TAIWO FAROTIMI
Few people expected they would be part of the August crowd that graced the ceremony marking the commemoration of June 12 and the investiture of the principal players of the election, annulled by Ibrahim Babangida, military president. So when the apologies they sent were read at the event in the Banquet Hall, State House, Abuja, few people showed that they missed them. While Olusegun Obasanjo, former military head of state who returned to power , as elected president, after the military was retired in 1999, Babangida was the head of state who annulled the election considered to be the most free and fair in the country.
Obasanjo sent apology , explaining that he was away in Norway for an international assignment. But for Babangida , the excuse was ill health. Quite a number of people would have wanted to know how these two men would feel being in that gathering.IBB did everything in his power to annull the election, never failing to defend the action , and Obasanjo failed to use his office to redress the wrong of the annulment. Perhaps they assumed that the effort of President Muhammad Buhari would dwarf their stature. So may be it was in the interest of their health , politically or otherwise , that they stay away. For how would IBB, an avowed friend of Moshood Abiola, winner of that historic election have felt seeing Muhammadu Buhari apologise for the wrong committed by him against Nigerians 25 years ago? Worse still IBB regarded as a friend of Abiola insists that the annulment was justified and Buhari not known to be an associate of Abiola now takes the glory for righting the wrongs done by a friend. Some people would have remembered one of Abiola’s sayings that “with a friend like Babangida you don’t need an enemy.” The former military president must have watched the ceremony broadcast live. He certainly would have heard the testimonies of people detained, brutalised and hounded to exile under his regime, and that of his friend, late Sani Abacha, as a result of the annulment.
