You Must Set Forth at Dawn (68 page)

Sani Abacha appeared to have it all his own way, even as the nation hoped, futilely, that he would soon overreach himself—at least, through his overassiduous servitors. His confidence and impunity further bloated by capitulations and defections from the ranks of well-known political figures, Sani Abacha moved to announce, yet again, new plans for a return to civilian rule, but this time with a difference. A new electoral body was set up, armed with that now-routine Nigerian democratic variant: the power to approve the formation of new parties. Five such consortiums were eventually approved, three of them being instantly recognizable as the personal property of Sani Abacha. Even before their formal registration, all three had announced the name of their flag bearer for the presidency—none other than the incumbent, General Sani Abacha. The “independence” of a fourth, funded and owned single-handedly by Abacha's former minister of petroleum, Dr. Don Etiebet, was short-lived. Its existence degenerated into farce when its founder, owner, and presidential candidate emerged from several days' seclusion in his home to renounce his presidential ambitions and defect, with all appropriate apologies, to one of Sani Abacha's parties. That seclusion, it turned out, had been a spell of house arrest, broken only by visits from Abacha's man of all purpose, officially his security adviser—the sinister Major Hamza al-Mustapha.

This left only one party. It put up a determined fight, led by Alhaji M. D. Yusuf, a former head of the secret service of an unusually liberal cast of mind, and of Fulani extraction. The nation did not hold its breath while it awaited the outcome. Even so, all bets were wrong. What most people had imagined was that this last party would be allowed free play in order to give the elections a semblance of choice. After all, the electoral machine was firmly under Abacha's control, and any results could be announced even before the completion of voting. Abacha's handlers were taking no chances, however. At a meeting held in Kaduna to select and anoint that party's own presidential candidate, Abacha's storm troopers, headed by the same Major al-Mustapha, made an unscheduled appearance with a “goodwill message” from the head of state. The authentic leaders of the party walked out of their own meeting in protest against the intrusion. The rump that remained behind had no difficulty in concluding the meeting with a formal adoption of Sani Abacha as the presidential candidate. Thereafter, all five parties became known—in the coinage of my late friend Bola Ige—as the five fingers of one leprous hand.

After which it was the turn of traditional rulers—the obas, obis, emirs, chiefs, and other titled heads. One after another, they visited Aso Rock to endorse their new king—a coy heir apparent to his own crown—who continued to deny that he had any ambitions to transform himself into a civilian president but said he would submit, albeit reluctantly, to the wishes of the people. The “people” soon made their wishes known, most vociferously, through the antics of a flamboyant impresario with an eye on the main chance. The young man appeared from nowhere, launched an amorphous body with the rousing title of YEAA—Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha—and proceeded to launch what he billed as a Million Man March on Aso Rock. My aborted 1994 march on Abuja to demand the exit of Abacha from Aso Rock had been cynically turned on its head; this time, the march was to plead with the dictator to remain in power as a civilian head of state! Armed with a bottomless campaign chest from a treasury that was flung wide open to any such ventures, this upstart, Kalu—who also swore that he would commit suicide if Abacha failed to heed their plea—organized a musical extravaganza in Abuja, at which political office seekers—men and women, former military officers, ex- and aspiring governors, and a sprinkling of traditional rulers—gyrated to rousing rhythms from prodigally remunerated musical groups. It was an awe-inspiring performance, one that plumbed the very abyss of self-degradation, a veritable wallowing in sycophantic sludge that, it would appear, some peoples accumulate in their passage toward self-definition and national becoming.

For the musicians, the repercussions were instant. As they returned to their hometowns, their erstwhile fans were waiting, but not with the welcome banners to which they were accustomed. Many went into hiding, issued statements that claimed that they had been duped into performing. In some cases, this was true. The campaign for self-succession took place during the buildup period to the global soccer madness known as the World Cup, and some bands had been taken in by the tale that this was a fund-raising event for the Green Eagles, as the Nigerian national team was known. Most knew the truth but could not resist the mouthwatering inducements. The response of the erstwhile fans, among others, was one cheering note, but a challenge also—it was a crop whose harvesting could not be long delayed, or it would shrivel in the heat of a tyrant's desperation. There were other responses that were no less encouraging, all indicative of a mood that needed to be reinforced and structured before it dissipated from battle weariness.

Abacha's campaign moved with increasing boldness and impudence. It was now the turn of the most palpable bastions of resistance, the physical, peopled arena, to be subdued. A well-known Abacha crony of Yoruba stock, a commodity supplier for the operations of ECOMOG—the West African peacekeeping forces—in Liberia and Sierra Leone during Abacha's tenure as the Nigerian Army chief of staff, suddenly appeared as point man for his benefactor. This was another “Triple A,” Alhaji Alao Arisekola, a long-standing shadow player in Ibadan politics. He proceeded to organize a public rally at the Ibadan Liberty Sports Stadium at which his now-adopted political protégé, Sani Abacha, would be presented as presidential candidate to the Ibadan people.

A reedy, normally self-retiring specimen more given to sneaky, behind-the-scenes activities and intrigues than overt confrontations, the Yoruba Triple A astonishingly discovered a hidden promotional verve in his psyche and became a public promoter of the Abacha regime. Indeed, the obsession of this trader, possessed of the messianic destiny of Abacha, was matched only by his contempt for his own people, the Yoruba, who, by contrast, had mostly held his protégé, Abacha, in deep abhorrence since the imprisonment of Moshood Abiola, the elected president of the Nigerian nation.

The Alhaji's performances on radio and television on the single-minded mission of imposing Sani Abacha on the Nigerian people were quite complex. They went beyond gratitude to a business benefactor and revealed astonishing depths of self-loathing. Once, on television, he chastised his fellow Yoruba in the most scabrous language, denigrating whatever qualities he held responsible for their hatred of domination:

“The Yoruba people are too clever for their own good. Because they are educated, they think they know everything and so never recognize where their true interests lie. That makes them act stupidly. If the Yoruba had any sense in their heads, they would have long realized that it is not the portion of the Yoruba race to rule this nation. God has given the Northerners that mandate. The sensible position, therefore, would be to adopt Sani Abacha as a divinely chosen leader and cooperate with him. That way, their interests would be well protected.”

The Northern scion and original propagator of the divine right to rule, Alhaji Maitama Sule, a former Nigerian representative to the United Nations, could not have preached it with greater conviction.

Now it was time to present the divinely anointed to the Yoruba, and Ibadan, his hometown, was Triple A's logical launching pad. The entire forces of the police and army were placed at the business mogul's disposal. A moderate rent-a-crowd had already taken up positions within and around the stadium with YEAA caps, T-shirts, and a few flags. Motorcades and delegations trickled into the stadium, the demeanor of the latter for all the world like that of chain gangs being led to roadside labor. The governor's motorcade would invade the stadium at any moment. Triple A himself arrived in his distinctive armor-plated Mercedes stretch limousine with police escorts and screeching sirens— and promptly ran into an ambush. Unknown to him, a fair portion of the rent-a-crowd were infiltrators from the camp of Comrade Ola Oni, a Marxist agitator from time immemorial, who, with a handful of resisters, had plotted all night in a small lecture room at the University of Ibadan campus. They had moved at an amazing pace through the warrens of Ibadan to mobilize the populace and set them up at strategic positions. Triple A take Ibadan for Abacha? Never! they swore.

There were running battles. Lives were lost, prisoners taken, but the Alhaji's forces were routed. He took refuge in an outside broadcasting van of the television station, sat upon for his own safety by policemen as the opposition combed the nooks and corners of Liberty Stadium, searching for him. Triple A then emerged after dark with a handful of his reconstituted bodyguards and moved to exact revenge for his public humiliation by combing the hospitals one by one, looking for the wounded. At Oluyoro Hospital, he and his men dragged out the wounded—anyone who looked as if he had been in a fracas and was not one of his followers—and shot them in cold blood, shot the doctor who was operating on them, routed the remaining medical attendants, and left other patients without aid.

THE SWOLLEN FACE of Olisa Agbakoba, with one eye closed and blackened— an image that was splayed all over the Nigerian media—told the entire story of a similar contest in Lagos. Olisa, an Igbo living in Lagos, was a human rights lawyer who had immediately responded to Kalu's YEAA by threatening a Two Million Man counterrally of his own within Lagos. He recharged the flagging mood of the opposition and the people responded, coming out in defiance of the cynical orders of the police—the peacekeepers who continued to ban all public gatherings, pronounced them illegal, but were always at the protective service of the YEAAs and AAAs and allied groups.

Although, like that of Comrade Ola Oni, Agbakoba's defiant public rally was to ensure that Abacha did not claim the city of Lagos as conquered territory, it was also partly a response to the wavering that had become apparent in the attitude of some foreign governments, which had begun sliding toward a policy of accommodation. Their diplomatic representatives were telling us bluntly, both outside and within the country, “The opposition appears to have faded away. There is no real action on the ground.” It was an outrageous sentiment. No real action? It was not the opposition that placed its own people in prison dungeons and subjected them to torture. Those victims had not voluntarily submitted themselves to their jailers but had been arrested for
doing
something
! And their innocent relatives and dependents were being held hostage, even children—but
there is no real action
! The sad truth was that most of these governments were eager to return to business as usual. Abacha looked more and more impregnable every day, and they feared that their business interests were being jeopardized through the principled policy of denying a tyrant their recognition.

In the same breath, however, the same governments repudiated any notion of armed resistance! The few bombs that went off—attributed at the time to the opposition—were vigorously condemned by these governments. One government—again our friends the Canadians—demanded from me an unambiguous pledge to refrain from violent tactics. I refused. The nation was being subjected to a sustained regimen of state violence, yet here we were, hamstrung in every way, being asked for a pledge to eschew violence. It struck me as absurd, as it did Chief Tony Enahoro, the chairman of NADECO Abroad. Indignantly he refused to make any such pledge. We both realized that this would cost us much financial assistance from both the Canadian and other governments, but it was not a pledge that we could make honorably.

It was an ironic situation since, even at that stage, we continued to explore strategies for avoidance of a dreaded resolution in an unpredictable armed struggle.

Not surprisingly, the basic handicap of the opposition groups remained— funds. Not even funds for what those governments imagined—explosives, arms, and ammunition—but funds for basic engagement in the most peaceful activities, such as public demonstrations, just enough to print posters and leaflets and pay for transportation, fuel, first aid, and medical bills. Both NADECO and UDFN received urgent appeals from Olisa Agbakoba, who had grasped the full foreign implications of Abacha's expanding campaigns for “popular approval” and recognized the need to thwart or counter them. His desperate appeal to us on the outside for his Lagos campaign was one of the lowest moments for me personally, since I understood the critical nature of his undertaking. The public face of resistance had to be bolstered, or else other governments would join Bill Clinton in what—in our view—surely ranked as the most execrable pronouncement of his career. Asked, as he stopped in Senegal on his 1998 African tour, what would be his reaction toward Abacha's now-apparent bid for self-succession, the leader of the world's most populous democratic nation replied, in obvious reference to the fifteen-year-old self-transformation of Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings of Ghana into a civilian president, Well, it is not unknown where a military dictator has taken that route, shed the military uniform for the civilian, and thereby saved his country from the edge of chaos. As long as he is able to win the people's mandate!

Words to that effect, of such devastating potential for numerous other nations in Nigeria's shoes, made Susan Rice, by then Clinton's undersecretary of state for Africa, throw herself into damage control. She issued an immediate disclaimer, insisting that her president's words had been taken out of context or distorted, assured the world that America's policy toward unelected rulers remained the same, and so on. Too late. The damage had been done, and it was extensive. Abacha no longer needed to await the steamrolled affirmation of the people's will. The words had hardly rolled off Bill Clinton's tongue than Abacha shed all further coyness and declared himself a presidential candidate. The appeal for material help from the home front attained a truly frantic intensity.