How we ended up in the Abacha era

Abimbola Adelakun

The present times in Nigeria have lately been compared to the
days of the dark-goggled general, Sani Abacha. Part of what the
folk making the comparison are wondering is how we crawled
ourselves back into the hole we thought we escaped. So, here is a
quick backward glance on the road that brought us here.

In the run-up to the 2015 elections, when the “anything but
(Goodluck) Jonathan” din was at its zenith, one of the absurdities
that characterised the period was the rash of amnesties given
Candidate Muhammadu Buhari over his repressive actions as military
head of state between 1983 and 1985. Trumpeting Buhari as a
“converted democrat,” a deluge of essays informed us that if those
who personally and grievously suffered his maladministration could
forgive him in the interest of the nation, other Nigerians too
should forgive him and move on. Nigeria, these essayists
insinuated, was at the crossroads and sorely needed a leadership
change.

The injunctions to forgive ­and forget came from surprising
quarters that included intellectuals and elders who should have
known better. One of the most astonishing for me was by Tunde
Thompson. Thompson and his colleague, Nduka Irabor, were the first
victims of Buhari’s infamous “Decree 4,” an anti-press draconian
diktat that protected public officers from the shame of their
bureaucratic shortcomings. In 2015, Thompson endorsed Buhari. That,
of course, was his prerogative. What I found repulsive was the
unprincipled rhetorical gymnastics he had to perform to extricate
Buhari from any moral responsibility for the abuse of power he
suffered. I do not believe that Thompson was as naïve about the
workings of the machinery of governance as he portrayed himself. He
– like other “forgivers” of Buhari’s sins – was probably
enthusiastic about the promise of change that they re-victimised
themselves to set their abuser free.

There were two important nuggets Thompson and co forgot. One,
while they might have been the faces of the excesses of the regime,
the wounds sustained from the abuses of that autocracy were not
unique to them such that they could unilaterally declare
forgiveness and exonerate Buhari from culpability. The trauma of
that period cut into the flesh of the entire society and the
cicatrix it left on the surface of Nigeria’s body still itches to
this day. Nigerians went through abuses that grated our collective
psyche, wrecked our senses of personhood and nationhood, and
destructively inveighed on our corporate ethics such that some of
us can no longer discern right from wrong anymore.

Two, Buhari himself did not deny responsibility for his despotic
decrees but instead doubled down on the necessity of inflicting
cruel punishment on the nation. Those who are familiar with this
column will recall that I have said this a few times: my respect
for Buhari dissolved to the last atom when I read an interview he
granted during his 70th birthday celebrations. They asked him about
his infamous Decree 2 and he, despite the benefit age and hindsight
should had granted him to reflect, still maintained his
sanctimonious stance that he did what was right. I concluded at the
time that this man did not think about things.

It is precisely this lack of rationality – the arrogant
unwillingness to engage critical thoughts on history – and how it
might shape both his legacy and the future of the nation that makes
him dangerous. Add to that the expectations of the Nigerians who
voted him to bring an iron hand of discipline to the nation whose
dysfunctionality was diagnosed as bordering on the looseness of
individual and institutional morals. What you get is a man who
makes savage and atrocious attacks on civil liberties. In 2015, to
have urged ourselves to show some restraint in the enthusiasm about
Buhari’s potential, and insist the man reflect on his brutal past
was almost an act of indulgence. Now we can look back and see that
those who slapped him with the label of a “born-again democrat,”
and forgave him without him soliciting it, created the monster that
now haunts us. We are stuck with a government that weaponises power
solely for self-aggrandisement and jingoism.

When he became President in 2015, the first omen of what we
would contend with was the move to bar the AIT from covering
presidential activities as payback for its opposition to his
candidature. Although that measure failed because of the blowback,
the tendency to “squeeze” people who express their democratic
agencies by standing against his administration has been the
defining ethos of Aso Rock. They have come up with different ruses
of curtailing democratic freedoms either by using legislation such
as the one that pretends to tackle “hate speech” or the one that
uses the court to declare antagonisms as “terrorism.” These are
military tactics being repurposed for an ostensibly civilian
era.

The administration has managed to clip the autonomy of other
arms of government that could check its excesses. The legislature
is full of their minions, and since the raid of the homes of
serving Justices of the Supreme Court on suspicion of corruption,
the message on how power will play out in his version of
“democracy” is clear. There have been many cases of abuses of power
from overzealous government officials who take their cues from the
Presidency’s body language. This is why we have an abusive military
that not only kills hapless civilians (think of the Shi’ites, the
IPOB marchers, and even lately, policemen) but will not even
condone criticisms of censoring organisations. Someone like
Thompson will swear that none of these excesses – also think of
that ludicrous instance of that time in 2016 when the DSS raided
forex dealers to force them to sell at stipulated rates – has
anything to do with the man at the helm of leadership. His kind of
willed naiveté is why democracy has lost more grounds since
2015.

Today, some of those who criticise the government have been
picked up and detained at unknown locations. We live in a democracy
where the Presidency has no qualms asking law enforcement agents to
be “ruthless” with those they say are election riggers. On
Saturday, the President himself gave a mandate to the military to
“identify and eliminate” the bandits troubling the country. We live
in times when security agents – with their inimical record of
cruelty against civilians – are publicly given the charge to be
judge and execute crimes without recourse to democratic
procedures.

The case of SaharaReporters publisher, Omoyele Sowore, is
another example of what we are losing. Sowore is a DSS detainee,
and they are scrambling to something with which to charge him. What
they came up with from their so-called “painstaking investigation”
would have been laughable if the man’s life and well-being were not
at stake. The demands Sowore made with #RevolutionNow were not
outside the legitimate claims one can make from a democratic
government, but he is being punished for dissent as if it is 1984
all over again.

Recently, Prof Wole Soyinka complained that we are back in the
dark, repressive days of Abacha. Well, the truth is, we walked into
all of these with our eyes wide open when we handed over the reins
of a fragile polity to a man who never atoned for his original
sins. When he got to power, the first thing he did was to cast off
the pretences and show his true self. Now that developments such as
attacks on democratic freedoms and Buhari’s anti-Midas touch on the
economy are pushing us to re-engage the questions evaded earlier,
we need to return to where the rain started beating us. We cannot
afford to spend the next four years fighting a government that
wants to take tyrannical liberties with civil liberties while other
elemental issues of development get elided.

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