Much public discussion has followed the launch of Ibrahim Babangida’s memoir. The book titled A Journey in Service is an apologetic attempt at falsification of history. The focus of discussion on the book has been the annulment of the June 12 elections. This is understandable for sections of the ruling class. But working-class activists and revolutionary youths must have a sharper class understanding of IBB’s place in history.
The IBB Presidential Library project, launched that day, garnered a remarkable N17.5 billion in donations. This was from just four or five billionaires. And this is in a country where the national minimum wage is N100,000.00 and 63% of the population live in multidimensional poverty. It is significant, not just because it is sickening. Its importance lies in illuminating our warranted concern regarding IBB’s place in history.
Each of those billionaires orated about how IBB made them. We must not forget what he made of us, as he made them. And we must tell those who never know. That must be at the heart of our story about IBB’s place in history.
“The June 12 saga” and tales by moonlight
The annulment of the June 12 election is often considered the albatross around Babangida’s neck in history. But for revolutionaries to still have this position decades after is to repeat what was done at the time; queuing behind one section of the ruling class, in interpretation as much as with deeds, instead of standing up for our own class – the working class – in the class struggle.
Our position as the May 31st Movement (M31M) at the time was “Neither IBB nor MKO”(and later “Neither MKO nor Abacha”). The reasons for this were clear. MKO Abiola did not represent the interests of working-class people any more than IBB did. Their conflict and all related sideshows to it, real or contrived, were intra-class battles between different fractions of our oppressors, all of whom shared the commitment to continue with our exploitation in the interest of capital.
It should be recalled that during the Hope 93 campaign, MKO Abiola dismissed the call for a Sovereign National Conference, which was then the rallying cry of the radical left, for socio-economic restructuring as well as to address the national question. And despite titling his manifesto as “Farewell to Poverty”, if he had been sworn in to implement it, it would only have led to furthering poverty for the vast majority of the population because it was based on the same for-profit motive of the IBB regime.
As I pointed out in several rallies at the time, it would not take up to a year before “Hope 93” would have given way to “disillusionment ‘94”. Like Peter Obi thirty years later, the greatest gift of history to MKO was that he did not win, allowing for the beatifying of someone whose head should otherwise have been impaled on a pike by working-class people.
It was clear to the radical left that neither of the flagbearers in the 1993 elections represented the interests of the working masses. In fact, we knew that the entire transition programme was a case of the more you look, the less you see, or as Alao Aka-Bashorun put it, IBB had “a hidden agenda” for the programme.
Campaign for Democracy (CD) which was the united front of radical and revolutionary progressive forces called for a boycott of the election. But we were not strong enough to put this into effect. The only place where a boycott held was in Ogoni land. Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was a leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), was also a member of the National Implementation Committee (NIC) of CD.
The position of CD before the annulment was three-fold: forcing the abdication of power by the military junta of IBB through mass mobilisation, formation of a popular provisional government, and its convoking of a Sovereign National Conference.
Switching full-swing to support for restoration of the June 12 mandate to MKO Abiola was an opportunistic exploitation of the moment laced with the belief that this was necessary to tap into the power of mass anger that erupted in the wake of the annulment. But it did not have to be so, as I argued to no avail at a meeting called at the beginning of those heady days at the CD headquarters on Imaria street.
Eventually the logic of supporting MKO Abiola and his mandate’s faction of the ruling class drove sections of the radical left with illusions in the ever elusive national bourgeoisie and a national democratic revolution into support or tacit acceptance of the Abacha coup. When it became clear that they had all been played by Abacha, our good friends on the left still ended in the treacherous hands of NADECO; learning nothing about the pitfall of faith in any section of the ruling class.
Interestingly, MKO appreciated the fact that, despite whatever rift there was between him and IBB, they both had much more in common with each other as arch-capitalists, than he would ever have with his newfound friends in the prodemocracy movement. Even though he knew that CD was mobilising down to show him support on 5 July 1993, he was not ready to receive us.
We were initially told that he was sleeping. It would later be realised that he had spent the night in Abuja, talking with IBB on how they could resolve the matter, hoping that he would be given power. He flew back that morning to come and sleep. The only reason he eventually came out to address the crowd was because of the mammoth-sized crowd that was outside which was surprising to everybody including CD and its leadership which had rubbed the kettle of mobilisation to summon a djinn beyond our wildest dreams.
Abiola’s disdain for the working masses and youth did not end there. Students from across schools in Lagos state stormed his residence in the wake of Justice Dolapo Akinsanya’s 10 November 1993 judgment declaring the Interim National Government (ING) illegal. They urged him to declare himself president. But he simply advised them to go back to their schools to study, hinting that he felt they were not serious students, and asking them to leave things for the adults to handle. All that while, MKO was in discussion with Abacha who overthrew the Interim National Government a week later.
And we should not forget that “evidence suggests that Abiola provided financial support for at least two military coups in the 1980s”. He was also suspected to have been a CIA asset, via the International Telephones and Telecoms, “International Thief, Thief” as Fela called it. This was the same company that the CIA had used to push through the right wing coup that brought in General Augusto Pinochet as dictator in Chile, after murdering President Salvadore Allende on 11 September 1973),
IBB’s true crimes against the working people
The story here is not about June 12. A lot has been written about it, and we have contributed to this discussion over the years, highlighting its significance and lessons for the working class, in the face of a myriad of perspectives that fudge class lines. It is in this light that it is important to point out that June 12 was not so much at the heart of the problem with IBB for working-class people as he and others, including activists on the left, continue to present it to us. This is a distraction from his real place of infamy in history, for working-class people.
IBB’s transgression lies in his primary place as the avenging spirit of capitalism laying the foundation for the most rabid capitalist and imperialist exploitation of Nigeria’s working people and natural resources.
Closely related to this are his honing the repressive capacity of the state and poisoning the heart of organised labour with normalisation of the trade union leadership’s bureaucratic powers over rank-and-file workers, and naturalisation of the unions’ politics of class compromise.
It must be added that, though the largest dose of this poison was for organised labour, the Babangida regime served it with breakfast for as many social forces as he could, including the students movement.
Brutally laying the foundations of neoliberal capitalism
In the narrative of his journey of self-service, he continues his ideological service to the ruling class, with the justification of his policies of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation. This of course enriched a few people, like those who pledged the whooping sum of over N17 billion during the book launch. But it worsened the lives and living standards of millions of others. IBB is quiet and does not say a word about his destruction of the lives of working-class people, and the attacks on working class organisations by his junta.
Babangida started his junta’s attacks on the exploited classes whose labour creates the social wealth, and shaping of the economy to better favour the parasitic classes of rich people from day one. His opening card was the deceit of a contrived debate on the IMF loan. His first ace was the first national budget of his regime in 1986. Yusuf Bangura described it as “the most class-conscious national budget since 1980”. It actually might count for the most ferociously class conscious in post-Independence Nigeria. And this was half a year before the formal introduction of the structural adjustment programme (SAP).
The civilian regime of Shehu Shagari and the military junta led by Muhammadu Buhari (in which IBB played a key role) had retrenched up to a million workers and frozen the salaries of civil servants. This lasted all of four years before IBB became military head of state in August 1985. With his typical trickery, he removed this wage freeze to win workers support immediately he came to power.
But what did he do shortly after? He introduced wage cuts of up to 15%. When the trade union centres shouted out against this, he introduced the National Economic Emergency Powers Decree No.22 of 1985. This law legalised the illegitimate deductions. Shortly after, he also amended that law to enable state governments to cut their employees’ salaries, under the guise of “special development levies”.
He used this same decree to proscribe the Nigeria Labour Congress in February 1988, after supporting a faction to establish a contrived case of division in the trade union movement. This tactic of banning the NLC was meant to break organised labour’s back and avoid resistance to his planned increase in fuel pump price that was put into effect on 10 April 1988. There was however stiff response from the working class and youth, despite the NLC ban. But this was not enough to roll back fuel pump price increases, which became central to the neoliberal project of capitalist interests, till today.
SAP was the foundation laying of neoliberalism in Nigeria and across the Global South in the 1980s; a decade which has been described as the “lost decade” for both Africa and Latin America, particularly for the working people in these regions. Babangida was its prophet and high priest. When the nation exploded in revolt against SAP in 1989, he also became executioner. Over a hundred people were killed, most of these on the Bloody Wednesday of “May 31st”. And what did this so-called evil genius have to say about it in his book?
He described the “so-called SAP riots” as the work of “innocent students,” whose “undue radicalism”, was exploited by “disgruntled politicians” and “ill-informed academics”. While he claimed that the protests did not distract his attention from the economic reform, he was clearly rattled and forced to provide some SAP relief. An important lesson from that pivotal moment is the centrality of workers’ power to defeating the ruling class. If accompanied by a general strike, the anti-SAP revolt could have toppled the regime. This would happen twice in 1993, as both the IBB regime and the Interim National Government crumbled in the midst of mass protests and general strikes, first in August and then November.
Reinforcing repression, deepening incorporation
More than any administration in Nigeria’s history, the Babangida-led junta finetuned the structure and capacities of the repressive apparatus of the Nigerian state against the working people and opposition forces. In his first national broadcast in June 1986, he informed that he would restructure the security architecture.
He dissolved the National Security Organisation (NSO) which was the secret police that was up in 1976 after the failed Buka Suka Dimka coup. In its place, he set up three structures, the State Security Service (SSS) which also calls itself the Department of State Service (DSS), the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Intelligence Agency (NIA). In doing this, he was guided by the Israeli structure of the Shin Bet, Aman and Mossad, respectively.
We should also not forget that it was the Babangida junta that established the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad in 1992. Apart from SARS as a brutal national unit in the Nigeria Police Force, military administrators in the regime also competed amongst themselves on setting up the most vicious joint squads of police and military forces.
The most ruthless of these joint bodies of repression was Operation Sweep in Lagos state. This pattern did not end with Babangida’s exit from power. It would lurk in the shadows to be called forth to draw blood as it did on 20 October 2020. Those uniformed killers of young Nigerians that tragic night were part of Operation Mesa, a shadowy joint security outfit drawing inspiration from Babangida’s legacy of the use of such joint police and military armed task forces for the most brutish of repression.
It is impossible to defeat the working masses and multitude of youth with repression alone. We are many, and they are few. This much was obvious on 5 July 1993. When hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Lagos, the anti-riot police were overwhelmed. Incorporation and manufactured consent of the oppressed is essential for the oppressor. Babangida was an evil mastermind in playing the co-optation card.
There has been no Nigerian government that used Marxists, socialists, radicals and other progressives of various stripes as much as Babangida’s. But even as he was hugging them, he was also infiltrating the left groups and social movements.
The National Association of Nigerian Students was a major target of the regime. Student activists were not only hounded by the secret and not so secret police, cult groups on campuses, working with the secret police, were mobilised to attack them. Neofascist bodies like the Operation Zero Option (OZO) at the University of Nigeria Nsukka were set up in the 1986-88 period to smash radical left groups and strike fear into the hearts of the mass of students.
When this did not stop the radicalisation of the students movement, the regime tried to split it with the short-lived Wushishi-led factional NANS in 1990/91. That failed, but infiltration did not stop. A number of radical student leaders, as was revealed at the NANS Senate meeting at the end of 1991, were working as agents or operatives of the SSS. These included Chima Okereke, the NANS Secretary General, Faith Osadolor, the Vice President External Affairs and Bola Ajimuda, NANS Senate President.
Beyond infiltration politically, the junta also sowed the seeds of what were alien values to the movement in an earlier period. Students unions then starting seeing themselves as some form of governments: student union governments, SUGs!
But the greatest victory Babangida won for the ruling class was with the number he did on its greatest foe; the working class, or more properly put, the bureaucracy of organised labour.
Under the impact of Babangida’s stick and carrot the trade union bureaucracy evolved, and trade union leaders increasingly became more of “oga” to the members they were supposed to be representing. Jimi Adesina described this process more vividly: they became “neo-Fuhrers”.
There were material and ideological lubrication for the process which Babangida lavishly made available with board appointments, opening the gates to bodies like the national institute of policy and strategic studies, foreign trips and cross-class national leadership retreats, to mention a few. In no time, things ended up like the ending of the story in Animal Farm where it became all but impossible to see any significant difference between the pigs and farmer Jones.
Conclusion
The foregoing is not to say that “June 12” is not significant in Nigeria’s history. It was an important moment then. And it is impossible to have a sound grasp of where we are today without understanding what it was all about. But June 12 was a moment; sparked as intra-class struggle. The transition programme was doomed to be a transition to crisis, with intra-class and inter-class dimensions. It was not for us to queue up behind one section of the capitalist class then. It is not for us to sow illusions of what might have been then, with our interpretation of how it all went down today.
As we could see at the book launch, the different fractions of the ruling class know that what binds them together, against us, is much more than whatever momentary differences they might have. Remnants of the June 12 “national bourgeoisie” whom we lined up behind, like Bola Tinubu, stood as one with their traducers, just as MKO did with IBB and later Abacha, until water pass garri, even when many on the left were crying themselves hoarse with standing on June 12.
It is noteworthy that while June 12 has been the focus of attention of most analysis, some on the left have equally listed out several other crimes of IBB. These include persisting questions about Dele Giwa’s assassination despite Babangida’s unconvincing denial in his book and his petty explanation of why he killed his childhood friend and poet, General Maman Vatsa, to name a few. These even include references to the introduction of SAP as one of the self-serving acts of the so-called Maradona.
It must however be stressed that there is a qualitative difference between the shaping the nature of the political economy, and all other crimes, even if these are important in their own ways. The structural foundations for the most rapacious economic, political and ideological attacks of IBB and his junta against our class, must be of primary concern to us. This is not only historically important. It is also crucial for the generations of today and tomorrow to know and guard themselves against illusion in any section of the ruling class, and stand up for unalloyed commitment to ideas and struggle for revolution from below.
