Ordinarily, I would have thought that I could number Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) as one of my elderly friends because of the intellectual engagements we used to have, in company of my bosom friend and brother, Mohammed Kuta Yahaya, especially because of and as he put on display his penchant for deep intellectual forays and the way he appreciated intelligence, if not for his abiding personal wiles making for extreme caution and the inability to ever lay down his guards for you to know when you have truly crossed into his inner circles. The same way it could be said that, in spite of enormous endowment from God of intelligence and charisma and vision and opportunities, he ended up betraying such uncommon endowment, the people and himself.
Come to think of it, I do not have any doubt that, outside of Obafemi Awolowo, there is no one else and there has not been anyone with the intrinsic qualities necessary for quality leadership in Nigeria as IBB. If in Awolowo, we had the best President Nigeria never had, with IBB, it was having a fitting President that wasted and misused the golden opportunity!
When IBB came into power after his military coup and gave himself the title of President and started putting in place definitive structures of governance easily recognizable and able to be followed openly, I remember writing an academic paper/article on the phenomenon then, suggesting and arguing that I could discern the constitutive elements necessary as springboard for the task of reimagining and rebuilding a new nation out of Nigeria in the concept of ‘military presidency’ and the formidable character behind and powering it. I thought I could see IBB in the mould of Singaporean Lee Kuan Yew, the leader to take on the challenge of positively transforming Nigeria and making it to realise its potentials to become one of the great nations of the world. But that would be to miss the essence and effect of the personal foibles of the man, whose propensity for self-sabotage would be enough to derail all real transformational efforts.
Take the case, for instance, of the resort to the interminable and unending political transition programme, which was more of a refuge for the negative fallouts of the idiosyncratic imbalances that made the pursuit of real transformation difficult and impossible. Essentially, in the grand scheme of things, the positive transformation expected from and under the aegis of a fitting president like IBB would be fundamental and comprehensive, touching every aspect of life but not necessarily dependent on a quick return to civilian, democratic rule through any transition programme; the transition expected was a total one affecting the whole of society as the transformational leader steers the country to new heights on new, functional structures that would deliver development and make life easier for the mass of the people.
Yet, even the resort to the refuge of political transition programme ended up a failure, in spite of having the benefit of the support and intellectual design of people like Adele Jinadu and Sam Oyovbaire, two of the finest political theorist and theoreticians produced in the land after the exit of Billy Dudley, alongside the grand old scholar, Omo Omoruyi at the Centre for Democratic Studies (CDS), largely because of the ingrained personal foibles and manipulative tendencies of the man in charge of the processes. The bottom line is that IBB represented and continue to represent an otherwise solid promise and expectation about the transformation of Nigeria, which expectation and promise ended up and floundered as significant failure on the altar or the personal betrayals inherent in and intrinsic to the man. In IBB, we confront the complexity of power and the limits to which we could draw on a uni-linear conception of the use of power. He had all the attributes of a transformational leader, but squandered them all through regrettable personal foibles and otherwise shocking conducts!
** Olaitan, Professor of Political Science, was Vice-Chancellor, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State.
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