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Daily Independent, Lagos
June 12, a metaphor for the presidential election of that date 10 years ago and the political impasse its annulment triggered, has had a profound impact on the political course of Nigeria. It also impacted on many political careers. Today, Daily Independent takes a look at 11 of the principal characters in that political drama and how they have fared since then.
Ibrahim Babangida
June 12 was the last but most important fixture of the electoral schedule of the political transition programme of General Ibrahim Babangida. He had seized power in a palace coup on August 27, 1985 and months later announced the programme, which he promised would bring about the end to military rule in Nigeria. It was a long and windy programme – amended several times on the excuse of it being a learning process – that was initially to end in 1990. Then it was elongated by two years with the popular expectation that an elected successor to the military president would be inaugurated on national day (October 1) that year. In line with that expectation, transition elections were concluded at the state and local government levels by the end of 1991. In July 1992, members of the National Assembly were elected thus leaving the presidency as the final office to be elected. State governors, who were elected in December 1991, were sworn in on the second day of 1992 and officials of government soon began to suggest that the new president would be sworn in on the corresponding day of 1993.
In October 1992, the military government however halted the process towards the presidential election when it cancelled the hotly disputed primaries of the two registered parties. General Babangida soon announced an extension to the transition programme to end on the eighth anniversaryactors fared of his coup. The parties, under new leaderships, successfully conducted their presidential primaries based on a novel electoral model imposed by the government. Two days to the election however, an ominous portent flared when an Abuja High Court, with Justice Bassey Ikpeme presiding, granted an application by an unregistered political association for an indefinite postponement of the election. Following angry local and diplomatic reactions, the government intervened to revalidate the date and so the election held on June 12, 1993 with Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola of the Social Democratic Party securing a pan-Nigeria mandate.
But trouble was soon to reappear as the electoral commission stopped processing of the returns midway. On June 23, General Babangida, through an unsigned statement he caused the media assistant to his deputy to issue, announced that the election had been annulled. Babangida ordered that the process of electing his successor start afresh with new contestants. But for the first time in his presidency, he was confronted with a popular resistance so strong he could not break. He was defied and found the country virtually ungovernable.
On the eve of the eighth anniversary of his presidency on August 26, Babangida pulled out from the military and handed over to an interim national government he handpicked under Chief Ernest Shonekan, the man he had called eight months earlier to head a transitional council that was to implement the extended transition programme.
Since he “stepped aside”, Babangida has remained in the mansion he built for himself at Minna, his hometown. Following the death of General Sani Abacha who overthrew the ING 81 days after its inauguration, Babangida returned to influence the transition programme of his successor and was credited with initiating the return of President Olusegun Obasanjo to power from prison. Babangida’s name has since continued to appear in political permutation such that people see him as the greatest obstacle to Vice President Atiku Abubakar taking the crucial step up in 2007.
Moshood Abiola
A successful businessman, media mogul and philanthropist, Abiola made his first foray into politics in the Second Republic but left in a huff after the ruling National Party of Nigeria blocked his move to challenge the re-nomination of President Shehu Shagari. He steered clear of the Babangida transition programme until its 1993 extension. With the 23 aspirants who contested the cancelled presidential primaries of 1992 no longer eligible, Abiola became the biggest actor in the so-called Option A4 primaries and won a surprisingly tight grand finale of the SDP in Jos. On June 12, he won a landslide victory in what many still account as the cleanest presidential election in Nigeria’s history. It was a pan-Nigeria mandate too as he won endorsement by every major political unit of the country. But the election was annulled midway to the returns. Inspired by the mood of the country and international reactions, Abiola rejected the annulment and vowed to revalidate his mandate.
Following apparent feelers that the government was about to pick him up, Abiola fled to the United States of America but kept up the pressure now led at home by a coalition of his supporters, pro-democracy and rights activists. Protests for the de-annulment of the election paralysed many parts of the country and forced the obstinate Babangida to back out, but handing over to the ING. Abiola soon returned to challenge the interim government. He appeared to have scored a major victory when General Sani Abacha overthrew the ING. His meeting with Abacha within hours of the coup spurred speculations that the reigns of government would be handed over to him, despite protests by some members of the party whose candidate he thumped on June 12.
But Abacha instead dug his heel in and after months of frustration and pressure by his supporters, Abiola declared himself president on the anniversary of the election in what has become known as Epetedo declaration. He was arrested after a few days of police hunt for him and fatally clamped to gaol. The government arraigned him on a charge of treason but the case was later bogged down in legal entanglements. He nevertheless refused to renounce his claim to the p[residency as a condition for his release. Government accounts said he was on the verge of being released a month after the death of Abacha on July 8, 1998 when he died from cardiac arrest after downing a cup of tea in the presence of an American delegation. His struggle made June 12 a political watershed in Nigeria although President Obasanjo, considered a beneficiary of this watershed, has refused to accord Abiola the national honour many insist he richly deserved.
Sani Abacha
He was chief of defence staff at the time of the election, the only general by Babangida’s side on the day of his 1985 coup still in service by the final year of the military president. Although his was the second voice to be heard on the day of the coup and the one who announced the foil of the April 1990 coup that almost sacked Babangida, Abacha said little in public and kept away from political discourse or functions that by 1993 he was already an enigma. But he seemed to found his voice against his friend Babangida when he made a statement tat tended to urge soldiers to stick to their professional role alone.
After the annulment and as he prepared his forced exit, Babangida inexplicably spared Abacha as he retired more officers. He then named him Minister of defence for the ING and the de facto deputy to Shonekan. Babangida had scarcely arrived Minna when Abacha made his first move by unilaterally reconfiguring the military leadership. On November 23, 1993, he took his final step to power by forcing Shonekan to announce his resignation. Abacha immediately scrapped the National Assembly and the elected governments at the state and local levels, thus effectively returning Nigeria to military rule less than three months after the one promised as the last.
Abacha chose to resolve the lingering June 12 crisis by introducing a fresh transition programme. He then detained Abiola after the politician declared himself president in 1994, clamped heavily on those opposed to him and surreptitiously launched a programme to hang on to power indefinitely. In 1995, he announced the final phase of his political transition programme, created six new states and five new parties. In 1998, the parties declared him their sole candidate for president. Abacha however did not wait for the election – he died on June 8, four days to the fifth anniversary of June 12.
Ernest Shonekan
He was a respected captain of industry and chairman of the local branch of a multinational company when Babangida announced him head of the transitional council in January 1993. The council was to govern in the last eight months of the Babangida era and oversee the implementation of the extended transition process. But the council was kept largely in the dark in the transition process. After the annulment and finding himself incapable of quelling the resistance to his rule, Babangida stepped aside and put Shonekan at the end of the ING. It was a most ineffectual government undermined by military elements within and declared illegal by a court. Shonekan’s personality, composure and policies did not inspire confidence and drew no sympathy when Abacha shoved him aside. He has since returned to political obscurity from which he occasionally emerged from the Abacha days for sundry jobs for his successors.
Babagana Kingibe
He hit the limelight when he scored an upset victory at the maiden convention of the SDP to emerge the party’s first national chairman. After the leaderships of the two parties were dissolved following the cancellation of the presidential primaries of 1992, Kingibe announced he would bid for the presidency under Option A4. He soon emerged the main challenger to Abiola. Following his close defeat in the race at Jos, Kingibe was announced running mate to Abiola. They ran a great campaign together and won a great victory that was however annulled. He stood by the side of Abiola through the early part of the struggle for the revalidation of the election. Following Abacha’s coup however, Kingibe surprisingly accepted appointment as minister. It was the first body blow to the struggle since the exit of Babangida. Kingibe was aloof as Abiola was arrested and stood by Abacha and in government until thedictator’s death of 1998. Since then he has also been aloof to politics. A speculation in 2001 that he was being prepared as chairman of the then All Nigerian People’s Party (APP) turned out a hoax. Instead, it was his wife, Heebah Ireti, who ran for the Senate from Abuja on the platform of the party. She lost.
Tony Anenih
He was elected national chairman of the SDP a few days after the nomination of Abiola as the party’s candidate for the presidential election. A former police officer and state chirman of the NPN in the Second Republic, Anenih brought his experience into play I the run up to the election, which Abiola won. Following the annulment, Anenih and a section of the party he belongs to under major-general Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, now late, began o vacillate about the struggle to reclaim the mandate. Anenih was a participant in the process that led to the formation of the ING and has since been derided as the leader who traded away his party’s electoral victory. He however took no appointment in the ING or in the Abacha government that sacked it. In 1998, Anenih reappeared in national politics at the campaign of Obasanjo for president. He has prospered in plitics since then. Obasanjo later named him into the powerful portfolio of works and housing, a role he combined with being top political adviser and pointsman for the President. He dropped from the cabinet early this year to assume deputy national co-ordinatorship of the Obasanjo re-election campaign. Recently,he announced that he was done with public offices.
Arthur Nzeribe
He was a contestant in the SDP presidential primaries of 1992. Following the cancellation of the exercise, Nzeribe stunned the nation when he called a press conference to announce the formation of the Association for Better Nigeria to press for the continuity of Babangida in office. Many ignored him while some took his antics for a comic relief from the complex political drama then unfolding in the country. But the maverick soldiered on. On June 10, two days before the presidential poll, Nzeribe struck: ABN obtained judgment at an Abuja court to forestall the election. But government directed the electoral commission to go ahead with the poll. But Nzeribe was not done. After the poll, he returned to court and persuaded the acting chief judge of Abuja at the time, Dahiru Saleh, to declare the election illegal having been conducted against a subsisting court order. Nzeribe was sidelined in the ING but bounced back during the transition programme of Abacha by winning a seat at the Senate. In 1998, in the transition to the
Fourth Republic, he re-enacted his victory, making it the third time his Orlu district would be sending him to the upper chamber of the federal legislature. He was the subject of several intrigues in the Senate culminating in his defection to the ruling party and suspension from the House over charges of anti-democracy antics, amongst which was cited his June 12 role. But Nzeribe is the ultimate cat with nine lives. Orlu re-elected him into the Senate where a majority of his accusers, not to talk of June 12 victims, are now missing.
Bassey Ikpeme
She was a judge at the federal high court in the Federal Capital Territory. In a judgment she delivered at about 10 pm on June 10, she ordered that the presidential election be withheld, based on an application by the unregistered ABN. Bassey, who was once a counsel in the chambers of Clement Akpamgbo, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice by 1993, never had another opportunity to reappear in history. She died in 1995.
Humprey Nwosu
He was a professor of political science until General Babangida plucked him from the university and named him to the chair of the electoral commission. He succeeded his old teacher, Professor Eme Awa, who had been relieved of the position over a transgression government did not care to disclose. Nwosu quickly settled into the job and led the commission to successfully conduct elections at the states and to the National Assembly. When Babangida cancelled the presidential primaries in 1992, Nwosu responded imaginatively to his directive by fashioning what has since been known as Option A4 towards cleaner primaries. The main election on June 12 was also adjudged clean and the process was moving toward a successful ending when it was overtaken by intrigues. Nwosu was an early victim of the annulment. He was removed from his office as Babangida reshuffled the electoral commission yet again for new elections he didn’t stay long enough to conduct. Nwosu was not only forced out of sight, he has failed to find his voice to give his own account of June 12, ten years after.
Michael Adekunle Ajasin
Ajasin was governor of Ondo State until the coup that terminated the Second Republic. He was too old to seek elective office as Babangida took Nigeria towards the Third Republic. He was anyway banned from active membership of the two registered parties as Babangida restricted the game to those he branded the newbreed. Ajasin however had emerged as natural successor to the political kingdom of Obafemi Awolowo who had passed on in 1987. After the annulment however, the group led by Ajasin joined and took over the leadership of a coalition that fought the most memorable battles for the revalidation of the poll. Ajasin fought on even after the Abacha coup and was in the vanguard of the responses by the civil political class to the chicanery and brazenness of Abacha. Ajasin died in action in the political trenches in 1997.
Kudirat Olayinka Abiola
She was then the senior living wife of Abiola, acclaimed winner of the June 12 election. She was steadfast behind her husband in the struggle and remained resolute after his arrest. She co-ordinated the legal side of the fight too, appearing in court at hearing of the treason case against Abiola. On June 4, 1996, she was gunned down in Ikeja, Lagos by those later revealed as agents of the Abacha government.
