Prof. Anthony Kila’s article responding to Femi Falana’s “How Abiola was killed in Government Custody” amounts to nothing more than a pretense at historical objectivity.
E.H. Carr in his classic text: WHAT IS HISTORY?, correctly points out that historical objectivity is a ruse. History, he states is a continuous dialogue between the past and the present. The historian’s right to write history lends him or her the power to offer an interpretation of events and facts.
The above is a direct consequence of the fact that History in reality is a course in human affairs. Human affairs are prompted by factors and causes that in turn steer the course of history. Human affairs and society on their part are not homogeneous entities nor are they mere gathering of individuals. They classed and divided classes. Those who rule and are ruled. The class of members of the billionaire and millionaire club and the opposite class of the millions of the working masses who labour and own little to nothing, who constantly battle on a daily, weekly or monthly basis squeezing blood from stones to survive. And these two poles of classes have opposing interest and to not recognise this, is to ignore the why of every historical happenings.
The question of facts tied only to the pronouncements of historical characters, ignores motives and actions, dismissing the obvious fact that historical characters will paint themselves in the green light of innocence doing everything to hide their selfish class interest or paint their interest as national interest. To now lift up such lipped up statements as facts, all in holy and righteous obediance to C.P. Scott’s holy order of *”facts are sacred”* and blindly ignore the more relevant question of who’s fact is to transmute and limit history to the desires and expectations of the power that be. The historical fact of the history Cock and the cockroach in reality is the history of the Cocks all out to make meal on the labour of cockroaches, even to the point of unaliving them into a meal by the colony of the Cocks.
To refuse to approach the historical craft only from this angle of the Cock makes History out as a spin doctor’s quest to write facts into historical truth, when indeed “there are eggs and there are eggs” as correctly pointed by Soyinka. Yes, in the same sense that “there are facts and there are facts”. When does an opinion becomes a fact, is it merely on the fact of it being stated by an historical character. Must we ignore the actions both seen and unseen and even the inactions of historical characters.
Yes, June 12 election was annulled is a fact. Is it then an opinion that the Military jackboots of the IBB dicatorship annulled June 12, and were bent on doing everything possible to keep the elections annulled and truncate any return to civil rule, and by so doing elongate military dictatorship. Is this also not a fact. A position IBB, Shonekan, Abacha, Abdulsalami Abubakar, all of the beneficiaries will never acknowledge as a fact, but an opinion of those non-patriots, who are merely slandering the good image of the country.
And in their bid to not accept this fact into history as an historical fact, protesters who demanded an end to military dictatorship were mauled down on the street. It didn’t stopped the protest; right the spontaneous anger by students to the organised mass protest from July 5 and in August, 1993, by Campaign for Democracy coalition of civil societies and pro-Labour organisation like the Labour Militant.
Like it or not, these protests were employed either consciously or in guise to exact the needed pressure to forced IBB to exit power in August 1993, either as a concession or a bribe for the working masses to agree to the fact that annulled June 12 election has come to stay. This is the “sacred fact of IBB”.
However, the working masses held on the fact of opposing the annulment, stood their ground resulting into the outright rejection of the interim regime contraption led by Shonekan. The prouncement of the court presided over by Justice Dolapo Akinsanya pronouncing the ING as “illegal” & “unconstitutional” only validated what the working masses had upheld in protest, falling victims of bullets, imprisonment and death.
So another fact that Prof. Anthony Kila will not question is the Nov 17, 1993 Abacha coup. Seven days after the courts prouncement against Shonekan, Abacha strikes to strengthen the fact of the June 12 annulment.
It is certainly not an opinion that Abacha didn’t play the IBB script, he appropriates it, making all of the necessary modification and himself as the grand beneficiary of the annulment and whatever plans IBB had in returning himself back to power, all of this was rescripted except that instead of IBB, Abacha became the leading character of the same drama of military dictatorship at play executing an earlier agreement that we shall take turn by turn. Emi lo kan in reality is not a Tinubu invention, this slogan had already been put to use before now.
But what Prof is contesting is not that M.K.O. Abiola died in government custody, this is already an historical accepted fact. He questions Falana’s claim that “Abiola was killed in government custody” and the fact “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”. Even though he recognises that “we cannot responsibly write as though the historical record contains only one version of events.”
So memory can serve the historical record to temper down the atrocities of the ruling class, but the same memory cannot be brought to defend the victims in their own historical account. Of course, Abiola didn’t die under Abacha’s custody. Since the latter assumed a position of allowing him to rot away, with him commencing a transition to hand over power to himself. He had won the confidence of nearly the wings of the ruling class to buy into his transitional programme, even won over die-hard June 12ists to come on board and serve in his regime.
Aj. Dagga Tolar is of the Movement for a Socialist Alternative
The be continued tomorrow
