Neither May 29 nor June 12
polling day, it is also elementary politics that voter turnout is a reflection of peoples’ faith in an election. So how the end product of a transition programme that had been rejected as a sham and a charade would suddenly transmute into a cause for celebration is something that I, for one, have never been able to fathom.
In February 1994, the Centre for Public Policy Analysis, Ibadan, organized a seminar at Premier Hotel, on “Building a New Nigeria.” I was a resource person at the seminar. One key participant was Professor Tam David-West who needs no introduction in this country. Another was the late Marxist lecturer in the city’s university, Comrade Ola Oni. He later became a senator during
Babangida’s regime.
During the seminar, David-West threw a bombshell when he said “Every election since 1959 has been rigged.” Some incredulous listeners in the audience asked if he meant June 12 as well. David-West answered with an emphatic “Yes”.
Comrade Oni, a die-hard Awoist if ever there was one, was even more damning than David-West. June 12th, he agreed with DavidWest had been rigged. “I was there”, he said. “I know what happened.” Abiola won, he said, not because June 12 was free and fair. Abiola won, he said, because “he prostrated before the North.”
The Abiola I knew from my days of reporting the 1978 Constituent Assembly in which he was a prominent member, has never been anybody’s stooge. He always knew what he wanted, and, the successful business mogul that he was, he knew, unlike so many Awoists, that you got results by building bridges not by abusing your perceived enemies.
So over a period of several decades he built bridges across religious and regional divides. If Oni called this prostration before the North, many reasonable Nigerians would see it as building bridges to a section of the country with the single largest number of voters. And his approach almost paid off because even if you discounted all the votes Abiola got in his region, he still won the election because of his resounding defeat of his rival, Alhaji Bashir Tofa, in his own region.
He failed, not because the North rejected him - it didn’t. He failed because his friends who used dubious means to clear the way for him in their apparently mistaken belief that he will not win the election used the same means to stop him. The chief should have known that the chickens never fail to come back to roost.
Because the means never justifies the end, at least in principle, and even more importantly, because, as the “June Twelvers” themselves would be the first to assert, Nigeria is yet to experience the genuine article, neither May 29 nor June 12 qualify to be Nigeria’s Democracy Day.