They don’t call Nigeria a football nation for nothing. If anything, our running round in circles makes the appellation apt, even if that wasn’t the real reason for the nomenclature. After all, IBB was called Maradona at some point.
I watched with ho.rror as Nigerian politicians jostled over themselves to launch ‘A journey In Service,’ written by one of Nigeria’s most controversial rulers, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida [IBB], who held the nation spellbound from 1985 to 1993.
I came into journalism in 1988 at the peak of IBB’s dictatorship and my professional journey was nearly truncated on account of his ruthless wa.r against the media—the southwest media, to be precise.
When The PUNCH, alongside other vocal media, was shut down in the aftermath of the media outcry that greeted the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election won by MKO Abiola, it was a dark period in our national history as Nigerians quickly latched on to the foreign media, especially the CNN and BBC, for News about their country.
Naturally, many journalists lost their job—that is, those who were lucky to have survived parcel bombing, orchestrated road crash de.aths and unsolved assa.ssin.ations suspected to have been perpetrated by the twin e.vil administrations of IBB and later, Gen. Sani Abacha.
Newspaper publishers also went into guerilla journalism. It was baptism of fire, as those of us who were retained after unavoidable mass sackings awaited highly guarded instructions about where our workplace would be, virtually on a daily basis.
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After The PUNCH couldn’t sustain the Top Life Magazine that served as a stop-gap after our office was shut down at gun.point in 1994 by the Gen Sani Abacha regime, I joined Bayo Onanuga’s AM News.
Mr. Onanuga had resigned from African Concord Magazine published by MKO Abiola in protest against the publisher’s directive that he apologize to IBB over a cover story that was highly critical of the dictator. He then went on to found The News Magazine alongside Babafemi Ojudu, Seye Kehinde, Dapo Olorunyomi and a handful of others.
I stayed with AM News for over a year, alternating between it and a secondary school nearby when salary delay was a regular experience at the media house on account of military clampdown that also forced advertisers to avoid us like a plague if they wanted to stay alive and in business. That was how dangerous it was to be a Nigerian living and doing business in Nigeria under IBB and, later, Abacha!
The IBB military regime held one of the longest and most expensive transition programmes in political history, yet truncated by the dictator’s unwillingness to relinquish power until he ran out of luck.
IBB’s rule effectively midwifed the slide of the national currency as he catapulted to IMF’s advice that the Naira was overvalued and that its devaluation was one of the ways to not only build the Nigerian economy, but it was also a condition for the IMF loan that his regime felt the nation couldn’t do without. Nigeria got the loan and, like plenty others after it, it disappeared into the sinkhole of the burgeoning industry known as corruption.
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IBB’s regime witnessed some of the best times of the Nigerian economic history. Oil earning was high. And Nigeria profited highly from the Gulf War because of that. However, Nigerians woke up one in.glorious day to learn that a whopping $4 billion earned from oil sale during the Gulf War had vanished. IBB didn’t offer any explanation for it.
At the book launch on Thursday, Senior Citizen Atiku Abubakar commended IBB for midwifing Nigeria’s privatization process. Good talk. Except that the privatized public entities were bought by people in government with public money. And because the owners are more powerful than the State, no one could challenge the poor but expensive service they render, and the nation has so far been the worse for it.
Baba Obasanjo has also advised IBB to ignore the critics of his book; while the so-called crème-de-la-crème of the Nigerian politics have launched the book with the most astonishing fanfare and mindboggling amount of money.
In one breath, President Tinubu criticized IBB’s administration and, in the same breath, he said, “Thank you for who you are.” Really?
While it’s astonishing that IBB could brazenly seek to rewrite history in his feeble days, I’m not surprised that politicians from all parts of the country suck up to him. After all, while the media counted its unquantifiable losses when IBB bestrode the nation like a colossus, politicians kept rebranding themselves under his chameleonic, endless transition programme—a rebranding that has continued to this moment.
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They don’t call Nigeria a football nation for nothing. If anything, our running round in circles makes the appellation apt, even if that wasn’t the real reason for the nomenclature. After all, IBB was called Maradona at some point.
And the dribbling has only got worse under the present crop of politicians, many of whom have expressed gratitude for IBB’s mentoring. Ironic.
