Ibrahim Babangida

The lesson was Peronist but the inspiration was Machiavellian all over again. Concerning the ruler’s relationship with the military, the Italian had counselled: “he must never let his thoughts stray from military exercises which he must pursue more vigorously in peace than in war.” Babangida understood this perfectly.

He helped to whip up a slumbering militarist consciousness by constantly appealing to their macho-instinct anytime the civil society snapped. Describing them as experts in the art of management of violence, he would appeal to them not to allow themselves to be disgraced out of office. At the peak of this appeal has been the dispatch of troops of the Nigerian army to various troubled spots of the world – Angola, Yugoslavia, Somali and the problematic Liberia.

Then, internally as he has done externally, he found work to engage their minds. An intricate politics of appointment and dismissal became a huge encyclopedia that compelled rigorously study for edification.

On assumption of office in 1985, Ebitu Ukiwe, then a naval commodore was military vice president but apparently his appointment generated a lot of rancour. Sani Abacha for instance, who was Ukiwe’s senior didn’t accept his new political seniority. The matter had to be settled by votes. Babangida voted for Ukiwe but went ahead to disgrace him out of office on 6 October 1986.

Ukiwe had demonstrated as the months passed that he was nobody’s errand-boy, and that he possessed a no-nonsense visage that soon blossomed, turning him into something of a folk-hero in his own right, especially following the OIC controversy in 1986 when he declared unequivocally that he was not aware that the country had joined the OIC. On 6 October of that same year, Commodore Ukiwe was shown the door as Rear Admiral Aikhomu was welcomed in.

The ensuing power game and the attendant moral miasma in the society had its toll on the military. The first military quality therefore to be compromised was the very basis of the military in government – the anti-corruption and corrective ethos. Officers jostled for political appointments at morally despicable terms, and once there, they unleashed a regime of fierce and aggressive kleptomania that belittle the crimes of the civilians of yester-years.

Thus, some Babangida military governors turned the treasury of their various states into their own private property while Augustus Aikhomu was always on hand to exonerate them of charges of corrupt enrichment and financial recklessness.

So accommodating to corruption is the government that no one in its eight years in power had been prosecuted or openly disgraced for the act. Indeed, what became popular was the art of compromising critics or potential opponents with favours and facilities too generous to be defined outside the meaning of corruption.

To date for instance, the military president has expended over one billion naira in car gift to officers. The official explanation is that it was only a loan but the truth is that the pay back terms is less than N100 per month, or to speak in the language of the season $5.

Along with the emergence of a new class of business elites created by Babangida’s economic miracle has also come the class of military millionaires. Whether this development will help to give new life to the military is yet to be seen but there are strong views like those recently expressed by former Head of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo that this development is actually destroying the army.

As Chidi Amuta, one of his multiple biographers effusively claimed in his Prince of The Niger “IBB pursues stability through a process of organised instability.” If this is true, it is probably a means to an end that must be seen through the institutional and human victims of his regime.
Radical critics of the regime, continue to insist that Babangida’s often-quoted hidden agenda is the terminal goal of this process of systematic desolution of the military and civil junctions of revolt in a neat Nasserite formula. If Babangida evolves into a de jure military president superintending over the National Assembly as Abdul Nasser did in Egypt of the fifties, it would have confirmed claims by Lt. Col. Tony Nyam, a former aide to the president that he once commissioned paper on the Nasserite model of government.

Babangida’s biographers, commentators and close watchers have been restrained in developing the Nasser imperative but it is true, the mass purge of generals in the army after the Okar coup of April 1990 may well be the prelude. Working under the guise of restructuring the Armed Forces, General Babangida retired Vice Admiral Aikhomu and nine other generals who were members of the Federal cabinet. Twenty-two air force officers were also retired. The sole survivor of the cyclone was Lieutenant General Sani Abacha, Defence Minister and Chief of Defence Staff who Babangida said would continue to serve alongside him until the end of the transition programme.

With the spate of retirements, General Babangida has emerged as the most powerful military ruler in the history of the country. Undoubtedly, Babangida knew where he was going right from August 1985 when he enacted Decree 17 which gave him sweeping powers to single-handedly appoint the Chief of General Staff, chairman, joint Chiefs of staff, the service chiefs and Inspector General of Police.

Said General Domkat Bali in a 1991 interview: “He must have known what he was aiming at. If you now take those powers of the president as civilian and you now put it on an army officer who then sits with other army officers in the name of the Supreme Military Council who are useless to him who he can change tomorrow, which means that the name is not supreme at all”

In case there was a doubt about the workings of the AFRC, Bali said the President dominated the proceedings and rammed decisions down the throat of other members. This was merely acting true to philosophy. Niccolo Machiavelli himself had cautioned that the prince, while affecting to listen to the opinion of others ultimately make up his own mind and execute his decision. In hunting down the participants of the April 1990 coup, in executing those he could find and incarcerating their relatives, Babangida was merely serving notice to other military officers that he was not to be trifled with. In his eight years as military head of state he asked for no quarter and given no quarter in matters of absolute power, especially where it relates to his constituency.

To give full complement to security, General Babangida has also set up the National Guard, an elite corps seen in military circles as an Army within the Army, lavishly provided for and loyal only to the prince himself. He has also dropped hints of relocating the headquarters of the Army to Minna, his hometown and the Air-Force to Kano.

MKO-Abiola

If these developments have any merit, they could not be said to be helpful in strengthening the joint services demand of the military, a gap which the ECOMOG operations in Liberia have so openly revealed as the major weakness of the military.

If the military provides no difficulty for Babangida to run over, the civil society fell without a whisper. To conquer the civil society – the press, academia, traditional rulers and labour groups, the students, Babangida deployed a complex webs of complementary and even antagonist strategies, all targeted at the inner recesses of the human psychology: greed, opportunism, hunger, revenge, lust for power, and even love.

He exploited the opportunism of the political class when he slammed a ban on the so-called “old breed”, and the younger elements were unmoved to question the principles involved. They refused to insist on justice because this would make the terrain wide open for them. But myopia had always been the Siamese twin of opportunism and greed. The new politicians did not reckon with the National Electoral Commission’s (NEC) long chain of decrees tying up the transition programme into a confusing maze of political hurdles, the disqualification and outright ban on some of their members, the endless revisions of the transition time table and General Babangida’s penchant for electoral rules that are generated only to breed chaos and throw up ‘politicians’ with dubious credentials.

One example best illustrates the duplicity of this class. In the run-up to the 1992 presidential primaries, General Babangida had invited Alhaji Lateef Jakande and Dr. Olusola Saraki, presidential aspirants on the platforms of the SDP, to Abuja. To each he promised the SDP ticket and a generous amount of money to see his ambition succeed. By the time the two ‘seasoned’ politicians realised that the General was enjoying a joke at their own expense, the harm had been done. TheNEWS also learnt that General Babangida funded the campaign of most of the presidential aspirants of both SDP and NRC, ensuring that no one candidate was as strong as the other so that they would inevitably find themselves at logger-heads. To every aspirants that called at the Presidential villa, Abuja, the promise of the Presidency was waiting meanwhile NEC and its leadership under chairman Humphrey Nwosu have their vision of what goals to pursue.

When the time came for reckoning all the presidential aspirants were consigned to the political wilderness, after portraying them to the Nigerian public as an irresponsible lot. The presidency, it seems, after all, was not in contention, the office being sought was not vacant.

This intriguing style in statecraft was also to prove fatally effective in coralling the intelligentsia, ostensibly the mouthpiece of the civil society. In the words of the patron philosopher, Machiavelli, “a prince should also show his esteem for talent, actively encouraging able men and honouring those who excel in their profession” For his ends, Babangida took these words in cherished humour. He horded into government and around government such big names as Wole Soyinka, Jibril Aminu, Bolaji Akinyemi, Tai Solarin, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, Ojetunji Aboyade, Gordian Ezekwe, Nkena Nzimiro,Tam David-West, Jerry Gana, Tunde Adeniran, Junaid Mohammed and Isawa Elaigwu. In the language of Amuta, his biographer, this was to “make up for his modest intellectual preparation.”

By this association, Babangida drilled a hole on the intellectual canvas of the nation and the policies he churned out only left the academia in an anaemic state. The government too tended to treat the intellectual community with contempt and in the words of Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, former drama teacher and chief executive of the government-owned Daily Times Plc this was so because of “academics who go prostrating to drop-outs in the military”

Ogunbiyi’s fate too become a good illustration of the shabby treatment the academic had suffered under this government. After re-invigorating a putrescent Daily Times, the government unceremoniously fired him and put in a security operative, Tola Adeniyi, to take over the paper.

Ogunbiyi, with Amuta, now runs the Tanus communication, a public relations outfit in Lagos that published Babangida’s biography and is currently participating in the N50 million publicity blitz by NNPC to educate Nigerians on its rationale for removing petroleum subsidy.

Like Ogunbiyi, Soyinka was a close friend to the presidency and was offered a national honour in the wake of his Nobel award in 1986 and after he was allowed to introduce the Federal Road Safety Commission. Since then snide comments have dogged his heels over alleged compromise in the barbed edge of his commentaries on national issues. Has Soyinka also become a specimen in the bottomless pit of academic victims of a capricious regime?

In the reading of the popular press, defanged was Kongi, the lion, that dressed scourge of military tyrants, who had begun to avoid the press ostensibly because “reporters are want to misquote you”

How much then has the intellectual input around him helped to define and re-define a new Babangida? Not much said Professor Ojetunji Aboyade, renowned economist and chairman of a dormant Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC). “He juggles several balls at once… (and) when he says yes to you don’t take it as yes because it may or may not be yes”

Speaking the frustration of the long train of intellectuals in Babangida’s cabinet and kitchen cabinet, Aboyade acknowledges Babangida’s incredible capacity to listen (“He is a very good listener”) but a puzzling instinct to ignore all he heard and implement decisions designed from a mind-set not as collectively agreed.

All said, Babangida is a man of his own will and the coterie of advisers serve no more props and decorative in the presidential panoply. The result has been programmes and policies noble and beautiful on paper but disastrous in implementation.

On the receiving end then is the mass of Nigerians whom the General has turned into experimental guinea pigs as he pursues social, economic and political programmes the gains of which only he can see.