Tony Momoh
22 June 2008
Lagos — JUNE 12 returned to the front burner when Prof Humphrey Nwosu thought he was finally going to lay the ghost of the presidential election held on that day to rest.
By speaking after a deafening silence for a whopping 15 years, he dug Moshood Abiola's body right out of its grave and gave it life to spread its wings and fly. Yes fly, not only within and around that part of the country called the South-West geopolitical zone where the memory of an electoral robbery had been kept alive, but across the one massive constituency, the whole country, that was his ward in the presidential election of June 12, 1993.
What Nwosu said attests to the widened horizon of Moshood's territorial entitlements, even if he cannot have an estate that can claim it in law. So, by Nwosu's clarification, it is heartwarming to know that the set of figures that people have been marketing for15 years to show that the elections were inconclusive were packaged to create the darkness that Nwosu's public declaration has cleared.
So, Abiola won the elections, securing the highest number of votes cast and meeting the commitment of spread in 28 of the then 30 states of the federation. Abiola thereby became president of Nigeria-in-waiting. He had a choice to resign or be impeached if he had assumed office; or die before he took office.
These are ways a president can fail to be in office. But what happened was that he was prevented from taking office. He struggled to fulfill the mandate by getting sworn in at the wrong venue by the wrong set of people.
Why, to prove a point and force the issue. But those who annulled the election did not see the point he was trying to make, nor was the issue being forced allowed to succeed. He was arrested and locked up with charges of treason hanging over his head. If he had been tried, there were laws to do him in.
The series of decrees that were passed to cripple the laws that had been made to legalise the elections were living laws in our books. A decree cancelled the elections and even stopped any courts from looking into any matter to do with the elections that had been cancelled.
rrangements made for an interim government were clear that the elections we all later described as the freest and fairest in the history of Nigeria were neither free nor fair in the eyes of the Interim Government (Basic Constitutional Provisions) Decree 61 of 1993.
The preamble to the decree is instructive. It said there were plans by the Federal Military Government to hand over government to a democratically elected administration in its transition to civil rule programme on January 2, 1993. That could not hold because of the disruption of the presidential primaries of the two political parties, the Social Democratic Party and the National Republican Convention.
The disruption was put at the door of "grave electoral malpractices." The next step taken was the decision of the government on November 17, 1992 that the transition programme be extended to August 27, 1993. The reason given was to "allow time for fresh presidential primaries to be conducted." The storyline was faithful to what the government did.
Wonderful magic wand
It conducted the primaries promised; also the elections but cancelled the election because it "was marred by grave electoral malpractices." Everybody said then and years after that the elections were the freest and fairest; that there was not a single drop of rain anywhere in the country during the voting, implying that even God endorsed the outcome; that it was a muslim-muslim ticket; that the wonderful magic wand of option A4 and an adjustment to the open ballot of lining behind your candidate or his photograph, all made history that Nigeria had never been witness to before.
Hurrah and Hallelujah. But come with me to 1993, to the law I am looking at and quoting directly from. It took effect on August 26, 1996.
And it says, "And whereas the Federal Military Government decided in the interest of national security, law and order, enduring democracy and the provision of effective economic direction for the nation, to annul the whole conduct of the presidential election and consequently nullified the presidential election held on June 12, 1993."
It was after the preamble that the Federal Military Government promulgated Decree 61 which said in clear terms that it is "supreme and its provisions shall have binding force on all authorities and persons through out the Federal Republic of Nigeria."
The Decree was signed by Gen I.B. Babangida, President, Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria at Abuja on 26th August 1993. So, Prof Humphrey Nwosu's claim that anyone but the lawmaking arm of the Federal Military Government (that is the National Defence and Security Council) was responsible for the annulment of the June 12 Presidential election is irresponsible, cheap, and unprofessorial. It is even the greatest disservice a grateful servant can render to a master he had served.
IBB would be ill-advised to accept a claim that is not borne out by the facts, by history and by law. The facts are there to be accessed, day to day; the history has been written by different participants, even those very close to IBB, and the law is right there in the books for everyone to see.
It says the election was "marred by grave electoral malpractices."
IBB has never denied being responsible for the annulment. Everyone knows what was steaming in the house, but that was their affair. IBB does not need people to anchor his branding on slippery foundations. In recovering lost grounds in encounters, time is always a credible ally where the truth is not denied or buried.
If IBB needs any help from anyone today, it is from men of honour, and truth. Nwosu has failed that test, and his publication is self-serving. But where it is useful cannot be ignored and I will come to that in a moment. But let's first refresh our memories of the June 12 saga.
The picture being floated now gives the impression that there was peace when what was done was done. I wrote a book titled Experiment With Disintegration. It was published in November, 1993! I wrote it, so to say, on the move. It is a 132-paged book, in three major parts.
In part two, which ran from June 24, a day after the annulment, to August 28, a day after Babangida returned to Minna, I kept a daily diary of events. On the June 24, 1993 entry entitled Some 12 Days Ago, I recorded what happened between June 12 and June 24. On page 29, I published the results of the elections as collated by the SDP on whose platform Chief Abiola ran. The results were signed by Chief Abiola himself, the SDP governors and party officials. The statement claimed that Abiola scored 8,187,720 votes as against Tofa's 5,950,217.
Abiola also had the required spread in 28 of the 30 states. These figures (plus-minus) seemed to have been confirmed by Nwosu's book that came out 15 years after the event. On June 26, in an entry, Darkness Gathers, I analysed the speech President Babangida had given the previous evening at 9.00 pm on NTA.
I said I was thoroughly disappointed, saying, "I rate (the speech) as the most uninspiring that Babangida has given for a long time." Everyone had looked forward to the speech which he promised would be given on June 26 after a series of meetings by the National Security and Defence Council, the highest law-making body in the land.
My entry on page 35 says, "The summary of the speech is that the cancelled presidential election was marred by corruption and that people did not have enough notice of its being held." When Babangida had left, I wrote a letter to Gen Sani Abacha who was the most senior minister in Shonekan's government.
It was dated September 13, 1993. It is published on pages 103-115 of the book. After asserting that June 12 happened and no decree could wish it away, I said at page 111, "General, do not believe anyone who tells you that there is no fire on the mountain. It is building up to a conflagration, and I am surprised that many people even fail to listen to the rumblings in the bowels of the earth."
Those rumblings erupted to claim lives and property, and changed the face of history for the worse, as we can see. Disaster management led to the story of Obasanjo and his tenure. It must have been one of those quiet ways of saying we were wrong, let's make amends.
Those amends have been creating integrity problems for those who initiated them in 1998. But the attempt was in every lip that what Obasanjo turned out to be was not what those who orchestrated his presence bargained for. And if they went back to the drawing board to redress the harm and asked Prof Nwosu to tell the story of the election, they were wrong to have accommodated his version which destroyed whatever credit Babangida has left to his name. I worked with him for four years and I did not think he was a coward. At least that is what Nwosu is telling us, isn't it?
Nwosu's book is not, however, for the garbage can. He did confess that he was going to do two things - help to lay the foundation for Nigeria's democracy, and give his account of the June 12, 1993 presidential election and its annulment. In telling the story, he failed woefully as a historian, as a researcher and as an honest man.
But the contribution he made to the growing of our voting culture is the best we have had. We should adopt it, if we mean well for this country. But first things first. The greed to control must be lessened through restructuring which should lead visibly to the decongesting of the political space.
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