Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and human rights activist, has accused General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) of attempting to carelessly distort history, stating that any effort to rewrite history will ultimately fail.
“In an attempt to tell a story, he engaged in careless distortion of history. There are gaps that were unable to fill at the end of the day. He also might have forgotten that not all the dramatics personae are passing away. So history has already taken care of Babangida’s tenure, any attempt by him to rewrite history failed woefully in the book.”
Falana made this statement on Wednesday during the program “Politics Today” with Seun Okinbaloye. He emphasized that the accounts of the June 1993 election, as presented in his new autobiography titled “A Journey in Service,” were distorted. He noted that IBB enacted seven decrees to affirm the annulment of the election that declared MKO Abiola as President.
“Talking about the annulment of the election, President Babangida claimed that he traveled to Katsina on the 23rd of June 1993 and was flabbergasted to learn about the annulment. All programs in the second quarter of the political transition programme schedule including the June 12 election was banned, he also banned the courts particularly the Courts of Appeal that was entertaining the case and the Court of Appeal was going to decide the validity of Exparte order of Justice Ikpeme and Justice Scion in the defence of Section 19 Decree 25 of 1987 that no court shall inquire into or make any order to stop elections.
“No interim order, no interlocutory order or final order will be made by any court to stop the election. When the junta discovered that the Court of Appeal was going to set aside those orders, a decree was enacted by General Babangida on the 22nd of June. All together it was 5 decrees which justified the annulment. So the announcement of 23rd by Nduka Irabor was anchored on the decrees enacted by him on the 23rd of June 1993 justifying the annulment.
“Between 23rd and 26th of August, General Babangida promulgated seven decrees to set aside a free and fair election and also set aside both the court of appeal and the election tribunal that was setup for that election is suddenly saying he had no idea that the election was annulled, is playing with the intelligence of all of us who were around at that time.”
