military ruler
Personal Information
Born September 20, 1943, in Kano, Kano State, Nigeria; married Mariam Jidah, 1965; children: six sons, three daughters.
Education: City Senior Primary School, Kano, Nigeria; Provincial Secondary School (now Government College), Kano, Nigeria, 1957-62; Nigerian Military Training College, Kaduna, 1962-63, 1964; MONS Defence Officers' Cadet Training College, Aldershot, United Kingdom, 1963; School of Infantry, Warminster, United Kingdom, 1966, 1971; Command and Staff College, Jaji, Nigeria, 1976; National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, Jos, Nigeria, 1981; Senior International Defence Course, Montery, CA, USA, 1982.
Memberships: National Institute (mni), 1981.
Career
Nigerian Army, Commissioned Second Lieutenant, 1963, promoted lieutenant, 1966, captain, 1967, platoon and battalion commander, training department, commander, 2nd Infantry Division, major, 1969, lieutenant colonel, 1972; commanding officer, 2nd Infantry Brigade, colonel, 1975, brigadier, 1980, announced coup, December 31, 1983, appointed general officer commanding, 2nd Mechanized Division, 1984-85, major-general, 1984, announced coup, August 27, 1985. Appointed army chief of staff and member, Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC), 1985, Lieutenant-General, 1987, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989, ministry of defense, 1990, secretary of defense, August 26, 1993; seized head of state in coup, November 17, 1993.
Life's Work
General Sani Abacha, long hovering close to the central power base of successive military governments in the coastal West African nation of Nigeria, finally assumed that country's center seat with a coup in November of 1993. Trained in Nigeria, Great Britain, and the United States, Abacha began his career as second lieutenant in the Nigerian Army in 1963, rose through the ranks to the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) and eventually assumed the head of state. Although back-up plans, including tanks and soldiers were in place, the transition occurred quickly and without bloodshed. An Associated Press (AP) report in the Boston Globe credited Abacha with having forced the former military ruler, General Ibrahim Babangida, to resign in August of 1993--two months after Babangida annulled the results of the national presidential elections of June 12, an election that the wealthy industrialist Moshood Abiola was widely believed to have won.
While continuing to assert his intention to bring democratic civilian rule to Nigeria, Abacha has received criticism from prominent Nigerian democracy campaigners, human rights advocates, civil rights lawyers, and world-renowned authors. These critics doubt his sincerity and commitment after 11 straight years of virtually uninterrupted military rule, all accompanied by promises made by other dictators for a return to democracy. Except for the four-year period of the Second Republic in 1979, Abacha's command of the state represents a final ascendence for him in successive military governments dating back to 1966, six years after Nigerian independence in 1960.
Abacha was born on September 20, 1943, in Kano, Kano State, Nigeria. Kano had been a part of the British colony of Nigeria until the nation won independence in 1960. From 1957 to 1962 Abacha was a student, first in the City Senior Primary School of Kano and then in the Provincial Secondary School (now Government College). During the years immediately following independence, from 1960 to 1966, Nigeria was governed by a civilian regime, the First Republic. In these years Abacha trained for the military and received his first appointment in the Nigerian Army. He attended the Nigerian Military Training College in the Northern Nigerian city of Kaduna from 1962 to 1963 and received his appointment as Second Lieutenant in 1963. Following was a series of promotions within the Nigerian military.
When the nominally democratic First Republic fell to a military coup in 1966, Abacha received his first significant promotion from second lieutenant to lieutenant. The military hoped to stem the tide of strikes, work-to-rule actions, demonstrations, and riots by workers and peasants that had erupted across the country in protest against the civilian regime which had unleashed an unchecked police force against Nigerian citizens and had failed to maintain public services. Meanwhile individual politicians displayed their enormous wealth arrogantly in the face of abject poverty, massive illiteracy, unemployment, and hunger. The military proved unable to impose order on the nation, however.
During colonial times, Nigeria had been divided into three regions, roughly corresponding to the areas of the largest ethnic groups, specifically the predominantly Muslim Hausa and Fulani peoples of the North, the largely Christian Yoruba people of the West, and the largely Christian Igbo people of the East. In 1967 the East seceded and formed the Biafran Republic; the ensuing civil war, lasting until 1970, caused the death of approximately one million people, according to journalist Peter da Costa in Africa Report. At the beginning of that war in 1967, Abacha assumed the position of captain; over the next three years, he rose in the Nigerian Army from platoon and battalion commander to commander of the training department, 2nd Infantry Division, and to major in 1969. In 1972, soon after the war ended and the boundaries of the nation were restored, Abacha gained the post of lieutenant colonel. During the next few years, Abacha received subsequent promotions to colonel in 1975 and to brigadier in 1980.
Commensurate with his military positions, Abacha received further training and education in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the United Kingdom, he studied at the MONS Defense Officers' Cadet Training College in Aldershot in 1963, and at the School of Infantry in Warminster in 1966 and 1971. In Nigeria he attended the Command and Staff College in Jaji in 1976, and the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies in Kuru, Jos, in 1981. In 1982 Abacha studied finally at the Senior International Defence Course in Monterey, California.
Abacha first entered the national limelight at 7 a.m. on December 31, 1983, in a broadcast over Radio Nigeria announcing the overthrow of the civilian regime. Citing the "Text of Coup Broadcast to the Nation, 31 December 1983" in their book, The Rise and Fall of Nigeria's Second Republic, 1979-84, Nigerian historians Toyin Falola and Julius Ihonvbere quoted Abacha as having stated, "I am referring to the harsh intolerable conditions under which we are now living. Our economy has been hopelessly mismanaged. We have become a debtor and beggar-nation." For these reasons, Abacha said, the armed forces "in discharge of [their] national role as the promoters and protectors of our national interest decided to effect a change in the leadership of the government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria...."
Falola and Ihonvbere criticized Abacha's ambitions for the new administration in the light of previous military governments in Nigeria. "Experience has shown however that ... the military can hardly be seen as a solution," the authors wrote. "The populist approach often adopted as soon as power is seized--hard statements, imprisonment or dismissals, even execution of corrupt businessmen and politicians and a few popular actions, soon die down...." Immediate and more popular actions were often passed whenever new military governments faced the limited position of the country internationally and the enormous difficulty of enacting substantial reforms across the whole of society. Military administrations frequently backed off from early reforms and generally just imposed the basic institutional status quo--once again raising the ire of the people.
After announcing the coup to initiate what became 11 years of military rule, Abacha participated centrally in succeeding coups and continued to move ever closer to holding ultimate power himself. With the first coup on December 31, 1983, General Muhammadu Buhari became head of state and Abacha became both a member of the ruling Supreme Military Council (SMC) and a general officer commanding, Second Mechanised Division, Ibadan, Nigeria. Next, on August 27, 1985, Abacha appeared in camouflage on Nigerian television to announce another coup. Having been promoted to major- general before the coup, afterward he moved up to chief of army staff and member of the AFRC. General Babangida took the absolute lead as Nigeria's first military president.
Throughout Babangida's subsequent eight-year rule, Abacha survived high-level reorganizations and steadily gained power, concluding finally with the lead of the entire military upon Babangida's departure in August of 1993. Promoted to lieutenant-general in 1987, Abacha survived Babangida's cut in the AFRC from 28 to 19 members in 1989, and in the same year received another promotion to chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. When Major Gideon Orkar, attempted a coup on April 22, 1990, Abacha defended Babangida and announced the crushing of the coup on Radio Nigeria. In September of 1990, Babangida shuffled Abacha out of the chief of army staff position and into the head of the ministry of defense.
In 1993 Abacha survived even the exit of Babangida himself. When Babangida handed over the reins of government on August 26, 1993 to Ernest Shonekan, a civilian appointee, Abacha assumed the lead of the military as defense secretary. Babangida resigned amid a series of strikes and protests for annulling the results of the presidential election held June 12 and "apparently" won by Abiola, according to the New York Times. Babangida reportedly voided the elections for fear that Abiola, a wealthy Yoruba-speaker from the Southwest, would upset the hold on power formerly wielded by military generals from the North.
In an attempt to gain legitimacy for his term as president of the Interim National Government (ING), Shonekan freed political prisoners, lifted press restrictions, and dismantled the oil bureaucracy, the target for accusations of squandering the nation's substantial oil revenues. However, Shonekan also imposed a fuel price increase of 600 percent at the urging of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), world financial development institutions, according to the New York Times. That increase precipitated a national general strike. Police fell into clashes with pro-democracy demonstrators across the Southwest while banks, major shops, and factories remained closed for one week. Finally a Lagos High Court declared the ING an illegal government. In the midst of this civic unrest, on November 17, 1993, Abacha requested Shonekan's resignation and seized control of the state himself.
Abacha initially offered a few concessions to pro-democracy forces, Abiola supporters, and Yoruba contenders for power, but over the course of the first year those actions lost their substance. He also immediately dissolved all remnants of democratic structures inherited from Babangida's transition to democracy. Existing political parties, gatherings, the National Electoral Commission, and federal, state, and local governments were all banned and slated for replacement by military commanders. With no political parties allowed and no campaigning admitted, Abacha's calls for a constitutional conference met with abysmally low voter turnout and boycotts from every region except the North, from where Abacha hails. Next Abacha bypassed civil rights lawyer Olu Onagoruwa, who was his appointment from the pro-democracy movement, in drafting and implementing a decree to dissolve a militant union. When Onagoruwa complained, Abacha fired him.
In 1994, his first year of governance, Abacha's attempts to chart a new economic course for Nigeria according to a three-year plan were not successful, West Africa reported. He had turned away from the suggestions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), headed by Babangida since 1986, and reimposed controls on the economy. Specifically, he stabilized the exchange rate between the Nigerian naira and the U.S. dollar, imposed interest rate ceilings on deposits and savings at between 12 and 15 percent and on loans at 21 percent, and banned the free repatriation of export revenue. The Nigerian economy lacked the infrastructure to achieve those rates, however, and production costs skyrocketed. In addition, the petroleum workers went on strike to protest the annullment of election results that projected Moshood Abiola to be head of state and to press for economic demands. "The unions also contributed to the failure of the budget by grinding the economy to a halt," the general manager of Belhope Plastics, Chief Alapuye Isokariari, said in West Africa. "How could we perform with basic industrial materials locked at Lagos seaports?"
In addition to economic concerns, Abacha has been wrangling with the pro-democracy movement. Much of that movement opposed his military rule from the beginning. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian human rights advocate and winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one such dissenter. "It is a regime of infamy and it should be isolated," Soyinka said in the New York Times. "This is going to be the worst and most brutal regime that Nigeria ever had. This regime is prepared to kill, torture, and make opponents disappear." A number of organizations pressed for democratic government including the National Democratic Coalition (Nadeco), the Campaign for Democracy, and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP).
In his own defense, Abacha continued to maintain that he still intended to bring democracy to the country. In West Africa for instance, Abacha appealed for non-interference from Western governments and for sympathy from Western media. "Africa is faced with strident calls for democratisation," he was quoted as saying. "Nigeria is an integral part of this global quest for democracy, contrary to what our detractors feel. The international media and the West must admit that their nations had gone through similar or even worse problems than what we are currently experiencing." In late 1994, as head of state Abacha was concerned primarily with refining his direction for Nigeria and resolving the deep political crises gripping the West African nation of approximately 90 million people.
In 1995, international pressure on Nigeria increased. Nigeria's military rulers were criticized by Western and African leaders after the execution of playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other anti-government activists, the Detroit News reported. Sanctions included the suspensions of Nigeria's membership in the Commonwealth of Britain, a halt of U.S. military sales to Nigeria by President Clinton, and the recalling of ambassadors from the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, and South Africa. Time magazine even voted him "Thug of the Year." Abacha promised, however, to hand over power to a democratically elected government on October 1, 1998, according to a report in USA Today, and to cede power to civilians.
Further Reading
Books
- Falola, Toyin, and Julius Ihonvbere, The Rise and Fall of Nigeria's Second Republic, 1979-84, Zed Books, 1985, pp. 229-30, 254-57.
- Osso, Nyaknno, editor, Who's Who in Nigeria, Newswatch Communications, 1990, p. 9.
- Africa Report, January/February 1994, pp. 47-49; July/August 1994, pp. 62-64; September/October 1994, pp. 38-41.
- Boston Globe, November 19, 1993, p. 2.
- Detroit News, November 12, 1995, p. 5A.
- Newswatch (Lagos, Nigeria), November 22, 1993, pp. 12-16; November 29, 1993, pp. 15-17.
- New York Times, November 18, 1993, p. A15; November 20, 1993, p. A5; November 25, 1993, p. A10.
- Time, December 25, 1995, p. 40.
- USA Today, October 2, 1995, p. 3A.
- West Africa, September 12-18, 1994, p. 1594; September 19-25, 1994, p. 1627; October 3-9, 1994, p. 1705.
— Nicholas Patti
