IBB: The ‘president’ that really was
In Nigeria, ideas about our history tend to be frozen or cast in stone once a particular interpretation takes hold of the media or popular imagination. New perspectives about the same epochal events in our past or the persons who played central roles in them are admitted. The result is a political history that remains largely unknown.
In a two-part article published in several newspapers only last month, to give a single example, a former federal civil servant and syndicated columnist, Eric Teniola, merely repeated the same well-known, perhaps worn out, argument that Nigeria was created primarily to enhance colonial administrative convenience, and no more. The articles were just as familiarly titled ‘The Mistake of 1914’.
Now, who has not heard that before? The idea that the creation of Nigeria was a mistake continues to be regurgitated, even by people one would expect to know better by now. But it is neither the only interpretation of Nigeria’s emergence as a country, nor necessarily the correct one. We could argue, for example, that the British amalgamated Nigeria because our forebears had done more than half the job already.
Geography and military force are perhaps the two most crucial historical elements in the formation of states, not culture or language. For nearly a hundred years before the amalgamation, the whole of Northern Nigeria was already a federation of sorts. So was SouthWestern Nigeria, which then stretched to areas in present-day Benin Republic and Togo. And since no unsurmountable geographical barrier exists anywhere in Nigeria from Maiduguri to the banks of the Atlantic in Lagos, Nigeria’s formation could well have happened without British colonial intervention just as with it.
So one could just as well argue that Nigeria’s formation was not a matter of convenience, but of completion; the British took to a logical conclusion a process that had been well underway for nearly a century before they arrived. The Oyo Empire of the time, the Benin Kingdom, the Emirates in the North, anyone with sufficient military might and enough will to venture could have formed the country. The British had both, used them, and here we are. No point fretting about some imaginary mistake.
My real point today, however, is that the history of Nigeria’s military and its role in our political development has so far only been told in the same casual and repetitive manner as the narrative of the mistake of 1914. So also are the narratives around the men who played various parts in the military incursions into our politics, and none more than Nigeria’s former military leader, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, who turned 80 last Tuesday. But for the present and future generations of Nigerians to properly understand Babangida’s role in our political development, we must first grasp the historical significance of the institution through which he governed—or ruled—for eight years.
In particular, we must try, as reflexively and soberly as we could, to understand the political and constitutional possibilities that lie under the term ‘military president’, a title Babangida selected for himself the very day he assumed the highest office in the land. Could a gap-toothed major-general refer to himself, and be referred to at home and beyond, as ‘President’? More importantly, could such a reference have any bearing on the character and content of the government he presided over for the equivalence of two terms in our current democratic system?
In Nigeria, military governments of the past were, and still are, referred to as ‘regimes’