I started reading ex-Head of State Ibrahim Babangida’s recent memoirs, aiming to look for the moment in the narration that gives an inkling into his becoming a tyrant. Ultimately, it was the little details that gave him away as still narcissistic. One example was the image of his secondary school, Government College Bida.
So dilapidated was the entrance arch into the school that the photograph of it printed in the book could not capture the faded name. They had to superimpose the name of the school on the image with printed letters. A whole IBB could not endow funds for his own secondary school to refurbish its crumbling glory and even maintain it in perpetuity! Yet, he will build a multi-billion-naira presidential library named after himself. For a man who wrote in his book that he believes so much in Nigeria’s youths and the future they can build, he could not be bothered to make a symbolic gesture by investing in the education of children walking the same path he once did. Even in their old age, these selfish rulers are still vain and lack charity.
Other things being equal, IBB will be the second Nigerian president to monumentalise his ego in concrete buildings. In a country where almost all public and university libraries are comatose, the ex-presidents who made away with the collective patrimony are the ones who get to build one for themselves. It is bad enough that we are a country where public schools at every level are gradually becoming history and public hospitals need resuscitation. Now we have reached a new low in our national history where children growing up in Nigeria will think what constitutes a library is a vanity project that is only inaugurated by ex-presidents who want to rewrite public memory. Nigerians will perhaps never have public libraries again, but our successive failed leaders can be counted on to build private ones for themselves.
Presidential libraries contain the records of defining moments in a presidency. Incidentally, some of those of the IBB regime are the very ones he once told us he loathed to be asked to account for anymore. In 2010 while he still had an interest in running for president, IBB warned the journalists who confronted him during a condolence visit to then-bereaved Zamfara Deputy Governor Muktar Ahmad Anka not to pose questions to him on June 12, Dele Giwa, or even the raging issue of PDP zoning. I am amused that IBB not only wrote a memoir, but he even chose to engage those topics! What happened in those 15 years that he now thinks his self-justification on those issues will ever matter? Who even asked him?
So, he now admits that MKO Abiola won the election, but didn’t the late former Chairman of the defunct National Electoral Commission, Humphrey Nwosu, already tell us that? Was he on vacation away from the planet when Muhammadu Buhari posthumously conferred the GCFR honours on Abiola, an acknowledgement of the wrong done to him. IBB says he accepts responsibility for annulling the June 12 election, but what difference does it make? What are we then to do with his confessions? What he owes us is restitution. I doubt it ever crossed his mind to make any effort to recognise the people who died because of the riotous transition programme he facilitated.
On Dele Giwa, another topic he did not want to address, IBB had nothing useful to say in his memoir. It is not like we expected him to admit culpability, but it was also not too much to assume he would shut up if he could not improve on the protracted silence. While he might not have personally ordered the hit against Giwa, it is unthinkable that a prominent journalist and his “personal friend” would die like that, and IBB would not have given anything to know who did it. We are talking of an unprecedented mode of killing like a parcel bomb. IBB cannot be as ignorant as he feigns. And that was one of my problems with his memoirs. If he had admitted everything he knew and did, nobody would do anything to him. He could have died the way he lived: as a villain. The difference does not matter in our ethically bankrupt society.
My impression while reading through the book was that IBB is looking for some moral exculpation from a country he wronged. Perhaps he wants to reassure himself that despite all he did wrong, he still has something to do with the vibrance that post-military Nigeria demonstrates. He has lived long enough to observe the nation move on from his time. Now, from the vantage height of his Minna mansion, he gets to observe that the country he and his soldier boys thought would always need their overbearing hand wakes up daily without them. Perhaps in his quiet moments, he realised that with a different set of choices, he could have been the hero that present Nigeria would fondly celebrate.
Like a man watching his ex-wife thrive after divorcing him, IBB wants to convince himself that even his moral failings and shortsightedness one way or another contributed to his resilience. I was amused to read that IBB gave himself credit for contributing to freedom of expression in Nigeria through media liberalisation that allowed private ownership of the media to bloom. What he did not say about his so-called gift of “freedom of expression” was that he was also the leader who serially shut down media houses, throwing thousands of people out of jobs and livelihoods. Today, he valorises the same media that survived in spite of him and attributes their feisty spirit to himself. Now he is going to build a presidential library to monumentalise the misattribution. To square up his recollection of history, we, the people who survived him, should also be allowed to include our refutations in the library. If he is going to write about our national history with the money he took from us, it is only fair that we too should get a say.
Presidential libraries will likely become a fad among our egoistic rulers seeking to ascribe to themselves a record of legacy they do not deserve. For a man who was technically never a “president” to suggest building a presidential library is, in fact, an affront; evidence he is still playing his silly Maradona games. Looking at Bola Tinubu seated beside IBB during the book presentation, I am almost convinced that he too will launch his presidential library project. The whole idea of a presidential library started with US President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 as a dedicated space to archive the materials of his tenure. His predecessors had suffered a loss of the official documents that defined their presidency, and he created the presidential museum to house his papers. Every US president since then has created their presidential library as both an archive and a museum to house the artefacts of their respective administrations for the public.
Since such libraries reflect the values, dispositions, defining moments, interests and introspections of each leader, the one IBB will build should be painted in bleeding red. That colour will signify the ethos of his presidency—the lives that he extinguished in his desperate bid to hold on to power, and the vitality his ambition drained out of the nation. The architectural design of the building should be a jackboot trampling on the heads of poor people, a visceral reminder of what his reign felt like. Since we are also copying American presidents, every shelf wherein that library where the copies of his new memoir will be displayed should be appropriately labelled “Profiles in Cowardice”.
Punch
