Babangida, Dele Giwa, and June 12

Nobody had expected that Gen. Ibrahim Babangida would be truthful in all the claims in his autobiography or that there would not be twists of history in his narrations and recollections. After all, autobiographies in their very nature are typically replete with embellishments and overstatements of personal acts of heroism. In my preview of the book, titled A Journey in Service, published three weeks before its launch on February 20, I had forewarned that the book may not offer much more than we had known on the major issues of his eight-year rule. I noted that because most of those who were part of his government had passed away, “IBB therefore has enough motivation to engage in revisionism and embellishment of his story.” I wrote, “Babangida has a lot to tell Nigerians, and I hope that he will be honest and candid. Coming this late, will IBB’s book be worth the wait? Will he give honest answers to the many puzzles that dogged his administration, or is this a mere attempt to burnish his image and rewrite history as he prepares for the final phase of his life? It’s been a generation since Gen. Babangida hurriedly put together a contraption called an interim national government and left office after an eight-year deceptive dictatorship. His transition programme was a farce, illusory and wasteful.’’

I have just finished reading the book, and I must confess that I was not prepared for the scale of obfuscations and revisionisms embedded in it, and in no other section is this more obvious than the one on the Dele Giwa assassination. Babangida claims that Giwa was killed as “part of a series of booby traps and acts of destabilisation being hatched against (his) administration’’ and it was meant as a “political blow to the young military administration.” He says the insinuations that the parcel bomb had emanated from “the headquarters of the administration as cheap and foolish,asking, “Why would an officially planned high-level assassination carry an apparent forwarding address of the killer?’’

In other words, IBB is arguing that, if indeed the military or his government had dispatched the bomb, the parcel would not have borne the coat of arms and the words “From the C-in-C.” He blames Newswatch management for frustrating police investigation by “recourse to play to the gallery of public sentiment” and noted that “the involvement of high-profile lawyer Gani Fawehinmi and the populist slant given to the case by the media poisoned the investigation with political overtones. The investigation into the Giwa murder became part of the tools in the armour of a growing political opposition targeted at discrediting the military over the planned political transition programme and human rights issues.

This is as specious as you can possibly get, and to blame the management of Newswatch and Gani Fawehinmi (who died many years ago) is, to say the least, very cruel. Many Nigerians are still convinced that the regime and/or the military authorities were complicit in the murder of Giwa. No civilian individual or organisation had the technology, capability, and sophistication to deliver a parcel bomb in Nigeria in 1986; and even as I write, the technique of packing explosives into a package, wrapping, sealing, and delivering it to the intended receiver in such a way that it could only explode when opened is a complicated technique available only to military and security authorities. That is why parcel bombs have not been used to settle scores with all the political assassinations we have had since 1999. The idea that Giwa’s murder was all “booby traps’’ and a “political blow’’ meant to destabilise the regime suggests that Babangida knows more than he’s telling us. As experts often tell us, understanding the motive could be crucial to solving a crime.

Read also: A Journey in Service: Warts and all, Babangida enriches Nigerian history

In the days leading up to the assassination, Giwa was thoroughly hounded, harassed, and hunted by the officials of the military intelligence. He was falsely accused of gun running and other heinous crimes. Afraid for his safety and security, Giwa reported the matter to his lawyer and senior government officials, but the snare had already been set up for him. The parcel was delivered to him a day after a military intelligence officer called Giwa’s home and asked for the address, and Giwa’s wife, Fumi, who took the call, innocently obliged the caller. Curiously, IBB omitted this damning sequence of events in his book.

That the parcel bore the seal of the government was just a clever ploy to deceive the recipient into opening the package. The planners of the plot had known that since Giwa was in regular contact with the President, and had previously received letters from the government; such an insignia on the package would be a convincing reason for him to open it. The aim was to kill him at all costs.

I have spoken to Ray Ekpu, the editor-in-chief of Newswatch, and he’s promised to issue a statement on IBB’s claims after consulting Dan Agbese, Yakubu Mohammed, and their lawyers. I look forward to reading their rejoinder and Ekpu’s autobiography set for publication next year. I am sure he will tell the Giwa story more truthfully.

Another disturbing aspect of the book is Babangida blaming Sani Abacha for the annulment of the June 12 election. He claims that the election was annulled by forces loyal to Sani Abacha while he, IBB, was in Katsina to visit with the Yara’Adua family that had just lost its patriarch. The government and the military were polarised and split in the middle, with some officials opting for the annulment while others were against it. He stated he was afraid for his life and safety and believed that Abacha was ready to lead a coup and assassinate him and/or Abiola. Babangida concludes that it was Abacha that deceived Abiola into rejecting his offer to be head of the interim government he was setting up.

By blaming his failure to hand over and conclude the eight-year transition on Sani Abacha, IBB appears as a coward who could not rein in a fearsome fiend. In one breath, he commends Abacha for his loyalty and sparing his life in two instances, and in another, he presents Abacha as an evil, power-drunk officer who was desperate to torpedo the transition programme and plunge the country into turmoil in order to take power. If IBB knew this much about him, why was Abacha not retired? It is a reasonable assumption that the two might have entered into a pact to let Abacha take over after IBB had “stepped aside.’’

Babangida’s accounts of the Giwa murder and the annulment of the June 12 election nearly rendered the whole volume distasteful. But it’s a good reading, rich in history, and well researched and written. I suspect that it was ghostwritten by Yemi Ogunbiyi and Chidi Amuta, two of Nigeria’s outstanding journalists, who are well acknowledged by the author for their support. In fact, IBB’s book has a striking similarity in style and language to Ogunbiyi’s memoir, The Road Never Forgets, published in 2022.

Etim Etim is a journalist and author.