Ray Ekpu

Ray Ekpu

Recently Nigeria’s former unelected president, General Ibrahim Babangida tried to deny his relationship with Chief Arthur Nzeribe, an Oguta businessman and politician who obviously was his political hireling. I did not believe Babangida’s denial of their political marriage. I also believe that anyone who believes Babangida on this issue is suffering from the virus of naiveté.

Nzeribe was a big game player, a shrewd businessman and politician with shrewd intuition, a man who had a big thirst for the bid game. He wasn’t a man who would do something simply for nothing. He was someone who worked for profit. He had charm, natural charm and the confidence level of a lion.

Whatever he wanted, he went for it full blast, leaving no stone unturned. He could not have worked for IBB without IBB’s prompting and approval.

In 1983, he contested for the senate seat in Imo State. He hired thousands of youths, put them in uniform and took them to the centre where the collation of the election result was done. His uninformed men surrounded the collation centre while he went inside to see what was going on. He told the election/collation officials: “lock outside, if you tamper with the result of this election, none of you will leave here alive”. They did not tamper with the result. Nzeribe won. The officials left the hall alive. I wrote a column for the Concord at the time titled “Winning Within the System”.

Nzeribe was the man who established the Association for Better Nigeria (ABN). He was one of the first few Nigerians who learnt early of the December 31, 1983 Buhari coup that overthrew the Shehu Shagari government. He escaped from the country before the guns started booming. There are not many politicians that are as smart as Nzeribe. The name of his association, the ABN gives the innocent bystander the impression that it is truly an association for the progress of Nigeria, but it was not. It was established to acquire four more years for Babangida who had done about eight years already.

The slogan he used was – Four more years for IBB. It did not occur to him that most Nigerians were already tired of military rule and earnestly wanted the soldiers to return to their barracks and trenches.

I decided to get close to Nzeribe because he was a man who was perpetually in search of information. That quality was good for me, so I made him my friend. He, too, made me his friend because he thought he could also tap my brain when necessary. We often met for lunch at a Chinese Restaurant in Ikeja very close to the Army Cantonment. The lunch was always delicious and our conversation always wide-ranging. So we both always enjoyed the lunch and the conversation.

At one of our meetings, he asked how I could help him to get four more years for IBB. I told him that the only viable way out was for IBB to retire from the army and contest the election as a civilian. I told Nzeribe that the man did not need to leave his post as unelected president. Nzeribe said, “No, I cannot subject him to an election”.

I told him, “Then you will lose because the time for military rule in Nigeria is over”. Nzeribe and I met again at the usual place for lunch.

This was a more serious encounter. Nzeribe said to me that he wanted Newswatch to do a vox populi to establish how popular Babangida was. I said that was a good idea. He said he would pay us N100 million which we would use in conducting the survey.

I told him we would hire one of the best companies in the world to help us do a good job. Nzeribe surprised me by saying, “No, I will supply the results of the survey”. I said, “No way”. He then said he would double the fee. I said that did not matter. We just could not do something like that in Newswatch. He said I should contact my colleagues before taking a final decision on the matter. I told him I knew how my colleagues would respond to such a request. He insisted I should talk to them and get back to him the next day. I spoke to them the next day and they agreed entirely with my position. I called Nzeribe and told him what they said. Matter closed! Mission impossible.

A few weeks later, I saw results of the purported survey in some newspapers. I knew that Nzeribe had got them. He didn’t get Newswatch. At one of our meetings, I had asked Nzeribe why Babangida chose to make Chief Ernest Shonekan an interim leader for the country. He said it was a stop-gap measure, a waiting time decision while a permanent solution would be found. I thought that Nzeribe did not avert his mind to the fact that Sani Abacha was a very ambitious officer and may not accept the Shonekan interregnum. He was not likely to remain a perpetual kingmaker and not the king. That Babangida left Abacha unretired was a major mistake. Abacha proved that by organising a coup against Shonekan. Now the kingmaker had become king, a king that appeared ready for a long journey, a long journey in dictatorship.

Abacha ruled with absolute ruthlessness, the type of ruthlessness that no one had seen before his arrival. Even those who helped him to come to power were disgruntled. David Mark, one of the coup plotters granted an interview to Newswatch. In that interview, he said that Abacha was planning to stay in office for a very long time contrary to the decision of those who brought him to power. Security men picked up the editor-in-chief of the magazine, Dan Agbese. I was on leave at the time. When I learnt of Dan’s arrest, I went to Calabar airport to board a flight to Lagos. I was arrested at the airport. Yakubu Mohammed was in Kogi State. There he was picked up too. Only Soji Akinrinade was not yet in the net. I told Soji not to allow himself to be captured otherwise the magazine would not come out. Three of us were tried for mutiny: journalists tried for mutiny for publishing an interview in a magazine! That is an indication of the sort of era in which we lived, the era where everything was right because madness had taken over our space, Nigeria’s space.

Abacha ran wild. There was no one to hold him back. He was now the commander-in-chief, an absolute dictator. He was ready to march on toes, all toes that were on his path. Since he knew that Nigerians wanted democracy, he was ready for it. He bulldozed his way into the five major parties and asked them, one after the other, to nominate him as their presidential candidate. No one had ever seen such a monstrosity here or everywhere else. One wife married to five husbands. I wrote a column in which I called it “political polyandry”, the Cicero of Nigeria’s politics, Chief Bola Ige, a great master of words described it as the “five fingers of a leprous hand”.

The politicians, all cowards, ran into hiding holes. Some of them flew abroad and started making noise from there. Only the media and a few courageous civil society organisations had the courage to stay and fight. Several people disappeared and remain till this day unaccounted for. It was later that we knew that Abacha had a killer squad that was making people disappear without trace. They performed magic.

But as God would have it, Abacha himself also disappeared. The cause of his death remains a guarded mystery till today. All that we were told was that he was poisoned by an Indian prostitute. How did an Indian prostitute get to poison our Head of State in our State House? That story has not been fully told. If there is another story, we haven’t yet been told. Those who may know of another story haven’t yet told us. It is doubtful if they will: Even IBB has not.

Anyone who dared raise a finger against any of the outrageous policies of the Abacha administration was walking the knife-edge of danger. Abacha was a man who knew where terrific things began. That is why he was feared even by his seniors in the army. And when General Abdulsalami Abubakar took over from Abacha, he discovered that the day he took over was the day he was to be retired. God did something wonderful for him on that day: He made him king.

*Mr Ray Ekpu, veteran journalist, wrote this originally for The Nation