Fazil Ope-Agbe it was who raised the stakes in the controversial Awolowo/Akintola controversy last year. Readers and elder statesmen who were around in the First Republic responded to his article on the two prominent but late Yoruba leaders - some agreed while others disagreed sharply. In this piece, Pa Ope-Agbe is raising another issue which promises to be as controversial as ever. Readers' reactions would be published.
I participated in the politics of the 2nd Republic and emerged with the conviction that this country would go nowhere but down until our concept, organisation and conduct of politics was drastically overhauled. Babangida effected that overhaul with his transition to civil rule programme that got Chief M.K.O. Abiola elected in the freest and fairest elections ever conducted in Nigeria. When I say “freest and fairest”, I am quoting Babangida’s enemies and detractors verbatim.
That Abiola’s election was annulled does not detract from the fact and does not dilute the achievement that Babangida devised the means to conduct free and fair elections in Nigeria. It is pertinent to ask and I wonder why nobody is raising the question, if as everybody admits, Abiola’s election has been the freest and fairest, why has the system which produced that freest and fairest election been jettisoned? Why was that system not adopted in the subsequent elections that brought President Olusegun Obasanjo to power?
My answer to that question is that there is a very powerful cabal that will not tolerate a leader who derives power from the people. This Mafioso group has constituted itself into king makers and will do anything and everything to interpose itself between the leader and the people he is expected to lead and cater for.
My analysis is that lbrahim Babangida and M.K.O. Abiola belong to this group by virtue of the heights they attained; they are however not comfortable within the group and would like to reach out beyond the oligarchy, to the masses comprising the common man in the street.
A few days before the 1983 N.P.N (National Party of Nigeria) convention in Kano, Gboyega Oshodi then Chief Accountant in M.K.O. Abiola’s business empire came up to me and offered me some money; he said it was a gift from Chief Abiola. He explained that Chief Abiola wanted my support in his bid to wrest the party’s chairmanship from Chief A.M.A. Akinloye at the forthcoming convention.
I told Gboyega Oshodi that if every vote but one were cast for Abiola, at the convention, the one and only dissenting vote would be mine.
I explained to Gboyega that the N.P.N. could not have the necessary impact in Lagos State because the State Chairman, Babs Hilario Akerele, in cahoots with Prince Sultan Ladega Adele handpicked unpopular characters and installed them as LGA (Local Government Area) executives at grassroots level.
Babs Akerele and I shared the same dormitory at the C.M.S. Grammar School boarding house at Odunlami Street in 1951; we would have become classmates in 1952 if he hadn’t left for St.
Gregory’s College Obalende.
In the N.P.N., Akerele and I disagreed sharply on his style of leadership and we had a running battle until his fair-weather friends and sycophants turned against him and tried to offer him as sacrificial lamb for the party’s abysmal failure in Lagos State.
To everybody’s surprise, I rose up in robust defense of Akerele. I pronounced him guilty of all the charges leveled against him but insisted that the elders who misled him must also be punished. Ironically his accusers and prosecutors were the same persons who had counseled Akerele to ignore my warnings and protests about his style of leadership.
Akerele showed his gratitude by offering me, on a platter of gold, board appointment in a federal government parastatal. I turned down the offer, insisting that I was not in politics for personal gain but to serve my country. In exchange for the board appointment, which I had rejected, Akerele gave me a note to Volkswagen (Nig) Ltd, at Ojo, to collect a car of my choice, which I did.
He also placed me on a sumptuous weekly allowance and assigned me to restructure the party in Badagry Local Government Area (stretching from Boundary Ajegunle to Badagry town and including about a hundred riverine towns and villages in the Lagoon).
I warned him that to effectively carry out the assignment, I must uproot the existing foundation and rebuild the party on a firmer foundation based on democratic principles. Akerele told me to go ahead and do what I thought was proper.
My first step was to nominate for party patronage, the party stalwarts, whom I had decided to eliminate. Some of them got board appointments, others got rewarded in various other ways. Predictably they settled down to enjoy the political booty I dropped on their laps. They made themselves inaccessible to the teeming masses of ordinary party members so they would not have to share the accruing bonanza with anybody. Even I, who nominated them, was kept at arm’s length.
The neglect inflicted on the lower echelon of N.P.N. party members was replicated in the other political parties, the U.P.N. and the N.P.P. The area was inundated with discarded party members, whose parties could conveniently ignore until the next elections. I gathered this political flotsam and jetsam and organized them into a formidable grassroots movement. With my overwhelming grassroots support, I got the erstwhile party stalwarts voted out of office; I had cooked their goose by accusing them of avariciously enriching themselves with party patronage proceeds instead of catering for all party members, particularly the lower cadre.
Finding themselves in the doldrums of grassroots rejection, the discarded leaders approached one Chief Abdul-Rasaq Ojora, a discarded U.P.N. warrior, who had acquired a reputation for terrorizing the common talk in the area. They took him to Chief M.K.O. AbioIa and introduced him as the N.P.N. chairman for Badagry Division. They told Abiola that Babs Akerele had been neglecting and maltreating members of the L.G.A. Executive of the party because of their love for Abiola. Chief Abiola was taken in by their story and he started providing them with funds which he erroneously believed was being used to keep the N.P.N. alive in Badagry Division. I explained to Gboyega Oshodi that there was no way I could support M.K.O. Abiola whose money was being used to destabilize the party and undermine my authority in the area.
Gboyega Oshodi told me that Chief Abiola was acting in ignorance and the truth only dawned on him when none of the persons whom he had been giving money, appeared on the official list of candidates going to the party’s national convention. Gboyega Oshodi came down the next day to tell me that Chief Abiola wanted me to come and see him. I told Gboyega to tell the Chief that I wasn’t in the habit of going to see “big men”. Next day, Gboyega Oshodi said the Chief asked him to book an appointment for him to come and see me. Again I told Gboyega Oshodi that I didn’t want to see Chief M.K.O. Abiola under any circumstance.
Whereupon Gboyega exclaimed in frustration “for God’s sake, the man made a mistake. We all make mistakes. Now he wants to make amends. There must be something you would like him to do.”
I told Gboyega Oshodi that having failed to secure the party ticket for the convention, Chief Ojora and his group were mobilising to go to Kano to give moral support to Chief M.K.O. Abiola and cheer him to victory in his bid to unseat Chief A.M.A. Akinloye. I told Gboyega Oshodi to tell Chief Abiola that I did not want to see Razaq Ojora or any of his group in Kano and I would only talk with the Chief if he kept the renegades from my constituency away from Kano for the duration of the convention.
Neither Chief Ojora nor any member of his crowd showed up in Kano as I stipulated. I later learnt that Chief Abiola had invited them to travel with him on his private jet plane to Kano. They had gathered at the airport in the afternoon of the day before the convention. Chief Abiola had plied them with food and drinks until 4am in the morning just a few hours before the convention was to commence in Kano. Then at that unholy hour, when they couldn’t make alternative arrangements to travel to Kano, Chief Abiola had given them money and asked them to go back home and await his return to Lagos. He cautioned them not to leave town.
Chief Abiola arrived in Kano; he was out smarted and out-manoeuvred by his powerful enemies and was forced to resign from the N.P.N., a Party which had been started and sustained largely with his money until the party found itself in power, and could afford to live without him.
Those who accuse Babangida of denying Abiola the presidency should take a closer look at the lot that stopped him from becoming the national chairman of the N.P.N. My projection is that that same lot, with added re-enforcement of Awoists, put unbearable pressure on Babangida to annul Chief Abiola’s election.
Abiola’s pursuit of my one vote, which he didn’t really need and which would not have affected the outcome of an election, had one taken place in Kano, and Babangida’s intervention to secure for me, my money trapped under ldiagbon’s orders, gives both men one character trait in common - the urge to reach out beyond the entrenched egocentric powers and interact with the common man who could not affect his fortune one way or another.
Chief Abiola’s philanthropy, which symbolises his love for the masses and the reciprocal love of the masses for “M.K.O.” made him a threat to the power brokers who believe it is their exclusive right to determine who becomes what in Nigeria. It has been an enduring policy of the elitist power brokers to suppress or eliminate anybody who seeks or acquires “people’s power.” As it is in civilian society, so it is in the military. When I met lbrahim Babangida at Flagstaff house in January 1984, he was not in the company of his fellow generals, neither was any colonel, major or captain in sight. All around him were Warrant Officers and below. Babangida loved the lower cadre of the Army just as Abiola loved the poor down-trodden masses on the street.
The military top brass must be as apprehensive of Babangida’s comradeship with the army rank and file as the political juggernauts were with Abiola’s dalliance with the common people. It is therefore not surprising as Olowolabi claims that “for senior military officers, Babangida is bad news”. Olowolabi states that the question in the barracks today is, ‘Can you trust this man?”’ For most members of the Armed Forces, according to Olowolabi, the answer is “NO”. My own question to Olowolabi is, which “members of the armed forces”, is he talking about. Is it the officers or the rank and file who out number the officers by at least a ratio of one thousand to one. This question is relevant because the present struggle is between Babangida, who loves the masses and the entrenched powers who believe that the common people do not matter and should neither be seen nor heard.
Irrespective of what section or cadre of the armed forces that was polled for Olowolabi’s article, I wish to express concern at his slant, which suggests that Nigerians expect a sizeable and maybe decisive input by the armed forces in the determination of who becomes the next president. I wish to appeal to every writer and commentator to always emphasize that the armed forces have no role to play in the jousting, jostling and manouevres of political parties or politicians of this country. The duty of the armed forces is to carry out the orders of the commander-in-chief chosen for them by the electorate, in so far as those orders fall within the provisions of the constitution. As for the charge that Babangiba promoted mediocrity and encouraged cronyism in the Armed Forces, if I were military Head of State in a coup-prone third world country like Nigeria, I would only elevate and surround myself with personnel whom I could trust not to start taking pot shots at me. If Aguiyi-lronsi and Muritala Mohammed had built fortresses of hand-picked favourites around themselves, chances are they would have lived to a ripe old age.
Now let us examine IBB’s transition to civil rule programme on which Olowolabi claimed that N40 billion was wasted. I was a sub-contractor to a company that built a few of the local government secretariats designed for the use of the political parties. I know how many jobs were created in my company for execution of projects generated by the transition programme. I refuse to classify as “wasted” any amount of money provided in the country and spent in the country by and for our countrymen and women. Besides, the local government secretariats built during that transition programme are being put to good use throughout the country, as you read this article.
What this country needs and has needed for decades is a change; a departure from old norms and methods. Babangida provided that in his transition programmes. He first encouraged politicians to form their own parties based on guidelines designed to make the parties broad-based.
My experience in the N.P.N. had convinced me that the progress of this country did not lie in the hands of the politicians being thrown up by the system. I had consequently decided to steer clear of party politics in the future. I was not interested in the political associations that sprang up at the first phase of Babangida’s transition programme until I read in the papers that my good friend, Jide Oki, had emerged as Lagos State Chairman of one of the parties vying for registration.
Jide Oki was my idea of a gentleman’s gentleman. I trusted him absolutely to steer clear of anything that was not proper, transparently honest and above board. Convinced that I must not be found missing in a group that had the sense and decency to elect Jide Oki as its leader, I went up to him, congratulated him and offered him my services in any capacity in which he could use me. Too late, I discovered good old Babs Akerele lurking in the shadows. My immediate and instinctive urge was to beat a hasty retreat at discovering that behind the Jide Oki facade was Babs Akerele and his abracadabra. But Oki had welcomed me with such joy, warmth, relief and hope that I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him I wasn’t staying. I stayed on and witnessed at first hand what probably was the most disgusting, disreputable political charade that could be devised by a human mind. 1 won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that Nigerian politics hit a new and unbeatable low during that exercise. I told myself that Nigeria was really finished if that was the caliber of leaders that would take over from Babangida.
But praise God, Babangida was watching. He knew what was going on. He had his own plans all worked out but first provided facilities for politicians to come out and make fools of themselves. After politicians had hanged themselves on the long rope generously provided by Babangida, he unfurled his own political agenda with his creation of a two party system, which saw the birth of the Social Democratic Party (S.D.P) and the National Republican Convention (N.R.C.). Babangida chose Alhaja Lateefat Okunnu and Mr. S. B. Agodo to midwife the two political parties.
Nobody would pick Alhaja Okunnu and S. B. Agodo for such assignments if he was not honest and sincere in his intentions. I knew Alhaja Okunnu (then Lati Oyekan) way back in her student days at Methodist Girls’ High School, Yaba. We went out on a couple of dates.
I prided myself as a person of high principles, but Lati Oyekan (as she then was) elevated principles to such dizzy heights that I couldn’t cope and had to cry off. I remember vividly the very last visit I paid her at her family house in Tokunboh Street.
I had attended an official party. I never drank because alcohol simply didn’t go down well with me. On this occasion, somebody had persuaded me to share a bottle of beer with him and I had obliged by taking just one glass. I arrived at Lati’s place and greeted her, “hello”. She wrinkled her nose, withered me with a disapproving stare and chided, “Hmph, you’re drunk.” She then gave me a long lecture on the evils of drinking. Nothing new about that; our meetings over the past year had been dominated by lectures on moral or religious issues, with me at the receiving end.
At the time of that last meeting, I had already decided I had had enough. There 1 was, an Assistant Publicity Officer in Her Majesty’s colonial civil service and Press Secretary to the Governor-General of the Federation to boot, and there she was, a school girl (she was in Kings College then, doing her Higher School Certificate Course). I patiently endured her lecture, at the end of which I turned my back and told her, “Lati look at my back”. She examined my back critically then asked, “what’s wrong with your back?
“Do you see any wings’?” I asked her. She looked momentarily puzzled, then she brightened up. “Ah I see, your alcoholic stupor is making you imagine that you have sprouted wings”. “No, I haven’t sprouted wings and I will never sprout wings for the simple fact that I am not an angel. Lati, you belong up there with the angels, not amongst us frail human beings”, was my parting statement to her.
The girl I told in 1960 that she belonged with the angels became a woman who maintained her very high standard of probity, incorruptibility and respectability and that was the lady General lbrahim Babangida chase to midwife one of his political parties. Does that not portray him as somebody who wanted to give Nigeria what was best for her?
Mr. S. B. Agodo was Private Secretary to Chief F. S. Okotie-Eboh, Nigeria’s first Minister of Finance at the time when that ministry was one of the ministries whose activities I was assigned to publicize. S.B. Agodo and I were thrown together a lot especially when we both went on tour with Chief Okotie-Eboh. After detailed and prolonged observation of Agodo, I concluded that the Englishman who coined the expression, “buffer wouldn’t melt in his mouth”, must have got his inspiration by looking at S. B. Agodo. Mild mannered (virtually verging on shyness) humble, modest, self-effacing and unpresumptuous. That Agodo, a man utterly incapable of any hanky-panky was the person chosen by Babangida to activate and nurture the second of the political parties, speaks volumes about his good intentions and noble aspirations for the country.
Alhaja Lateefat Okunnu and S. B. Agodo, two embodiments of everything good. honest and noble, were handpicked by Babangida and the result of their work was the “freest and fairest” election Nigeria has ever had. The person who handpicked that fine duo cannot be bad as his detractors are portraying him, rather he deserves gratitude, respect and a yearning by Nigerians for him to come back and establish a solid and permanent base for what he alone has been able to accomplish in Nigerian history - free and fair elections.
Babangida’s Option A4 was designed to make it impossible for anybody without appreciable and extensive countrywide support to became president. What we had at the time Babangida was executing his transition programme were regional and sectional strong men, power brokers and Godfathers none of whose influence covered more than an infinitesimal fraction of the whole country. M. K. 0. Abiola was the nearest thing to what could be described as a person with country - wide appeal. The power brokers who put Abiola forward and lent their support, which resulted in his victory, did not do it for love of Abiola. They only saw in AbioIa an instrument with which they could get rid of Babangida, who was proving too smart for them.
Osifeso and I understood his grouse; Shonekan had not bent the rules in their favour nor allowed them to exploit his position for their personal gain. That was Shonekan alright; no straying from the path of rectitude, not for friend not for family, not even for himself. That was the man that Babangida chose to head an interim government that would conduct another “free and fair” elections which is what he would have done because Shonekan was totally incapable of foul play or partiality.
Shortly after Shonekan became Head of State, a prominent member of the power brokers whom Babangida had side-stepped, came to me and said he had been mandated to approach me as a bossom friend of Shonekan to explore the possibility of me going to talk to him on their behalf.
He said they all knew that Babangida had chosen Shonekan to spite them for forcing him out of office. He wondered if I could go and tell Shonekan that they were ready to accept him as Head of State and work with him to ensure he had a successful tenure.
What they wanted was for Shonekan to drop the ministers chosen for him by Babangida and replace them with their own nominees. He told me that they were behind all the protests, strife and mayhem surrounding the June 12 annulment and the whole thing would stop if Shonekan admitted their members into his cabinet.
I turned down the assignment for three reasons:
1. I couldn’t have a hand in anything that would generate bad blood between my good friend Shonekan and Babangida who helped me, a total stranger, retrieve my money trapped in the Federal Ministry of education on Idiagbon’s orders.
2.I was horrified and saddened that all that mayhem resulting in loss of lives and properties was not for love of Abiola or democracy, as it was made clear to me that if Babangida had limited himself to the appointment of the Head of the Interim government and invited other vested interests to nominate ministers, there would have been no trouble at all.
3.I knew that Shonekan would never betray a trust and it would be a futile exercise trying to convince him to unilaterally alter any arrangements he had with Babangida.
A few weeks later and about a month before Abacha toppled the Interim National Government, the politician who had approached me to contact Shonekan, told me I had missed a good chance of influencing Nigeria’s history. He informed me that they had presented their plans to Abacha, then Minister of Defence and he had agreed to remove Shonekan, become Head of State and appoint the politician’s nominees as ministers. Abacha had always had his ambitions but it is a matter of conjecture whether he would have struck if these same people who are now calling themselves civil rights campaigners and defenders of democracy had not urged him to take over.
When I look at all the persons who served in the Abacha cabinet and compare the list with those who are lambasting Babangida over June 12, I wonder what is happening. The same people who claim to be annoyed with Babangida for denying Abiola his mandate were in the cabinet of the government which held Abiola in detention.
When I was informed that Abacha had agreed to remove Shonekan so that our “civil rights campaigners and defenders of democracy” would become ministers and board members, I toyed with the idea of going to Shonekan and advising him to sack Abacha as Minister of Defence. I knew of course that Shonekan was not a fighting man and could not be expected to confront Abacha. My assessment of the situation was vindicated when Major General Joshua Dogonyaro in an interview with a national magazine gave reasons why he retired from the Nigerian Army.
Gen. Dogonyaro stated that Abacha was planning a coup and there were only two ways of stopping him. The options, according to Dogonyaro were for Shonekan to remove Abacha as Minister of Defence or for him Dogonyaro to stage a pre-emptive coup and remove Abacha.
Dogonyaro Stated that he went to Shonekan told him what Abacha was planning and urged him to remove Abacha, a constitutional prerogative which could be enforced by him with loyal troops. Shonekan, according to Dogonyaro responded that he was an economist and his concern was to improve the Nigerian economy, not to dabble in military matters. Dagonyaro said rather than carry out the second option of removing Abacha by force, which could be bloody, he opted for retirement.
I told myself that if an officer of the caliber of General Dogonyaro could not prevail on Shonokan to sack Abacha, then it would be presumptuous of me to expect him to act on a similar advice from me. In conversation with Shonekan after he had been removed by Abacha, he confirmed that he would not have fought anybody just for the sake of staying on as Head of State.
I mention this incident just to highlight the hypocrisy of those who are now opposed to Babangida’s bid for the presidency but who installed Abacha whose atrocities in office outstripped any faults of Babangida by a ratio of ten to one. Babangida never set up any alleged hit squad like the one headed by Brigadier Mustapha and featuring the likes of Colonel Omenka.
Babangida never got anybody killed the way Abacha, installed by the patriots, got his men to kill Papa Alfred Rewane, Onagoruwa’s son and shot up lbru and Abraham Adesanya’s car in assassination attempts. When I say that Babangida never killed anybody, I expect people to ask, “What about Dele Giwa if things happened the way Babangida’s accusers want us to believe they happened, then the Dele Giwa tragedy will rank as the greatest theatre of the absurd ever to come to my attention
The story being peddled about is that Dele Giwa had some information with which he was blackmailing or attempting to blackmail Babangida and that was why he was killed with a parcel bomb.
If Babangida’s accusers read authors like Peter Cheyney, Leslie Chatens, Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, Harold Robbins, Jeffrey Archer, Sydney Sheldon, Jackie Coffins, to mention just a few, they must have known that the most elementary first step a blackmailer takes is to put his blackmailing material in a secret and very safe place and inform his victim that if anything happened to him (the blackmailer), the custodian of the damning material would go public and spill the beans.
Ten years after Dele Giwa’s death, nobody has come forward with any specific and tangible material with which Dele Giwa might have been blackmailing Babangida or that puts him in a position to blackmail Babangida. It could be concluded therefore that Dele Giwa was either too naive or too stupid to take that elementary but imperative precautionary measure to protect himself from such a powerful figure as Babangida was then.
My knowledge of Dele Giwa does not portray him as naive or stupid so I am left with no other option but to conclude that Dele Giwa was not blackmailing Babangida and did not have any material with which he could blackmail Babangida, for the simple reason that such material did not exist because Babangida never indulged in any actions for which he could be blackmailed.
It was also alleged that shortly before the parcel bomb arrived, the Had of Military Intelligence had phoned Dele Giwa to find out his residential address and tell him a parcel was on its way. For crying out loud! you don’t phone somebody you want to kill to find out his address, you obtain that information very surreptitiously and I challenge anybody to come and tell me that the Head of Military intelligence could not find out Dele Giwa’s residential address without phoning Dele Giwa himself to obtain that information. I am inclined to believe that if HaIilu Akilu did phone Dele Giwa that fateful morning, it was not to ask him where a parcel bomb could be delivered to him. What makes sense to me is that somebody or persons who did not like Dele Giwa or Babangida got wind of HaIiIu AkiIu’s phone call (assuming there was one) and sent in his/her parcel bomb under cover of that call. It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody phoned Dele Giwa falsely claiming to be Halilu AkiIu and under that guise obtained Dele Giwa’s address. Persons who contemplate murder lay false tracks and draw red herrings across their paths; they don’t advertise their presence and scatter incriminating evidence all over the place as brazenly as Akilu was being portrayed as doing.
