General Abdulsalami Abubakar
IT is not easy to keep a promise. This is more so when factors extraneous to the promise’s objective intrude. Both General Babangida and General Abacha had made the important promise of returning Nigeria to a halcyon democratic era. After years of turmoil in a political system dominated by soldiers and military politics, the country enthusiastically welcomed those sweet mouthings and swallowed, hook, line and sinker the prettified pronouncements of military leaders who emerged as saints and ended up as sinners. At the end, hopes were sunk in the sludge of controversies, destroyed beyond redemption and, in their place, doubts, despair and despondency were sowed. Above all was the entrenchment of distrust and disbelief of any promises military gentlemen made.
How could General Abdulsalami Abubakar make much difference? The truth is, he has already started doing so. In the last one or so months since his ascention to power, he has made a number of promises and, luckily, fulfilled them. Hence the release of political prisoners, dialogue with various sections of society, including tile suddenly respectable members of the opposition who, for years, remained on the fringes like lepers, rapproachment with other countries, and a continuously repeated pledge to chart an honourable course to return the country to better times. It’s a new dawn.
Last Monday’s speech by the head of state has been hailed by a cross-section of Nigerians as an inspiring one. It contained decisions that for once tallied with the expectation of most of the people, ones arrived at after a series of consultations with opinion makers at home and abroad. By scrapping the political parties and the electoral commission, as well as cancelling all elections held under the dubious system put in place by the Abacha regime, the present administration appears to be genuinely committed to returning sanity to a system wracked by gloom, indecision and wherelessness. As one commentator noted, there has been a bit of something for everyone in Abubakar’s speech. This reporter for one had, while supporting the call for cancelling the Abacha-managed elections, been opposed to the disbandment of the parties and the NECON in the firm belief that it was the leadership that perverted the system rather than vice-versa, that if you replaced the leadership of the parties and the electoral commission with credible people, all other things would fall in place. Besides, the nation can ill-afford to be creating new, expensive political parties and electoral bodies any time there is a new government with a fresh political agenda.
However, this does not presuppose that Abubakar’s unfolding style isn’t inspiring enough. He has decided to take only a year to implement a transition programme in which credible parties would be registered and people from various shades of opinion be given the chance to take part. The government’s resolve to wash its hands off the sponsorship of parties in terms of financing would go a long way in saving costs and dispelling the spectre of favouritism which dogged the experiment with transitions since 1985.
Critics were quick to read similarities between Abacha’s and Abubakar’s transition speeches; Abacha too made lurid promises about returning power to civilians in a very short time, respecting human rights, and having no interest in the final outcome of elections. As it happened, these pledges were booted by Abacha who, through the most peculiar security crackdown, allowed his aides to do exactly the opposite of his earlier commitments.
The great difference is that while both IBB’s and Abacha’s transition programmes were covertly designed to ensure the self-succession of their managers, Abubakar himself appears to have no interest in political office, just as his career shows. Rather than begin with ‘sweet mouth’ while doing nothing concrete, he has set in motion the machinery for the establishment of a system in which citizens could see themselves as in a mirror. Rather than jailing people, he is releasing those jailed.
But of course there are the chronic doubting Thomases still claiming to be seeing in the unfolding events faint signs of problems. They may be seeing double, though. For, the head of state has not really given concrete gounds on which to doubt him. He must have destroyed many careers, including the multi-million dollar June 12 industry, and dashed the dream of many a Nigerian who, propped up by the if-you-are-not-for-us-you-are-against-us style of the last four years, may not make it to the National Assembly again.
But there will be beneficiaries of the cancellations and dissolutions still. Some would land ministerial and or board membership positions to be announced in due course. Others would now have the golden opportunity to float their own political parties where they are boss, get elected to high office and get even with former foes. Out of the whole mishmash would eventually emerge a president.
The next test for General Abdulsalami Abubakar will now be the midwifing of a transition programme which would be transparent, fair and all-encompassing. To do this, the head of state would need to finish the job he has since begun — i.e. purging the regime of most of the people who drew hate to the last government. For, there could be fifth columnists lurking in the dark who might want to derail the administration even if to embarrass it.
Then of course the government must ensure that it keeps to the promise of handing over power as promised after an honest transition. If he succeeds in doing that, the head of state would retire quietly as the best military ruler Nigeria had in twenty years. The nation would have come full circle, considering that it was in 1979 that the army quit the political scene just as they wish to do so again in 1999. Everybody would very much love that. As one of the chronic doubting Thomases in the country, Alhaji Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa, said in a newspaper interview published last Thursday, many would hope the Abubakar regime would be “the last show by the soldiers.”
The vogue worldwide is that the show now belongs to tile civil society.
* Published in my column, Melting Pot, in the New Nigerian Weekly today
