The rise and rise of the evil genius
As an active competitor and beneficiary of all the coups till he ‘step aside’ in 1993, IBB’s delusion of aggrandizement and boldness is rising at a time he should be in political purgatory. Would anyone blame him? No. He had the infamy of disrespecting the outcome of the votes of 60 million Nigerians and handing […]
As an active competitor and beneficiary of all the coups till he ‘step aside’ in 1993, IBB’s delusion of aggrandizement and boldness is rising at a time he should be in political purgatory. Would anyone blame him? No. He had the infamy of disrespecting the outcome of the votes of 60 million Nigerians and handing over a contraption unknown in the annals of political engineering. What more, he lives to boast about it.
Give it to him; IBB is smart, but he is not clever. Smart is escaping mob justice by the skin of his teeth a criminal enjoying a generous retirement at public expense. Smart is keeping avoiding criticizing incumbents but heckling has-beens. Clever would have been grateful that the law of karma has not visited on you the same measure of evil which you visited on your peers. Clever would have been learning from Abdulsalami Abubakar, his kinsman who now deservedly enjoys international recognition after retirement. IBB has never featured in the radar of anything noble since he left office.
Babangida is not clever; regularly his guilty conscience still forces him to lure hungry editors to the mansion with which he was rewarded for elevating official corruption to Olympian heights. In civilized climes he would have no claim to that mansion anymore than the descendants of Mary Antoinette or Louis XVI have claim to the Elysee Palace. But from his castle IBB holds court and frequently tempts fate with disturbing intervews. He mistakes delayed justice for forgiveness or forgetfulness and regularly attempts to obfuscate history. Never having been called to reckoning, he is becoming bolder with each passing day.
Under IBB’s watch, Nigeria transformed from a country finding its feet to one experimenting with the worst of crimes. Yet when the Oputa Panel tried to get him to answer for some of the worst crimes ever committed in the history of our country, Babangida escaped summon or subpoena with every legal trick his stolen wealth coup afford him. The army he led was decimated of its finest officers from one of the best pilots Squadron Leader Martin Olufolorunsho Luther to the first soldier-poet and buxom buddy, Mamman Jiya Vatsa and the mysterious crash of a Hercules C-130 plane in a marsh in Ejigbo. IBB groans about how he couldn’t help Vatsa since the penalty for coup plotting is death an offence he would forever be guilty of. His regime opened the chapter of the political assassination of voices of dissent with the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed Dele Giwa, one of Nigeria’s best pioneer investigative journalists. That murder opened the floodgates of unresolved politically motivated murders still haunting our nation today.
What shall we say of the grand betrayal of friends, colleagues and the nation while he presided over the most dubious transition in history or the institutionalization of the settlement principle that finally transformed the civil service into an evil service? More than anyone who ever ruled Nigeria, Babangida has more to answer for, but so far he has escaped accounting for his sins.
Last week, Babangida lured editors back to his den of evil and shamelessly became the subject of media headlines. A classical case of the pot calling the kettle black, IBB aptly described Obasanjo’s government as visionless and without direction as if to obscure our memory of his infamous journey to Ota to draft Obasanjo into ruining his own covered legacy. Yes, Obasanjo spent $16 billion generating darkness and retired with impunity but how many power stations did IBB build? True a barrel of crude was sold for N120 under Obj but less than a fraction of that under IBB. Let us compare the value of the Naira in 1985 to what it was reduced to when he left office in 1993.
Only a fool would be wasting precious newspaper space defending Obasanjo’s rubbished legacy. The verdict of history is written in indelible ink and cannot be effaced with the thin veneer of a fake tippex. In the minds of the average Nigerian, both IBB and Obasanjo are two usurpers who should have their date in court and their future in jail if not at the stakes. But they equate tolerance with forgetfulness and lack of opportunity to bring them to justice with forgiveness. Master of doublespeak, IBB claimed once said he does not criticize his superiors because that would be unnatural to military tradition and that he does not critique his subordinates because it would be misconstrued. Truth is, he is afraid of being brought to book for his many foibles.
The anger of Nigerians against IBB is not his criticism of Obasanjo; it is the cowardice of doing it after the fact. It is the exhibition of his traits as a coward who dared not criticize the government in power; it is his blatant refusal to look back at his own place in history – the cost of his misadventure; of using a whole nation as a laboratory for his unending experiments which plunged Nigeria into the dungeon of moral, political and economic abyss. It is his failure to ask for forgiveness for the errors of commission and omission that still pushes our country ever to the edge of the precipice. It does not matter what Babangida or Obasanjo think of themselves, for as long as they live, they will ever have to look over their shoulders for the day of reckoning.