Anthony Kila
A nation that cannot agree on what happened yesterday will struggle to determine what it should learn tomorrow. There are moments in a nation’s life when history ceases to be merely about the past. It becomes a question of national character. June 12 is one of those moments.
The question is not simply who won an election, who annulled it, who went to prison, who negotiated, who resisted, or who died. The deeper question is whether, nearly three decades later, we are still capable of establishing what happened, while resisting the temptation to mould the past to the needs of the present. This is why I found Femi Falana’s recent intervention on the death of Chief M.K.O. Abiola both fascinating and troubling.
I have shared political battles with Falana and have stood on the same side in many of the struggles he has taken part in. I therefore have no interest in reducing this matter to a quarrel between personalities. Indeed, precisely because of the seriousness of the man and the importance of the period he was writing about, I believe his account deserves careful examination rather than either reflexive acceptance or casual dismissal.
In his recent essay, “How Chief Abiola was killed in government custody”, Falana argues that after the death of General Sani Abacha, General Abdulsalami Abubakar brought in the international community to persuade Abiola to abandon his claim to the presidency. He specifically says that the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, were brought in to pressure Abiola to renounce his mandate, and that, in separate meetings, they asked him to exchange the June 12 mandate for his freedom.
That is a serious historical claim. And serious historical claims deserve serious evidence.
One of Nigeria’s enduring problems is our remarkably casual relationship with history. We have developed the strange habit of turning yesterday’s villains into today’s heroes without a Damascus moment, while yesterday’s heroes can become today’s villains—or, worse, irrelevant extras in a story that once centred on them. We do this with extraordinary ease.
People are remembered according to the politics of the moment. A government is either cast as entirely evil or retrospectively misunderstood. A patriot is rehabilitated because he has gained new admirers. A controversial figure becomes respectable because the political coalition around him has shifted. Eventually, nothing is fixed. And when nothing is fixed, nothing is sacred.
That is how societies become anomic. When facts become dependent upon influence, allegiance and political convenience, citizens gradually lose confidence not only in their institutions but in the very possibility of a shared national truth. This is why the politics of memory matters.
Memory is valuable. Testimony is invaluable. But memory is not automatically history. History requires the harder work of comparison, corroboration, documentation and contextualisation. This is where an old newspaper column becomes unexpectedly important.
On July 5, 1998—almost immediately after the events in question the late Chief Bola Ige wrote in his Uncle Bola’s Column in the Sunday Tribune under the headline “Internationalising June 12?” Bola Ige was responding to the visit of Kofi Annan and Emeka Anyaoku and, specifically, to what he considered a serious misrepresentation of Annan’s press conference.
His observation was unequivocal: having listened carefully to the press conference and examined the full text published in the newspapers, he said that Annan used neither the word “mandate” nor the word “renounce” anywhere.
Ige was equally emphatic about Anyaoku. He wrote that he was not surprised that Anyaoku had been more careful, and he expressed pride in the Commonwealth Secretary-General, describing him as a brilliant classics scholar from the University of Ibadan. Most significantly, Ige recorded that Anyaoku had rightly said that only Chief Abiola could speak about his mandate and his future.
That contemporaneous record matters, but it does not settle the entire matter. It cannot simply be ignored. It is evidence from the time, not a recollection reconstructed almost three decades later. But there is another piece of evidence, and this is where intellectual honesty requires us to be careful.
Falana’s account does not rest solely on his own recollection. He cites a July 6, 1998 letter from Abiola to Gani Fawehinmi, in which Abiola stated that both Annan and Anyaoku had wanted him to sign a statement that he would not again demand his mandate after his release.
That is important. It means we cannot responsibly write as though the historical record contains only one version of events. Instead, a tension exists between the contemporaneous public account recorded by Bola Ige and what Abiola is said to have written about the private discussion. That distinction matters.
Annan’s public statement may not have used the words “mandate” or “renounce,” while a private conversation may nevertheless have addressed what Abiola would do after his release. Those propositions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The historian’s task, therefore, is not to choose the version he prefers. It is to find out what happened. So I began asking questions, not wanting to rely solely on documents.
I spoke separately with a senior Afenifere figure and a veteran journalist, both of whom had been on the frontline in the resistance to Abacha and the struggle around June 12. I put the account to them plainly. Their reactions were strikingly similar.
Both questioned the narrative that Anyaoku had gone to Abiola to persuade him to surrender his mandate. By the time Abdulsalami Abubakar became head of state, there was no need to negotiate; everyone was waiting for MKO’s release. Both believed that some aspects of the account did not align with their understanding of the events and the people involved. That did not prove anything by itself, but it deepened the question. So I decided to take the question to the person at the centre of it.
I sat with Chief Emeka Anyaoku and put the matter to him directly. His reaction surprised me. He was genuinely surprised that anyone had attributed such an account to him.
This was particularly striking because Anyaoku has always spoken warmly of Femi Falana, and I know of no personal animosity between them that would explain any deliberate distortion of their respective positions. Anyaoku confirmed his understanding of his intervention during those extraordinary days.
His account was not that he had gone to Abiola as an emissary tasked with persuading him to surrender his mandate. As he understood and remembered it, his intervention was part of the broader effort to resolve Nigeria’s political crisis and secure a legitimate way forward from the June 12 impasse.
That account is also broadly consistent with the historical record of Anyaoku’s earlier mediation between Abiola and the military authorities. His memoir, The Inside Story of the Modern Commonwealth, contains a substantial chapter (Six) on the Nigerian crisis, including his efforts to facilitate dialogue on the annulled election and the political impasse.
I am very inclined to believe that Chief Anyaoku would not have suggested anything in private, given what was widely known at the material time that the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth affirmed in his statement that Abiola’s position was a result of what was generally described by international observers as a free and fair election.
Again, this does not mean that every recollection has been conclusively reconciled. It means something more important: We have conflicting evidence, and therefore we have a duty to investigate rather than declare victory.
This is the point at which June 12 becomes bigger than Falana, bigger than Anyaoku, and even bigger than Abiola. A nation needs memory, but a nation also needs discipline in the use of memory.
Memory tells us what people experienced, believed, feared, and thought they were doing. Documents tell us what was recorded. Contemporaneous testimony tells us what people were saying at the time. Later memoirs tell us how participants subsequently interpreted their actions. These are all valuable, but they are not identical.
The temptation to collapse them into one convenient story is particularly dangerous in a country whose political history has been repeatedly interrupted by military coups, authoritarian governments, suppressed records, propaganda and political realignments.
When archives are weak, memories become powerful. When memories become political weapons, history becomes vulnerable. And when history becomes vulnerable, the next generation inherits not a national memory but competing political versions of the past. That is a dangerous inheritance.
There is also an ethical dimension to this. Not everyone who lived through June 12 can speak today. Abiola is dead. Bola Ige is dead. Kofi Annan is dead. Gani Fawehinmi is dead. Abacha is dead. Many of the journalists, activists, lawyers, diplomats and political actors who lived through that turbulent period are gone.
The dead cannot defend themselves when their actions are reinterpreted. That places a special responsibility on those of us who remain. We must be careful in attributing motives. We must distinguish what they said publicly from what they may have said privately. We must distinguish what they remembered from what contemporary records establish. And, above all, we must resist the seductive convenience of historical certainty where the evidence remains contested.
This is not an argument against Falana. It is an argument for history. Indeed, Falana’s own lifelong commitment to justice should make this principle familiar: the burden of proof matters.
June 12 has become one of the defining symbols of Nigeria’s democratic journey. The election has been officially recognised. Abiola has been posthumously honoured. June 12 has been designated Democracy Day. The political struggle surrounding the election has become part of the moral vocabulary of democratic Nigeria.
Precisely for that reason, we must be careful. We cannot build a democratic culture on a historical foundation we are unwilling to examine. Nor should we imagine that correcting one version of history requires replacing it with another. The mature position is more demanding. It requires us to say: Here is what the evidence establishes. Here is what contemporary witnesses said. Here is what later participants remembered. Here is where the accounts conflict. And here is what remains uncertain. That is not weakness. That is scholarship. That is intellectual honesty. That is how serious nations preserve their history.
I am less concerned about winning an argument over what happened in June 1998 than I am about what a young Nigerian in 2040 will be told about it.
Will that young Nigerian inherit a history in which facts are patiently established, or one in which the most influential surviving narrator automatically becomes the author of the past? Will our children learn that historical claims must be tested against evidence, or will they learn that political loyalty determines which version of yesterday becomes truth? The answer matters because a nation without a reliable memory is condemned to repeatedly renegotiate its identity, and that is perhaps the deepest lesson of June 12.
The struggle was not only about who should occupy Aso Rock. It was about whether citizens’ choice should mean anything. Today, the struggle should also be about whether truth itself should mean anything.
We should honour our heroes without sanitising them. We should criticise our villains without fabricating evidence against them. We should listen to witnesses without treating every recollection as infallible. And we should interrogate even those whose political causes we share. That is the price of intellectual integrity.
There is a temptation, particularly in politics, to believe that history belongs to those who have the loudest voices. It does not. History belongs, ultimately, to those who come after us.
They will not be able to question Abiola, Ige, Annan, Anyaoku, Falana, or the many others who lived through June 12. They will depend on what we leave behind—our books, newspapers, archives, testimonies, documents, and, importantly, our honesty. That is why this conversation matters, not because we need another quarrel over June 12, but because we need to decide what kind of country we want to be.
A country in which memory is constantly adjusted to suit the present? Or a country mature enough to allow evidence to complicate its cherished stories? I choose the latter.
For the sake of the dead, we owe history accuracy. For the sake of the living, we owe it honesty. But most importantly, for the sake of those yet to come, we owe them a past they can trust.
• Kila is the author of ‘Crucial Cs Around D: The Disciplines of Decision-Making and Leadership’, and a member of the League of Nigerian Columnists. He is a Jean Monnet Professor of Strategy and Development at the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies (CIAPS). He also serves as Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of the Michael and Cecilia Ibru University (MCIU).