We first met in the mid-seventies. Both of us were daring, very daring: maybe a bit careless with our lives. It was okay that we were all young, for only young men can do what we did. It is a great lesson I have learnt from one of my late uncles who was always sounding philosophical.
“When you are young, you run after death. But when you are old, death runs after you”, he told us one day.
On the morning of February 13, 1976, General Murtala Mohammed, Nigeria’s Head of State, was driving to his office in Lagos when he was gunned down by a mutinous band of Nigerian soldiers led by a whisky besotted Lt Colonel by the name Bukar Suka Dimka. In Lagos, then Nigeria’s capital city, there was panic and commotion. In the rest of Nigeria, there was confusion.
Evidently still heavily drunk, the assassin and his troops drove to the headquarters of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) in Ikoyi and made an impromptu and incoherent announcement in which he sacked the government of General Murtala Mohammed. Then he announced the imposition of a daytime curfew on the whole country which allowed people to go about only at night but to stay at home in the day time. The whole bizarre broadcast was capped with the grave warning that anybody who disobeyed his orders would be killed.
We students of Nigeria’s premier University at Ibadan refused to be intimidated by the threats. We first gathered voluntarily in the courtyard in front of Trenchard Hall. We sang the National Anthem and listened to the spontaneous oratory of our student union President, Mr. Banji Adegboro, who urged us to go to town and protest the change of government as announced by the unsteady voice of an unknown army officer and also to liberate Nigeria from his lunacy.
We obeyed our union President and moved. From the Trenchard Hall, we liberated the Queens Hall and then proceeded outside the university gate to liberate Agbowo, then we liberated Orita and had just liberated Mokola and were marching gallantly to liberate Dugbe when a broadcast by Colonel Jemibewon, the Military Governor of Oyo state on radio O-Y-O to tell the people that the announcement from Lagos was made by a mutineer, who had no mandate to remove the government of the day. Temporary pacified, we retreated, got back to campus and went to rest, following the news carefully, just in case.
In Lagos itself, another strange drama was playing out at the Federal Radio Corporation. Dimka and his band of heavily armed and drunken men were still in control of the station beaming out to the world their strange broadcast. Then walked into the studio a smartly dressed army officer. He was evidently not armed but sought audience with the emergency broadcaster and coup maker – Dimka. The soldiers around Dimka did not only object to the meeting, they cocked their guns ready to kill the intruder. Strangely enough, Dimka ordered them not to kill him and proceeded to grant him audience. The intruder left unharmed only to return a few minutes later with a full complement of armed men of his own that flushed Dimka and his drunken men out, ending one of the most dangerous dramatic acts that threatened Nigeria’s existence. Dimka took to his heels and fled.
The bold actions of the young unarmed colonel who confronted armed and drunken soldiers and tactically rendered them impotent was the saving grace of the day. It soon turned out that the man who saved the day, the daring army officer was Lt Col Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. If Dimka had succeeded with his mad adventure, the students at Ibadan and Babangida were all going to be shot.
Then little was known of him outside the ruling military circles. Then pictures started appearing of him in the newspapers showing that he was gap- toothed, handsome and had a permanent smile on his face. He looked friendly and warm.
Some of us experienced this friendship and warmth by proxy in 1979 with the establishment of National Institute of Policy and strategic studies in Kuru. He was part of the first batch of students – a mixture of senior army officers and civil servants sent to the institute. About forty years later when I had developed a personal relationship with IBB, I for the first time revealed to him that he was on that course with my maternal uncle. He just stared at me and asked; “was that Mr. Ezekiel Akiga?” I was surprised. How did he know the person I was talking about? I just answered him “Yes sir” and our discussions continued. But Mr. Ezekiel Akiga was the first person I was closely related to who spoke of his positive qualities to me and other members of our family after their 1979 encounter. Ezekiel was already late when his name came up at our meeting.
IBB has some magnetic personality traits that make him look like a magician when you relate with him. First, once you have met and introduced yourself to him, your name sticks. Next time you meet, he just calls you straight by your name. I keep wondering how a man who meets hundreds – sometimes thousands – of strangers every day keeps such a long list of names in his head. Has he got a computer there?
The IBB mystic was complemented by that of his charming wife Mariam while they were in office. She was the one who mesmerized my mother. Long after they left office, my mother kept asking me why subsequent governments scrapped the “Better life For Ruler Women” which she introduced. Apparently the program had touched and positively changed her life in a profound way. But how was I going to explain such a complex government issue to an illiterate rural woman who had been given out to my father as a wife at the tender age of thirteen and who had lived all her life as a rural woman? In retrospect I think I was unfair to her. Maybe I should have allowed her to benefit from the enormous personal sacrifices she made to enable me study political science at Nigeria’s premier university at Ibadan. I should have given her some lectures on the strange political developments in Nigeria.
When IBB phoned me after her death to sympathize with me and underwrite a substantial part of her burial expenses, I told him of my mother’s fondness of his wife. It was an emotional moment I will never forget. This was a woman he never met, he never knew but he had time to come down his high horse and relate his sympathy with me, ordinary me on my hour of grief.
That is the IBB style which was reflected in his governments programs in the eight years he ruled Nigeria. His projects such as DFRRI, road construction, liberalization of the petroleum industry, more funds for oil producing areas, infrastructural development – roads and bridges, the movement to and the development of Abuja, primary health institutions, opening up of electronic media to private investors are just a few of his achievements that make him tick thirty years after he left the magnificent Villa he constructed.
What is wrong in saying happy birthday to a man who has achieved so many remarkable things and lived on to be 80 years?
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