Sani Abacha | Zikoko!

General Sani Abacha died 24 years ago, but he’s still Nigeria’s OG sugar daddy in 2022. The evidence of his massive stealing of Nigeria’s assets in his five-year military regime continues to outlast him.

On August 23rd, 2022, the United States agreed to return to Nigeria the sum of $23m which Abacha stole over two decades ago. The US alone has returned more than $334.7m linked to the former dictator.

But as nice as it is for Nigeria to get some of its money back, there’s been a lack of transparency in how the returned Abacha loot is spent. Nigerians just aren’t feeling the impact directly enough.

For example, the government wants to spend the fresh $23m on projects like the Abuja-Kano road, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the Second Niger Bridge.

But we have other ideas on more tangible ways to spend it:

Giveaway, obviously

It’s not easy to be a Nigerian these days. You just need to look at the state of the economy to agree everyone needs some credit alerts.

Call it hardship allowance or allowance for igbo and shayo, but everyday Nigerians need to personally feel touched by the Abacha loot.

Give it to ASUU

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has been on its annual ~~leave~~ strike for the past six months because of its unending conflicts with the Federal Government (FG). The two parties have left thousands of students stranded at home while they battle over money and control. FG should think about throwing the $23m ASUU’s way to end the strike… for now.

Compensate Nigerian students

Speaking of those stranded students, there have recently been conversations about how they should be compensated. This $23m from ~~our sugar daddy~~ Abacha should do some leg work in appeasing them for the time lost at home without education.

ALSO READ: Why Nigerian Students Deserve Compensation for ASUU Strike

Bribe the national grid

The national grid has been a relentless opp to Nigerians, especially in 2022, with many breakdowns and blackouts. The government can make it stop by bribing it to chill or something.

Jollof rice festival

The way to anybody’s heart is through their stomach and what better way to feel the impact of Abacha’s recovered loot than for the government to feed everyone?

$23m feels just right enough to throw a Guinness World Records-breaking Jollof rice festival. Everybody gets a taste of the national ~~cake~~ rice!

Expensive sacrifice at a T-junction

Transparency International estimates that Abacha may have stolen up to $5 billion from Nigeria between 1993 and 1998. We’re yet to get half of that money back.

We can use this little $23m to offer an expensive sacrifice to the gods to help in the recovery of everything that took flight under Abacha’s watch. You spend money to make money.

Pay bounty on oil thieves

Buhari recently complained that oil thieves are partly to blame for Nigeria’s revenue-generation issues. Some of these thieves are “big men” cashing out from robbing Nigeria. We can use the Abacha loot to place bounties on their heads to encourage citizens to help security agencies to find them more easily.

Tithe

It’s important to always give unto Caesar — and unto the Lord — in style.

ALSO READ: There’s a Place for Animals in the Nigerian Public Service

Samson Toromade

August 25, 2022

Citizen

Abacha, Abacha loot, Muhammadu Buhari, Sani Abacha
June 12 is one of those important dates that’s impossible to erase from Nigerian history. It’s a date that sticks out. So, why’s June 12 such a big deal in the country?

It’s about an election

June 12th, 1993, was the day Nigeria conducted what’s widely considered by local and international observers as its freest and fairest presidential election.

MKO Abiola won that election

MKO Abiola of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was adjudged the winner of the June 12 election as he had won over 58% of the total votes cast before collation was paused. His only opponent in the contest was Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC).

Babangida annulled the election

Even though Abiola was widely considered the winner of the election, he was never officially crowned the winner. General Ibrahim Babangida’s military government cut Abiola’s victory dance short by annulling the election.

Corruption was used to justify the annulment

Babangida’s decision was unpopular at the time. To justify the annulment, he said more than ₦2.1 billion was spent by presidential candidates to undermine the election. He also accused officials and party agents of electoral fraud. The military government’s reasons for the annulment didn’t fly with Nigerians and the international community.

The annulment ended the Third Republic

The June 12 election was going to cement Nigeria’s return to a democratic system of government. State governors and lawmakers had already been elected and in office before the government annulled the presidential election. Nigeria would’ve returned fully to civil rule on August 27th, 1993, if everything went according to plan.

Babangida stepped down months later

After eight years in office, the June 12 incident increased pressure on Babangida to step down as promised. He handed over power to an interim government headed by Ernest Shonekan, who was tasked with completing Nigeria’s transition to democracy.

Abiola rejected a Vice Presidential appointment

Shonekan named MKO Abiola the vice president of the interim government Babangida handed over to, but he rejected this. The interim government was unpopular and ruled to be illegal by a Lagos State high court.

June 12 paved the way for Abacha

The chaos of the annulment of the June 12 election paved the way for General Sani Abacha’s military coup of November 1993. He overthrew the interim government and ruled Nigeria until his death in 1998.

ALSO READ: An Abacha in Agbada Is Trying to Return to Power

Abiola died fighting for his June 12 mandate

MKO Abiola protested heavily against the annulment. One year later, on June 11th, 1994, he declared himself president of the country. His declaration prompted the Abacha government to arrest and detain him for four years. He died of a heart attack as he was about to be released a month after Abacha’s death.

June 12 birthed the National Democratic Coalition

The annulment birthed the formation of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) which was an influential pressure group of pro-democracy activists who called on Abacha to step down for Abiola to claim his mandate. Abacha’s government blamed the group for a series of attacks that targeted the military. Many civil society groups and trade unions also protested against the Abacha government.

There were martyrs

The annulment of the June 12 election wasn’t well-received by the Nigerian public. Security forces killed protesters while trying to suppress protests against the government. The military government also assassinated prominent people like Kudirat Abiola, MKO’s wife, and Chie f Alfred Rewane, a financier of NADECO, over their agitation for June 12.

June 12 didn’t become Democracy Day until recently

Democracy Day used to be celebrated every May 29 since 1999, the year Nigeria eventually returned to civilian rule. President Buhari changed that in 2018 when he made June 12 Nigeria’s new Democracy Day. He also conferred the posthumous title of Grand Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (GCFR) on Abiola.

ALSO READ: What If Abacha Never Died?

Samson Toromade

June 12, 2022

Citizen

Ibrahim Babangida, june 12, MKO Abiola, Sani Abacha
24 years ago on June 8th 1998, General Sani Abacha died five years after he launched a military coup to take over Nigeria. What caused his death? It depends on who you ask. The official cause of death was that he died of a heart attack. But word on the streets was that he was poisoned by prostitutes who used an apple — you know, the same device that logged us out of the Garden of Eden.

Abacha’s death caused a ripple effect that altered the course of Nigerian history. But what if he never died? What would Nigerian history look like then? Let’s find out.

He’d be president for life

Before his death, Abacha’s government was transitioning Nigeria from military rule to democratic rule. But the kind of democracy Abacha planned to transition Nigeria into was as democratic as a mushroom is a fruit.

For starters, he arm-twisted all five political parties he approved at the time to nominate him as the only presidential candidate on the ballot. If he’d stayed alive to win that election, you’d expect that he’d have written the Nigerian constitution on his toilet seat and kept himself in power for life.

Nigeria would run a monarchy system

Sani Abacha didn’t come off as a guy that’d just be content with a life presidency. You just get the feeling he’d want his image to continue to loom large, long after he was gone. In 2022, it just so happens that his oldest surviving son, Mohammed Abacha, is on the ballot for the 2023 Kano governorship election. So it’s very likely he’d have wanted to directly transfer power to his children.

ALSO READ: Is the Abacha Stove Making a Comeback?

Twitter wouldn’t exist in Nigeria

President Buhari banned Twitter for seven months because his controversial tweet was deleted and everyone was mad about it. But Buhari is learning work where Abacha was, because the first person to make an inevitable joke about President Abacha’s tribal marks would easily get Twitter a permanent ban in Nigeria. VPNs wouldn’t work too and we’d have to sneak into Cameroon to tweet amala slander.

Buhari would be Abacha‘s Lai Mohammed

It’s hard to see a path that leads Buhari to become the president he is today if Abacha stayed alive. But despite Abacha’s terrible human rights atrocities and the well-documented fact that he was a big-time thief, Buhari is a strong defender of Abacha’s legacy. This makes it easy to imagine that in an Abacha lifetime presidency, Buhari would be his Lai Mohammed.

NTA would be Nigeria’s only media station

It’s no secret that Abacha wasn’t a great fan of the media. So, if he didn’t die 24 years ago, there probably would be no Channels TV to win “Best Station” for 12,000 consecutive years. All Nigerians would have would be an NTA remote-controlled from Abacha’s bedroom. The inflation rate and unemployment rate wouldn’t even exist.

General Sani Abacha’s place in Nigerian history cannot be forgotten for better or for worse, but it’s probably best for everyone that he left when he did. May affliction not rise a second time.

ALSO READ: An Abacha in Agbada Is Trying to Return to Power

Samson Toromade

June 9, 2022

Citizen

Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria, Sani Abacha
General Sani Abacha is pretty hard to forget for different reasons to different generations of Nigerians. Those that were alive in the 1990s remember him as the brutal dictator that turned Nigeria into a terrifying hellscape. The Abacha regime served human rights abuses for breakfast and political assassinations for dinner.

But younger generations of Nigerians remember him as the thief who stole so much that, every three Eke market days, a bunch of Abacha loot is still being discovered in the most random places on the planet. He’s now regarded as a sugar daddy whose past loot is making its way back to Nigeria in the present.

Regardless of which generation is passing judgement, a lot of people can agree that the Sani Abacha years weren’t such a great time for Nigeria. So, of course, it was going to raise eyebrows that an Abacha is contesting for public office in a democratic Nigeria.

Enter Mohammed Abacha

This guy

When he suddenly died in 1998, Sani Abacha left behind six sons and three daughters. Mohammed Abacha is the eldest surviving son of the late dictator and has had an interesting life since his father’s death. On May 26th 2022, he won the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to contest in the Kano State governorship election in 2023.

First, a backstory

Sani Abacha stole billions of dollars, and he did it with help from friends, close associates and family members. And his son, Mohammed, who’s been a central figure implicated in his late father’s thieving activities, was arrested in 1999 by the government of Olusegun Obasanjo over corruption and money laundering allegations. When he was released in 2002, the government announced that it was based on an agreement that required the Abacha family to return more than $1 billion stolen from Nigeria. That deal also allowed the Abacha family to keep the sum of $100 million they claimed was acquired before Sani Abacha took over Nigeria in 1993.

Mohammed was also arraigned in court for alleged involvement in the Abacha government’s assassination of Kudirat Abiola but was acquitted by the Supreme Court before the commencement of trial.

When Goodluck Jonathan came into power, his government dragged Mohammed to court in 2014 for receiving stolen property worth N100.38 billion, but the charges were later dismissed.

Man’s the proverbial cat with nine lives.

ALSO READ: How to Punish Corrupt Nigerian Politicians, Since Imprisonment Isn’t Working

Now, about Abacha’s political career

The first thing to know about Mohammed’s political career is that this isn’t the first time he’s contesting to become the governor of Kano. He’s been trying to get into power long before anyone ever came up with the idea for TikTok.

His first serious stab at running for office was in 2011. He was a member of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) which you may remember as the party of a certain Muhammadu Buhari at the time. In fact, Abacha’s wife and Mohammed’s mother, Maryam, said in an interview in 2014 that her son became a member of the party due to Buhari’s influence.

Dictator. President. Influencer — work rate >>>

Mohammed won the CPC’s ticket in a primary election, but the party submitted the name of another aspirant, Lawal Ja’afaru Isa. The younger Abacha’s attempt to fight this in court ended in failure, and Maryam wasn’t happy with Buhari over this.

Mohammed wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he contested again in 2015. But he withdrew from the race just before the PDP’s primary election for unexplained reasons. But he didn’t stop there.

Mohammed was a bit luckier in 2019 when he won the ticket of the Advanced Peoples Democratic Alliance (APDA). He was finally on the ballot for the governorship election and it seemed to be his time to shine. More than 2.2 million people voted in that election, but Mohammed ended up with only 3,035 votes.

So, what now?

Even though Mohammed won the PDP’s governorship ticket, he’s currently not the party’s only candidate for the election.

This situation of two winners is made possible only through the magic known as “parallel elections”. But what does that even mean? Well, PDP had a civil war of personalities that created two opposing factions in the party. The two factions then went ahead to organise separate elections with different winners.

Mohammed won the PDP’s ticket in a contest against one other aspirant, Jafar Sani Bello. Sadiq Wali, the son of a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, won the other election which was organised at the Sani Abacha Youth Center in Kano. You can’t make this kind of irony up.

What’s left now is for the PDP to decide whose name will be submitted to INEC as the authentic candidate. This means that Mohammed must be praying that whatever happened in 2011 with CPC doesn’t repeat itself in 2022 with PDP.

ALSO READ: These Politicians’ Kids Are Taking Over from Their Parents

Samson Toromade

June 3, 2022

Citizen

Mohammed Abacha, pdp, Sani Abacha
The 1990s wasn’t such a bad time for Nigeria. The Dream Team won a historic gold medal in football at the 1996 Summer Olympics. The country returned to a democratic system of government after nearly 20 years of military rule. And a really brutal dictator died.

But the 1990s wasn’t such a great time for Nigeria too. And that was mostly down to that dead dictator: General Sani Abacha.

This ashy guy.

General Abacha ruled Nigeria for half of the 1990s — from 1993 when he hijacked power till 1998 when he mysteriously died, to wild jubilations.

Abacha’s legacy is defined by the trail of the destruction he left behind and the billions of naira he stole and stashed abroad. That legacy of stealing is one that even new generations of Nigerians are very familiar with. After all, much of his stolen loot is still being recovered over 20 years after his death.

However, there’s another one of his legacies that has progressively faded from memory but isn’t completely erased.

Introducing… the Abacha Stove

As a Nigerian, nothing inspires innovation more than hardship. It’s what led to things like this:

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s an aero-amphibious jet car.

And whatever the hell this is supposed to be:

It’s that same kind of hardship-enforced ingenuity that birthed the Nigerian invention that’s known as the Abacha Stove. It looks like this:

How did the Abacha Stove happen?

When kerosene became scarce and expensive as hell under Abacha, Nigerians innovated with a new stove technology. The stove wasn’t complicated and was a cheap substitute for kerosene stoves.

The Abacha Stove was mainly powered by sawdust. Sawdust is made of small chippings of wood and is commonly found at sawmills and carpenter workshops. Because it’s a waste product of woodwork operations, Nigerians could acquire it for free to cook their meals. Sawdust looks like this:

The Nigerian economy under Abacha wasn’t in the best of conditions. And sawdust was simply economical and helped poor Nigerians get around paying for expensive kerosene.

How did the Abacha Stove work?

Many of the stoves were products of Do-It-Yourself experiments. For example, you could find a metal paint container and create holes in it to stack the sawdust and let it breathe while it burned. You still needed a bit of kerosene to start the fire and keep it alive during the course of cooking.

What was so bad about the Abacha Stove?

The most pressing concern with the Abacha Stove was its health implications. Because of how unstable it was as a fuel, you still needed to keep fanning the stove with your mouth or an object to keep it burning and complete cooking your meal.

The implication of this is exposure to poisonous fumes that potentially caused lung diseases and were especially harmful to children. The Abacha Stove may have saved families money, but it was also having an adverse effect on their health.

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) said in 2021 that almost 185 children under the age of five die every day from pneumonia due to air pollution in Nigeria. The majority of the deaths are from air pollution in the household, including that from cooking over open fires.

ALSO READ: “We Are All Smokers in This City!” — The Life of Port Harcourt Residents Under the Soot

Is the Abacha Stove making a comeback?

Over 20 years after Abacha’s death and the eventual decline of the Abacha Stove, Nigeria is yet to fully embrace cleaner methods for cooking. The incumbent Buhari administration has been promoting the use of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) as cooking fuel. But the inflation of cooking gas prices has derailed the drive to get more Nigerians to adopt LPG in the past few years.

According to a February 2022 report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the average retail price of LPG increased by 83.69% from February 2021. The average retail price of household kerosene also increased by 26.66% in the same period.

Lack of access to clean cooking fuel is what drove many Nigerians to the Abacha Stove decades ago. In 2022, there is a danger of a deja vu as the country’s economic situation is forcing many to stick to unsafe cooking methods. And a Buhari Stove probably isn’t as impossible as many think.

May affliction not rise a second time.

Samson Toromade

April 20, 2022

Citizen

Abacha Stove, inflation, Kerosene, LPG, Sani Abacha