Last Friday, June 12, I attended the world premiere of MKO at Sheffield DocFest, held in the city of Sheffield. Ose Oyamendan’s documentary revisits the life and fate of Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, and his tragic death five years later in controversial circumstances. I had been invited by Pastor Tunde Bakare, whom Oyamendan recognised as the project’s most important supporter: always calling, always encouraging, always insisting that the work must be brought to completion against the odds.
Also in attendance was Kola Abiola, the first son of the late business mogul, who spoke with evident emotion about his father’s enduring legacy. Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who flew into the United Kingdom that day specifically for the event, was also present, again at the invitation of Pastor Bakare. It was, in every sense, a room heavy with history.
As one might imagine, it was a poignant and deeply emotional experience on several levels. The documentary brought into view important actors and silences around June 12, including General Abdulsalami Abubakar, the Head of State under whom MKO’s infamous meeting with American diplomats took place. Susan Rice, the American diplomat associated in the public memory with that final encounter, declined to speak to the documentary crew.
This piece is not a formal review of the documentary, and I will not rehash its main storylines. Instead, I want to offer a few reflections on the things that struck me most as I watched it. None of these is, by itself, a groundbreaking revelation. Some may even sound familiar. The real insight, as I see it, lies not in the novelty of the individual parts, but in the story they tell when placed together.
General Ibrahim Babangida emerges in the documentary, as he does in most established narratives, as the archvillain of the June 12 tragedy. As much as viewers could tell, he appeared to have made some kind of peace with his villain status among Nigerians. There is no serious question that he bore the primary responsibility for the annulment. He supervised the destruction of the biggest democratic hope Nigeria had ever known.
Thirty-three years later, the Nigerian state is still reeling from that original violence against the popular will, haunted by the relentless ghost of June 12 and by the traumatic enactment of what could have been but may never be.
Part of what made June 12 so powerful was not simply that MKO won, but the manner and meaning of the mandate. It cut across region, religion and ethnicity in a country perpetually held hostage by those very fractures. It suggested, however briefly, that Nigerians could imagine themselves as citizens before they were conscripted back into ethnic groupings, faith and fear. That is why the annulment was not only an assault on one man. It was an assault on a rare national possibility.
Yet the documentary also sharpened something else. Babangida was not acting in a vacuum. He was battling, or at least negotiating with, a coalition of desperate and powerful forces he either could not resist or would not resist. The documentary suggested that his own life may have been on the line if he refused the demands of the military and political cabal pressing for annulment.
Even if one accepts that account, it does not mitigate his responsibility, let alone absolve him. The logic is simple. It is absurd to imagine that a man whose professional identity was built around bravery, sacrifice and putting one’s life on the line in defence of the nation would, at the country’s most decisive democratic moment, retreat into naked self-preservation. Either Babangida did not believe enough in a democratic Nigeria to sacrifice for it, or he was actively complicit in the historic move to kill the country’s brightest democratic possibility.
The foreign actors also come into sharper view, with considerable taint and blemish. For all the lip service to liberal democracy, Western powers did little of consequence to help Nigerians reclaim the mandate freely given on June 12. The documentary’s own framing is apt: the question of who killed Abiola cannot be separated from the question of who abandoned Nigerian democracy.
Of course, there were sanctions, statements and diplomatic gestures. But the overall response to the Abacha regime and its brutality was muted. It was too cautious, too self-interested, too unwilling to match democratic rhetoric with democratic courage.
It appears Western governments, led by the Clinton administration, were unsettled by MKO’s vocal advocacy of reparations for slavery and colonial exploitation. Surprise, surprise. American political leaders, Democrats or Republicans, were never going to be enthusiastic about that proposition. They also seemed uncomfortable with MKO’s nationalist posture, including his repeated insistence that Nigerians must take primary responsibility for solving Nigeria’s problems.
He was not opposed to foreign assistance, mind. But he believed Nigerian experts should lead Nigeria’s renewal. That confident and defiant stance, a deliberate break from the paternal West-Africa relationship, did not endear him to the powers that preferred African leaders who understood their place in the old hierarchy.
In the end, the dream of June 12, and all the hope it represented, was killed by a coalition of forces within and outside Nigeria. Many of them were covert. Some never had the courage to put their names and faces to arguably the most consequential annulment in Nigeria’s post-independence history. But hidden hands are not innocent hands. Silence, in moments of historic crime, can also be complicity.
The ghost of June 12 has refused to yield. It pursues the Nigerian state with relentless force, condemning citizens to a Sisyphian contemplation of what could have been, leaving us grasping in desperation at a democratic dream that once seemed imminent, but now feels painfully distant, perhaps even lost.
But I must return to Pastor Tunde Bakare. Whether or not one agrees with all his views, you would be hard-pressed to find many Nigerians with his unwavering belief that the Nigerian state can still be made to work. He is, of course, a preacher and public intellectual who speaks regularly and forcefully about the Nigerian project. But what I find especially refreshing is that he does more than speak.
The MKO documentary is one example in a long list of projects and interventionsPastor Bakare has been involved with, but it is different in two respects. First, it is a project he supported rather than led. Second, his support was quiet, sustained and relentless over many years until the work came to fruition. In a country where many people only want to be seen at the front of every noble enterprise, there is something instructive about that kind of steady, background commitment. But perhaps even more remarkable is his exceptional ability to bring people together, across a whole spectrum of interests and backgrounds.
That is the kind of positive energy, resilient focus and practical patriotism Nigeria needs to turn the page and exorcise the ghost of June 12 once and for all. But sentiment will not be enough. The new page must begin with the restructuring of Nigeria into a true federation of constituent nations, where power is genuinely devolved, citizenship is meaningful, and the centre no longer sits over the federation like a predatory inheritance.
Otherwise, we will return, like Sisyphus, to the same mountain, rolling the proverbial rock upward in a mad, exhausting and unending repeat.
June 12 was not merely an annulled election. It was a broken covenant between the Nigerian state and its citizens. Until that covenant is renewed on the foundations of justice, federalism and democratic courage, MKO will remain more than a memory. He will remain, in that moment, an accusation. That question still burns.