Crafty former Nigerian dictator has been known to tell many lies, but now he is heaping the blame for his woeful failure to bequeth a lasting democractic legacy on the man he betrayed - MKO Abiola. According to General Ibrahim Babangida, he had wanted to restore the June 12 mandate to MKO Abiola after a secret meeting, but Abiola messed up by not trusting him.
Retired army General and former Nigerian dictator, Ibrahim Babangida, the man also popularly known as IBB, "evil genius", and "Maradona" granted an interview to an internet news site: The Peoples' Magazine/PointBlank News.com in which he purportedly argued that the government that he ran between 1985 and 1993 is definitely better than former President Olusegun Obasanjo's. The text of his interview has been reproduced widely on the internet and in the local media. IBB certainly can't be serious and he needs to be told so. His assumptions ought to be exposed for what they are: hollow revisionism. And of course this is not the first time that IBB would attempt to rewrite history. Since his ignominious exit from power in 1993, he and his many willing agents have tried every trick in the books to white-wash his image and smuggle him into a nice corner of contemporary Nigerian history.
Only the unintelligent optimist would have failed to observe subtle moves since the inception of the Mr. Umaru Yar'Adua administration to weaken anti-corruption efforts in Nigeria. It cannot, therefore, be stunning to hear that the last bold move to remove the remaining block in the immensely strong Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) - the plot to send its Chairman, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, to a useless training program that has helped to breed the most corrupt administrators in the country - has been hatched. It is a shame, a repugnant outcome for a government that ought to be very humble before Nigerians. It is a distraction we unambigously reject. Read More
“Democracies in Western Europe are not what we have here, they are strong because the citizens watch them strictly, but we went to sleep after establishing democracy in Nigeria." - Audu Ogbeh, influential politician
