June 12 Story: The Other Side
M. T. Usman
ear Segun, while your piece last week on ‘June 12: A Complicated Story’ was quite revealing, President Muhammadu Buhari’s decision can stand on its own merit since it may help provide the much needed closure to a protracted national crisis. But it also cannot be divorced from the politics of the 2019 elections; after all, the opportunity was there in 2016 and 2017. But you are on point that Buhari’s traditional support base will see nothing amiss in this climactic presidential decision.
Triumphalism unfortunately is already evident in the way the decision is being interpreted, if not celebrated, especially in the South-west. Now, every two-bit Yoruba group is issuing demands for one thing or the other. The closure sought may not be achieved, after all. For those who may have forgotten, the Yoruba people appropriated June 12 only after the fact of victory. Before the election, they were largely indifferent, if not hostile, to the late M.K.O Abiola on account of his anti-Awolowo credentials dating back to the Second Republic. Yes, he did garner Yoruba votes but that was because the political arrangement then admitted only two political parties.
When the opportunity arose in 1999, the Yoruba people floated first, the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and later, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). Meanwhile, after the annulment of the presidential election, Abiola didn’t recoil into his ethnic-group shell but was willy-nilly sucked into it by a Yoruba establishment looking for a casus beli.
In June 1993, prominent figures of the Northern political establishment denounced the annulment whose sole purpose was to extend the tenure of the military government then in office. That administration would still have voided the results of the election whoever emerged the winner. The miscalculation was that the “winner” and the rest of the political class would then quietly acquiesce. It didn’t happen that way. Afenifere promptly interpreted the action of the military government as the wish and desire of the North and proceeded to engage in a campaign of demonisation that subsists to this day.
The registration of AD as well as the contrivance which produced two Yoruba candidates were intended to instal a Yoruba man in Aso Rock as president, but it produced “the wrong Yoruba man” in General Olusegun Obasanjo who wasn’t a darling of the Southwest because he was accused of robbing the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo of victory in the 1979 presidential election. It’s a safe bet therefore that if Chief Olu Falae had won in 1999, his victory would have gone down well in the region.
All said, President Buhari has done well for the country by righting the wrong of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election and recognising Abiola as the winner. The worry is that those who insist on ‘June 12 or nothing’ may not stop its regular exhumation for their own selfish political ends.