June 12: When Villains Reap Fruits Of Heroes’ Struggle -By Festus Adedayo

Wednesday will be the 26^th anniversary of the Nigerian June 12, 1993 elections. Borrowing the lingo of liberation crusaders, June 12’s portent is equal in audacity to the recently concocted epithet of O to ge which Kwara State people devised to signify their resolve to discontinue the slavish queue behind the Saraki dynasty. In racial liberation, June 12 is also akin to 42 year-old seamstress, Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat for a white passenger in the Montgomery bus in Alabama on December 1, 1955. This stiff-necked decision of Parks, in a racially dominated system that demanded blacks to so do for the white, sparked off a boycott. This boycott threw Martin Luther King Jr. to global prominence and renown. In her refusal to give up her seat, Parks had uttered the famous sentence, “My feet are tired,” analogous to Kwarans’ O to ge but clearly verbalized 26 years ago by Nigerians’ denunciation of the military class.

In 26 years, June 12 has morphed severally. This battle that was fought with the blood of several Nigerians led to the eventual handing over of power to civilians in 1999 and the incineration of military despotism in Nigeria. Stray bullets killed several compatriots; many died in detention; the Bagauda Kalthos got missing and have not been found ever since; Sergeant Rogers and his family of bloodless military killers secretly wiped many off. I remember Chiedu Ezeanah, poet and journalist, shot on Ring Road in Ibadan during this period and the several people eliminated by the Sani Abacha goons at Lifecare hospital, also in the capital of Oyo State. I also remember NADECO activist, Taiwo Akeju, Beko Ransome-Kuti and others locked up by Abacha. I remember how, when we got a whiff that our brand of journalism irked the despot, our Omega Weekly newspaper office on Ibadan’s Ring Road had to be relocated to my modest flat at Oke-Ayo Street, off Ring Road in 1997. Abacha’s goons would have made nice roast of our entrails if they had found us out! And sundry other recollections.

Ironically, 26 years after, the social and political issues we battled have metastasized into far more hydra-headed and cancerous cells. Life was far more live-able under the thieving Sani Abacha than it is today under his surrogate, Muhammadu Buhari. The social crises we confront today in a so-called democracy are far more benumbing and destructive than the ones of 1993. In my faintest imagination, I never believed that, 26 years after, travelling to my village of Ilu-Abo in Akure, Ondo State would be strung with fear and apprehension; a road which, under Abacha, posed no iota of danger. It is easier, cheaper and far likely for a Nigerian to die today than it was 26 years back. Many Nigerians who run away from the country through the sea make grisly confession that it is better for them to perish on the Mediterranean than be subjected to the wicked vagaries of life under a Buhari who is terribly insulated from the consuming crises in the country he rules.

Far more instructive is that the bulk of those who administer Nigeria today, who reap the fruits of that bloody and consuming battle for liberation of Nigeria, had nothing to do with the fight fought by the Ransome-Kutis, the Gani Fawehinmis, Bagauda Kalthos, the Taiwo Akejus and others in the trenches of the June 12 battle. Beginning with Muhammadu Buhari himself – who was never attributed with any supportive intervention in that struggle, to Olusegun Obasanjo, who was even quoted to have made several Judas Iscariot-like abetments of the oppressors of the people – villains of June 12 have been presiding over the booties of June 12. It is one way of providence that man cannot assess. It reminds me of that quote from an anonymous man, while assuaging a distraught son of his. He had asked the son – I paraphrase now – “my son, since you were born into this world, have you ever seen good repaid with good consistently, or evil recompensed with evil, consistently?” It is one inscrutable lesson of life and liberation struggles that I just can’t explain.