Nigeria Content Online

Our former military
President Ibrahim Babangida is one individual about whom it is
difficult to be neutral. His many loyalists say they are willing to
follow him into the pits of hell-fire. His fans are all over the world,
ranging from a wealthy Jewish commodities magnate I met in Antwerp to a
former Guinean minister I met at a conference in Libreville and a
leading Cameroonian banking colleague in Paris, His foes are also
legion. And they swear that the hottest parts of sheol are reserved
precisely for his type. “Even when they cannot get their wives
pregnant, they say it is because of IBB”, he once lamented.

When you meet him
in person you will find him to be disarmingly charming, elegant and
witty. A man of good taste, he is unostentatious and unfailingly warm
and courteous — a good listener. He radiates a self-command and
charisma that one is likely to find only in the truly great. A
Bonaparte in a brown skin is the first impression I had when we first
shook hands. Some of us mourned with him and with Mohammed, Aminu,
Aisha and Halima when the agelessly beautiful Maryam went the way of
all flesh.

Even Babangida’s
worst enemies must get it very clear that he reserves a constitutional
right to aspire to any position in our fledgling democracy. Whether he
has a moral right to do so is another matter. His many critics have
painted him as this monster that wreaked untold havoc by the agency of
a corrupt and murderous military dictatorship. Much has been made about
the ‘missing’ US$12 billion oil windfall. Dele Giwa’s ghost refuses to
go away. There is also the dilemma of June 12. Others have dug up tales
about Bongos Ikwue and military aircraft that went up only to disappear
into the lagoon. A lot of it is hysterical nonsense.

As combative as the
armoured commander that he once was, Maradona has fired back, daring
anyone to produce evidence linking him to stolen funds. He has denied
ever knowing Dele Giwa. As for June 12, he would like to have us
believe he caved in to certain “powers”; powers that must remain
nameless. He insists he is the man of the hour because “the youths”
cannot save Nigeria.

That unfortunate
obiter from the mouth of our self-described ‘evil genius’ has only
succeeded in further fuelling the embers of mass opprobrium. Many say
they will never forgive him for having destroyed their future only to
turn round and mock them as leadership no-hopers.

For sheer political
shrewdness, few can match the wily Old Fox. But in the here and now, I
believe his dharma is to remain an elder statesman and ‘king maker’. At
three score and ten, he’s had his innings, as the cricket-loving
English would say. He should spend his time mentoring those ‘incapable’
young men that he has unwittingly insulted with such uncharacteristic
indiscretion. Besides, he has enough stocked up in his library to keep
anyone with a minimum of curiosity busy. He still owes us a book of
memoirs. And there are the grand children to dote over and the pupils
from the El-Amin Schools left behind by the immortal Maryam Babangida.
From time to time, government may have cause to use his talents on some
intractable African bushfires as it did not long ago in Guinea-Conakry.

From where I stand,
I see nothing new coming from the man once described as “the Prince of
the Niger”. Almost every misfortune that haunts our generation began
from his time: state-sponsored assassination; oil bunkering; armed
robbery; cultism; the collapse of NEPA; the culture of impunity;
disappearance of the railways; the grounding of Nigeria Airways;
devaluation of the naira; domestication of corruption; privatisation of
government; destruction of the universities; and the wholesale
humiliation of a gifted people.

If, in the vigour
of youth, Babangida led us down the gadarene slopes of collective
ruination, I do not see how, in old age, he can lead us back to glory.
There are many who covet his wealth and would never tell him these home
truths. He may not be the monster that he has been made out to be, but
I am not convinced he can muster the moral and intellectual wherewithal
to lead the New Nigeria of our dreams; a country destined to take its
rightful place among the leading nations of the twenty-first century.

The German-Jewish
literary critic Walter Benjamin, in his ninth thesis on the philosophy
of history, depicts the Angel of History as having turned his face
towards the past: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of
his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole
what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has
got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer
close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which
his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”

The Babangida years began the process that hurled us from the
heights of world-historic ambition to the quagmire of an irresponsible,
beggarly fourth-world nation. He cannot give what he does not have.