Michael Orodare: June 12 and the lessons for ‘tomorrow’s leaders’

by Michael Orodare

MKO-Abiola...

Now is the set time for negotiation as no meaningful negotiation comes after victory. The post-1993 experience is enough to learn from; not to be too fixated on struggle and ignoring the round table talk for power sharing.

Though I was a boy during the hullabaloo that engulfed Nigeria after the 1993 Presidential Election, which led to the arrest of the widely acclaimed winner of the election, Bashorun MKO Abiola, I make bold to say that as a student of history and a trained 21st Century journalist, impeccable information at my disposal revealed that Abiola won the election but the then Military Head of State, General Ibrahim Babangida (IBB) annulled the result of the election.

Dissatisfied with the decision of the Military government to truncate the mandate freely given to him by the populace, MKO Abiola after waiting for ‘so long’, took to the streets  to declare himself the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He was thereafter arrested and the rest is now history.

Like I once said that I do not know the art of making myself intelligible to readers who refuse to open up their minds to the facts present therein; For me, the election and the post events simply brought out a villain out of a hero and a hero out of a villain.

According to the account of Student Union Leaders, when NANS was still a formidable organisation that was indeed a force to be reckoned with and a thorn in the flesh of government, most Nigerian students didn’t support Abiola’s ambition before the 1993 Presidential election. They were not on his side and never wanted him to rule this nation, but he acquired his heroic status when he was denied his mandate. Immediately after the election, the table turned and the villain became the hero while the awaiting hero became the villain.

IBB would have been one of the most celebrated heroes in Nigeria history, writing his name on the roll of honour as the first Nigerian Head of state to ever conduct the freest and fairest election in Nigeria, if he had not done what he did with the result of the 1993 Presidential election. Permit me to borrow the words of an ex-student union leader, Who said: “IBB was on his way to heroism if he had handed over to MKO and for conducting the freest and fairest election in Nigeria.” But he messed up that opportunity, becoming an uncelebrated hero, a villain and an object of ridicule in the Nigerian political arena. What a sad way to end a career.

There is no question about the fact that Abiola enjoyed a cross-ethnic or pan national support to better put which no one had ever enjoyed before in the history of Nigeria and might still not even in today’s democratic experience.

To salvage this unprecedented Mandate that was about to be thrown to the trash can, Nigerian youths took to the streets, protested, burnt tyres on the highways, and endangered their lives fighting for the return of Abiola’s mandate. Unfortunately after the transition back to the so called Democracy in 1999, all these young men and women who stood in the face of military tyranny became irrelevant and neglected. They were seen as toddlers who did not know what power meant and were without remorse subjected to the back stage of power.

When it was time for power sharing, it was then they remembered the sons and daughters of Chief XYZ who had spent all their days in Europe, while the fate of the young men, who risked their lives in the name of activism clamouring for the materialisation of the nation’s founding fathers dreams, hung in the air.

Imagine the possibility of having a 30-year old Nigerian (not a son of a former President or a former Governor) run and win election to the Nigerian Senate. “If a 25-year-old can run a company, why can’t he run for Senate?” Was the argument of Grace Wyler, in her opinion published recently in Time Magazine.

We are now in the heat up to the 2015 elections and as it has always been, we are the ones doing much of the talking, the sensitization, the door to door campaign, but far away from the scene of negotiation and at the end gaining nothing when the whole agitation finally becomes a reality.

Now is the set time for negotiation as no meaningful negotiation comes after victory. The post-1993 experience is enough to learn from; not to be too fixated on struggle and ignoring the round table talk for power sharing.

Failure to do this will only see us doing what they believe ‘we know how to do best’ tweeting, writing great articles and composing inciting Broadcast Messages on BBM, leaving us at the end with nothing, after all tomorrow is not here yet, when we are expected to be leaders.

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Michael Olanrewaju Orodare has worked in the Office of the Chief Press Secretary to the Ondo State Governor as a Media Assistant. He has garnered experience writing in the The Nation Newspaper working with the paper’s Sunday Desk. He leans towards the Labour Party. He blogs at www.michaelorodare.blogspot.com and tweets from @MichaelOrodare

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

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