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There’s been quite a bit of angst, south of the Sahara, about recent events in some Arab countries.

To be sure, not as
much as in the Arab world itself, where rulers fear that they can no
longer rely on the complicit acquiescence of the United States of
America in their fundamentalist/Islamist = Hamas/Hezbollah =
terrorist/destruction of Israel equation as an excuse for repression.

But in sub-Saharan
Africa, the commentariat has been exercised about whether it could
happen here, why it hasn’t happened here, and how docile Africans (and
in particular, Nigerians) are: quite a reversal from the belief of many
Africans that it was the Arab people who were spineless and
downtrodden! Only short memories can explain ignorance of the fact that
“it” has happened and continues to happen here.

In September 2009,
157 peaceful opposition protesters were killed in Conakry, the Guinean
capital. Before that, West Africa saw Ghana’s June 4th uprising in
1979, and Southern Africa had the continuing civilian resistance to
apartheid of which the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre and the 1976 Soweto
uprisings were bloody punctuation marks.

But as the world waits to see the outcome of the Egyptian revolution, some similarities with our own history are striking.

During the June 12
crisis, troops commanded by General Sani Abacha killed 194 Nigerians in
the streets of Lagos. The kind of restraint that informed the Egyptian
Army’s declaration that it would not fire on the people for making
“legitimate demands” was not a big feature of the Nigerian Army’s 1993
philosophy. Nowadays, even if cold-blooded firing on unarmed
demonstrators in the full glare of the international media might no
longer be acceptable, reports of the army-of-hostile-occupation
behaviour of troops quelling civilian unrest in places as far apart as
Jos, the Niger Delta and Zaki Biam suggest that our armed forces are
yet to fully imbibe the principles of ‘friendly relations with
civilians’.

Indeed, it was the
violence of Abacha’s soldiers that informed the decision of civil
society leaders to continue the June 12th protests by a ville morte
(dead city, no movement) strategy. And it worked: despite his bluster,
our dictator du jour, Ibrahim Babangida, was forced out.

But not only did
Babangida leave Abacha planted in the Transitional National Government
of Ernest Shonekan, he himself didn’t go anywhere. Similarly, Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak has ruled out a fate similar to that of
Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who reportedly fled with a gun to the
pilot’s head to dissuade him from turning the airplane back to Tunisia.
Instead, Mubarak insists that he will live (and eventually die) in
Egypt.

Of course, at 82,
Mubarak can hardly be hoping for the kind of comeback that our own
ex-dictators hanker after (with apparently only General Abdusalami
Abubakar immune to the disease). But despite the international arrest
warrant issued for Ben Ali, Mubarak is not unrealistic in looking
forward to a happy old age in the country of his birth if the fate of
Nigerian dictators is anything to go by.

Provided you go when you are advised to go:

Mubarak however,
insists that he will go at a time of his own choosing in keeping with
Egypt’s constitution. This might bring his fate more closely in line
with that of the same Sani Abacha. It is not for nothing that Nigerian
wags declared that ABACHA was an acronym for After Babangida Another
Criminal Has Arrived. His rule almost exactly mirrored that of his
military predecessor: civilian assassinations, phantom coups, attempted
coups, constitutional assemblies and so on.

Except that by the
time Abacha was ready for his own metamorphosis and subversion of the
democratic process only to find that the Nigerian people were no longer
afraid of his guns and soldiers; he failed to learn from Babangida’s
example. We have the battered face of Olisa Agbakoba, convener of
United Action for Democracy which called the ‘Five Million Man March’
in Lagos, as well as the dead of the Ibadan counter-demonstration and
the May 1st rally to remind us that the Nigerian people were indeed
ready to take risks and make sacrifices for their freedom in 1998.

Abacha’s fellow
generals certainly took note, and Nigeria being a military
dictatorship, the line of succession was already established. By
contrast, in Egypt Mubarak’s immediate successors were only moved into
place when the crisis was well underway, with the appointment of a new
vice-president and a new prime minister, both old soldiers.

Still, now that
they are in place, Mubarak should remind himself of what happened to
Abacha at the point where – unlike Babangida who tearfully agreed to
“step aside” – he insisted on steering the good ship ‘Nigeria’ onto the
rocks (i.e. continuing to resist the demands of the Nigerian people).

We were only told
that Abacha had died. But if a ship’s captain sets his course for the
rocks and resists the advice of his fellow-officers (who are at quite
as much risk of drowning as everybody else on board), nobody was really
all that surprised that the next thing we heard was: ‘Man Overboard’.