Babangida’s autobiography

The news that General Ibrahim Babangida is set to launch his autobiography next month, 32 years after he left office as our fourth military dictator, is one of the surprises of 2025, but will the memoir answer the many questions Nigerians have been asking? I had long given up expecting a memoir from IBB. He has a lot to tell Nigerians and I hope that he will be honest and candid.

General Yakubu Gowon also owes Nigerians a full account of his story. Coming this late, will IBB’s book be worth the wait? Will he give honest answers to the many puzzles that dogged his administration or is this a mere attempt to burnish his image and rewrite history as he prepares for the final phase of his life? It’s been a generation since Babangida hurriedly put together a contraption called interim national government and left office after an eight-year deceptive dictatorship. His transition programme was a farce, illusory and wasteful. Nigerians have moved on and practically forgotten about him.

A lot of those who were either members of his regime or active participants in the polity in those days have either passed away or are too old to bother about what he writes. IBB’s book may therefore escape rigorous scrutiny from eyewitnesses to the events of that era like other such accounts from Olusegun Obasanjo and other civil war actors. Given IBB’s notorious predilection to obfuscate facts and dribble the country when he was the Head of State (the press did not name him ‘’Maradona” for nothing), this book will likely be a mere addition to the shelf. Nothing new will come out of it. But I want to be surprised.

What will IBB write about the coldblooded assassination of Dele Giwa, one of the nation’s finest journalists, in the morning of Sunday, October 19, 1986, through a parcel bomb delivered to his home in Ikeja, Lagos? What reasons will he give for the annulment of the June 12, 1993, general election, an event that set off the most cataclysmic political crisis in the country after the civil war?

Will IBB write candidly and honestly about Gloria Okon; the $12 billion Gulf windfall; Nigeria’s membership of OIC; Ebitu Ukiwe matter; Vatsa’s coup; Orkah’s coup and his endless transition programme? Nothing defines the IBB junta and his persona like the heartless killing of Dele Giwa. I look forward to reading a full and honest account of the sad event in his book.

Babangida had always struggled to live with the negative impressions Nigerians have of him. He believes that he should be treated like a respectable global statesman in the mould of Obasanjo. He has consistently denied complicity in the numerous atrocities that happened under his watch, hoping that somehow, we would forgive him. He had always toyed with the idea of coming up with a memoir, but he was never sure of how well it would be received.

In 2018, he told journalists that he was not sure that ‘’Nigerians would like to read about a dictator’’, a self-deprecating way of lowering expectations in whatever he came up with. With Chief MKO Abiola; Prof. Humphrey Nwosu; Chief Gani Fawehinimi; Dr Beko Ransom Kuti; Admiral Augustus Aikhomu; Admiral Ebitu Ukiwe; Dr Chu SP Okongwu; Gen. Sani Abacha and many others who fought against him; worked and walked with him gone, who shall offer counter-narratives?

In his own memoir published a few years before his death, Prof Nwosu, the INEC chairman (it was then known as NEC) who supervised the 1993 presidential election, laid the blame for the annulment on IBB’s insatiable appetite to prolong his stay in office. I’m eager to read the general’s response.

Of the 28 original members of the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC), the regime’s highest policy and legislative body, only IBB who served as its chairman is alive. He’ll be 84 in August. Many of the newspapers that thrived during his time have died. A lot of the journalists that covered him are now old; some suffering from memory loss and other impairments. IBB therefore has enough motivation to engage in revisionism and embellishment of his story.

He should, however, be reminded that Ray Ekpu, who was the deputy editor-in-chief at Newswatch magazine, is alive and well; and is writing his own memoir. Funmi, Giwa’s widow and Billy, his young son who collected the parcel bomb from the gateman and took it to his father, are also alive. The other key members of the Newswatch family like Dan Agbese; Yakubu Mohammed; Soji Akinrinade and Kayode Soyinka who was with Giwa at his study when the bomb exploded, and a few others are also well and kicking. I am sure that they will read IBB’s book with considerable concentration.

At this point, I remember the firebrand lawyer and civil rights activist, Gani Fawehinmi, who fought tooth and nail to save Dele Giwa as the regime’s killing machine was closing in on him. Even after Giwa’s assassination, Fawehinmi continued to fight to uncover the truth and bring the suspects, who were the intelligence chiefs in the military, to justice.

I had a taste of IBB’s repression. I was a young reporter of only 27 years of age at The Guardian newspaper when the regime locked me away for three months in 1988 for doing nothing other than my work as a journalist. I am eagerly waiting to read this autobiography.