Babangida and his whitewashed biography

Although Babangida had no original idea on how to cycle Nigeria’s wheel of progress, he surrounded himself with men of excellence and intellect, men whose resourcefullness would have created a functional socio-political and economic resuscitation for the country. Only if he had looked beyond immediate personal gain to weave those ideas into a consistent fabric. But he lacked the capacity to attain that goal in the shimmering diffusions of his opportunism and matchless appetite.

With his defective understanding of simple economics, Babangida turned Nigeria into a guinea pig for all sorts of bizarre experiments. At every point and on every issue, his policies were irresolute, long on rhetorics but short on facts, objectives and results. Babangida’s deceptiveness set him apart as the most dangerous ruler Nigeria has had.

He was the misgotten offspring of extrapolation. Some of his policies were good and even well intentioned, but a persistent lack of credibility and consistency were the two evils that worked against all his policies. Although he declared a worthwhile transition programme, he placed every conceivable obstacle on its path.

The result was that all his policies – economic, political, social – became well modulated fiction, long on hyperboles and short on facts. Babangida had a grandiose dream of creating a political masterpiece with his two party imposition. Nigerians were willing to play along with him.

The idea perhaps, was not a bad one, not for him, not for the country. But the contradictions of his personal cravings worked assiduously against him. Like a glutton, he has a voracious and insatiable appetite for food, money, power, publicity, ecstasy, tangentiality and immorality.

His policies and programmes reflected political and economic acrobatics. His political character was aptly captured by Irving Stone’s description of the humming bird “reversal in mid air without first stopping the forward movement, the great whirring of wings without moving an inch in any direction.” Babangida was a streetwise soldier who maneuvered himself through treachery to the highest office in the land, and embarked on a cold blooded and premeditated destruction of millions of lives and families.

But like a small time pimp, his heart was always in the street. His method was one of frustrating others, filibustering them and like a mild oryx, eroding the remnants of hope and vestiges of faith left in the system. Babangida’s aspian politics inflicted severe pains on Nigerians.

This pain was physical, psychological and spiritual. Babangida revelled in intrigue, manipulation and confusion. Even though he preached democracy, and promised Nigerians what he called “an enduring democratic legacy”, he was an enemy of democracy, the rule of law and human rights.

He branded himself an evil genius. He was indeed evil and ingenious. But he was a genius without a conscience.

He was a king who ran his kingdom with the triple B – bribes, blackmail and brutality. His profligate generosity..

. clung like a miasma to those who were tainted. He not only institutionalised corruption as a state policy in Nigeria but planted its seed in the hearts and soul of every Nigerian.

Babangida performed a lobotomy on every Nigerian. The surgery was both physical and spiritual. The entire complexion of the Nigerian society was tragically and irrevocably altered by Babangida’s hocus pocus.

This he achieved to the detriment and shame of even the unborn generation. Make no mistake, those born long after Babangida’s era will feel the pain of his misdeeds and perceive the stench and secretions of his legacy. And many will walk in his footsteps.

Babangida understood the psychology of money and used it to great personal advantage and even greater national disadvantage. Decent and dignified Nigerians were reduced to helplessness, begging to feed on the crumbs that fell from Babangida’s table. The extent to which Babangida betrayed the trust of the Nigerian people was so bottomless it would never be reached.

Here was a man who stole from orphans and widows, from the sick and infirm, from the old and feeble, from the wounded and dying to fill his own coffers. This was a man totally, completely, fatally without conscience. In one of the monumental epitaphs to Babangida’s era of perfidy, Chidi Amuta ‘praised’ him as a man who “pursues stability through a process of organised instability”.

One may also add violence for good measure. Many Nigerians fell victim to the form of organised violence and orchestrated instability which Babangida fostered. He created a spectacular form of violence on all fronts – physical violence, moral violence, spiritual violence and economic violence.

His era clinically removed morality from the art of governance. For him, there was no frankness, there was no moral courage, there was no sincerity and there was no devotion to high principles and conscience. In the words of Peter Oparah, “Babangida personified all that is bad in the Nigerian state.

Babangida and his minions ‘those characters of ill defined pedigree’ despoiled Nigeria and dumped the carcass in the bottom of the pit.” Arthur Nwankwo further identified the sycophancy and praise singing which became a national culture under Babangida. He hired praise singers to sing his praises and those who refused to join the chorus were marked down as enemies.

“Much emphasis was placed on croynism. State resources were shamelessly and recklessly used as carrot to appease relationships and cultivate new friendships, creating an unprecedented cult of sycophants and hangers on in the corridors of power.” Babangida enjoyed the dubious distinction of being a Maradona.

The tragic irony however was that while Maradona, the Argentine soccer legend, dribbled his opponents, scored goals, achieved results and brought glory to his fatherland, Babangida never did. Instead, after all his dribblings, acrobatics somersaults and macho politics, he brought defeat, misery, loss of hope, tragedy and disaster to his fatherland. Despite what anyone may say, today or in years to come, General Ibrahim Babangida must be held supremely responsible for the Abacha atrocities, for handing over to Abacha in 1993 instead of the man who won a free and fair election.

From all accounts, Abacha was a better man than Babangida. Whatever evil Abacha has done, Babangida would remain the most loathed and the most guilty figure in Nigeria. It was his maneuverings of Stalinist resourcefulness that created an enabling environment for the likes of Abacha, Gwarzo and Mustapha to unleash a reign of sorcery, witchcraft and terror on the Nigerian people.

Without Babangida’s treachery, Abacha would have been best remembered as the man who announced Nigeria’s fourth coup. Babangida is a man so possessed by evil that he has managed to burn guilt and shame out of his system. In a country of greater prospects and conscience, Babangida would have stood trial as a traitor, saboteur and a desecrater of the general will.

Babangida should have been sitting in gaol today doing penance for the atrocities he perpetrated against Nigeria and it’s people. But he is a free man, a prince and a blue blood, living in an orgy of affluence in his hilltop paradise in Minna, from where he continues his games of polemics and subterfuge against Nigeria. Concluded.

(Culled from the author’ book, “Political Soldiering: Africa’s Men on Horseback.” Published by John Jacob’s Classic Publishers Ltd. Enugu.

2001. Pp 84 – 94).