To remember the illegitimate presidential election that the late Chief MKO Abiola won on June 12, 1993, Democracy Day was created. At the time, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, leader of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), was among those who fought for the mandate to be carried out. He’s the head of state right now. Tinubu might have perished in Cotonou’s adversities if not for the generosity and love of Amala.
The annulment drove the former dictator, the late General Sani Abacha, completely insane. Abacha displayed a large number of ruthless assassins. After he argued in favor of democracy, he dispatched his assassins. Tragically, many lives were lost as a result. Abacha sent his assassins to the Republic of Benin on one of these trips.
In an interview with TheNEWS, Tinubu elaborated on what happened: “I didn’t have a passport and couldn’t have been able to fly. They had spies everywhere, the Benin Republic, so they found out about our travels eventually. I was found twice, but each time I managed to escape. They found me hiding out in a seedy motel.
The day they arrived to the hotel to get me, I had taken an Okada to a market frequented by Yorubas in order to purchase amala. I was going to meet Akinrinade and the rest of the crew. When I arrived at the hotel, I saw two people asking questions while wearing tajia (skull caps), indicating that the spies had gone there. The receptionist, with whom I had been conversing very amicably, winked at me as he attended to them, and I turned around to face them. I contacted a sympathetic architect friend of mine in the Benin Republic. Professor Wole Soyinka and Alani Akinrinade were among the fortunate guests at a high-end hotel that night. Those who were after them failed to catch up with them as they fled from the airport to the hotel.
No eulogy is free of anguish. After facing adversity and fighting for democracy, Tinubu is now the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Like Lesh Walesa of Poland, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya’s Mau Mau Struggle, Uganda’s Yuweri Museveni (now a sit-tight leader), Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe (before he changed his mind), Zambia’s Keneth Kaunda and Patrick Chiluba, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and South Africa’s own Nelson Mandela.
FEATURED IN: The Punch
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