President Buhari is a man who speaks his mind. He has an enormous capacity for shooting from the hip. As many of his off-the-cuff comments, such as calling Nigerian youths “lazy”, have shown, he is unfiltered and relishes provocation. He is much like President Trump, who is well known for “speaking his mind”, and for causing offence. But words are powerful, and presidents should be circumspect and sensitive to sensibilities across their nation. Sadly, President Buhari often fails this test. But he fails it profoundly with his frequent eulogising of the late despot and kleptomaniac, General Sani Abacha.
Recently, when addressing his supporters, President Buhari said “I don’t care what opinion people have of Abacha”, saying that the late dictator “loved Nigeria”. But how? Well, because he set up the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), which he appointed Buhari to lead, and through which he “developed” Nigeria’s infrastructure i.e. by building roads. This was not the first time that Buhari would publicly endorse and panegyrise Abacha. In 2008, on the tenth anniversary of Abacha’s death, Buhari said he “never stole” Nigeria’s money. All of this is sad and odious. It’s so for two reasons.
First, it is extremely offensive for President Buhari to ignore Abacha’s heinous crimes, his murderous repression, and elevate him to national heroship. Surely, Hitler built roads, hospitals and schools, but woe betide any German president or chancellor who says: “I don’t care about people’s opinion of Hitler, he loved this country, he built roads”. Abacha was Nigeria’s Mini Hitler – fascist and despotic. Even if he built roads – not with his own money, by the way, but with the nation’s resources – he terrorised this country, destroyed its soul and traumatised its people. The infrastructure development, if any, paled into insignificance beside the enormous damage he did to Nigeria’s polity and national psyche. Thus, by saying “I don’t care about” people’s opinion of Abacha, President Buhari gratuitously insulted this country and hurt the sensibilities of its people.
Second, by saying that Abacha “never stole”, Buhari does irreparable damage to his anti-graft reputation. A leader who is seriously fighting corruption would not spare even his own family, but Buhari has a long history of double standards, bias and selectivity, in his anti-corruption crusade. He often sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil when corruption is detected in his camp, but huffs and puffs, threatening fire and brimstone, when corruption is suspected in the camp of the opponents. Recently, his government published a list of corrupt politicians in Nigeria, but they were all from the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP); none from his own party, All Progressives Congress (APC), even though many former PDP leaders accused of corruption are now in APC. It was a blatant trivialisation of corruption. But Buhari took that trivialisation from the ridiculous to the absurd when he said that Abacha “never stole”.
Truth is, if Nigeria has a hall of infamy, and it should, Abacha’s name should be ingrafted in it. The evidence against the late despot is so overwhelming that no self-respecting individual, let alone the president of this country, should try to exonerate or rehabilitate him. Of course, Abacha’s kleptomania, his despotism and, indeed, his wreckage of the economy are matters of public knowledge. But as President Buhari and other Abacha apologists have engaged in Abachaic denial or revisionism, let us briefly remind ourselves of some of the late dictator’s atrocities.
Take first his plundering of the nation’s resources. In 2004, Abacha was listed as the 4th most corrupt leader in history. Even western governments, which are normally silent about foreign leaders hiding stolen money in their countries, could not ignore the damning evidence against Abacha. The Swiss government, having accepted that Abacha ran a criminal organisation that siphoned money out of Nigeria, agreed to repatriate about US$505 million of his frozen money to Nigeria. The American government, in fact, created what it called the “Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative”, where about US$480 million Abacha’s stolen assets were kept. A US Assistant Attorney General said in 2014 that “rather than serve his country, General Abacha used his public office in Nigeria to loot millions of dollars, engaging in brazen acts of kleptocracy”.
In her book, Reforming the Unreformable, the former finance minister Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala detailed with an impressive level of granularity how Abacha looted and laundered money out of Nigeria through the central bank and contract inflation. She said that in the five years of his rule, Abacha, his family and their associates looted and sent abroad “an estimated $3 billion to $5 billion of Nigeria’s public assets”. These sums, she added, “amounted to 2.6 to 4.3% of the 2006 GDP, and 20.6 to 34.4% of the 2006 federal budget”. She went on: “At the upper end of the range, the amount stolen is larger than the 2006 education and health federal budgets combined”. Yet, this was the same person that President Buhari said “loved Nigeria”. It beggars belief!
But what about Abacha’s despotism? Well, he was also among the world’s most barbaric despots. General Abacha became head of state in November 1993 following General Babangida’s iniquitous annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, and after easing out the feeble Shonekan-led interim government. Once he took over, Abacha used brutal force to entrench himself in power. He forced several prominent Nigerians to flee the country, jailed or detained many of those who stayed at home, including the winner of the June 12 election, MKO Abiola, who later died in prison, and sent hired assassins to kill many pro-democracy activists. In his most brazen act of brutality, Abacha executed, in November 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists! Under his regime, Nigeria became a pariah state, ostracised by many other countries and ejected from the Commonwealth.
As a magazine publisher in London in the 1990s, I followed the June 12 saga and Abacha’s reign of terror closely. I remember interviewing Baroness Lynda Chalker, then Britain’s Overseas Development Minister, who said that the UK and the EU had stopped military assistance and other aid to Nigeria and that they would have no government-to-government contacts with Nigeria until Abacha returned the country to democratic rule. But Abacha had no such plan. Ironically, while he sent troops to restore democracy in Liberia and Sierra Leone, he brutally suppressed dissent at home. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Abacha “assembled a personal security force of some 3000 men”. He wanted to be president for life. Well, he was. Except that it was a short life. He died in June 1998 at the age of 55!
Amid all of this, Abacha wrecked the economy. When he took over in 1994, he introduced a massive programme of regulation and control, with pegged exchange and interest rates and other restrictions that created huge distortions and stifled the economy. Although his January 1995 budget was hailed for reversing most of the restrictions, the so-called “guided deregulation” that he introduced did not last. Following the killing of Saro-Wiwa in November 1995 and the attendant hostile international reactions, Abacha simply reverted to type. Meanwhile, massive disinvestments were taking place, as foreign firms pulled out of Nigeria in droves. The economy was in the doldrums; inflation was around 100%, budget deficit was 10% of GDP, unemployment skyrocketed, interest rate, even pegged, was 21%.
Yet, for Buhari, Abacha was the best of Nigeria’s past leaders! It’s as if his stupendous kleptomania never happened; as if his reign of terror never happened; and as if he never wrecked the economy. Buhari is glorifying kleptomania and canonising terror, presumably because Abacha put him in charge of the PTF and he wants to defend a “legacy”.
But, in truth, it’s more than that. Buhari and Abacha were each other’s alter ego: taciturn, close-minded and extremely self-willed. As a military dictator, Buhari was almost equally brutal, and Abacha’s dirigiste economic policies mimicked Buhari’s own in the mid-1980s. Little wonder, then, that Buhari is affectionate towards Abacha even in death. But Abacha’s rule was one of the darkest moments in Nigeria’s history. As president, Buhari shouldn’t be insulting Nigerians. But he is, with statements like “I don’t care what people think, Abacha loved Nigeria”. A key test in politics is “Whose side are you on?” By praising Abacha, Buhari shows he’s on the side of a fascist, a kleptomaniac! Sad!
Olu Fasan
