By Rev. Fr. John Odey
If it is true as Albert Einstein said that “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything”, what will happen to a nation where a potpourri of former heads of state, political stalwarts and business moguls and billionaires of questionable and unquestionable characters gathered to eulogize the man who, as a heartless dictator, caused the most tragic political catastrophe in his country?
The indefatigable Dele Farotimi has provided a fitting reply to this rather troublous question. I wish to start from there. On Thursday, February 20, 2025, at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, the former military president of Nigeria, made a public presentation of his autobiography, *A Journey In Service,* and the fundraising for the IBB Presidential Library Project. As should be expected, the event attracted the presence of who-is-who in the Nigerian political and business space. In the book, Babangida admitted for the first time that Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola won the June 12, 1993 presidential election which he annulled. It is still fresh in our memories that the struggle to claim that mandate landed Abiola in the prison and that the saddest chapter in the history of the June 12 annulment is that Abiola was released from prison in a coffin after four years of incarceration which made his death or murder inevitable. Kudirat Abiola, the wife of Moshood, was also killed because of her insistence on claiming the mandate of her husband. Abiola’s business has been permanently destroyed.
On the basis of this, while a good number of the dignitaries in the crowd eulogized what they called the inspiring legacies of Babangida, in his own remark about the whole event, Dele Farotimi was quoted by the Sahara Reporters as saying that it is a tragedy of our nation that a man who caused the greatest political upheaval in the country by annulling the June 12, 1993 presidential election that was clearly adjudged the freest and fairest received so great praise from people who are supposed to be very responsible. His very words: “To die for a people devoid of memory, is to be killed over and over, again and again. In a place inhabited by the conscious, IBB would not dare to show his face in public. But in the crime scene that doubles as our country, having been succeeded by even more villainous rulers, Badamasi is installed in the seat of the statesman. Tueh.”
Farotimi’s central message here is that Abiola died for people devoid of memory. The gathering of who-is-who in Nigeria at the book launch to eulogize Babangida launch makes that remark painfully true. When I read the remark I prayed God to keep Dele Farotimi long and healthy to keep speaking for us. The political prostitutes that have hijacked Nigeria have turned the country into a mad world. But they have not and will never succeed in turning all of us into mad people. Dele Farotimi’s remark confirms this truth. Before I go further, let me recall what happened some years back.
On April 1, 2012, I wrote and published an article, *When the Revolution Comes,* in my column with *The Voice* newspaper based in Ebonyi State. In that article I wrote: “I am calling for a revolution that will produce leaders who will begin to think. So far, our political leaders do not seem to think. They have no vision. If at all they have any, it is all about money, about the nation’s wealth, about the national cake, how to scramble for it like vultures and then leave the country and those whose sweats harness the wealth comatose. We have visionless leaders. And no nation will survive without leaders who have vision. The revolution I am talking about will produce leaders who can think; leaders who have vision and leaders who know that Nigeria is bigger than whatever they think they are and that they have no other place in the wide world to call their fatherland if they destroy Nigeria.
In that same article, I recalled what happened in the late seventies and the early eighties, when I was a student of St. Augustine’s Major Seminary, Jos. By then, Plateau State Radio used to have a programme they called the *Mad World.* People generally enjoyed that programme. I never wanted to miss it because it confronted the ills of the society headlong and had a lot of credit to itself for curbing a lot of them. That was when most Nigerian politicians had not succeeded in killing their conscience and so could become ashamed of themselves if they were caught doing something wrong. By the year 2012, when I wrote the article, I said, we were living in the super grade level of the mad world and nothing, no matter how abhorrent it was, seemed to disturb most of our political leaders.
Currently, 13 years after that article and 32 years after Ibrahim Babangida annulled and had the man who won the election incarcerated in the prison until he died, on Thursday, February 20, 2025, Nigerians were greeted with the news that the same Babangida had been eulogized as a political saint by people who want us to believe that they are well. No. They are not well. They have succeeded in proving to the world that the Plateau State Radio of the yesteryears was right when it called Nigeria a mad world. They have turned Nigeria into a mad world.
In my article, *Dele Farotimi: The Nemesis of Judicial Corruption and the Hope of a Crumbling Nation,* which was shared in different social media platforms on February 12, 2025, I drew readers’ attention to the fact that when former President Goodluck Jonathan announced the removal of oil subsidy on January 1, 2012 and raised the price of fuel from N65.00 to N141.00 the whole country rose in protest against him. The prime leader of that protest was Bola Ahmed Tinubu who called the fuel price increase *Jonathan Tax* and wrote a stinker against Jonathan with the title: *Removal of Oil Subsidy: President Jonathan Breaks Social Contract with the People.* In the article Tinubu said:
“Subsidy removal will increase costs across the board. However, salaries will not increase. While some will benefit from the removal, most will experience setback. What is doubtless is that the Jonathan tax will increase the price of petrol, transportation and most consumer items. With fuel prices increasing twofold or more, transportation costs will roughly double. Prices of food staples will increase between 25-50 percent. There will be less food, less medicine, and less school across the land. More children will cry in hunger and more parents will cry at their children’s despair. This is what government has done. Poor and middle class consumers will spend the same amount to buy much less. The volume of economic activity will drop like a stone tossed from a high building. This tax has doomed Nigeria to extra hardship for years to come. People will starve and families crumble while federal officials praise themselves for ‘saving money.’ Nigerians do not need to be wedded to the subsidy. It is as if Jonathan has turned from president to pharaoh and has decreed that the people make bricks without straw.”
Seeing the massive pressure put on him, President Jonathan was compelled to reduce the fuel price from N141.00 to N97.00 per litre. But in this same Nigeria, 11 years later, on May 29, 2023, when he forcefully imposed himself on Nigerians as their president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu who wrote this well articulated explanation of the consequences of the removal of oil subsidy, removed oil subsidy and raised fuel price from N175.00 to N1030.00. Seeing that the very Nigerians who wanted to pull down the heavens on Jonathan have silently been watching Tinubu destroy Nigeria and Nigerians, I retorted once more that Nigeria has been turned into a mad world. My very words: “Without further comment, it suffices to ask since it is only mad people that cannot be blamed for being disjointed in their way of talking and acting who says that corrupt judges and politicians have not turned Nigeria into a mad world?”
In my article, *Beyond Biafra Agitation: Nnamdi Kanu And The Quest For Freedom,* which was shared to different social media platforms on the very day that Babangida’s book was launched, I once more revisited the idea of Nigeria having been turned into a made world by a conspiracy of corrupt politicians and corrupt judges. I wrote: “In a land where some people elevate themselves to the status of the Law and not just above the law, criminals own the land and move about freely while the upright men who raise alarm that such people’s free movement may bring about national disaster often end up in the gulag.”
Chief Moshood Abiola, who won the June 12, 1993 presidential election ended up in the gulag from where he was taken to his grave and buried while Ibrahim Babangida who committed the crime of annulling the free and fair June 12 election and in the process caused an unprecedented political hiccup in the country, is now being eulogized by former failed Nigerian leaders. When Dele Farotimi wrote a book denouncing what goes wrong in our criminal justice system it fetched him detention. When Babangida wrote a book telling the world that Abiola won the June 12 election that he annulled, it fetched billions of naira for him. Nigeria is a mad world. But all Nigerians are not mad. It is not for nothing that Babangida gave himself the name *evil genius.* Similarly, a veteran columnist with the *Vanguard* newspaper of July 6, 1986, Chinweizu, had his good reasons for calling Babangida a political Maradona after Diego Maradona, the Argentine soccer player who mesmerized the world in the 1980s with his playing skill and goal-scoring abilities.
As I think of this national shame called book presentation, I go beyond Abiola and his immediate family to think about people like Dele Giwa, Chief Gani Fawehinmi and Col. Abaubakar Dangiwa Umar. Gani’s spirit must be very uncomfortable wherever he is now. On October 19, 1986, Dele Giwa, the Pioneer Editor-in-Chief of the *Newswatch* magazine, was assassinated by a letter bomb allegedly masterminded by Ibrahim Babangida who was then the military president of Nigeria. The dogged Senior Advocate of the Masses, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, spent his time, his resources and his life fighting to get Babangida to face the law. But the many things that have gone wrong in our nation’s criminal justice system shielded Babangida. On October 19, 2007, 21 years after the assassination of Dele Giwa, Gani declared: “There can be no justice for Dele Giwa and the Nigerian society for his assassination on Sunday, 19th October 1986 until the investigation into his murder is re-opened, and those responsible are brought to book. It is only then that the Rule of Law will find its fulfillment.”
After that, Gani began to battle with the lung cancer that eventually claimed his life on September 5, 2009. Babangida heaved a sigh of relief that his nemesis had gone. Dele Giwa who has long been dispatched to the world beyond will certainly not be comfortable with this new development of orchestrated eulogy. While Babangida used his position to unleash unprecedented dictatorship on Nigerians, Dele Giwa used his position as a seasoned journalist to speak for the voiceless Nigerians. That is why he was assassinated. Some questions: Is this new book, *A Journey In Service,* capable of giving Babangida a clean bill about the murder of Dele Giwa? Dele Giwa has relations and millions of Nigerians who cherish his memory. I am one of them. Is there any way this new book can settle our minds by assuring us that Babangida’s hands are clean over his assassination? The eulogizers of Babangida can tell us.
Prior to the annulment of June 12, 1993 presidential election, Col. Abubakar Umar was known to have been very loyal to Ibrahim Babangida. This cozy relationship made the latter to appoint him the military governor of Kaduna State after he (Babangida) had toppled Buhari on August 27, 1985. As a vanguard of justice and equity, the annulment of June 12, 1993 election broke Umar’s silence. When the annulment was first muted in military circles he took it upon himself to alert the nation, particularly the military, of the dangers posed to the nation by such a volatile intrigue. On June 17, 1993, he visited Ibrahim Babangida in Abuja and advised him to write his name in gold by handing over the country’s leadership to Moshood Abiola, the winner of the election. If Babangida did so, he assured him, he would be acclaimed as the Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Nigeria. He assured Babangida that if annulled the election, he would voluntarily resign his military commission for henceforth the military would have totally lost its credibility and he did not see the rationale for remaining a part of a discredited military.
But Umar was talking to a brick wall. On June 23, 1993, Babangida annulled the election. Umar was stirred to fury by the monumental injustice. He wrote a letter of resignation and handed it over to Lt. General Ibrahim Salihu, the Chief of Army Staff. In the letter, he declared: “The cancellation of the presidential election and other measures taken by the Federal Military Government regarding the transition programme are not acceptable to me.” In view of this, he continued: “I cannot, in honesty, defend those decisions as a senior military officer. I can neither rationalize the decisions to my subordinates nor command them to put down any civil disturbance that may arise from them. I have therefore, decided to apply to you for voluntary retirement from the service.” He further made it clear that the military had become the greatest stumbling block to the transition it initiated. As a result of that letter, he was threatened with court marshal. But he stuck to his guns.
Thanks to God. Abubakar Umar is alive and is bubbling with life. I wonder how that great man who, in addition to many other sacrifices, gave up his military commission in protest against the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, will be feeling about the shameful gathering of former heads of state, whose commissions and omissions helped to reduce Nigeria to a crippled giant, to eulogize Babangida.
Those who eulogize Babangida say that by admitting 32 years later that Abiola won the June 12, 1993 presidential election he has proven his love for the truth, his love for his country and his humility to admit his mistakes. Such is a criminalized way of reasoning or the logic of the mad world. It is as good as saying that if a notorious armed robber enters someone’s house, kills him, his wife and children, loots all the valuables in the house, sets the house ablaze and disappears, reappears 32 years later and confesses that he is the person who committed the crime, he should be proclaimed a hero and possibly made a king. No. He is not a hero. He is a villain. Such a person should instantly be made to pay for his crime. The people who eulogize Babangida urinate on the graves of Abiola, his wife and all who died for the June 12 mandate. Babangida does not deserve eulogy. He is a scoundrel. He is not a saint and should not be canonized. If not for his age, he should be taken to the prison immediately so that many others in his group will learn their lesson.
By the way, now that the same IBB has told the world in very clear terms that the January 15, 1966 coup is not Igbo coup, can the Igbo be allowed to live and survive in Nigeria? That is a topic for another time.
