THE IBB INTERVIEW! (continued)
So, you really can not beat your chest and say we have done this before, we can teach you people how to do it because on your own you aborted the process, you annulled the election. Does this now make you feel bad that you can not truly speak so glowingly of your accomplishments on this particular score?
No, no the circumstances that made us annul it was very much evident but it did not stop the whole concept. We could have repeated that election but the same Nigerians were crying that the citizens were election-weary, that they needed time. Of course they did not give it enough thought at that time and when we left, the system we put in place, that you media people called “a contraption” had a constitution and it was to last six months…
But you left General Abacha behind?
Yes, to supervise that election which could have been held in February of 1994 but then the same Nigerians cried that it was better to have a military government than a contraption.
Was it really the cries of Nigerians or that General Abacha betrayed you?
No, no, no he did not. It was the cries. Abacha merely responded to what you people wanted: “throw this contraption out”; that the court had ruled that the Interim Government was a contraption, that it was illegitimate, it was illegal. And typical of Nigerians, everybody began singing that no, the interim government was not recognized. Meanwhile, nobody read, to find out what we tried to put out there. As I said, we military men are always very smart. We would not dare topple a government if we don’t gauge the mood of the nation, the mood of the citizens, especially the mood of you, the media. And everything was right for Abacha to intervene: the mood of the nation, the media, the prominent citizens and so on. So he did what they expected him to do.
Maybe you should have waited to organize the rescheduled election yourself?
No, no, no, I was the issue so I wanted to give everybody the free chance to say okay, this man that was the obstacle is no longer there. That was why I said I stepped aside.
Okay let me take you back to the PDP. Did you resign from the party after you opted out of the presidential race?
No.
Now that efforts are on to reconcile all aggrieved persons in the party, would you regard your self as an aggrieved member. Or putting it the other way, would you say you were satisfied with the way the party treated you during the presidential primaries?
No, I did not even do the primaries.
I mean the processes leading up to the primaries?
I did talk about my intention not to go into the primaries of the PDP because I did not agree with the way they were going about it; I did not believe that that is the way primaries should be conducted. Opting out was the right thing to do.
So, what is your take on the Ekwueme reconciliation committee of the PDP?
I believe putting the committee in place is the right thing to do. You see, the people who sat together to form the PDP are veteran politicians who are versed and experienced and they are patriots. Naturally, the likes of Ekwueme and the rest of them who put the party together ought to feel worried; they ought to feel that something went wrong. The party was their vision and it now seems that it is disintegrating, I think it is right that they should go and say now wait a minute, what went wrong, this was not the way we conceived it, this is not the dream of the founding fathers of the party and if they say lets address it and get it back to how it should be, I think it is a step in the right direction.
Your were an early joiner of the party, the PDP, you have been there from the beginning. So it is safe to ask you: what went wrong with the party? At what point did the party begun losing it?
Oh… so many things went wrong. First of all, I think the whole thing was attitudinal. We did not follow the due process of politics and competition within the party and that brought about a lot of disenchantment, a lot of intra-party squabbles… look, everything went wrong just because those who were charged with the responsibility of handling them did not have the requisite experience or knowledge to even manage a system like that, so the whole thing was messed up. I think this is basically what went wrong.
So you are obviously going to be actively involved in deciding who becomes the next National Chairman of the party?
I think the way they have done the zoning thing makes the picture of things to come quite clear, which in itself is not new since the NPN started zoning. The whole aim is to bring stability within the political party. If the President is from the north, the party chairman emerges from another zone, which is perfectly okay. So, I think the PDP is trying to maintain this system. If they keep the system, I expect the next party chairman should come from the south-east and whoever in the party the south-east endorses is perfectly okay by me.
A close look at your years in the Army revealed that other than being a member of the ruling military council, you never took a political position outside the Army until you became the President. And this is in spite of the fact that you took active part in virtually all the successful military coups in the country before the ultimate one that brought you to power? For example, Obasanjo was a Federal Commissioner; Buhari was a Military Governor and also Federal Commissioner. How come you never served as a Military Governor or a Minister under a military administration?
Yes, you are right, I never did.
Why?
I think the Leaders at that time, like General Murtala Muhammed, General Danjuma, General Shehu Yar’Adua, they believed in one thing; they said that their best officers should not be allowed to take political offices. It was their view that after the mass movement of officers into political offices, there must be other good officers who will remain to make sure that the Army or the military institutions are being run properly. So, you find that we did not lose some of the best officers to political appointments. In spite of the fact that these were military governments, some of our best officers remained within the military system because we wanted to keep the system. So that was the only reason why I remained in the system.
Yes, talking about the military, there has been some fuss about your relationship with the late Colonel Bukar Dimka…
What did they say about us?
That on that infamous day of the aborted coup you where supposed to get him out of the premises of Radio Nigeria dead or alive but that you went in there and negotiated with him and allowed him to escape
We were friends.
So, because of your friendship you allowed him to escape?
Friendship helps.
But you had an order to get this your friend “dead or alive”
Because I was his friend he did not shoot me, he could have shot me.
You had troops and you had an order to arrest him
I had an order to dislodge him
Not to arrest him?
To dislodge him. That is himself and his men. To get them out of the place.
So you allowed him to escape?
No, I could not have. It was just like what happened in January of 1966. When we go in … look, in situations like that, there are many factors you take into consideration. As much as possible, you must try to minimize casualties; there are unintended consequences of any action that either Dimka or myself could have taken and lots of innocent people would have died. That, in fact was one operation that I feel proud that apart from one or two – a soldier and an officer and one civilian, we did not have cases of death in that operation. It was one of those situations that you just have to use common sense.
You had discussions with Dimka.
Yes. When you are confronting a man that is armed, you could trigger off trouble the way you talk to him. When I got in there, those boys were terribly drunk. Only God knows what they took. The slightest thing would have provoked unnecessary blood-letting; so you would become a foolish brave man. But in such situations you have to use your bravery and intelligence to achieve maximum result. The whole issue was not to go there and just engage them in gun battle otherwise your training as an officer would have been a waste. We were also trained to wage psychological operation. To convince some one who is erring that look, you are doing the wrong thing and if you abandon it, it would be safe for you and it would be good for the country. It’s all part of our training.
So, what was Dimka telling you in there?
Oh, we had some good chat. He was talking about why they had to do what they did. He was talking about people like me, how we were considered junior officers but we were being given accelerated promotion and all that, that many officers in the army were not happy; you know all those things. But I tried to remind him that two of us were friends, that he was one of my Best men at my wedding and that I would not want to see him dead, that I would rather prefer to see him captured and maybe tried.
Sir, there is also another missing link that we would want to fill up. What really happened to General Bako?
Yes, I like that, there is a missing link. I think … when they went to Abuja for that operation, they tried to… this thing happened in the night… you see, from the experiences we had from the civil war, we found out that soldiers sometimes panic and when they panic, there are dare consequences. So, it was in the night and there was what you could call accidental discharge and the first reaction of the soldiers was that they were being attacked and in situations like that, you could shoot anyway. It happened to us I remember, during the civil war. You get shot at in the front and the sound reverberates behind so the soldiers at the back believes that the person shooting is right there then they forgot that some 500 meters away are what we refer to as own troops, your own forces. Because of no adequate training, a soldier would just cork his riffle and start shooting only to discover that he is shooting his own people. During the civil war, we sustained lots of casualties as a result of this situation. So, my suspicion is that a similar situation must have played out during that operation in Abuja and a bullet hit the late Ibrahim (Bako).
So, claims that General Tunde Ogbeha may have pulled the trigger on Bako are not correct after all?
I would not like to say he did it, no. It was the situation they found themselves; it was dark and everybody was shooting anyhow.
But is it true that General Bako was going to be the Head of State after the coup that ousted President Shehu Shagari?
No, no, no it is not true. Before we went into the whole thing we agreed that General Buhari would become Head of State.
Some people said it was you that was primed to become the Head of State then?
No, no, I resisted it.
You were actually offered?
They wanted me to and I said no. Buhari was our senior, so I did not want anybody to jump him.
It was also said that those of you who ousted Shagari actually wanted to bring back General Obasanjo as Head of State in 1984. Is this true?
It is true. But to be very fair to General Obasanjo, he rejected the offer. He said no. He said it would destroy his integrity, that he handed over to Shagari and that it is not right for him to get involved. But he (Obasanjo) said he was not stopping us from going ahead with the plot (general laughter).
On a lighter note, there is this picture magazines in the country have used severally of you playing a game of draft with far senior officers like Generals Obasanjo and T.Y Danjuma. So many interpretations have been given to this picture owing to the belief that a junior officer ought not to be that cozy with officers who are his seniors by far. What is your take on this mild controversy?
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IBB, Obj, Danjuma, Abacha, playing a game of draft |
No, normally… if you looked at the dress we were wearing, every evening at certain periods, all of us get together, whether to play squash, to play soccer or to go to the gym. So, everybody including the commander-in-Chief, we have a day set out for every one to mingle and play games.
There is this Big Brother myth around you. Your friends and associates believe that somehow you have solution to a whole lot of things, including their problems. Are you worried, are you burdened by this seemingly high expectations?
Quite frankly, it is not a burden. I am not worried.
But are you aware of this situation I am talking about
Yes, I am. I used to have an uncle who died about four or five years ago. Somebody asked him a similar question and he said no, I (IBB) wasn’t doing one tenth of what my father was doing. Yes, he said I am trying but that my father did much more. Now if you looked at the environment at that time, it was a local environment but this uncle of mine was comparing me to a man who operated in a small locality. So, quite frankly, I am not burdened. A lot of my friends have said they wanted to see anybody that I quarrel with. They have not. They wanted to see the day I will say no… But if you are dealing with human beings, there are better ways to say no than an outright “go to hell.” I normally tell people that there are decent ways to call people stupid and the person would not even realize that you called him stupid and he continues doing what he is doing until it suddenly dawns on him that things are not what he thought and then the truth will dawn on him.
And your close friends have told me that you have this uncommon ability to forgive and even forget betrayals and treachery. How did you cultivate this trait?
This is true. To be honest, I would say my religious background helps me a lot. You must try as much as possible to put into practice what you learn, lets say from parents, from religious teachers and what have you. It is very difficult but you try to do it at certain level. However, some other people are gifted, you know like I feel: why should I quarrel with you over something that if I sit back and we reflect, we should be able to resolve this problem. So the whole essence of quarrelling is no longer there. But then it requires somebody who is naturally patient. I am lucky, I don’t act on impulse. My grandfather used to say that whatever happened to somebody today happened to another person yesterday and somebody would go through the same tomorrow. So you keep wondering, is it really worth it to quarrel?
Would you consider it a thing of joy if any of your sons take this trait from you. Would you consider it strength on his part?
I will consider it strength. I will give you an example: when my boy (Muhammed) was growing up, we were in Lagos and I was, I think, a Lieutenant Colonel. I took him in a car and those days he loved fiddling with musical instruments. So, we passed through a traffic, it was hot and people were at bus stops or trekking and struggling and sweating. And here was us comfortable in a car and playing music. So, I told him and he understood quite well at that time. I said to him see those people outside toiling, suffering and look at you now in an air-conditioned car, we are here enjoying while others are walking in the sun to their destinations and I told him that the God that created you created them. He said yes. The same God loves them as much as he loves us and that the same God protects them the way he protects us; that He knows what they are going through but that this same God does what he likes. So I urged him to always remember that the fact that he is enjoying does not mean he is better than those people before God. You know, I tried to put things into his mind. It is good that you tell them early in life that nothing should bother them and some times it works. And I had another teacher who said that any day you wake up and you don’t feel that somebody betrayed you, that day is a bonus for you; but always have it at the back of your mind that somebody will betray you one day. So, if he does it would only dampen your feelings for a while but because you expected it, this feeling will not go very deep. The trauma it will bring will be very limited and you will forget it easily.
Finally sir, what goals are you setting for yourself before age 70?
A: First, it is my prayer to remain in good health, that is very important; and to be able to share my experiences with all of you who are growing up. I think that is probably what is lacking today in our country, we don’t pass enough information to the next generation, it is not right and I want to help correct that. We must share our experience with the younger generation. That is the goal I have set for myself.
No more partisan politics?
Partisan politics? Well this is what I told one of your boys (Journalist) recently: He asked me, are you going to contest election in 2011 and I answered him that you don’t expect me to at age 70 come to you and beg you to vote for me. I think the older one gets the more you think about a lot of things. For me, it is not a do-or-die affair.
THE END