About a week ago, Nigeria’s former Military President, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, unveiled his autobiography: ‘A Journey in Service’ before a gathering of the cream of the Nigerian society.

All surviving former military and civilian Presidents and Heads of State were present, except Muhammadu Buhari who sent a representative. Buhari has obviously not forgiven Babangida for ousting him on August 25, 1985 and detaining him for years. Arthur Eze, one of the guests, summarised it all when he simply confessed: “He (Babangida) made me who I am. He made all of us here”.

This was no exaggeration. In his exactly eight years in power, Babangida engaged in extensive economic, social, political and constitutional reforms. He banned the old political class that held sway from independence in 1960 to the end of the Second Republic in December 1983 from participating in politics. He created what he called the “New Breed” political class who abandoned the politics of ideology and principles in favour of the Machiavellian-type maneouvering and trickery perfected under Babangida’s convoluted Transition to Civil Rule programmes.

Apart from the events leading to, and after the Nigerian Civil War, the issues of the unsolved murder of Dele Giwa and especially Babangida’s annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, expectedly, have dominated discussions in the wake of Babangida’s book launch. The former president seized the occasion to admit officially that Chief Moshood Abiola, the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, actually won the election which he (Babangida) annulled.

He said he feared that the possible assassination of Abiola would lead to another civil war. In caving in to brazen efforts to prevent power shift to the South as freely mandated by the Nigerian electorate from across all the divides, Babangida and his co-conspirators felt they were protecting the political interest of the North. They did not realise they were fighting against an idea whose time had come.

When General Sani Abacha, the ring leader of the anti-June 12 forces suddenly died in June 1998, the same Northern leaders and elites, with General Abdulsalami Abubakar and Babangida himself at their forefront, rallied the North to voluntarily cede power to the South-West, with former Head of State, Olusegun Obasanjo, as their choice in 1999.

Since then, power shift has come to stay, with the South producing three Presidents (Obasanjo, Goodluck Jonathan and Bola Tinubu), while the North produced two (Umaru Yar’Adua and Muhammadu Buhari). Indeed, the inevitability of power rotation between the North and South showed in the fact that it was Northern All Progressives Congress, APC, Governors who chiefly fronted Tinubu’s election in 2023.

The biggest lesson of June 12 is that the era of the use of military force for sectional domination is over. We must learn to equitably share the powers, resources, responsibilities and duties of the Nigerian Commonwealth. Nigeria, not any of its sub-national divides, must come first.

Babangida is a major architect of Nigeria as we know it. We commend him for telling his story. It has valuable lessons for posterity. (Vanguard)