Real Reason June 12 1993 Elections in Nigeria Were Annulled.

June 12 has been touted as a grand elite conspiracy. It is not: it was a conspiracy between two, and only two persons alone; General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sanni Abacha. The twosome had to draft in the greedy, thieving elite when it became clear the situation was getting more intractable than envisaged.
In the heat of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections, Gen Muhammadu Buhari,  now Nigerian president, granted Tell magazine (or The News) an interview in which he categorically stated that the elections were not meant to work in the first place. It was a revelation that should have been obvious to everyone in the first place, the storied elections being a culmination of a macabre political transition process in which two political parties were registered by fiat by the military junta headed by Gen Ibrahim Babangida who loved to style himself the evil genius. It might sound a bit funny that political institutions in Africa were being modeled after the Republican and Democratic parties of the US but the joke turned a bit flat when Babangida started banning, unbanning and then banning again political aspirants and election dates got mired in endless postponements. It was a process meant to have one logical end but Nigerians, being the passionate and passive people they are, had to wait for Buhari to reveal it to them. When it was too late.
Yet, the interview, revealing as it was, was only a tip of the iceberg. A huge chunk of horror and distress lay underneath. Being a measured man, flames were already high and he was reluctant to pour in more petrol. Otherwise he would have revealed that when Babangida was plotting to overthrow him as military head of state, he swore to Gen Sanni Abacha, whose support was vital to the success of the coup, on the Koran, that he would hand over power to Abacha, nobody else but Abacha, anytime he relinquished power. Not that Abacha believed him, he knew Babangida liked swearing falsely, taking the name of Allah in vain. In fact, Buhari got wind of the plot against him and promptly invited Babangida, his Chief of Army Staff. 'Ibro, I heard that you were plotting a coup against me'. Babangida denied it outright and had a Koran brought in, on which he swore. So merely swearing on the Holy Book wasn't going to fool Abacha
Nobody can say with certainty how this power-transfer oath between these two men would have unraveled but two events were to later play hugely to Abacha's favor. The first was the first plot against Babangida, otherwise known as the Vatsa coup. The rebels had tried to draw in Col Alalade, an Abacha acolyte, into the plot. He refused but kept silent. Not until the conspirators set after him, fearing he would let the cat out of the bag. He was fatally wounded but did not succumb to his injuries immediately and it was on his death bed that he sent for Abacha and revealed everything to him. Abacha did not hesitate to save Babangida's skin.
Again in 1990, in a far more violent insurrection led by a young major, Gideon Orkar. As the gunfire of the mutiny died down, quelled by Abacha's troops, it dawned on Babangida that whether he was sincere in his oath to hand power over to Abacha or not, he had no choice now. Hence, the whole transition program was no more than a contraption, a rigmarole, to bring to fruition the fulfillment of a pact he swore to in 1984.
So by the time the presidential elections were held on June 12, 1993 and the results started tricking in, giving Chief M.K.O.Abiola an overwhelming lead against his rival, Alhaji Bashir Tofa, Babangida was practically a prisoner in Aso Rock, cornered like a rat in his own seat of power, held hostage by Abacha. He has made so much noise about officers and prominent northerners being against Abiola's presidency. It was all bunkum. Only one prominent northerner was against Abiola. That was Abacha. And he was the person that mattered, control of the army being completely in his hands. Babangida himself was finished militarily in the aftermath of the Orkar coup, having escaped from the mutineers in an old Peugeot 504 station wagon through a secret path out of Dodan Barracks, the then seat of power, dressed as a cook. It was the worst humiliation he would face in his life and in the wake of that, Abacha was the de facto military strongman, planting his boys and buddies in the strategic military formations. Therefore as the controversy over the polls raged, Babangida was a commander-in-chief unable to give orders to his own bodyguards. When Professor Omo Omoruyi, head of the Center for Democratic Studies visited him in Aso Rock during the crisis, Babangida intimated him of people watching all his movements and would not hesitate to kill him. He was right. Those invisible eyes were Abacha's men stationed everywhere in the seat of power, armed with the order to move against him if there was slightest inclination to do so. A move to announce the results and declare Abiola as president would have sent him instantly into his grave. In fact, Abacha would have finished him off instantly if not for the fact that it was Abacha who insisted in the first place the polls should go ahead, believing Tofa, a fellow northerner who hailed from the same Kano state as himself would win the election. It would then be easy for him to move against a fellow northerner. The average northerner does not really care about who governs them, civilian or military, as long as he is from the north. Spurious sample polls had fooled Abacha into believing that the voting patterns that brought Shehu Shagari's NPN into power in the defunct 2nd Republic would be reenacted. Northern votes would be delivered for Tofa en bloc and votes from the fractious south would be shared between the two candidates. The more discerning Babangida wasn't so sure and was for the postponement of the polls, favoring interim political arrangements, schemes in which he was well-versed. As he feared, Abiola won hands down, fair and square, taking the vital northern city of Kano, home of his opponent. There was no way Abacha was going to seize power from Abiola, northerners had been in power for a hefty 14 years, besides Abiola would have moved against him the moment he assumed power, Abacha being a famed coup plotter. Annulling the elections became the only option. An alternative was to announce the results of the elections and declare Abiola as president. And die. At the hands of Abacha. Sad Babangida lacked the courage to lay down his life for honor.

Abiola

Babangida

Abacha

Buhari, Abiola, Obasanjo and June 12.

In the heat of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections, with nationwide protests the most visible affairs on Nigerian streets and the nation on the brink of collapse, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo formed an organisation that had as its immediate and express mandate, the re-validation of the election results. It was almost a national coalition, credible too, with the present head of state, President Muhammadu Buhari, a prominent member. In its inaugural meeting in Otta Farms, home of Obasanjo, the group issued a communique which expressly condemned the cancellation of the polls and called for their re-validation and attendant declaration of Chief M.K.O.Abiola as president-elect of the country. Gen Buhari was to give fillip to this quest by granting an interview to Tell magazine in which he categorically stated, told all and sundry, that the elections were meant to fail right from the beginning. 'The elections were meant not meant to work, right from their inception' were his words. A copy of the interview should still be available in the relevant archives. In the same interview, Buhari debunked the insinuation that the north was against the candidature of Abiola, reminding everyone that Abiola won in Kano, the home state of his opponent, Alhaji Tofa, and challenging Gen. Babangida, the grim strongman who conducted and then annulled the elections to name just a couple of those in north opposed to Abiola. With the tension in the national air so thick and Babangida cornered in his Aso Rock Villa, government headquarters, like a rat that had overplayed its hands, Buhari's bold interview was a very dangerous thing to do. It was just like laying his life on the line and in no small measure did he alarm the powers that be.
By the time the meeting would reconvene in the same venue, Buhari got the rudest shock shock of his life. In the interval, Babangida had sold the idea of the Interim National Government to Obasanjo, a stop-gap arrangement to be headed by the industry titan, Chief Ernest Shonekan, A fellow Yoruba like Abiola and even from the same city of Abeokuta. Shonekan had little compunction in playing Judas and so was Obasanjo. In fact it dawned on everyone that Obasanjo's earlier moves to side with Abiola were nothing more than a mischief to harvest some of the national outpourings of anger and put himself a bit in the spotlight. He was a guy who liked swimming with the tide but not for long. A new current and he was away with a fresh shoal. Buhari was dumbfounded when Obasanjo started to digress from the commonly-stated objective of poll re-validation and realized he had been fooled into being drafted into a fool's errand.  In fact, Buhari stormed out of the meeting halfway and was never to attend it again. In fact, the meeting was never to hold again.
Hence it is on record that Buhari was the only leader to have taken a consistent stand on the whole June 12 saga, even endangering his life in his vociferous insistence, and his decision to honor Abiola should be seen only in this light. When he became the president of the country again and the clamor to honor Abiola got strident, Obasanjo told not a few aides that doing such was going to anger the north. He simply lacked the gravitas for boldness. Now a northerner has done it and everyone is happy, north and south. 

Buhari

Abiola

Babangida

General Babangida and General Abacha: A 'Friendship' that Ruined Nigeria 2.

So Babangida started plotting against Buhari quite actively the very day the latter became head of state. And his projections about the new administration came to trenchant actualities. As he expected, Buhari left the affairs of state largely in the hands of Major General Tunde Idiagbon, Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, effectively his deputy. Idiagbon was another stern, disciplined army officer who arrogantly believed Nigerians could be whipped in line in a day. But the civilian forces he was contending against were too numerous, too riotous, too stubborn and when the resistance became too intractable, it became necessary to resort to high-handed tactics. Newspapers were proscribed, journalists were jailed, unions banned and human rights abuses spiraled away. Nigerians welcomed Buhari with open arms but it didn't take long for the relationship to turn sour. In a disorganized country of 80m people with little or no civic orientation, few, very few, were ready to embrace regulated discipline. The domestic intelligence agency in those days was the National Security Organization(NSO) and overnight, its  director, Ambassador Rafindadi became a poster boy for repression and people started playing on General Idiagbon's name with that of Idi Amin Dada, Uganda's erstwhile murderous dictator. Buhari's subordinates could do all they liked knowing they would receive little or no censure from their master. It was often said Idiagbon was more powerful than the head of state himself.
All of which played into Babangida's hands. However, in order to supplant Buhari, he would have to rely on Abacha again. Abacha and Babangida were no friends. No two men could ever be so dissimilar. Babangida liked to pride himself as urbane, clever, learned and sophisticated while he regarded Abacha as dull, crude and too fond of women and drinks. On the other hand, Abacha took Babangida for a coward, a decadent sophist and a boastful buffoon. He knew Babangida's fabled intelligence to be of the dark type, one which he would use to plunge his country into political and economic disaster. Abacha relied on his sense and intuition, knowing he had more of this in his little finger than Babangida had in the whole of his brain. But if Babangida was to realize his burning ambition, become head of state, Abacha would be a necessary evil. Abacha, because of his ill-discipline and carousing lifestyle, had a huge following among officers in an army that was growing increasingly idle. He had prevailed on Babangida, who was chief of army staff, to install one of his sworn buddies, Brigadier Dongoyaro, as General Officer Commanding 2nd Mechanized Division, Ibadan, that army formation vital to the success of any coup plotter. Dongoyaro was to announce the demise of Buhari's administration on August 27,  1985. Then, in military and political calculations, the much-touted homogeneous north is in fact roughly split along Fulani and Hausa fault lines. The Buharis and the Yar'aduas belong to the Fulani group while Abacha then had the ears of the Hausa or Kano group. He was Kanuri, in far away Borno, but lived and grew up in Kano. Babangida was really an outsider, having come from Bida in far away southern margins of the north. Few Fulani officers would move against one of their own and it was imperative to garner support of the Hausa group, through General Sanni Abacha. Abacha was quite receptive to the removal of General Buhari  but he wasn't going to risk his life the second time for nothing. He too was interested in becoming head of state. He regarded himself as the Khallifa, or Successor. Kano was his adopted city, where the assassinated head of state, General Murtala Mohammed, also hailed from and there was the widespread feeling among civilian and military establishment in city that they had been shortchanged in the scheme of affairs and that they had been poorly compensated for the ill-fated regime of General Mohammed that was cut brutally short. In short, if he was going to spearhead another coup, he needed assurances he was going to get his just rewards.
Babangida said "No problem."
Abacha said he needed an assurance that looked more concrete that a verbal agreement.
Babangida then brought out a Koran and swore to the effect that whenever he was leaving power, Abacha would succeed him. That seemed to satisfy Abacha but he was no fool. He knew Babangida liked swearing falsely. Two events were to later bear him out. As the plot against him thickened, Buhari got wind of it and invited Babangida. "Ibro, I heard that you are plotting a coup against me." Babangida looked at him straight in the eye and flatly denied it and to reassure Buhari, had a Koran provided. On which he swore so volubly. The second was during the later stages of his incredibly tortuous political transition process. He had banned unbanned and banned again so many politicians that few, very few, believed the whole process had any credibility left. So when Chief M.K.O. Abiola was being persuaded to contest for president, he was naturally skeptical. So he went to Babangida who was supposed to be a great friend of his and asked if presidential vacancy truly existed in the whole political process that was looking worse than a charade every passing day. Babangida said yes and then brought out a Koran to cement the assurance.
So Abacha knew Babangida considered it fun taking the name of Allah in vain but he never betrayed a single emotion. He knew what he was going to do. He nodded and there and then, the fate of Nigeria was sealed. A horrific destination from which it was unable to free itself.
 

General Babangida and General Abacha: A 'Friendship' that Ruined Nigeria 1.

By late morning on February 13, 1976, Col. Buka Dimkah and his co-conspirators had succeeded in assassinating the head of state, General Ramat Mohammed, and in capturing the national radio station where he made his infamous broadcast of imposing a dawn to dusk curfew. It was as far as he got. Loyal troops rallied quickly and it was left to Col. Ibrahim Babangida to persuade him the game was up. And at the same time, carry out a bit of reconnaissance. Considering the heat of the moment, it was a task that would require tremendous bravery, even foolhardiness. Babangida went and instantly catapulted himself into national fame. And power. Overnight, a mid-level officer started dining and wining with the head of state himself, and other powers that be. Pictures would later emerge of Babangida playing checkers with General Olusegun Obasanjo and General Theophilus Danjuma, head of state and chief of army staff respectively, the two most powerful men in Nigeria at that time.
The taste of power would never leave his mouth and as early as 1981, was himself already plotting the overthrow of President Shehu Shagari, the civilian regime that supplanted the military regime of General Obasanjo in 1979. He had enjoyed the trappings of power and had evidently seen that those who were his superiors in the military regime he helped sustain were not better than him intellectually and morally. Which was a grave indictment of the superiors because Babangida's moral quotient was abysmally low and the intelligence he often prided himself on bordered mostly on the charms of a confidence trickster. As he himself unwittingly confessed, comparing himself to Diego Maradona, the great footballer whose celebrated dribbling skills must have inspired the general in weaving intricate and outlandish political, economic and social twists and turns around hapless Nigerians while he held sway as president. The goodwill, if there was any, that Shagari enjoyed on coming to power barely lasted three months. His administration was horribly effete, dominated by incredibly venal subordinates who were far more powerful than he was. But corruption wasn't the only evil of his regime. In 1982, he orchestrated the massacre of hundreds of his own kinsmen in Bakolori, Sokoto State, poor folks protesting the confiscation of their farming lands for a dam project without being paid adequate compensation. The army moved in and mowed down hundreds in what would later become known as the Bakolori Massacre. The 1983 national elections, the only one his regime would superintend easily became the last straw that broke his back. These were so rigged that ballot boxes and papers were being hawked in the open streets and the outrage and violence that greeted the polls was the coup de grace Babangida needed to stage his own coup. Helped ironically by the sheer cowardice Shagari himself displayed in refusing to disengage him from the army, having been warned several times, by all and sundry, that if his regime was to last, Babangida held the key to that longevity. Babangida had acquired tremendous wealth in the defunct military regime and in the intervening years had bribed and corrupted many a military officer: buying for them luxurious vacations, building houses for them, sponsoring children's education abroad. He stuck out as a dangerous sore thumb to the civilian regime and the fact that nobody deemed it expedient to move against him was a sordid testament to Shagari's overall weakness.
Nobody was going to shed tears, sincere or crocodile, if Shagari was removed but then Babangida would still have to need troops and several other officers and the officer that mattered most was Brigadier Sanni Abacha, General Officer Commanding 2nd Mechanized Division, Ibadan, a formation that had under its command all the army formations in Lagos, the seat of power. Apart from being a fearless army officer, Abacha himself had a large following in the army. A lifestyle dominated by women and beer had ensured he was not without a plethora of buddies that he could count on at any time. Abacha himself was to announce the overthrow of Shagari's regime in 1983.
Babangida later claimed in an interview that in a meeting of senior officers convened to choose a successor to Shagari, most of those present tried to prevail on him to accept the post but that he declined out of altruism, or whatever he attributed to his decision. He had his own loyalists, no doubt, but General Muhammadu Buhari was the obvious choice. Like Shagari, he was a Fulani and it would be of less consternation to the Hausa-Fulani power base if a Fulani man overthrew another Fulani. Babangida was not even technically Hausa, his origins being farther south in Bida, Niger State. Then there was the resolute stance of General Mamman Vatsa who was Babangida's friend and knew him very well. Mamman stood up, he was a poet, and in trenchant eloquence, harangued his fellow officers that if they were removing Shagari as a result of corruption and inefficiency, it made sense that the efficient, spartan and incorrigible Buhari should supplant him. Mamman was to be later executed by Babangida for plotting against him when he would eventually become head of state. That would be about four years later and General Domkat Bali, a top member of the Armed Forces Ruling Council that confirmed Vatsa's death sentence, had admitted that the evidence they relied upon to nail him was weak, in reality, the seeds of his death was sowed in that meeting that chose a successor to Shagari. Babangida was not happy about his snub. He had plotted, organized and financed the coup and it must have necessarily riled him to be denied his just rewards but there was little he could really do. He quietly swallowed his bile and decided to wait for another chance.
Which he knew would certainly present itself. And he was emboldened in his expectations by his intimate knowledge of Buhari. He knew that Buhari would never succeed in a country gone to dogs like Nigeria. He knew Buhari was disciplined and incorrigible, traits that made him the archetypal army officer, but he also knew him to be a poor administrator. Buhari was a 'civil service' army officer. In administration, he could be counted upon to leave tasks, even important one that demanded personal attention, to subordinates. He would leave tasks and instructions to subordinates and expect them to carry out their performance to the letter. With the civil service Nigeria has, that was going to be a recipe for disaster. In many instances would he be unaware of what was going on in his own administration. The qualities that made Buhari a splendid officer were going to be grossly inadequate as the head of state. Babangida started plotting against Buhari the very day Buhari became head of state.
  

Nigeria's Unending Comedy 2

The old man might have been attacked all of a sudden by a surge of nerves and join the present bandwagon of Buhari bashing, or someone might have been preying on his name in this toxic political atmosphere where anything a big name says is lapped up by a fickle public as political gospel. In either case, it is necessary to continue with a catalogue of Shagari's achievements as president of Nigeria, to let us assess properly the political gains that might accrue from his criticism of Buhari.
Shagari, ably assisted by the then governor of Sokoto State, Alhaji Kangiwa, was the architect of the Bakolori  Massacre. In 1982, huge swathes of land had been seized from peasant farmers in his own Sokoto State to construct the Bakolori Dam without any form of compensation being paid to them. The poor fellows naturally protested. Shagari moved in with troops and tanks and by the time the smoke from the tanks' exhaust cleared, more than two thousand farmers had been butchered. He was, with Kangiwa, later to earn the sobriquet, 'Butcher of Bakolori.'
The 1983 general elections were the only ones he had the opportunity to conduct and his handling of it shattered all the illusions left about his regime. The polls were not rigged, they were hanged. Packets of voting papers were being openly sold in the streets. Votes were simply allocated not only to the highest bidder, but to anyone who could bid. In the old Ondo State, Akin Omoboriowo, who had just defected to Shagari's NPN, was declared winner of the gubernatorial elections, an electoral heist as brazen as it was hefty. Violence erupted instantly. Laco Stores, a prominent landmark of Akure was sacked by an irate mob and prominent businessman, Agbayewa, and handsome publisher, Olaiya Fagbamigbe were butchered into pieces and set ablaze in their homes. Hundred of lives perished and property worth billions were destroyed in this torrid conflagration, a loss the entire south-west region is yet to recover from.
Shagari's genial features has long been widely propped up as the human face of his regime. By the end of 1983, the handwriting was on the wall for anyone to see. Buhari and Babangida wanted to avoid bloodshed as much as possible in the looming putsch and so they sent Brigadier Bako, more or less a godson to Shagari, his father having been friends with the president, to persuade him to see the handwriting to. They all hoped he would see reason with his 'son.' Big mistake. Bako had hardly pronounced the first letter of coup, when Shagari pressed the red button that controlled his security. A bloodbath ensued and by the end of the day, Bako's blood had been so conspicuously shed.
Shagari's removal was widely celebrated in his own home state of Sokoto.