (rtd.), and he gave me his autobiography detailing his account of the investigation. He postulated that when he visited the site of the blast, he discovered that the damage caused was very enormous. For instance, the bomb’s explosion was centrifugal: it damaged the window’s anti-burglary bar, blew the toilet seat and tank away, damaged the toilet window steel bars, shattered the glass all around the room and bathroom.

Reverend Omeben is still confused that the only eyewitness to the blast, Mr. Kayode Soyinka, a business partner of Dele Giwa and indeed the magazine’s London bureau chief, claimed to have suffered only ear perforation, despite the detailed damages caused by the bomb blast. The same Mr. Kayode Soyinka was the one who saw the envelope and told his colleagues that it bore the markings of the Presidential Seal. The man was coherent enough to rush out of the room, made contact with Mrs. Giwa, then went outside to flag down a taxi that took him and Dele Giwa to the hospital, where Giwa was pronounced dead and Soyinka was treated for a sever ear impairment. He recovered later, and surreptitiously slipped out of the country without any immigration documentation to London, where he continued treatment for his hurt ear.

People, I was in the Nigeria-Biafra War, and I saw people affected by shell-shock; believe me, they were not coherent enough to discern their bearing immediately after the shock and, sometimes, for weeks thereafter. The first time any police investigators learnt of the bomb and the alleged source of the letter bomb was from Newswatch publication immediately after. They never even allowed the police to conduct a thorough investigation of the site before telling the world their finding. And to complicate the issue further, none of Dele Giwa’s partners gave any statement to the police, according to Omeben. However, Reverend Omeben maintained that as far as he was concerned there was no interruption from the then President Babangida to suffocate the investigation, contrary to what the intellectual critics would have us believe. As a matter of fact and record, he reiterated that he questioned Brigadier Generals Haliru Akilu and Togun (both retired) so many times to ascertain if they were involved. He categorically exonerated them and even thanked them for making themselves available for interrogation. Rev. Omeben is still puzzled that none of Dele Giwa’s colleagues would come forward for questioning on how the only eyewitness was smuggled out of the country.

This case went to court, and was disposed forthwith. Those who point accusing fingers at General Babangida just because Kayode Soyinka said that the alleged letter-bomb envelope bore the Presidential Seal should know very well that seals and all sorts of forgery adorn the city of Lagos. Some say that only the military could make such bombs. Think again! The bomb that rocked Lagos in the early stages of the war was made by Colonel ‘Hannibal’ Achuzia (rtd.); he wasn’t even in the army yet, but has a degree in engineering. So you must understand that any good graduate of physics, engineering, or chemistry can make a bomb. Since the critics refer to Nigerian generals as ‘ordinary,’ how then could they have the intellect to make such a device?

At Oputa Panel hearing in Abuja, the only evidence produced by Chief Gani Fawehinmi was the same theatricals presented in Lagos. First, he had pictures of Dele Giwa circulated with bias around the hearing venue. Second, he had rented thugs positioned strategically to shower insults and possibly attack General Babangida, if he came. The Panel cautioned him for his ranting several times. His behavior was, quite frankly, unbecoming of a learned man. I was there. Even recently, it was revealed at the same Panel that the driver of Mr. Dele Giwa’s former wife, a senator in the current republic, delivered the alleged letter bomb to Dele Giwa’s residence. Incidentally, nobody is pursuing that fact. Bomb experts even acknowledged that the bomb might have been planted before hand.

I remember my discussion with a very brilliant attorney, a lead counsel with the Panel, (name withheld). I posited that the Panel should have a closed session for all the invited former heads of state, with only the Panel members, the opposing attorneys, and lead counsels present. They might elect to televise the session if they wish; but, under the current arrangement, no good attorney would allow his client (former heads of state) to attend the circus. He took note of my suggestions. However, the Panel acted on my suggestion at the end of their sitting by inviting the former leaders to come to Hilton Hotel and give their respective recommendations to the Panel. Medicine after death, they refused to honor the Panel’s invitation. Dele Giwa’s death will continue to be a sad event in Nigeria’s history, but Babangida, Akilu, and Togun had no hand in the heinous crime.

(c) The economy (SAP)

The learned tag-team intellectuals stated as fact that General Babangida met the naira at par with the United States dollar when he assumed office. This is simply perfidious. General Buhari’s regime had already implemented what President Shagari would have done upon assumption of his second term. The naira was 3.5 to 1 dollar. The intellectual writers also admitted that Babangida, in his attempt to move the country forward, made use of intellectuals in his administration. They forgot to tell us that it was these intellectuals like Chief Olu Falae (Economic Adviser and Yale university trained), Chief S.P. Okongwu (Finance Minister, Harvard University trained), Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu (Minister), Bolaji Akinyemi (Foreign Minister), Alex Akinyele (Information Minister), Professor Omo Omoruyi, Professor Tunji Olagun, Professor Jubril Aminu, Chief Clement Akpamgbo SAN, Professor Wole Soyinka, Bola Ajibola, Tai Solarin, General Alani Akinrinade (Agriculture), Professor Tam David-West and later Chief Don Etiebet (Petroleum Resources) and a host of other equally endowed brilliant professionals like Professor Jerry Gana who altruistically recommended one form of program or another to Babangida. Since he is an ‘ordinary’ general, he trusted these heavily endowed professionals to come up with the program that will move the country forward.

Chief Falae still insists that the Structural Adjustment Program, which he designed, was meant to help Nigeria move from a consuming economy to that of production. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s intellectuals were seen to be too lazy not to accept the challenge thrown at them. The rich kept their wealth holy; very few tried to take the plunge. SAP challenge is similar to the challenge Ndiigbo found themselves immediately after the war. They accepted their fate and struggled with their innate resilience and good heartedness to get where they are today, despite the manmade mountains of marginalization. SAP could have worked if the rest of the country had tried to learn the resilience and productive capacity of Ndiigbo during the war. Under unspeakable adverse conditions, they produced salt, refined petroleum, built bombs and armored cars, constructed international airstrips, etc. and still executed a bloody war for 30 months against a well-oiled and by far materially superior Federal force.

But the question to ask the 120 million Nigerians today is whether they were better off during Babangida era than today. When Babangida left office, the naira exchanged for 45 to 1 dollar; today it is at 137 to 1 dollar, a bag of beans (Potiskum brown, considered the best) sold for 650 naira then; today it is 8,500 naira. A bag of rice (long grains) sold for 450 naira then; today it is 4,500 naira. A bag of garri (Delta flavor) sold for 350 naira then; today it is 1,500 naira. A loaf of bread (Niger Bridge-head price) sold for 10 naira then; today it is 50 naira. The cost of petrol has since tripled, and all other attendant cost of living indexes have gone up considerably. The intellectuals could not even tame the economy, whereas the ‘ordinary’ generals were able to tame the military. During Babangida, all salaries and pensions were paid in full when due; today workers and pensioners give bribes to receive their salaries.

Babangida critics should at the very least be honest to their readers when attacking his records. Yes, he allowed everybody to make money, but he did not create corruption. If you check our national records you will find out that the first coup plotters and all others that followed mentioned corruption as one of their cardinal reasons for taking over government. Nigerians would rather have a president who allowed everyone to make money, his advisers, and himself included, than a president that allows only his advisers, party leaders, and himself to keep all the money -- as is happening today.

CONCLUSION

You may choose to hate him, like him, and or respect him, but the truth still remains that the man General Babangida did touch many lives positively in Nigeria. He is not asking to be worshipped, adored, or likened to the Almighty God (The Merciful), he has not even claimed to be infallible; however, it is only fair to state that if you decide to attack the man, kindly stick to the relevant issues; that is, his policies. Surprisingly none of the so-called intellectuals, with professorships and doctorate degrees appended to their names -- in case we don’t know how mighty or how high they are, have made a scholarly effort to study why all the economic policies enunciated from the First Republic to date have failed or succeeded. Instead, they prefer to take the short cut to criticism; not only that, they even resort to name-calling and to threatening one’s life, and many have become so abusive that one begins to wonder where they received their miseducation.

I have already commented on the annulment. It has become part of our national history of uncompleted exercise in democracy. The annulment was necessitated by events eventuated by Chief Arthur Nzeribe, ABN, Chief Tony Anenih, Chief M. K. O. Abiola (for not honoring the repeated invitation of a properly constituted court of law), and the court presided by late Justice Bassey Ekanem. Why did all the Emirs, Ezes, and Obas who met with Babangida keep mute after visiting and seeking full explanation? The fact that Chief Ernest Shonekan accepted to take control of government on interim basis raises more questions. You may not like the outcome; it is your prerogative. I am sure Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sir Tafawa Balewa, Chief S.L. Akintola, Brigadier Maimalari, Colonel Arthur Unegbe, and all those killed with them and their families did not like what Major Nzeogwu and his group started. Surely, the families of General J. T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi and Colonel Francis Fajuyi and hundreds of victims of July 29, 1966 are not jumping up with joy even in 2002. The same can be said of all the other forceful takeover of government in Nigeria. There is nothing emphatically different between June 12, 1993, January 15, 1966, July 29, 1966, and December 31, 1983.

Did it occur to anyone that General Babangida had the choice of staying back in power after the annulment? He could have mustered his loyal troops, crushed any and all oppositions, and maintained power. But he suppressed and sacrificed any personal ambition for the greater good of the nation. If we must blame anyone for General Sani Abacha coming to power, we must look at other axes of mischief, as revealed by Chief Bolaji Akinyemi in his book; don’t blame Babangida, please.

I am not one to call someone abusive names because they have an opinion different from mine. I guess it has to do with one’s parental upbringing and commitment to good faith. I am also imbibed with the culture of respect for one’s position and age and, most importantly, faith and loyalty to God first, and my family and friends second. If my defense of General Ibrahim Babangida is hurtful, painful, and annoying to some people, all I can say is: Brace yourself for the ride because I will not be wished away with concoctions and figments of uncultivated imagination.