The 1990s were not the best of times for dictatorial regimes world-wide. It was a time when the strong wind of democracy was aloft, unfettered, running swiftly over many countries and sweeping away dictatorships. The wind of democracy swept away larger dictatorships like the Soviet Union and East Germany before creating similar havoc in Africa, affecting Zambia, and nearer home Mali, Niger, Togo, and others. Nigeria which had been under military dictatorship since 1966 with the exception of the brief civilian intermission of 1979-83, made all efforts to resist the wind of democracy in the 1990s. The iron will of the military regimes in Nigeria to resist and continue business as usual made it imperative for them to embark on self-serving, unending, transition programmes that in the end consumed many brilliant careers among both civilians and the military.
Ishaya Bamaiyi who rose to the rank of Lieutenant General in the Nigerian Army as well as becoming its Chief of Staff is one of those consumed by these developments. A few months after his retirement from the army, he was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of Alex Ibru the publisher of the Guardian Newspaper. He spent eight excruciating years in detention in Kirikiri Maximum Prison in Apapa, Lagos and was finally, in April 2008, discharged and acquitted of any wrong doings in the saga. In effect Ishaya Bamaiyi literally ended up in the belly of the beast but probably like the biblical Jonah, he has survived and now is able to tell his compelling story in the book titled, Vindication of a General.
Somehow I missed the well-attended launching ceremony of the book chaired by General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s former Head of State. I read excerpts of the book in some national dailies and when I saw the strong gale of rebuttals from those affected by the some of the disclosure I decided to seek for a complete a copy to read. I tried to get a copy to buy or borrow but none was available in Abuja. When all my efforts failed I decided as the last option to travel to Kaduna and look for a copy in the Aliyu Gusau Library which has now a reputation of being one of the largest repository of biographies and memoirs of distinguished Nigerians. I wasn’t disappointed as two copies were available there and I spent the whole day perusing one.
Vindication of a General is a riveting story of intrigues and backstabbing among the top echelon of the Nigerian Army. It is all about coups –attempted and counter – that kept on recurring in the 1990s. It is also about the zig-zagging story of Bamaiyi’s rise to grace from the grass and back to grass and then back to grace of the high moral grounds aided by the sweet vindication at the courts of law. I bet anyone picking the book might find it difficult to put down. It is the kind of book that one read with a racing heart – just like when for the first time one read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather or Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.
I read the two books in the early 1970s when I was a student in the university, but it was Darkness at Noon that made the strongest impression on my youthful mind. It was a harrowing tale of an old Bolshevic in the Stalinist Soviet Union that was arrested, sent to prison and tried for treason by the same government that he had helped to bring to power. Bamaiyi’s account is even more touching for it is a contemporary story that had spread out before our very eyes in the media.
By his own account Bamaiyi had a very humble upbringing in Zuru where he was born in 1945. The family finances were in dire straits thus young Bamaiyi and his many siblings found schooling very tough. He said that due to poverty he was attending classes in ‘walki’ – a traditional garment that covers only the private parts and buttocks. He was only able to get some form of clothing at a later stage when the school matron gave a tailor her used clothes to make ‘bante’, short pants for him.
Those were the tough beginnings but being a brilliant and focussed young man who knew what he wanted in life, Bamaiyi weathered all these early storms and forged ahead. Even when he decided to join the army in 1967 there were plenty of difficulties. In fact for a few months he had to start from the lowest rank in the army. He intimated that for those few months he was even posted to perform guard duty at General Mohammed Shuwa’s house in Kaduna, when Shuwa was GOC 1 Div in Makurdi.
He fought in the Nigerian civil war and thereafter had a meteoric rise in the army, having the privilege of commanding 7 different battalions, plus the Brigade of Guards. The icing on the cake was his command for the highly coveted Lagos Garrison Command. All these achievements, he said, ‘however represent one side of the experience. The other side of that experience is how the search for power and influence fuelled intrigues and malicious propaganda against my person and prepared the ground for my unwarranted detention and trial’. It was the 1990s and coups and attempted coups were the order of the day. It was probably the toughest period to hold any high command in the Nigerian Army. Bamaiyi was in the thick of it all and he told the stories of all those attempted coups against the regimes and his role in stemming them.
Beginning with the Gideon Orkar attempted coup against the Babangida regime in 1990 when Bamaiyi was at the time both Commander of Mechanized Brigade as well as the Ikeja Cantonment, and he was one of the officers that played heroic roles to upstage the mutinous troops. He related these happenings in clear graphic terms not relenting on details with names, etc. He was still in Lagos also in 1995 when some officers attempted to overthrow General Abacha, the Head of State then, where again he played a key role to stop them. The attempted coup has been tagged, ‘the phantom coup’ but Bamaiyi in this book said it was real. He said, ‘I want to state clearly and without fear of contradiction that the 1995 coup in which General Obasanjo was convicted was real’.
In the subsequent 1997 coup attempt he was even more directly involved, because by then he had become Chief of Army Staff and a confidant of General Abacha the Head of State. The cat and mouse games played normally in the corridors of power in the Presidential Villa had become more acute in the mid-1990s. The 1997 coup attempt which allegedly involved Abacha’s second in command as well as other key Generals, was one of those putsches that have been shrouded in mystery. Bamaiyi related in the book how he was nearly roped in but steadfastness in his loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief saved him.
The beginning of Bamaiyi’s travails started at the sudden death of General Abacha. Bamaiyi was never really at ease with Abacha’s successor who had promised to return power to civil administration. And when he was asked his opinion on the likely civilian successor he had openly opposed the emergence of a retired general and he felt that’s why he later suffered the consequences of arrest, imprisonment and trial. He was taken from Abuja to Kirikiri Maximum Prisons, Apapa, Lagos, in shackles and would remain there for eight years. One of the impressive takeaways from reading the book was Bamaiyi’s thoughts on the sordid corruption, indiscipline, and deteriorating conditions in our prison. Bamaiyi had also definite views about why discipline had eroded in the Nigerian Army. We shall return to the subject next week. Keep a date with this page.
