IBB as a metaphor

Five years ago today, I wrote a birthday tribute on these pages to Nigeria’s one and only self-styled Military President, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. At 75 today, he is the youngest living former military head of state, bar General Abdulsalami Alhaji Abubakar, his childhood friend, class mate and neighbour on the Niger State capital, Minna’s, exclusive hilltop neighbourhood; General Abubakar was 74 on June 13.

(General Muhammadu Buhari who will be 74 on his next birthday on December 17 and who Babangida ousted in a palace coup on August 27, 1985 as his army chief, would have been the youngest, but then he returned as elected President Buhari in May last year after a record three attempts and another record of being the first contestant to oust an incumbent national ruler in Nigeria’s history.)

At 75, Babangida is also Nigeria’s longest ruling peacetime military head of state, with his eight years in office; General Yakubu Gowon who ruled a year longer, between 1966 and 1975, spent three of those years (1967-1970) fighting a civil war to keep Nigeria one.

Babangida’s eight years as military president, as I said in my birthday tribute to him at 70, have since become the defining period of Nigeria’s history for better or for worse. This is because since Independence in 1960 no Nigerian leader has sought to change the face of the country’s politics and socio-economics in as thoroughgoing manner as the man. To date the Structural Adjustment Programme and the Newbreed dominated two-party democracy he sought to impose on the country have remained the template of our political-economy.

Because of the impact of his long rule on the country, many Nigerians have come to regard him as the chief villain of Nigeria’s many woes, not least of all its deep and widespread corruption. For such Nigerians there could hardly be a more conclusive proof of their view than the recent remark by President Buhari that Babangida removed him from power because he was about to investigate a case of corruption against Babangida’s friend, then army intelligence chief, General Aliyu Mohammed.

As he said in the now widely reported interview with the opinion monthly magazine, The Interview (July, 2016), “I found out that some officers were spending money. I asked: Where did they get the money from? They said it was from the military intelligence fund. Later, I learnt that General Aliyu Gusau who was in charge of intelligence took import license from the Ministry of Commerce which was in charge of supplies and gave it to Alhaji Mai Deribe. It was worth N100,000, a lot of money then. When I discovered this, I confronted them and took the case to the Army Council. I said if I didn’t punish Aliyu Gusau it will create problems for us. So I said General Aliyu Gusau had to go. He was the Chief of Intelligence. That was why Babangida got some officers to remove me.”

Contrary to the claim by the magazine that this was the first time Buhari would reveal why he was ousted by his army chief, Buhari had said as much several times before in media interviews, perhaps the only difference this time being his more specific mention of names and his speaking as a president whose topmost priority, quite rightly I believe, is his fight against corruption. He had, after all, given the same reasons each time in response to claims by Babangida – the first time in a Newswatch interview in November 1985 after his first 100 days in office – that he ousted Buhari because himself and his co-conspirators had come to the painful conclusion that Buhari was “too rigid” on issues national and international.

In his interview in The Interview Buhari challenged Babangida to deny his claim. “Let him (Babangida) repeat his own story. Ali Gusau is still alive,” he said.

Babangida would be wise not to pick up his former boss’s gauntlet for at least two reasons. First, the Ali Gusau factor may not have been the only one in Buhari’s ouster, but certainly it was among the key ones. Second, as we all know, image has since come to matter more than substance even before the advent of the so-called social media. Unfortunately for Babangida the public has since been persuaded to regard his charm and ability to neutralize almost all opposition to his viewpoint as a vice.

Personally I have always believed this negative image of Babangida is a metaphor for people wanting to blame everyone else but themselves for their inability to stand up for their convictions. I have been as great a beneficiary of the man’s legendary large heartedness as any. But that has never stopped me from telling him the truth as I saw it in private and on the pages of newspapers, as any regular reader of my columns going back to 1978 would testify.

On his part, my forthrightness has never stopped him from remaining a senior brother and a benefactor. It has therefore never seized to amaze me why anyone would blame the man for the failure of many politicians to stand up for their convictions during his years in power.

Unfortunately for Babangida, verisimilitude, as one public relations executive once put it, matters more than veracity. And so at 75, his image as the Great Compromiser is, sadly, a cross he has to bear for the rest of his life. Fortunately, however, since 2011 the man has put partisan politics behind him for reasons of age, as he himself put it, and of ill health, due mainly to a worsening of his well-known radiculopathy, occasioned by a bullet he took on the war front during the civil war. This ill health apparently led some faceless malicious people to spread unfounded rumours of his death twice this year in the social media.

Happily those rumours, as they say, proved greatly exaggerated.

And now that he does not need to charm anyone out of his or her convictions, Babangida can only live a quiet and peaceful life for the rest of his highly fulfilled life.

Here’s wishing many more returns of today to arguably the country’s most astute military politician.