Past imperfect future tense

Past imperfect, future tense

Each day, I become more convinced that Nigeria's greatest bane is a stupendous but wilfull amnesia, a willed forgetting of the evil details of our recent history. Nothing reinforces my conviction in this regard as much as the talk these days about Ibrahim Babangida's presidential ambition. For me, the fact that IBB still walks the streets a free man is profoundly amazing. That he is seriously contemplating a return to public life beggars credulity. That many so called "Political heavyweights" and "chieftains" are in broad daylight hawking this unprecedented fraud to Nigerians points, I believe, to our elite's moral bankruptcy and shamelessness. That many ordinary Nigerians affect a resigned equanimity at the prospect of his return is (and here I mince words) a mark of collective craziness.

Why do I insist that a deliberate amnesia is at work? Because no one who lived in the IBB years could have forgotten what a tragic figure he cut-and how close he came, by commission, to unleashing upon Nigeria a fate bloodier than Rwanda's and gorier than Sierra Leone's. Here is a man who once confessed to reporters that his nation's resilience baffled him. Here is a man who said, in other words, that he had no clue how his country defied all his efforts to destroy it, how it continued to operate from day to day. That sense of bafflement was no idle prattle. After all few nations in the world would survive the kind of machinations IBB and his minions put Nigeria through. I doubt that any nation in history has witnessed the brand of unconscionable kleptomania that this vain man (and his cohorts) elevated to principle.

True, Babangida did not invent corruption in Nigeria. But what he did was worse. He took corruption from the closet and installed it as the nation's patron deity, the god in whose name all public acts were done. He elevated corruption to the status of doctrine, an ideological blueprint. He invested public theft (the worst brand of 419) with the force of law; empowering both himself and his aides to treat the public purse as if it were their personal estates. He invited himself and people around him to reap where they had sowed nothing. In Karl Maier's book, this House Has Fallen, IBB boasts that he gave Mr. Abiola much of the money with which he ran the 1993 campaign. He forgets to say where a general, who was supposed to be on a fixed salary, found all that extra money.

IBB's self-characterisation as an evil genius has been much quoted. Sadly, few commentators have tried to restore perspective to this exercise in grand delusion. Of course, the evil is writ large, incarnate, starkly recognisable even to those who would refuse to see. But where does the genius lie? In the plot to tear the nation's frayed fabric by attempting to thwart its fragile secularity by treacherously sneaking Nigeria into membership of the Organisation of Islamic States? In the constant shifting of the transition date? In the cynical disposition that money could "settle" all principled dissent, the idea that each person had a price? Does IBB's genius reside in the emptying of the nation's treasury into private hands? In the annulment of June 12, the proudest election in which Nigerians had ever taken part? Far from suggesting any genius, these acts amount, pure and simple, to evil.

Unfortunately, some Nigerians including those who should know better-have begun to speak of IBB's presidential designs as if it was a logical step in the nation's political development and a demonstration of the man's political savvy. Something far more rudimentary is at play. This is a case of a man who robbed the public purse and now imagines he can use a small part of his loot to buy back the office he soiled. This must rank as one of the most arrogant displays of political hubris in contemporary history.

Those bloated "chiefs" and profane professors who champion Babangida as the key to problems they can't define as well as aware of this simple political arithmetic. The tragedy of a nation like ours is that such certified mediocrities continue to strut about the political stage, relishing the myth that they are power brokers, king makers, chieftains and barons. To put it directly, they are miserable collection of clowns, comedians and courtesans. These are people whose moral faculty is entirely dictated by the scent of money. They remind one of the vulture's proverbial raison d'etre. According to an Igbo proverb, the vulture said that his wife's pregnancy gives him much joy. "If she gives birth to a live baby, I shall rejoice as a father. But if the child is still-born, I shall gleefully feast on its remains."

In typical Nigerian fashion, all sorts of inane excuses are being bandied to justify IBB's reclamation of Nigeria's rulership. Some have said that he "gets things done." Apart from squandering Nigeria's scare resources, pray, what has the man done." Others have said that he can heal rifts between Nigeria's different groups. A simple question: who created or exacerbated those tensions to begin with. One young Igbo man even suggested that, since IBB is married to an Igbo woman, he would be good for Ndigbo. After all, said the neophyte -invoking an Igbo proverb -a man's in-law is akin to his god. I'd like to hear about all the wonderful graces the man bestowed on the Igbo during his first spree as ruler. Of course, like many others rushing into the profitable business of selling IBB, the young man was engaged in the contemptible game of conscious memorylessness. What renders the game all the more reprehensible is that it is all about personal gain. In fact, one can say with absolute confidence that none of the IBB backers would mention the man's name at all if they did not expect to reap profit. In lulling the nation, then, to forget the past, these men are out, like vampires, to grow fat on Babangida's lucre and on the people's perdition.

There are all kinds or rumours about a supposed agreement between IBB and President Obasanjo on the rulership of Nigeria. Ordinarily, one would dismiss such speculations as lacking in substance. But strange things have happened-and happen-in Nigeria. Certainly Mr. Obasanjo has tended to coddle Babangida in a fashion that Nigerians must find curious. In sending IBB as a special envoy to Sudan ( a country, by the way, whose tragedy could mirror Nigeria's, if IBB ever returns to power), the president has exhibited a grave insensitivity to the popular sentiment about the man. More to the point, Mr. Obasanjo's timidity in probing the financial scandals of the Babangida years is responsible for this bizarre situation where IBB and his courtiers think it is possible to don a mask and deceive the people. In fact, the president's decision to pretend that he has no information about IBB's ill-gotten wealth has undermined his so-called anti-corruption stance.

A more intriguing question has to do with the Nigerian media's seeming acquiescence in the fraud-in-progress. After a hiatus of several years, IBB has emerged from his cocoon. He has granted interview to many Nigerian newspapers and magazines. But the most remarkable thing about interviews is that the Nigerian journalists, for the most part, have been unaccountably reticent about confronting the man with his part. In no interview that I have read did I see any reporter ask him-with insistence -to explain the source of his wealth. In none has he been compelled to account for the June 12 fiasco. Why?

I raised that particular question with a Nigerian colleague currently visiting the U.S. He looked me in the eye and answered that a lot of Nigerian journalists want the same thing from IBB that his crooked "supporters" want: a slice of that loot. It was a painful answer, but one that made sense. For I am unable to believe that my colleagues are forgetful of the things this man's evil hands wrought in our country. In fact, if the press did its duty in this case, reminding Nigerians of the evil that stalked our land under IBB's rule neither the man nor his shameless minstrels would dare fart in people's faces as they now do. IBB was one of those who wrecked our past. It is up to Nigerians to decide whether they want him to destroy the future as well.