FORMER Military President, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, IBB (retd), has justified military incursions into governance in Nigeria.
IBB, who explained why the country had five coups between 1966 and 1985, added that military governments had more development projects than civilian governments.
In extracts from Part Three, Chapter Five, pages 104 to 115 of his controversial Autobiography: ‘A Journey in Service’, launched last Thursday, he highlighted the motivations behind military interventions, the historical context of coups in Nigeria and Africa, the structural reforms initiated by military leaders, and the on-going challenge of ensuring responsible governance.
He wrote:
When I started working on this autobiography a few years ago, I knew that, as someone who had participated in military coups, I would, at some point, need to reiterate my position on the problematic issue of military interventions in politics.
Anyone, who reads descriptions of me, particularly in foreign publications, as a ‘serial coup plotter’, or as ‘the moving spirit behind most military plots in Nigeria’, would think that my 35-year military career was devoted entirely to coup plotting!
One foreign journalist, Karl Maier, whom I readily obliged with an interview, ‘returned’ the favour in his book: ‘This House Has Fallen’, by claiming that ‘coups seem to run in my blood’!
He was not the only one with that mindset. In its reporting of the coup that brought me to office as head of the government, one international news magazine headlined its story: ‘The Triumph of the Trouble-maker’! I will not bother responding to the discriminatory implications that I did no more than plot coups as a soldier.
This volume bears testimony to the modest contributions of a soldier who stood up to play the role assigned to him by destiny at a notably peculiar moment in his country’s history. And as I will show in subsequent chapters of this book, it’s a role (my mistakes and shortcomings, notwithstanding) that I look back upon with pride.
Credit: Vanguard newspaper
