On Obi's Canonisation of Sani Abacha (1)
By Igboeli Arinze There is a particular kind of audacity, the sort that makes angels weep and historians reach for the nearest bottle of strong spirits , one that manifests
By Igboeli Arinze
There is a particular kind of audacity, the sort that makes angels weep and historians reach for the nearest bottle of strong spirits , one that manifests when a politician, drunk on the peculiar wine of desperation, decides to rehabilitate the memory of one of Africa's most notorious military despots. It is the audacity of a man who, standing in the middle of a burning house, insists that the flames are merely decorative. It is, in the most charitable interpretation, an act of breathtaking foolhardiness. In the less charitable and considerably more accurate interpretation, it is the last desperate gasp of a political career searching for oxygen in a room already thick with the smoke of its own contradictions.
Peter Obi, once the accidental darling of Nigeria's restless, hopeful and the gullible, the Labour Party's messiah figure who swept through the consciousness of a weary nation like a cleansing harmattan wind, has apparently decided that the path to political relevance runs directly through the rehabilitation of General Sani Abacha. One must pause. One must breathe. One must resist the overwhelming urge to check whether the calendar has somehow somersaulted backwards to an era when such revisionism was the exclusive preserve of Abuja's most shameless apologists.
For Obi to ascribe to Sani Abacha any form of democratic sainthood is not merely worrisome. It is a cathedral of irony so vast, so magnificently constructed, that one almost admires the architectural ambition of the absurdity.
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Let us, for the benefit of those whose memories have been conveniently sanitised by the passage of time, return to the scene of the original crime. The year was 1993. Nigeria stood at what should have been its finest democratic crossroads , the freest, fairest, and most peacefully conducted election in the nation's turbulent history. Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, the Epetedo colossus, the man whose philanthropy had watered the nation's soil from Kano to Calabar, had won the presidential election in a manner so resounding, so gloriously unambiguous, that even his opponents could only bow their heads in reluctant acknowledgement.
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And then, in a moment of spectacular infamy that history shall never forgive, General Ibrahim Babangida annulled that mandate. The deed was done. Like Shakepeare's Duncan, Democracy was murdered in its sleep, with the assassins wearing military fatigues.
Into this theatre of constitutional carnage walked General Sani Abacha, flanked by the likes of General David Mark, Murtala Nyako, men who had made careers of interrupting Nigeria's democratic aspirations with the reliable punctuality of a civil servant collecting his salary. Abacha, the dark and brooding Kano general whose eyes always seemed to hold secrets that would chill the bones of the bravest man, positioned himself as the reluctant saviour, the soldier who would restore order from chaos. He even reached an understanding with Abiola — a gentleman's agreement, a sacred compact that the mandate of June 12 would be honoured.
True to the finest traditions of military perfidy, Abacha, upon seizing power in November 1993, promptly demonstrated what his word was worth. He did not merely break his promise to Abiola. He shattered it, ground the pieces underfoot, and then had the pieces swept away by aides who were themselves too terrified to ask questions. In one fell swoop, Abacha torpedoed what was left of our democracy, the National Assembly and sitting governors were stripped of their mandate and asked to go home.
We shall ask the question plainly, without the softening gauze of diplomatic courtesy: Does a democrat dissolve the legislature? Does a champion of human rights sweep away elected governors because they exist as inconvenient reminders of a popular will he did not consult?
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Does a democrat sanction the murder of his critics?
Consider Alfred Rewane, the grand old man of Nigerian activism, the NADECO chieftain whose home became the intellectual engine room of resistance against tyranny. On the night of October 6, 1995, gunmen came for him in the supposed sanctuary of his Ikeja home. He was eighty years old. He had lived long enough to see Nigeria's independence, to survive coups and counter-coups, to endure the privations of civil war and yet he could not survive the democratic credentials of the man Peter Obi now finds himself defending. Was his murder an act of democracy?
Consider Kudirat Abiola ,wife, warrior, and indomitable spirit who refused to be silenced even as her husband rotted in Abacha's detention. She was shot dead on June 4, 1996, on the streets of Lagos in broad daylight, the kind of killing that announces itself without shame because it is conducted by those who believe themselves beyond accountability. Is this, Peter Obi, the democratic record you have chosen to celebrate? Is the blood of Kudirat Abiola merely a footnote in your historical calculus?
And what of Olu Onagoruwa's son, who's son Toyin Onagoruwa was killed because the father dared to possess a conscience? Or the great Shehu Musa Yar'Adua, who was injected to death on the orders of the same Abacha.
What about the attempted murders of Chief Alex Ibru, the newspaper proprietor whose Guardian had been a persistent thorn in the flesh of authoritarian comfort. Or the targeting of Pa Adekunle Adesanya, whose survival was a matter of providence and other African combinables rather than any restraint on the part of those who wished him silenced.
These are the democratic credentials of the man Peter Obi would seemingly canonise. These are the saintly works for which he apparently believes Abacha deserves our revised historical assessment.
But even this catalogue of horrors does not exhaust Abacha's application for democratic sainthood. For it was in November 1995 that the world witnessed one of the most grotesque exhibitions of state power since the darkest chapters of African post-colonial history. Ken Saro-Wiwa — the writer, the environmentalist, the Ogoni son who had dared to hold multinational oil companies and their Nigerian accomplices accountable for the devastation of his people's lands and waters was hanged. Hanged, along with eight of his Ogoni compatriots, following a trial so transparently kangaroo in its character that the international community erupted in unanimous revulsion.
Nigeria was expelled from the Commonwealth. The world turned its face away in disgust. Foreign leaders who had once gladly shaken Nigerian hands now crossed the street of diplomatic courtesy to avoid the association.
