*The real issue behind the annulment
* Abiola followed the wrong people by joining NPN
* Zoning is a figment of the North’s imagination

Simply put, Professor Omo Omoruyi, is Mr. June 12. He was the Director General, Centre for Democratic Studies, CDS, Abuja at the height of the Ibrahim Babangida transition programme.  Omoruyi and some egg heads ploughed everything they had into the last leg of that programme but were as he put it “fooled in the end”. He attempts to properly situate the crisis the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential elections threw up and concludes that the British design of a permanent rulership in the north and a permanent followership in the south was not going to be reversed by a mere electoral process or an election.
Omoruyi made some profound revelations in this first part of this interview:  Is it about his disclosure to MKO Abiola that a vacancy had opened up in Aso Rock Presidential Villa, or his many encounters with Obasanjo, or how he escaped assassination? Excerpts:

By Jide Ajani, Deputy Editor

For a 17 year-old who keeps hearing about June 12 and its annulment, how would you want to educate him     on the real issues?
What I’ll say is that the real issues in the annulment have not been really told – and I mean the real issues have not been fully told.  But gradually, the truth is manifesting itself everyday with one incident after another, Nigerians come to terms with those issues and I then remind them, ‘those were the real issues’ regarding June 12 annulment.
An example sir!

Prof Omo Omoruyi

A typical example is this thing called zoning.  Is it that a southerner cannot become President?  Or are we saying this country, the way the white man gave it to us, designed it the way we should continue to run it?  This country was not designed in a manner that would enable a southerner to become the President.

That June 12 matter, in a nutshell, proved, for the first time, in a free and fair election, that a southerner called Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, won that election and some people got up and shouted, ‘Ha!’ the white man wasn’t wrong when he gave us this order, therefore, that election must be done away with.  That was just one of the real issues.

But even Obasanjo a southerner has said there was never anything called zoning?
I am surprised about Obasanjo.  Obasanjo, when he left Sani Abacha’s gulag, the first sermon he delivered at the Baptist Church, he talked about the tragedy of June 12 and that June 12 epitomised the crisis in Nigeria where a southerner can not be the president of the country on the basis of a free and fair election.  He became head of this country when he succeeded Murtala Mohammed.  For Obasanjo to go back on what he said at that Baptist Church shocked me as a Baptist.  Some of the things Obasanjo said there were the real issues in the annulment.  He talked about the armed forces, the integrity of states and so on.

Those who talk about zoning today are working against Nigerian history.  The Nigerian history is very clear.  Look, in 1977, Chief Solomon Daushep Lar, Obi Wali, Paul Unongo, Mudiaga Odje and I worked hard to create a system to call federal character, where states are units.  We never anticipated that this thing would come to this.  We also talked about 12 two thirds of the states for majority in the presidential elections and you still have something like that in the constitution till today.  We never talked about north or south, we talked about the integrity of the states. This thing is a figment of their imagination.  States as facts is what you find and not integrity of zones or north or south.

This was at the 1977 Constituent Assembly, I guess.  But then some people wanted a north and south arrangement as opposed to your own idea.  People like Adamu Ciroma if I’m not mistaken?
Yes, there were people like Adamu Ciroma, Shehu Shagari and co, who were working for a north and south and unfortunately, that became the order of the day when the National Party of Nigeria, NPN, came to power and started creating this thing called permanent northern president, permanent southern vice president.  They never really created rotation, rotation was never in the lexicon of the NPN at that time so this thing they are now talking about that power should rotate between north and south is a figment of their imagination – it was a permanent northern president and a permanent southern vice president.

But at that time there were 19 states?
Yes!  But the north was taken as one north and the south was taken as many souths by these people.  They believed in the integrity of the north, they saw it as one, indivisible.  The south was taken as many souths and that was the way the white man designed it.  And this is the lesson of June 12 and its annulment.  We must sit down and educate ourselves who were alive then and old enough to see these things, not just a 17 year old.  What were the real issues?  It was an attempt, through a free and fair election, to change the order of the white man or the British design of Nigeria.

The attempt to change the Sudan character of Nigeria, through the process of free and fair election, created what we have.  So, those talking about the north and south are simply saying let’s remain a slave of the white man, let’s go back to what he designed for us.

It was the contraption of Lord Lugard and successive Nigerian leaders including Tafawa Balewa, of blessed memory, Murtala Muhammed, Yakubu Gowon, who really had no clue about what the Nigerian order should be, and so on, never made any attempt to change that order, that British design.

So, what about Jonathan today?
Those who are saying Jonathan should not run are simply telling all of us that the white man’s design for Nigeria does not create room for Jonathan or a Bayelsa man that he would become President of Nigeria.

Prof Omoruyi

Let’s play the devil’s advocate here so that the other view can be well taken:  In 1983, when MKO Abiola was stopped from getting the NPN presidential ticket, ostensibly because the constitution says a President can have two terms; and for the party, the NPN, it was their own decision that the ticket was zoned to the north.  Would you then fault the party in that manner if you were a member of the party?
But I was never a member.

Yes I agree but if you were a member, would you say your party was wrong?
(Long laughter)  Okay, if I were a member, let’s work on that hypothetical case.  Of course yes.  MKO and I were members of the Constituent Assembly.  I remember seeing Moshood at the airport when he was flying to the north to attend the 40th anniversary of the installation of the Sultan of Sokoto, and I asked him, ‘Basorun, where are you going?’
I asked him because he had chartered an aircraft to attend the occasion and I called him and told him that that party was not meant for him and he confided in me that he wanted to become President of Nigeria.

What year was that?
That must be in 1977/1978.  I said that group you are following would never make you a president.  He said ‘Ha! Omo Bini that’s not true’.
I said we would see.  Then he started running into these problems he was running into.
Then we met again when I was at Benin, he said, ‘Omo you were right, I was in the wrong place (this was after the primaries).
Then I became the Director General of the Centre for Democratic Studies.

Okay, you were beginning to sound bitter?
Yes!  Some of the things that make me feel and sound bitter is because of what happened to MKO.  He came to me and there was one language he was always using and I’ve also used that language: Was there vacancy?  That is, was Ibrahim Babangida truthful with what we were doing? That is if there was vacancy, he, MKO would seek that nomination – that was 1991/1992.

Then it came to a point, I became convinced that there was vacancy and I telephoned Abiola. He came to see me at Bwari in my office and I said, Basorun, there is vacancy, meaning he could contest. Then he ploughed everything into it and knowing him as I did at that time, he ploughed everything into whatever he decided to do.  I feel this sense of guilt that I assured this man that there was vacancy in the Aso Rock Presidential Villa, meaning that Babangida was going to go.

When exactly was this?
That was after the cancellation of the other primaries and the disqualification of the other presidential aspirants in 1992.  I said go ahead and he went ahead but what then happened to him, today, I cry whenever I remember because I was also one of the last persons that he spoke to when the police were taking him away from his house after the Epetedo declaration in 1994.  I had just returned from the hospital then and he was one Nigerian leader who came to see me in the hospital.  He came to see me and he danced in the hospital that day; he gave the doctors money, he gave my wife money, he gave the nurses money and ordered that fresh flowers should be delivered to my hospital bed everyday for three weeks – this was in London.  He telephoned me that morning to find out about my health.

The Epetedo declaration had just been done that day and I wondered ‘that this man, what has he done’?
When he died, some of the things I said that time was that the man was betrayed.
He told me a lot about those who betrayed him.

Prof Omoruyi

Talking about betrayal and the election itself, what signs did you see that suggested to you that there was vacancy?
Not a matter of signs but I was told by General Ibrahim Babangida himself that he meant what he asked us to do.  I couldn’t be a fool because I was the match commissioner, Humphrey Nwosu was the referee.  You will not see the match commissioner but he ensures order and preparation and conduct of the match – the CDS that I ran was the match commissioner and we made sure that we had a credible election which meant Police, the press, civil society, international community, political parties and their behaviour came under my supervision.  I used to report to Babangida and he told me that he wanted to make history.

At that time he said he wanted to make history and he said he wanted me to assist him in making history of conducting free, fair and credible elections and I ploughed everything into that effort.  In fairness to him, he has agreed that he made error and asking Nigerians to forgive him.  We are a forgiving people, and maybe Nigerians will look back and say maybe the man has atoned for his error and Nigeria is a second chance country.  So let’s see if the people will give him a second chance and I am not saying judge him based on some issues.  Judge him on the other things he did while in office – the Third mainland Bridge was abandoned but he completed it; Abuja; some faculties in Nigerian universities.  But that is for him and Nigerians.

Okay, from the time he gave you assurances that he wanted to make history and the time all the issues of annulment started, at what point did you think the thing snapped?
He said so himself; he has tried to explain what happened himself.

Prof. this man has said so many things but as an individual with a bird’s eye view, what did you see or notice?
When I went to Harvard in 1995, I said I was going to explore why democracy eluded us and why we failed to achieve what we set out to achieve and find out some of the things we did that ought to have been done differently and I came to the conclusion that we did not address the north/south dichotomy.  We did not address the British design of Nigeria.  We permanently made Nigeria look like Sudan, with permanent rulership from the north and permanent followership from the south.  The politicians never addressed it.  Even Babangida who tried to address it using free and fair election, could not because if he knew that a permanent north, as husband and a permanent south as wife or wives, that  could not be reversed through the process of free and fair election, it would have been a different matter.  The truth of the matter is that there was never a rotation arrangement in the NPN, same thing for the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and the National Republican Convention, NRC.

Obasanjo did not rule Nigeria on the basis of zones nor did he rule Nigeria as a southern leader, not even a Yoruba leader.  Definitely, he didn’t win election even in his area in Otta, not to talk of the southern states.  Was he really a President representing the interest of the south?  No, he was a southern president in the conception of the north.  It is one north, one destiny. NPN merely said one Nigeria one destiny but the south is many souths many destinies and that is still the picture till today.  Jonathan is Jonathan and he doesn’t represent the Igbos or Yorubas but he is from Bayelsa State.

You have talked about the design of the British and how June 12 election failed to address that but then, we had a leader in charge.  From your insider knowledge, what signals did you again get or see that tended to suggest that this thing might not be followed through?
I confessed at some point that some of my staff went to Yola, and they taped some of the expressions of some NRC leaders that ‘this professor we don’t know him. National Electoral Commission, NEC, as of that time, we know; State Security Service, SSS, we know; Police we know; but Omo Omnoruyi of the CDS, we don’t know.  That Babangida must have planted him.  But for me, if I knew that it was not going to hold or it would be annulled I wouldn’t have gone into it but I was convinced we were going to make history and when I was told of the genuineness and sincerity of what we were to undertake, I told Basorun MKO that there was vacancy but I never told him before then but we used to joke about it before then.

Before the disqualification of the presidential candidates, anything could have happened at that time but after that I became convinced that we were working to make history and I had no reason to think that we were never going to produce a president based on the system we were working on.  But after the election, a new situation arose. I started seeing that the man was not willing to go beyond what had been produced and the military at that time and the north came together and insisted that ‘this is not what we bargained for’, so he yielded.

Prof Omoruyi

Was it that the military was not taken into confidence about this history to be made or that they just didn’t want to agree to the reality of an election producing an MKO Abiola as president?
I think they did not believe that the election would be conclusive and, therefore, if that happened we cancel it and when the elections were held, the elections went well.  The leadership of the armed forces, led by General Sani Abacha and the leadership of the north did not believe that the election would go well but it did.  It produced an order they never bargained for and somebody just woke up suddenly and said he had canceled it.

Just before the annulment, I heard that you were meant to see General Babangida; but you were locked out of the villa. What actually happened?
You see, we discussed at length how we could go about the problem and I think I came up with a plan how we could accommodate MKO Abiola and also accommodate the NRC too.  And I went and put something together and my plan was that MKO Abiola would be sworn in as President but we could then have a President whose ministers would be nominees of state governors from the two parties. Therefore, NRC and the Social Democratic Party, SDP, would have nominated ministers for MKO and that mix would go a long way to resolve the crisis.  That was the system South Africa ended up using and people started hailing South Africa.  Mandela and Buthelezi worked to do something like that.  When I was going to meet him, it became impossible to get the document across to him.

What were you doing that day, June 23, 1993, when you heard of the annulment?
The following morning, I woke up and then I got a phone call from Washington from VOA, reading the annulment statement and I said not in your life, this did not happen.  They read it to me and even sent me a fax and I collapsed,
I tried to reach him and at some point I got in touch with the President but he was busy and he said he would get back to me and at about 1 pm, he came on network news but at that time MKO Abiola did not even know.  He got to know through the media. A reporter came to me and saw me crying in my house and he asked what system we would adopt in moving forward and I said ‘I don’t have any other system; this one we did is free and fair and credible’.
I said quite a lot of things and I didn’t know he had a recorder and they went ahead to publish it and when it came out and I saw it, I said ‘these people are going to kill me’.

The then SGF, the late Aliyu Mohammed, from Kafanchan said I should go and retract what had been published but Babangida said no, I was speaking the truth.  They wanted me to say that I was misquoted but I was not misquoted; I did not know he had a recorder because I was angry and I was bellyaching.

You sounded angry?
No!  I did not sound angry.  I was angry because of what had happened to all that we laboured to do.  I was angry and with me at that time was my brother and friend, Dr. Adesina Sambo of blessed memory, he was crying I was also crying.  It was something which I made many young people to work for.  We abandoned our families, working round the clock in Abuja and round the country.

At the end of the day?
(Cuts in) But we were fooled; in the end.  We couldn’t believe it. So, when I look back, I feel bad and after a year at Harvard, I discovered that we didn’t go wrong, we just didn’t take some facts of our history into consideration especially when I ran into that document about north and south, a permanent northern leader and a permanent vice president in the many souths and I discovered that you can not reverse that through elections.  My first vote in my life was in 1959, so you can think of how old I am.  Lord Harcourt labeled the north as the husband and the south as the wives and you do not use elections to reverse that, but you have to first of all change the mentality of the people.  That system has not changed and that is what we still have in the PDP, unfortunately.  I had written a book, Beyond The Tripod which deals with this issue of one north and one south but that Nigeria is made up of states.  PDP must see Nigeria as made up of states because we have 36 states in Nigeria so nobody should fool anybody.

So, how do we change that, especially with the attitude of our politicians across board?
Every June 12 must be devoted to political education.

We must educate our people. To believe that Nigeria is made up of states and not north and south; that Nigeria must take into account the integrity of states.  When politicians run into trouble they begin to talk about the north and south but let me tell you there is nothing like that.

The media, too, is guilty, you should educate the people and stop this thing about Jonathan is from the south, Obasanjo is from the south but Obasanjo never ruled like a southerner, same with Shagari. Let me tell you, at the Constituent Assembly in 1977, the people from the Middle Belt, led by Chief Solomon Daushep Lar, said they didn’t believe in the north.  They had this group Council of Understanding and Unity, CUU.  They said they didn’t believe in the north.  So, what has changed?

We can even start by asking somebody like Solomon Lar if he believes in the integrity of the north and I know Lar would tell you that he doesn’t believe in that. Some people have said even after the June 12 annulment, Nigeria had another opportunity in 1999 to start on a tabular rasa with the emergence of Obasanjo but people say his eight years were wasted? Obasanjo believed in himself and himself alone.

Obasanjo never really set out to create an order in this country, and therefore, those who brought him in, they knew that Obasanjo would create a disorderly arrangement and that disorderly arrangement persisted until we got to a point where the issue of Third Term came up and then Obasanjo came to a position where he fooled General Babangida, he fooled Aliyu Gusau and he even fooled the late Yar’Adua because Yar’Adua did not bargain to be President of Nigeria and if you go back to the day Babangida collected his form, what was published was that Babangida was going to launch his campaign from Katsina.  So who was going to be Babangida’s anchor man from Katsina?  It was going to be Yar’Adua but what happened  Yar’Adua became a candidate.

It was after that that I realized that Obasanjo was playing games and Yar’Adua became a factor in that game. Obasanjo didn’t set out to create a successor.  He wanted to create confusion and that confusion was what we had with Yar’Adua until Jonathan became President.

WHAT DID BABANGIDA TELL OLU FALAE AND PAPA ADEKUNLE AJASIN WHEN THEY MET?  HOW DID PROF.  OMO OMORUYI ESCAPE ASSASSINATION?  WHO WERE THOSE BEHIND THE ATTEMPT ON HIS LIFE? WHY IS OMORUYI STILL CARRYING EIGHT PELLETS OF BULLETS IN HIS BODY SINCE 1994?  HOW DID OMORUYI SURVIVE CANCER?

READ ALL THESE AND MANY MORE IN PART 2