August 27 and a daughter’s celebration of Abacha, By Festus Adedayo

Last week, 27 August, was the 39^th anniversary of the coup that toppled General Muhammadu Buhari, erstwhile GOC 3^rd Armoured Division of the Nigerian Army. On that day, Fatima Gumsu, daughter of military despot, General Sani Abacha, who is also wife of Yobe State governor, Mai Mala-Buni, sparked a debate. It led to a comparative assessment of military autocracy and civilian dictatorship. Gumsu had posted a photograph of her father in full military regalia on Facebook. On the photo, Gumsu merely wrote, “Baba na” – my father – with an emoji of “Love.” In the photo, Abacha was flanked by then Chief of Army Staff, Major Gen Ibrahim Babangida, who later became military president; and General Joshua Dogonyaro, who announced the palace coup on radio. The trio, who had just seized power, accused Buhari of high-handedness, incompetence and failure “to rejuvenate the economy.” Earlier, on 31 December, 1983, all of them had violently brought to a rude halt Nigeria’s Second Republic.

No matter the global stench oozing out of the Abacha name, Gumsu had every right to celebrate her father; after all, back-flipping that celebration, the Yoruba say that every child is a hero in the eyes of their parent (gbogbo omo l’óńjé Jagun l’ójú ìyá è).

One thousand five hundred people commented on Gumsu’s attempt to beatify her generally loathed father. Virtually all the comments were positive, literally submitting that Abacha was worthy to be canonised. While one Ibrahim Musa wrote “Brave patriot General(,) may Allah be pleased with his soul”, one Oladipupo Michael wrote “Cow does not know the value of it’s (sic) tail, until it is cut off,” while a few others wrote: he “was a great man” by a Kene Kenneth, and an Oluwayomi Oyedepo, wrote “RIP sir, it pains me you didn’t kill Balablue, now he is killing everybody.” Generally, however, the comments were reflective of ethno-geographical sentiments, with some delivering their comments in Hausa. So, was it the passage of time that purified Abacha, making him worthy to be made a Canon? Was it ignorance by the respondents? Was it their naivety of the crookedness of military rule? Or, the fact that, successive Nigerian governments have shed democracy of the beautiful people-centric furs that citizens, like Plato, wore on this 5^th century Greek city-state of Athens concept?

Perhaps coincidentally, on same 27 August, Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant-General Taoreed Lagbaja assured Nigerians that the Army would not yield to calls by people he called “powerful interest blocs” to re-enact the infamous hijack of power by Abacha and other military adventurists. He said this in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. Lagbaja spoke against the backdrop of recent calls for military intervention in Nigeria, especially during the August 1 to 10 #EndbadGovernance protest. Lagbaja attributed the calls to “young Nigerians who never experienced the era of Nigeria’s extensive military rule” and stated that, with “the image-bashing” the Army received for planning coups since 1966, it “is not poised to lose the new prestige it has painstakingly built in the past 25 years.”

Lagbaja’s homily notwithstanding, Nigeria and indeed Africans, have begun to subject the democratic waves that took hold of Africa in the late 1990s to some interrogations. They place the waves side by side the backsliding into military autocracy in some other African nations in the last two years or so, the grueling poverty and absentee governance in Africa and the clear inability of so-called democratic governments to tame insecurity and hunger. The question they ask is, can what Nigeria/Africa practice today be called democracy? Or, is democracy on the decline? A case study is the current Nigerian government which has made a fatal botch of democratic rule.

Philip Schmitter and Terry Carl, both of Stanford University, in their “What democracy is… and is not,” (Journal of Democracy, June 1991) attempted to identify what democracy is not. They concluded that democracy is not necessarily a system of regular elections. Such understanding of democracy, they said, is a fallacy because a system of regular elections, rather than democracy, can be better defined as “electoralism”. Democracy is also not majority rule because it could be tyrannical. However, democracy, they submitted, is everything about a most distinctive element called citizens. Leonardo Morlino, in his “What is a ‘Good’ Democracy?” (Democratization, Vol.11, No.5, 2004) also said that democracy needs liberty and equality, rule of law, accountability, full respect for rights, freedoms and a progressive implementation of greater political, social and economic equality. Larry Diamond, in his Is democracy in decline? (2015) even submitted that there is a strong relationship between economic performance and the survival of democracies. Thus, if the definitions above constitute the irreducible minimum of what democracy is, it may be right to submit that what most parts of Africa practice today is not democracy.

Since it will be Afghanistanism, similar to a dog abandoning its soggy nose and choosing instead to bark at bystanders, (ajá ò rán ti’mú è tí ò gbe…) let us Nigerianise the issues involved. It looks pretty obvious that in the last 25 years, Nigerians have been shortchanged. In the last 15 months specifically, situations have gone direr. Life and living are worse for the people now than under military rule. For example, so much hoopla has been made about the Tinubu government’s absenteeism in the lives of the people. His 15 months in office has triggered about the worst economic downturn in Nigerian history, comparable only to the great depression era. Cost of living is kissing the firmament and Nigerians are convulsing under unprecedented socio-economic seizures and death. Like fiddling Nero, the president and his appointees breakfast in Lisbon, lunch in Paris and dine in the Antarctic. They literally buy mansions in Uranus with people’s wealth. 

Life is searing hot for Nigerians. It reminds one of a 1981-written track by Immortal Peter Tosh called Solution to this Pollution: “Gas gone up/Bus fare gone up/The rent gone up/For meal gone up?/Lighting gone up/The tax gone up/Car parts gone up,.. /Onion gone up/Red beans gone up/Black pepper gone up/Chicken gone up/And the parents dem angry/Cause the pickney (pikin) dem hungry”, he sang, as if his beef was with today’s Nigeria.

More than the economic regression under the Tinubu government, what is of greater concern is its peremptory walk down river road of oppression and strangulation of free speech. It seems envious of the Sani Abachas’ footprints. Under the toga of a Decree 4-like Cybersecurity Act, a regime of repression is gradually being unleashed on Nigerians, chiefly journalists. Fear of the blood-baiting claws of the Villa looms like a pestilence. A few examples abound. Daniel Ojukwu of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ) was abducted by the Intelligence Response Team of the IGP, Kayode Egbetokun and detained incommunicado for three days. Segun Olatunji, editor of FirstNews, was arrested by heavily armed military personnel and detained in an underground cell for 14 days on the orders of Femi Gbajabiamila, Tinubu’s CoS. Kasarachi Aniagolu of The Whistler was allegedly arrested for covering an EFCC raid in Abuja. So also Achadu Gabriel of Daybreak newspaper and Godwin Tsa of The Sun, assaulted and detained for covering a peaceful protest in Abuja. Last Sunday, Adejuwon Soyinka, Regional Editor of The Conversation Africa, was arrested at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport. The most recent of this media repression is that of Shafi’u Tureta, a social media critic. He was ordered arrested and taken into custody by heavily armed police in Sokoto State. His crime? He posted the viral video of Hajiya Fatima Aliyu, First Lady of the state’s lavish birthday party.

Contrary to Schmitter, Carl and Morlino’s definition of democracy above, citizens’ welfare takes backstage attention. “Liberty and equality, rule of law, accountability, full respect for rights, freedoms and a progressive implementation of greater political, social and economic equality” seem to be regressing into abeyance. Those who know, claim that the quantum of corruption under this government in the last 15 months is benumbing. However, in the eye of the state, the interest of the Leviathan is more important than the welfare of the people.

Former governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, in yesterday’s edition of the Tribune, called Nigerians’ attention to what may be in the offing. With the awesome, raw powers at the disposal of the president, it will be wishful thinking dislodging him in 2027. He said, “Tinubu today is somebody who has a grip on Nigeria, who owes obeisance to nobody in Nigeria, who believes that God made him and he made himself and he is now lording it over the Nigerian people and nobody can challenge him. He was adept at studying the system, manipulating it. He exploited it and he did it well. I wish he could use his sagacity, his talent to help Nigeria’s development. It would have been wonderful. But he is using it negatively. He has everything but not for the development of Nigeria and it is affecting you, it is affecting me.”

The Nigerian state is not only in the president’s kitty, anyone who doubts that a civilian dictatorship is afoot would be fooling themselves. The Nigerian president today is a potential palace despot. He has a lickspittle parliament, headed by Villaswill, a marionette whose fancy he tickles at will; an allegedly pliant judiciary and a hugely troubling coercive apparatus. The IGP today used to be his police lapel, so brewing a police state to babysit autocracy is a done deal.

On 23 July, a bill to amend the Nigerian Police Act 2020 was speedily passed by Villaswill’s Senate. Tinubu had asked that the No 1 Sheriff continued to leech to his trousers for more years, despite having reached the statutory 60-year terminus. Statutorily, 60 years or 35 years in service is the age civil servants disembark from service train. If you listened to the IGP’s oily and adulatory speech in service of Tinubu recently, you will realize how he is an icing on the cake of a potential imperial rule. Almost tearfully appreciative, Egbetokun recalled how he “met President Bola Tinubu in 1998, and that meeting produced a positive transformation in my life within 24 hours.” That is a major ingredient with which a police state that abets an imperial power broth is cooked.

In the words of Udenta O. Udenta in a television interview last week, democracies no longer die by the wielding of guns as it used to be through coups of 1966, 1983 and 1993. Once a government, which controls huge coercive apparatuses, dismantles press freedom, human liberties and sows fears as Tinubu is doing in the hearts of the people, then, we must be ready to sing nunc dimitis to democratic rule. Eleko orun np’olowo – the heavenly hawker of corn meal porridge – must then have started advertising its wares. Nuhu Ribadu, like his predecessors as NSA, is demonstrating a conceptual naivety of what his beat, the national security, is all about. In the words of Margaret Vogt, former Nigerian diplomat and political scientist, national security isn’t state security, nor is it the security of ‘His Imperial Majesty.’ National security is security of jobs for the unemployed, foods and good living for the citizens. By failing to provide these essential ingredients, the Tinubu government has left its democratic food unattended to and flies of calls for military rule are perching on it.

If you study the manifestations of military governments in Nigeria from 1966 to 1999, what you can call a milder version of their repressiveness and recklessness are on display today. In 1973, Yakubu Gowon’s governor, Alfred Diette-Spiff, shaved the head of Meneri Amakiri, a reporter. Today, Sokoto State governor, too shaved off Shafi’u Umar Tureta’s freedom. As Sani Abacha jailed TheNews’ Kunle Ajibade for life under trumped up charges, the Tinubu government equally detained Olatunji in a dark cell, in a replica of Abacha’s Frank Omenka style.

The Nigerian economy under the military was even comparatively munificent and people-friendly. As military Head of State, to curtail ostentation, General Olusegun Obasanjo decreed modesty across board in Nigeria. Obasanjo himself lived by example and drove Peugeot 504 car as official car. Today, the Tinubu government asks Nigerians to tighten their belts but he and his officials live the profligate life of an Oil Sheik. Drunken stupor wastefulness is the middle name of government. It has no empathy for the people, and to compound matters, has no respect for people’s freedom, free speech and human rights. The people’s rule we thought we would have today, for which we fought hard yesterday, during which we lost many of our fathers, mothers and siblings and lost our freedom, is indistinguishable from the Khaki rule we fought yesterday.

As Gumsu Abacha did with her father’s photograph last week, I challenge Iyaloja Sade or Seyi Tinubu, the president’s daughter and son, to post their father’s picture on Facebook today and say, affectionately, like Gumsu, “Baba mi.” If it equally attracts 1500 respondents as Gumsu’s, not less than 1490 of the comments would rain curses on their father. It shows that something is fatally wrong with that thing we call democracy in our land. In any case, what we have today is what can be called the triumph of Abachaism. Abacha’s Prime Minister, the Chagoury brothers and his bagman are top henchmen of this government, back to their PM roles. NADECO, which fought Abacha tooth and nail, losing some of its soldiers in the process, didn’t realize that it had fallen into what soldiers call an ambush. It escaped from a house of infirmity only to land in the bedroom of death.

Having said all the above, however, let me borrow that timeless cliché and say, the most benevolent Abacha-kind rule can never be compared to a flip-flopping democratic government like Tinubu’s. When anyone loses their newborn child, Yoruba console them by saying, it is only the water that poured away; the pitcher remains intact (Omi l’ó fó, agbè ò fó). Yes, we lost a democratic government but we still have the spirit of democracy.  For a Nigerian pollution this rank and damp, we must find solution, as Tosh counseled. But the solution can NEVER be military rule. Those of us who grew into the power manic of Khaki will never pray for its shadow in Nigeria again. We must knead the raw dough of what we currently have into a tantalising meal.

Yes, Lamido has painted a very grim picture of the probable renewal of this imperial rule in 2027. Quoting him, he said, “even Pharaoh’s empire collapsed. So, no matter how daring you are, ultimately, it won’t end well.” However, apologies to our physically challenged compatriots, Yoruba, in their witty best, say that whoever coveys the lame to a party must convey them back to their destination (Ení gb’áro wá, ni ó gb’áro lo). Our vote was what was claimed to have brought this árohere. It must be what would wheel it back.

Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.