Who was . . . Moshood Abiola?
Richard Synge
The extraordinary life of Moshood Abiola, who has died aged 60, apparently of a heart attack, while meeting an American delegation, matches the tumultuous pageant of Nigeria’s political life in which he played such a pivotal role.
Abiola first came to prominence as an accountant for the American telecommunications multinational ITT’s Nigerian offshoot, which he joined in 1968. He developed a knack for getting contractual cheques signed by the highest-ranking military officers under the 1970s regime of General Murtala Muhammad.
This relationship with the military hierarchy both secured Abiola control of ITT’s Nigerian operations and gave him the platform to pursue his always flamboyant ambitions.
His direct influence on the political process began with the constitutional conference of the late 1970s. The then military government had lifted the ban on political parties and Abiola became chair of the Ogun state branch of the National Party of Nigeria in the time of the Second Republic civilian rule which lasted until the end of 1983.
At the conference he donated pocket calculators to all participants. His political career began to flourish with the launch of his Concord newspaper group in 1980. He hoped it could influence his campaign for presidential nomination within the then ruling National Party.
It was in that brief phase of democratic government between 1979 and 1983 that Abiola became a truly public figure, known for his extraordinary generosity in building schools and financing the education of many children of the elite, as much as for his penchant for marrying more than the usual numbers of wives allowed by Islamic custom. Tension between the different families of which he was head was something he later began to regret.
Abiola’s ambition never faltered, and when his friend General Ibrahim Babangida took power in 1985 he had access to the innermost machinations of the military as they moved cautiously and uncertainly into the new phase of democratic transition that eventually unfolded in June 1993.
When Abiola won presidential nomination for the Social Democratic Party in 1993, he campaigned convincingly and tirelessly, his “rags-to-riches” progress serving as an inspiration for ordinary Nigerians across a notoriously ethnically divided nation.
Despite, and more likely because of, this popular appeal, Abiola was a threat to others in the military, who prevailed upon Babangida to annul the most democratic presidential election the country had witnessed, in which Abiola won almost 60% of the popular vote.
He was potentially the first southerner to hold the presidency in a civilian government since Nigerian independence. His ousting provoked the political crisis which Nigeria has been struggling to overcome ever since.
In private, Abiola was both surprisingly humble and enormously engaging, with a mischievous sense of fun. In 1988 he bought Africa Economic Digest, for which I worked. It was his first foray into publishing outside Nigeria.
Although some expected him to develop his publishing profile on the world scene, as an African equivalent of Rupert Murdoch, his heart was clearly more in providing political leadership within luckless Nigeria than in the world of publishing. He attempted to establish a publishing liaison with the ANC in South Africa but this came to nothing.
Before long he was engulfed in the Nigerian political crisis. His imprison- ment by General Sani Abacha in 1994, for daring to claim the mandate he had won the previous year, removed him from public life but in no way diminished his potential to cross the ethnic divide.
Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola was born in poverty on August 24 1937 in Abeokuta in the south-west of Nigeria, and was the first of his father’s many children to survive. He was a Muslim and a Yoruba, a member of one of the largest ethnic groups in the country.
Educated at the Baptist Boys’ High School in his home town, he went on to study accountancy at the University of Glasgow from 1960 – the year that Nigeria achieved independence from Britain.
He had never forgotten, he observed five years ago, that it was the educational policy of Western Nigeria’s democratically elected government which had provided him with the scholarship.
Back in Nigeria, he worked as an accountant, having joined ITT in 1968 and by 1971 was ITT Nigeria’s chief executive and chair, posts he held until 1988.
It was in 1985 that his sometime friend Babangida came to power, leading eight years later to the fateful campaign. By then Abiola had an airline, a publishing house and a vast portfolio of foreign investments.
By June 1994 Abiola’s challenge to Babangida’s successor, Abacha, had confirmed his emergence as a symbol of the democratic movement. He declared himself president in defiance of the military at a clandestine ceremony, and soon after was arrested and charged with treason.
Within a year it was reported that Abiola was in solitary confinement, and had lost more than 40kg. His physician reported that he had been cut off from the news, that he was no longer aware of the time, or whether it was day or night.
Meanwhile, the senior of Abiola’s three official wives, Kudirat, was gunned down by “unidentified gunmen”.
Abiola was no saint but his love for Nigeria and all Nigerians was unquenchable. The sporadic reports of his poor health, and the lack of treatment provided by his captors over the past four years, have been disquieting. The country he hoped to save from disaster is almost certainly once again on the brink.
His first wife Simbiat died in 1992. He had 18 unofficial wives and more than 60 children.