Remembering Abiola and Gani

President Muhammadu Buhari stepped into the head winds as a popular politician on June 6. He scored a major surprise political bulls eye. He recognised the late Moshood Abiola as a Nigerian president who won an election but never took office. Abiola died in the course of his struggle to actualise the mandate that slipped […]

President Muhammadu Buhari stepped into the head winds as a popular politician on June 6. He scored a major surprise political bulls eye. He recognised the late Moshood Abiola as a Nigerian president who won an election but never took office. Abiola died in the course of his struggle to actualise the mandate that slipped out of his hands in the June 12, 1993 presidential election. 

Buhari will confer on him posthumously the nation’s highest national honour reserved for heads of state or presidents, GCFR, on June 12 this year. He has also named June 12 Democracy Day, thus taking the day out of the hands of politicians in the south-west.  From June 12 this year, all Nigerians would mark the day every year. Pleasant and welcome surprise. 

Two other men, Abiola’s vice-president who never was, Alhaji Babagana Kingibe, and the principled and courageous human and people’s rights defender, once fondly known as the Senior Advocate of the Masses, the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, would also be conferred with the second national honour, GCON, on the same day. It bears repeating: pleasant and welcome surprise.

Whatever the PDP men might make of this important gesture, I think it would be unfair not to acknowledge Buhari’s courage in righting the wrong that has haunted the country for some 25 years now. June 12 was not destined to go away. It has had a long hold on our conscience as a nation. Its appropriation by the south-west geo-political zone as a half-hearted public holiday, degraded its significance. 

The big surprise is that I have no record of the president’s reaction to the annulment all these years. Did he seethe over it or did he just wake up to see the wisdom of mining it as a politician? Perhaps, we will know on June 12. I think the PDP men are wrong to dismiss it as an act of desperation to shore up his political fortune. My take is that this is the first strategic thinking demonstrated by the president since he took office three years ago. The timing of his announcement was calculated too. Perhaps, it was intended to take the sting out of the resolutions of the national assembly.

In taking these steps, Buhari put his fingers in the eyes of his two formidable political enemies, namely, former President Ibrahim Babangida whose administration annulled the presidential election; and former President Olusegun Obasanjo who, convinced that Abiola was not the messiah, resisted every pressure to honour him, including suggestions that he should name the new national stadium in Abuja after the man known in his life time as the pillar of African sports.

 It was Obasanjo, who, on taking office on May 29, 1999, named it democracy day. He ignored those who argued that it would be more appropriate to name June 12 democracy day. To be fair to him, June 12 did not end military rule and, therefore, did not replace khaki with agbada. Indeed, its subsequent abandonment by the chieftains of SDP and its appropriation by NADECO and Afenifere as a Yoruba political struggle denied Nigerian voters the right to insist that their votes must count. The lessons of June 12 were thus lost on us. Perhaps, not any more.

Now, Buhari has done what Obasanjo refused to do. He is garnering accolades for it. Former President Goodluck Jonathan tried to put Abiola back on the political pedestal by renaming the University of Lagos Moshood Abiola University. Unfortunately, he goofed; or more correctly, he was not properly advised by the coterie of senior lawyers in his administration. The law setting up the university does not permit him to change the name of the institution at will. 

This late acknowledgement of what Abiola stood for in Nigerian politics offers him no place any more in Aso Rock. But it is enough to accept that the posthumous honour demonstrates that he stood for something in our national politics. He would be as pleased as his family and friends are to know that his struggle to actualise his mandate was not in vain and that his footprints on the sands of our national politics would not be lost in the dust of history. 

Buhari said he decided to rename June 12 democracy day because “..in the view Nigerians, as shared by this administration, June 12, 1993, was far more symbolic of democracy in the Nigerian context than May 29 or even October 1.”

So be it.

It is interesting that Buhari remembers Fawehinmi. The fiery lawyer whose courageous forensic battles in the defence of the legal rights of his fellow country men and women, was unstinting in his support for the Buhari military administration, 1984-1985. He welcomed the return of the military and the sack of what he never tired of describing as the “corrupt and clueless Shagari administration.” When the NBA, headed by Prince Bola Ajibola order lawyers not to appear before the military tribunals setup by Buhari unless they were headed by senior lawyers or judges, the chief defied the order of his peers. He went on to defend Col Peter Obasa, former director-general of the National Youth Youth Service Corps, against allegations of his helping himself to the fund entrusted to him. Gani’s name was the only one entered in the black book of the NBA. 

I once asked him why he chose to abandon his colleagues. He said he acted on principles as a lawyer. So, the man who was for several years denied the silk has become, posthumously, the first lawyer and the third non-politician, military or civilian, in the country to be conferred with the second highest national honour. Gani Fawehinmi, GCON. Sounds nice. The other two were the leading African business moguls, namely, Alhaji Aliko Dangote and Dr Michael Adenuga, Jr.

As my old teacher would say, ‘you see life?’