This article was published in 2007, during the 10th year anniversary of Kudirat Abiola
Today, exactly ten years ago, Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, wife of Chief MKO Abiola, the undeclared winner of the 1993 Presidential elections was murdered in cold blood on her way from her Ikeja home to Victoria Island to keep an appointment. Mrs Abiola was one of the major revelations of the struggle for democracy in Nigeria: she epitomized how the imposition of injustice on a people can release revolutionary zeal even among ordinary people and create unusual heroes and heroines.
She was a dutiful wife and business woman, mother of seven, who in the face of the injustice of military rule, the abortion of the people's sovereignty by the Babangida government and anguish in the land, joined on her own volition, the pro-democracy coalition and became a principal contributor to the struggle for liberation. On June 4, 1996, General Abacha's agents aided by the treachery of an aide gunned her down. She had become too vocal, too prominent, too determined in the eyes of Abacha's goons who had prepared a long hit list of those they labelled enemies of the government.
It was a murderous season. Abacha and his men had blood on their minds, they would not brook any opposition and so all over the country, they pumped bullets into anyone who dared to defend democracy or express an alternative view. Alhaja Kudirat was one of their victims. They killed her because she was a friend of the Nigerian people and a critic of military dictatorship.
On the tenth anniversary of her murder, we ought to remember, and pay tribute to her courage and sacrifice. This is important because this is a country that forgets too easily and too soon. Our collective memory is tied to the present. We love heroes as a people, but we lack the capacity to iconise and preserve our heroes. The average Nigerian is driven by the conviction that "life is for the living", and so the dead are soon forgotten except by their close relations. Four days ago, the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND), the civil society institution set up by the Kudirat Abiola children in their mother's honour, held a memorial symposium and an awards ceremony at MUSON in Lagos and at the City Mall across the road.
Attendance was modest. But the emphasis on Kudirat's heroism was well-placed. Most of the politicians in the county today who are gallivanting all over the land, chasing people off the roads with noisy sirens, all those men and women who collected N50 million and attempted to mortgage the people's sovereignty, all the big men in high places now parading themselves as the hope of the country for the future, they have all forgotten or rather they cannot be bothered; they have failed to realise that to reach where they are, other lives were sacrificed, and that this democracy was not won on a platter of gold, but with the blood of innocent people.
In remembering Kudirat Abiola, we necessarily remember others like her, the prominent and not-so-prominent who paid the supreme price: Ken Saro Wiwa and the Ogoni 8, the Ogoni 4, Pa Alfred Rewane, Bagauda Kaltho...and the ordinary, undocumented victims who were gunned down during pro-democracy rallies, and the living who have many scars to show for daring to confront the dictator. Ten years later, the issues thrown up by the failings of that period have not yet been addressed. The murderers of Kudirat, of Rewane and the architect of all the other murders have not been identified and brought to justice.
The Oputa Panel which was supposed to defend Human Rights and ensure reconciliation eventually came to nothing because government has neither released the report nor acted on any known recommendations. It is true that there is a reconciliation committee currently going round Ogoni villages but what kind of reconciliation can anyone bring to the Ogoni and all the peoples of the Niger Delta without addressing the issues of federalism, resource allocation, and equity? Ken Saro Wiwa's son has been made a Special Adviser to the President on Conflict Resolution. How ironic. Is it an appointment that Ken Wiwa needs, or an official proclamation that his father and others were not enemies of the Nigerian state and so did not deserve to be hanged?
Kudirat's place in history has been recorded in such memorials as Kudirat's Corner in New York, Radio Kudirat which became the voice of the pro-democracy movement in exile, Kudirat Way in Oregun Lagos, KIND, and statues of Kudirat in Lagos and elsewhere. These are useful but the very phenomenon that produced Kudirat, the June 12 struggle and its principal martyr Chief MKO Abiola have been deliberately ignored, not by the states in the South West, but by the Federal Government in the last seven years. By ignoring MKO Abiola, the people in Abuja have more or less endorsed Babangida's mistake and Abacha's evil. By treating June 12 as a Yoruba affair, other states of the federation have also missed the point. June 12 is something we cannot run away from, sooner or later, we must all return to it and its significance, in order to have a complete sense of Nigeria's recent history. It is as much at the root of the national question as the Ogoni rebellion, MASSOB and the crisis in the Niger Delta.
The murder of Kudirat and all the others also raised questions about the safety of human life in this society. It is a notorious fact that in the last decade, not a single case of assassination has been resolved. Police investigations always end in a cul de sac. Promises by official authorities that justice will be done cannot be relied upon. The people have heard so many of those promises, they no longer believe them. It is in part why we have a crisis with the rule of law in Nigeria. Faced with a system that cannot guarantee justice, the people have been emboldened to take the laws into their own hands; creating patterns of anarchy that tug at the stability of the state.
Perhaps the most scandalous failure of the system was recorded with the murder of Chief Bola Ige, a serving Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation. He was murdered in cold blood in his own home in Ibadan. His killers have not been found yet. The government that he served is still in power but nobody in Abuja is still talking about what happened to Bola Ige. When privileged persons are killed and their killers cannot be found, then ordinary people have no hope whatsoever. This explains the emergence in many of our communities of vigilante security groups.
Confronted with a state that continues to betray them, the people are forced to make their own security arrangements, and resort to self-help. In the meantime, criminals have become very bold. These days, political figures are kidnapped from their homes and asked to pay ransom. Kidnapping has suddenly become a popular mode of communication. When oil workers are not being abducted by aggrieved militants in the Niger Delta, it is politicians who are taken away, interrogated and returned to their homes, and the police and all the other security agencies have so far functioned as spectators.
Kudirat's death is also about power relations between the state and the individual. Under the military, the state and its resources were used to intimidate the average citizen. Persons in the corridors of power considered themselves superior to the people, and whenever they were challenged, they responded with the unleashing of the instruments of violence. The likes of Kudirat resisted this abuse of power, and insisted on respect for due process. Ten years later, sadly, even with a civilian government in power for seven years, this misappropriation of power has not changed. The state has remained a fortress and its managers are as power drunk as ever. The power of government continues to choke the people. The methods may have changed but the spirit of domination, the intolerance of reason, and the conversion of office into royalty have remained. The Nigerian state still needs to be reinvented and restructured for performance and efficiency in the interest of the people.
Kudirat's province was in civil society, and the catalyst for the renaissance of civil society at the time was the abuse of the electoral process by the powers-that-be. In the last ten years, we have witnessed the importance and limitations of elections: how the electoral process can be used to steal advantages, discount the electorate and create social imbalance. The best tribute that can be paid in remembering Kudirat is to sustain the value of civil society as a countervailing force against the excesses of power mongers. Another election is on the way. It is as important as the elections of 1993, for it represents change in a formal and definite sense from one civilian government to the other. The vigilance of civil society will be required. It is time again to stand at the barricades and keep watch. Kudirat and all the other martyrs in Heaven must have been glad with the resolution of the Third Term debacle. Standing up for electoral integrity will further preserve their legacy.
Finally, Kudirat's emergence as a major icon for the women's movement in Nigeria is remarkable. Women were in the frontlines of the battle for democracy as participants, and victims. In fairness to President Obasanjo, his government in the last seven years has been the most women-friendly in Nigerian history in terms of the promotion of women causes, and the recognition of women in public life. But this is nothing compared to the kind of voice that women acquired between 1993 and 1999 when every Nigerian was required to choose between tyranny and progress. Indeed, in the run up to the 1999 elections, women groups prepared their own political manifesto, they even sought to register a political party. They wanted power as participants not as members of a so-called women's wing or as recipients of political appointments which amount to sheer tokenism.
It is sad to note that after the women's movement missed the former and was amply rewarded with positions by the Obasanjo government and the PDP in the states, its members lost the momentum. The biggest tragedy that happened to the women was even the treachery of some of their members who got big positions in Abuja and suddenly began to accommodate the same discriminatory values that they used to criticize. Kudirat was not an ideologue; she did not theorise about womanism but her example connected deeply with the larger aspirations of women in politics.
Now is the time for the women's movement to begin to articulate those aspirations afresh. It is instructive that at a time when Governors and political groups are shopping for a Nigerian President for 2007, nobody is looking in the direction of women. No woman has been mentioned as a likely Nigerian Johnson-Sirleaf. The women themselves are leaving the space and the initiative to the men. They are waiting and watching so they may complain later about tokenism and the phallocentrism of Nigerian politics. That won't be good enough, please. The leaders and foot-soldiers of that movement should know.
Kudirat's example is a challenge to all women. She is now justly a member of that illustrious family of Nigerian women who have distinguished themselves through a display of commitment and uncommon courage: Efunsetan Aniwura, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the women of the Aba riots, Margaret Ekpo. But beyond the larger symbolism of her action, her loyalty to her husband deserves special notice. Here was a woman who fought her husband's fight and by extension Nigeria's fight. She followed her husband to the field of battle at great personal risk. Her faith in her marriage moved her at a private level to fight in the public in pursuit of high principles that held great meaning for the rest of society. How many women these days can stand by their husbands? How many husbands stand by their wives? The story is commonly told about women who abandoned their husbands in moments of trials. One famous Nigerian was jailed for a few months (his name is hereby withheld, although he has told his own story publicly), by the time he returned, his dear wife was already pregnant for another man! Even in the Abiola household, similar incidents occurred while the man was in detention... This is a delicate subject. ...Sleep well, Kudirat