With Nigeria’s elections dead before the voting has even begun, Wole Soyinka warns the world against falling for the hoax of `democracy’ propagated by Sani Abacha
RARELY has so much self-deception been hidden behind doublespeak, as we have been made to marvel at, in the business of commentators on General Sani Abacha’s record in power in Nigeria.
We are bemused, for instance, by plaudits for something variously titled “the democratic process”, “elections”, “a transition programme”. It is not merely the media, but governments and their policy advisers that delude themselves and their constituencies with references to these non- events in accents of solemnity.
The most recent “local government elections” are as good a place to begin as any – we shall proceed straight to facts.
That was an election that was dead before the first vote was registered. You do not describe as a democratic process any form of election in which you disqualify in advance every single individual who had ever spoken against a government in power or is identified or denounced as such.
That so-called election was not simply flawed in this or that respect – it was a self-cancelled undertaking that had no foundation in law, constitution, or proceeding.
You do not call a democratic process any activity that is preceded and governed by a decree that gives a dictator and his surrogates – state governors, military administrators, etcetera – absolute powers to disqualify any candidate before, during, or after elections. The word for that is a charade. A mockery. A pantomime. An act of public ridicule. A funeral wake.
Even if you were sufficiently bedazzled by a few regimented lines of would-be voters, you surely must know that something is grievously wrong when, out of a 90-million population – the government’s own very latest census figures with a declared 45% under the age of 15 – that same government announces that 65-million adults have registered for an election.
Any election based on such premises is – ab initio – a hoax. One does not have to have a degree in demography to know that someone, somewhere, is having a belly laugh at the expense of the nation and – crassly enough – at the entire discerning world.
As for the five political parties supposed to be in this race, is there anyone still left in the world who does not recognise that these are merely five fingers of one leprous hand? That, by the way, is now common parlance within Nigeria.
What we exposed to the world, from the very beginning of this process, has already come to pass. Affecting a show of unity – motivated naturally by the loftiest patriotic sentiments, determined to avoid all the partisan acrimony of the past, etcetera, etcetera – the leaders of these parties have begun to call for a consensus candidate that would eliminate the necessity of a presidential election. I leave any half-wit the formidable task of guessing who that consensus candidate is going to be.
The grounds were prepared by a lavishly orchestrated tour of the United States by the chairmen of all five parties, where they impressed the impressionable with their statesmanlike and affable interaction.
Their follow-up tour of Europe is in the pipeline, so let all impressionable hosts in these parts prepare themselves for an extravaganza of an invasion of the flagbearers of Nigeria’s New Age Democracy!
In the meantime, however, here are some indisputable facts for all such gullible entities to digest: one of the credible presidential candidates, Dr Olu Saraki, had a narrow brush with death after a mysterious attack on his home that resulted in fatalities for the innocent.
So instructive was that experience that Saraki quickly made a public announcement that he had abandoned all presidential ambitions and was content to vie solely for a senatorial seat.
Yet another candidate, Dr Etiebet, former minister of petroleum and founder of one of the five registered parties, the National Centre Party of Nigeria, and obvious presidential candidate for that party, was arrested and locked up – no reasons offered the public until today.
Wonder of wonders, when Etiebet returned from that educative experience, he did not merely renounce all presidential ambitions, publicly, he forsook the very party that he had founded to team up with another.
That other party, the United Nigeria Congress Pary, need one add, had led the charge in drafting Abacha as presidential candidate. Even the redoubtable warlord Emeka Ojukwu recently announced that he was burying his own ambitions, since, according to him, he had no wish to go in for a game of soccer only to be informed at the last moment that the match would be played by rules of rugby.
As for human rights, a pre-condition, I would have thought, for embarking on a genuine process towards democracy, we may summarise that department by recalling that there was a writer called Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Together with eight of his companion environmentalists, he was hanged by a process that revolted even the most hardened consciences of the world. Condemnation was swift, and near universal.
The International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International, the Commonwealth of Nations’ Human Rights Committee, the United Nations Special Rapporteurs, etcetera, etcetera – every investigating body pronounced those executions as nothing but a barbaric act of judicial murder.
We shall reserve for comment in another place the ongoing unscrupulous campaign by Abacha’s henchmen to tarnish his memory by parading witnesses to his alleged guilt on the international circuit, long after his death.
Well then, the Ogoni Nine are dead, but here comes the question: what of those who are still alive, those who have been awarded seven, 10, 15 years and even life imprisonments under near identical procedures – in some cases even more cynical – to that very process of judicial lynching that has been so uncompromisingly condemned?
What of Chris Anyawu, Shehu Sanni, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Olusegun Obasanjo, Gwadabe, Bello-Fadile, Charles Obi, Shehu Yar’Adua, and untold others, some of whom have been horrendously tortured but all still held in prison?
And what of the president-elect of Nigeria himself, Moshood Abiola, who has been denied any form of trial at all under any system? What of his companions, similarly deprived of even a sham of a trial since the ascendancy of Nigeria’s current monstrosity – Frank Kokori, the leader of the Petroleum Workers Union; George Mbah or Kunle Ajibade, both journalists? They all share the one common crime – dissent, and expression of dissent.
We must continue to remind the world that among the hostages of this dictator are also the children of wanted dissidents, some of them between the ages of four and 14 years. The age of innocence is no immunity under Abacha’s rampage of impunity.
Despite knowledge of the foregoing, there are still sensibilities that affect shock when we compare the state of oppression with the handy instance of apartheid South Africa – but why is this so difficult to grasp?
Both cases are instances of minority rule, sustained by a mechanism of state terror – murder, arson, kidnapping, hostage-taking. Sharpeville and Soweto have been replicated and their atrocities surpassed in more than a few Nigerian cities.
The world has yet to catch up with the scale of the recent slaughter of school children in Edo state, about three months ago, mown down for protesting a 1 000% increase in their school fees. But who recalls the fact that, since taking power, Abacha has merely continued the tradition that he established when, as Babangida’s Number Two, he personally led a detachment of soldiers and ordered them to open fire on peaceful protesters, with heavy fatalities?
Habeas corpus is a dead-letter phrase; instead, just as in South Africa, the operative instrument of security is the 90- day-detention decree, infinitely renewable, a decree that makes, in its operations, even the 90-day-detention law of apartheid South Africa benevolent by comparison, even sparing in its applications. Need we go on with further comparisons?
But, most crucial of all, there is the question: what did happen to the authenticated elections of June 1993? That incubus squats over the future of Nigeria. South Africa also had her elections. Unlike the Nigerian, they were violent. They were acknowledged by both winners and losers to be imperfect, yet they have laid a foundation for the future of a new South Africa.
The elections of June 12 1993 will not disappear. Any proposed solution outside of that framework is a futile act of compromise – the past will not release the Nigerian nation.
Wole Soyinka, the playwright and outspoken critic of Nigeria’s military rulers, is currently in exile