By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)
Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
— Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
When my friend Jerome Okolo handed me “A Journey in Service”, the air in Lagos was thick with anticipation. The book’s launch had sparked a frenzy—WhatsApp forwards, op-eds dissecting its “revelations,” and debates in roadside bukkas about Babangida’s legacy. As someone born in Nigeria’s mid-60s, I had lived through the coups, the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), and the June 12 crisis. Yet, I hesitated to comment until I read the memoir myself. Now, having done so, I find myself not just reviewing a book but revisiting a lifetime of national tumult and personal reckoning.
Babangida’s autobiography is more than a political memoir; it is a mirror held up to Nigeria’s fractured soul. Its 13 chapters span his rural upbringing in Minna, his ascent through military ranks, and the eight turbulent years of his presidency (1985–1993). But beneath the polished prose lies a deeper tension: How does a man accused of orchestrating some of Nigeria’s most divisive events—the annulled 1993 election, Dele Giwa’s assassination, the IMF-driven SAP—reconcile his legacy? And how do we, as witnesses to that history, reconcile with him?
The early chapters paint Babangida as a product of postcolonial Nigeria’s aspirational zeitgeist. Born in 1941 to a Gwari family in Niger State, his childhood in Wushishi and Minna was steeped in the egalitarian ethos of Northern Nigeria’s rural communities. His father, a local administrator, instilled in him a belief in public service—a theme that threads through the memoir. At Provincial Secondary School, Bida, Babangida honed leadership skills that later defined his military career: pragmatism, charisma, and an almost Machiavellian ability to navigate alliances.
His military training—from Kaduna to India and the UK—coincided with Nigeria’s early nation-building struggles. By 1966, as a young officer, he was thrust into the chaos of the January coup and counter-coup. Babangida’s account of these events is revealing. He denies the “Igbo coup” narrative, arguing that the plotters’ grievances—corruption, regional imbalance—were national, not ethnic. Yet, he concedes that the bloodletting’s ethnic slant sowed seeds of division. “We became soldiers in a war not of our making,” he writes, “but one that would define our generation.”
Here, the memoir falters. While Babangida laments the war’s toll—over a million deaths, famine, and lasting Igbo marginalization—he sidesteps the military’s role in perpetuating post-war inequities. As a teenager in Abiriba during the war, I recall the collective trauma: all of us, broken, hungry and malnutritioned fleeing bombed villages, the whispers of “entire villages massacred and razed to the ground”. Babangida’s sterile descriptions of “strategic maneuvers” and “national unity” feel dissonant against these memories.
Babangida’s account of Nigeria’s foundational traumas—the 1966 coups and the Civil War—reads like a carefully curated dossier, one that acknowledges the chaos but absolves the military of its role in perpetuating ethnic divisions. He frames the January 1966 coup as a “youthful revolt against corruption,” led by idealistic officers like Nzeogwu, whose motives were “nationalist, not ethnic.” Yet, his insistence that the coup’s ethnic fallout was unintended rings hollow against the historical record.
The targeted killings of Northern and Western leaders—Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, Akintola—while sparing Igbo officers like Ironsi, cemented a narrative of Igbo complicity. Babangida dismisses this as “coincidence,” but for Ndigbo, who bore the brunt of retaliatory pogroms in 1966 and the war’s devastation, this explanation feels disingenuous. The counter-coup of July 1966, which he describes as a “corrective measure,” was, in reality, a bloodbath. Igbo soldiers were hunted down in barracks across the North, and General Ironsi’s assassination marked the collapse of trust in a unified Nigeria.
The Civil War, as Babangida narrates it, is a tale of tactical brilliance and “necessary sacrifice.” He recounts commanding the 44th Infantry Battalion, the siege of Umuahia, and the “humanitarian” gestures of “no victor, no vanquished.” But this sanitized version glosses over the war’s atrocities: the starvation blockade of Biafra, the Asaba Massacre, and the systemic erasure of Igbo political influence post-war.
For Ndigbo, Babangida’s narrative offers little solace. His admission that “mistakes were made” feels performative when juxtaposed with his regime’s continued marginalization of the Southeast—denying infrastructural investment, underrepresenting Igbo in military leadership, and sidelining the region from key political roles. The memoir’s failure to reckon with these structural inequities leaves Ndigbo’s grievances unresolved, a festering wound in Nigeria’s body politic.
Does Babangida’s account bring closure? For many Igbo, like me, it does the opposite. By reducing the war to a “strategic necessity” and sidestepping the moral questions of collective punishment, the memoir reignites old frustrations. The Aburi Accord of 1967—a last-ditch effort to decentralize power and avert war—is mentioned only in passing, with no reflection on how its collapse doomed Nigeria to conflict.
Babangida’s silence on the postwar policies that entrenched Igbo marginalization (like the Indigenization Decree of 1972, which transferred economic control to non-Igbo elites) speaks volumes. For a generation of Igbo who grew up hearing stories of abandoned property in Port Harcourt and the “20 pounds” policy, his narrative feels like a missed opportunity for accountability.
The book also sidesteps the psychological toll of the war. My uncle, a Biafran veteran, once told me how returning soldiers were treated as “traitors,” denied pensions, and erased from national memory. Babangida’s sterile focus on “national unity” ignores this lived reality. Instead of closure, the memoir opens new cans of worms: Why did successive regimes, including his own, fail to implement the postwar reconciliation programs promised by Gowon? Why has Nigeria’s political architecture remained skewed against the Southeast? These questions linger, unanswered.
Babangida’s reverence for General Murtala Muhammed, under whom he served as Chief of Army Staff, underscores his ideal of military leadership. Murtala’s 1975 coup against Gowon, framed as a corrective to corruption, resonates with Babangida’s later justification for ousting Buhari in 1985. Both coups, he argues, were acts of “patriotic intervention” to rescue a faltering state.
Yet, Murtala’s assassination in 1976—a pivotal moment—receives curiously muted treatment. Babangida praises Murtala’s reforms (moving the capital to Abuja, purging corrupt officials) but avoids probing the coup’s aftermath: the rise of Obasanjo, the shaky transition to civil rule. This elision foreshadows a pattern: Babangida often acknowledges crises but evades their systemic roots.
Upon seizing power in 1985, Babangida inherited an economy in freefall. Global oil prices had collapsed, and Nigeria’s foreign debt topped $19 billion. His solution—the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)—remains his most polarizing legacy. The memoir defends SAP as a necessary shock therapy: currency devaluation, privatization, and subsidy cuts to spur competitiveness. “We needed to break the rentier state,” he insists, echoing World Bank orthodoxy.
But for ordinary Nigerians, SAP was a nightmare. I recall the austerity measures: tripled fuel prices, empty pharmacies, and university strikes. Babangida’s “cushioning measures”—MAMSER, DFRRI, and the People’s Bank—were noble in theory but hobbled by graft. A senior friend, a cocoa farmer in Ogun, recently quipped, “DFRRI built roads to nowhere, while we ate garri for breakfast and dinner.”
The memoir’s defense of SAP typifies its blind spots. Babangida cites macroeconomic gains (GDP growth, export diversification) but ignores the human cost: UNICEF estimated SAP-induced poverty pushed 12 million children into malnutrition. His technocratic tone—”We preferred creating institutions over palliatives”—rings hollow to those of us who lived through the suffering.
No event haunts Babangida’s legacy like the annulment of Nigeria’s freest election. On June 12, 1993, Moshood Abiola, a Yoruba businessman, seemingly defeated Bashir Tofa in a historic vote. Babangida’s cancellation of the results, citing “legal irregularities” and “security threats,” triggered protests and a political crisis that still simmers.
The memoir’s account is a mix of contrition and deflection. Babangida admits, “The annulment was my gravest error,” but insists it averted civil war. “Had Abiola taken power,” he claims, “Northern elites would have revolted.” He also alleges foreign pressure—vague allusions to unnamed “global powers” fearing Abiola’s populism. Yet, he offers no evidence, leaving readers to parse truth from revisionism.
As someone who vividly recalls Lagos’s June 12 protests [Ọsọ Abiola], I find this explanation insufficient. The annulment wasn’t just a political misstep; it shattered Nigerians’ faith in democracy. Babangida’s subsequent handover to Sani Abacha—a dictator who jailed Abiola—exposes the cynicism of his “transition program.” The memoir’s plea for understanding—“I acted to preserve unity”—feels like a tired refrain from a man who once declared, “I am an evil genius.”
The author’s retelling of the June 12, 1993, saga aligns with the widely accepted narrative: MKO Abiola’s victory in Nigeria’s freest and fairest election was annulled by General Ibrahim Babangida, plunging the nation into chaos. Yet, as the book revisits this pivotal moment, it does so with a clinical detachment that borders on evasion. The author acknowledges the electoral theft but sidesteps the visceral human toll—the blood spilled in pro-democracy protests, the ethnic clashes that turned Lagos into a tinderbox, and the systemic violence that disproportionately consumed innocent lives, including those of Igbo traders and families caught in the crossfire.
This omission is not a gap in storytelling; it reflects a broader culture of historical sanitization, where perpetrators narrate tragedies with the cold precision of archivists, stripping survivors of their right to rage, grief, and accountability. The book’s account, feels less like a revelation and more like “rape victims getting tutored by the rapist about the incident”—a grotesque inversion of justice where the architects of trauma dictate how it should be remembered.
What the nation craved was not a regurgitation of facts already seared into collective memory, but a reckoning. How does Babangida, reconcile his decision to annul the election with the thousands killed in its aftermath? How does he explain the calculated stoking of ethnic tensions, which saw Igbo and other communities—already scarred by the civil war’s legacy—scapegoated and attacked in Lagos?
The riots of 1993 exposed Nigeria’s festering wounds: a nation quick to fracture along ethnic lines, with minorities perpetually cast as outsiders, their loyalty questioned, their lives deemed expendable. The book’s silence on these truths is deafening. Instead of contrition, we get revisionism—a sterile chronicle that reduces June 12 to a “political misstep” rather than a moral crime.
The question now is not whether Babangida’s account reshapes history, but how Nigerians—particularly the marginalized—reclaim and re-narrate it. The June 12 saga, much like the civil war, lives on in the bodies and memories of its victims. For the Igbo, who bore the brunt of retaliatory violence in Lagos and elsewhere, the incident was a cruel reminder of their precarious place in Nigeria’s polity.
Decades later, this pattern persists: from the annulment’s aftermath to the post elections protests and attacks on Ndigbo and their properties in Lagos, Igbo lives and livelihoods remain vulnerable to state and communal violence. The book’s failure to address this continuum of injustice underscores a bitter truth: Nigeria’s power structures would rather bury uncomfortable histories than confront them.
Yet, Babangida’s memory may have become dull; history’s memory is long. The June 12 annulment did more than derail democracy—it shattered Nigerians’ faith in the possibility of a unified nation. It normalized impunity, emboldening future dictators and today’s political elites to repeat cycles of violence and exclusion.
For the Igbo and other marginalized groups, the lesson was clear: in Nigeria, justice is rationed, and belonging is conditional. Until the state confronts these truths—not with hollow memoirs, but with reparative action—the ghosts of June 12 will linger. The day of reckoning may be deferred, but it is inevitable. History, after all, is not a ledger to be edited by the powerful; it is a storm that gathers in the quiet, waiting to sweep away the lies.
If June 12 is Babangida’s open wound, the 1986 murder of Dele Giwa—Nigeria’s foremost investigative journalist—is its festering scar. Giwa’s death by parcel bomb, shortly after being summoned by security agents, remains unsolved. Babangida denies involvement, calling it a “personal tragedy” and blaming “rogue elements.” His memoir recounts ordering investigations but laments the “media hysteria” that “obscured the truth.”
This rings disingenuous. Giwa’s son, Dele Jr., has long accused the regime of complicity, and declassified U.S. cables suggest high-level plotting. For journalists of my generation, Giwa’s killing symbolized the perils of dissent. Babangida’s failure to address these allegations head-on—or apologize—leaves a stain on his narrative.
In retirement, Babangida styles himself an elder statesman, dispensing advice to youths and hosting politicians in Minna. His memoir’s epilogue, “Letter to the Next Generation,” urges unity and innovation. Yet, one wonders: Can a man who shaped—and arguably stunted—Nigeria’s democracy credibly mentor its future?
The book’s greatest flaw is its reluctance to confront hard truths. Babangida’s economic reforms, while bold, entrenched inequality. His political transitions were Machiavellian theater. And his handling of dissent—from Giwa’s murder to the repression of student protests—reveals a dictator’s iron fist beneath the “Maradona” charm.
But to dismiss the memoir as mere propaganda would be simplistic. It offers rare insights into military governance: the 1985 coup’s planning, the calculus behind SAP, and the OIC membership crisis. Historians will value its primary accounts, even as they question its veracity.
This much acclaimed book, glides over the turbulent waters of his regime with the polished ease of a statecraft veteran. Yet, beneath its surface lie submerged truths—incidents that shaped Nigeria’s historical trajectory but remain conspicuously absent from his narrative. These omissions are not oversights; they are calculated erasures meant to sanitize a legacy stained by repression, ethnic bias, and authoritarian excess.
With just four examples let us excavate the pivotal episodes the book ignores, each a prism refracting the inconvenient truths Babangida seeks to bury.
In December 1986, General Mamman Vatsa, Babangida’s childhood friend and former comrade-in-arms, was executed alongside nine others for allegedly plotting a coup. Vatsa, a decorated poet-general beloved by the rank-and-file, had no history of disloyalty. The trial, conducted in secrecy, lacked credible evidence—a fact noted even by skeptical observers. Rumors swirled that Vatsa’s real “crime” was his growing popularity and criticism of SAP’s harsh policies. His execution sent a chilling message: dissent, even from within the inner circle, would be met with lethal force.
Babangida’s memoir side steps Vatsa’s case entirely, avoiding any reckoning with the regime’s paranoia and ruthless consolidation of power. The silence speaks volumes. By erasing Vatsa, Babangida obscures the regime’s systemic purge of perceived rivals—a pattern repeated in the disappearances of critical journalists and activists.
In 1986, Babangida surreptitiously enrolled Nigeria into the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), a move that ignited nationwide protests. Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, his Chief of General Staff and a Christian Igbo, resigned in principled opposition, warning that the decision threatened Nigeria’s secular fabric. The regime dismissed the backlash as “misunderstanding,” but the incident exposed Babangida’s alignment with Northern Islamic elites and deepened Christian-Muslim fissures.
While the memoir briefly mentions Ukiwe’s resignation as a “policy disagreement,” it ignores the OIC saga’s fallout: the radicalization of religious identities, the marginalization of Southern Christians, and the tacit endorsement of Islamization. This omission underscores Babangida’s reluctance to confront his role in Nigeria’s enduring sectarian divides.
In July 1990, the regime sanctioned the deployed of bulldozers and armed troops to demolish Maroko, a Lagos slum home to over 300,000 low-income residents. The “urban renewal” project, framed as a development initiative, was in reality a land grab for luxury estates. Families watched helplessly as homes, schools, and clinics were flattened. Many were rendered homeless overnight, their lives erased to appease real estate cartels.
The memoir’s silence on Maroko epitomizes Babangida’s attitude and mindset for the urban poor. While touting “grassroots development” through MAMSER and DFRRI, his regime weaponized state power to displace the vulnerable. The incident reveals a core hypocrisy: Babangida’s reforms prioritized elite interests while masking exploitation as progress.
Major Gideon Orkar’s 1990 coup attempt remains one of Nigeria’s most ideologically explicit revolts. Orkar’s manifesto decried Northern hegemony, calling for the excision of five Northern states from Nigeria. Though crushed within days, the attempt resonated with Southerners and Middle Belters exhausted by structural marginalization. The regime responded with mass executions and a purge of “disloyal” officers, predominantly Igbo and minority ethnicities.
Babangida’s memoir dismisses Orkar as a “misguided officer,” ignoring the coup’s roots in systemic inequities. The regime’s retaliatory crackdown—targeting southern soldiers disproportionately—exposed its ethnic bias. By airbrushing this episode, Babangida evades accountability for policies that deepened Nigeria’s ethnic fault lines.
In 1989, nationwide protests against SAP’s austerity measures—fuel hikes, wage freezes, and subsidy cuts—erupted into riots. Students, workers, and market women clashed with police in Lagos, Kaduna, and Enugu. The regime responded with live ammunition, killing hundreds. In Owerri, soldiers opened fire on unarmed protesters at a university campus, a massacre buried by state-controlled media.
The memoir lauds SAP’s “visionary reforms” but omits the human toll. The riots, and their violent suppression, laid bare the regime’s indifference to popular suffering. Babangida’s silence here is strategic—an effort to divorce his economic “legacy” from the corpses that underpinned it.
These incidents form a shadow archive to Babangida’s memoir—a counter-narrative of repression, ethnic favoritism, and elite impunity. Their erasure is not accidental; it is essential to the memoir’s project of legacy-laundering. By omitting Vatsa, Babangida masks his tyranny. By ignoring Maroko, he sanitizes his neoliberalism. By sidelining Orkar and the SAP riots, he absolves himself of ethnic and economic violence.
The inconvenient truth is this: Babangida’s regime was not a benevolent dictatorship but a calculated machinery of control. Its “reforms” entrenched inequality, its “unity” rhetoric masked exclusion, and its “transition” programs were facades for perpetual militarism. The memoir’s opaqueness is a metaphor for the regime itself—a hall of mirrors designed to distort reality.
For Nigeria to transcend Babangida’s curated mythos, it must confront these silenced episodes. The Vatsas, Marokos, and Orkars of our history are not rubber bullets; they are the bloody ink with which the nation’s story is written.
“A Journey in Service” does not close Nigeria’s wounds; it reopens them. Babangida’s narrative, while illuminating, demands critical engagement. For my part, I cannot forgive the June 12 betrayal or the SAP hardships. Yet, I recognize his era’s complexity—a time when soldiers saw themselves as saviors, blind to the damage wrought by their “patriotic” interventions.
Babangida’s memoir is not just a historical document; it is a Rorschach test for Nigeria’s conscience. For political and institutional Nigeria, the book’s revelations demand serious responses beyond the bandagings the book proposes.
A commission, with broader power and mandate than the Oputa Panel is now unquestionably necessary to officially and formally document wartime atrocities, hear testimonies from survivors, and hold public figures accountable. Babangida’s admission of “mistakes” could catalyze this process, but only if paired with concrete reparations—educational grants for Igbo communities, infrastructure projects in the Southeast, and symbolic gestures like a national apology.
Nigeria’s history curricula still sanitize the Civil War, framing it as a “unification struggle.” Babangida’s memoir, despite its flaws, could be used to spark critical dialogue in classrooms. Students should grapple with primary sources—Biafran memoirs, wartime journalism, and oral histories—to understand the war’s human cost.
The memoir inadvertently highlights Nigeria’s systemic failures: a centralized state that fuels ethnic competition, a military culture steeped in impunity, and an economy that rewards cronyism. Decentralizing power through state policing and fiscal federalism could address the root causes of disenfranchisement.
For Ndigbo, Babangida’s memoir is neither absolution nor closure. It is a reminder that Nigeria’s elite have yet to confront the structural violence that birthed Biafra. The book’s value lies not in its answers but in the questions it forces us to ask: How do we memorialize the past without sanitizing it? How do we build a nation where “unity” is not a slogan but a practice of equity?
Babangida’s legacy, like Nigeria’s, remains unfinished. His memoir is a plea for understanding, yet true reconciliation requires more than words—it demands justice. Until Nigeria faces its ghosts, the journey toward nationhood will remain as fractured as the history this book seeks to narrate.
The book is, at its core, an exercise in selective recollection—a mosaic of truths, half-truths, and strategic omissions. While the memoir provides a granular account of Nigeria’s political machinery under military rule, it often entrenches the very opaqueness it claims to dismantle. Take, for instance, the handling of the 1985 coup that ousted Buhari. Babangida meticulously details the “patriotic necessity” of the takeover, citing Buhari’s authoritarian excesses and economic mismanagement. Yet, he glosses over the internal rivalries and personal ambitions that fueled the plot.
Where is the candid reflection on the role of figures like General Sani Abacha, whose shadow loomed over the regime? Or the whispered deals with Northern oligarchs who saw Babangida as a bulwark against Southern political ascendancy? The memoir’s narrative is polished to a sheen, presenting a streamlined version of history that sidesteps the messy, often unflattering realities of power consolidation.
This selective transparency extends to the book’s treatment of institutional decay. Babangida laments the “indiscipline” of the Nigerian state, yet his administration’s legacy—a bloated bureaucracy, the entrenchment of prebendalism, and the weaponization of security agencies against dissent—reveals a regime complicit in the rot. The Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), framed as a bold economic reset, is lauded for its “visionary” deregulation, but the memoir ignores how SAP’s shock therapies enriched a crony capitalist class while immiserating millions.
As an accountant friend of mine in Lagos during the 1980s told me, “I witnessed firsthand the paradox: Babangida’s inner circle flaunted Mercedes-Benz fleets, while civil servants queued for months to collect salaries.” The memoir’s refusal to confront this dissonance—to name names or admit complicity—leaves readers with a hollow narrative, one that acknowledges systemic failures but absolves the architect.
The book’s greatest weakness is its isolation. Babangida writes as though his voice alone holds the keys to Nigeria’s past, yet history is a chorus, not a solo. This is why I call for real and factual memoirs from figures like Ochiagha Ebitu Ukiwe, Ogbuagu Ike Nwachukwu, and Ike Oha Alison Madueke and not just academic but existential narrative. Ukiwe, Babangida’s erstwhile Chief of General Staff, famously resigned in 1986 over the OIC membership controversy, a schism the memoir reduces to a “policy disagreement.”
Ukiwe’s perspective—rooted in his Igbo identity and Christian faith—could illuminate the ethno-religious tensions Babangida downplays. Did the OIC crisis, as Ukiwe hinted in interviews, reflect a deeper Northern Islamization agenda? Or was it, as Babangida insists, a pragmatic bid for Arab petrodollars? Without Ukiwe’s counter-narrative, the memoir’s version stands unchallenged, a monolith of curated truth.
Similarly, General Ike Nwachukwu—a diplomat-soldier who straddled the civil-military divide—could unravel the contradictions of Babangida’s foreign policy. The memoir trumpets Nigeria’s role in Liberia’s ECOWAS intervention but sidesteps the grim irony: Babangida’s regime championed democracy abroad while stifling it at home. Nwachukwu, who negotiated with Charles Taylor and managed regional fallout, might contextualize these paradoxes, exposing the gap between rhetoric and realpolitik.
Admiral Madueke, meanwhile, as a key player in Biafra, could force a reckoning with the Civil War’s humanitarian horrors—a topic Babangida sanitizes with clinical detachment. These voices, if amplified, would transform the memoir from a solo aria into a polyphonic dialogue, one where Babangida’s assertions are stress-tested against the lived experiences of his peers.
Babangida’s memoir arrives at a precarious moment in Nigeria’s history—a time when the military, emboldened by democratic backsliding across West Africa, eyes a return to prominence. For the generation that endured his rule, the book is a real test: Is this a penitent’s confession or a tactician’s gambit to reshape his legacy? The answer lies in what the memoir omits.
There is no detailed evidence of the assassination of Dele Giwa, beyond a terse denial. The June 12 annulment is framed as a tragic event, but the regime’s covert support for Abacha’s tyranny goes unexamined. Even the “institutional reforms” Babangida champions—the two-party system, MAMSER—are stripped of their authoritarian subtext. The National Electoral Commission (NEC), for instance, was less an independent body than a tool for engineering political outcomes, a fact well-known to those of us who observed its manipulation of local elections in the late 1980s.
This is where the ethical imperative of memoir-writing clashes with the vanity of legacy curation. Babangida, like all autobiographers, has the right to his narrative. But when that narrative shapes national memory, the moral stakes escalate. The book’s silences are not benign; they are active erasures. For instance, Babangida waxes lyrical about Maryam’s “Better Life Programme” but omits how the initiative’s funds were funneled through patronage networks, exacerbating regional inequities. My aunt, a grassroots organizer in Owerri, once lamented that “Better Life” loans were reserved for wives of military officers, while market women starved. These omissions matter because they perpetuate a myth—that the Babangida era was a golden age of reform, rather than a gilded age of inequality.
“A Journey in Service” is not the final word on Babangida’s legacy; it is the opening salvo in a long-overdue conversation. For Nigeria to heal, it must move beyond the cult of personality and embrace a culture of collective accountability. This requires three acts of courage:
1. Declassify the Archives: The regime’s records—coup plots, SAP negotiations, OIC deliberations—must be made public. Only sunlight can disinfect the festering wounds of suspicion.
2. Amplify Marginalized Voices: The memoirs of Ukiwe, Nwachukwu, and the updated rewriting of Madueke’s, and others must be incentivized, not just as historical footnotes, but as corrective lenses to Babangida’s myopia.
3. Institutionalize Truth-Telling: A national commission [Covering specific historical timelines], modeled on Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission, could subpoena living actors—Babangida included—to testify under oath, reconciling competing narratives into a shared truth.
Babangida’s memoir, for all its flaws, has cracked open a door. It is now our collective duty to kick it down, drag the skeletons into the light, and decide—finally—whether Nigeria’s past will be a prison or a prism.
The publication of this book marks a pivotal moment in the ongoing reevaluation of Nigeria’s complex political history, casting an unflinching spotlight on General Yakubu Gowon’s contested legacy. While historical narratives often evolve with time, the bold assertions within this text have thrust Gowon back into the court of public judgment, demanding accountability for his role in shaping the nation’s history. His choice of prolonged silence—rather than confronting critiques or engaging in dialogue—has only deepened perceptions of a leader grappling with the weight of unresolved history. The book’s damning indictment, amplified by its meticulous documentation, positions Gowon not as a figure of the past but as a symbol of the lingering tensions between accountability and impunity in Nigeria’s governance. His legacy, once enshrined in the mythos of national unity, now teeters on the edge of revision, as younger generations and scholars question the costs of that “unity” and who bore them.
The public presentation of the book, ironically featuring Gowon’s own foreword, unfolded as a spectacle rich with symbolism. The gathering of Nigeria’s political elite—Jonathan, Babangida, Obasanjo, Gowon and Tinubu—created a tableau of power both historic and hollow. Their presence, while underscoring the event’s significance, also laid bare the calculated erasures embedded in the nation’s political theater. Notably absent on that table were faces representing the Igbo, a glaring omission that reverberated beyond the room. For 64 years, since Nigeria’s independence, the systemic exclusion of Igbo leadership from the highest echelons of power has remained a festering wound, a testament to the unaddressed inequities of the post-civil war era. The nonexistent chair at that table echoed louder than the speeches: a nation still fractured, still unwilling to confront the ghosts of its past, let alone reconcile them.
Gowon’s visible unease during the event—his “troubled and tortured” demeanor—spoke volumes. Here was a man whose decisions during the civil war, including the controversial hunger blockade and the hypocritical “no victor, no vanquished” proclamation, now face piercing scrutiny. The book’s narrative, juxtaposed with the stoic presence of leaders like Obasanjo and Babangida—each carrying their own burdens of unresolved histories—highlighted a collective refusal to reckon with the past. Tinubu’s attendance, as the sitting president, further complicated the imagery, symbolizing continuity in a system that prioritizes power consolidation over inclusion. The event became less a celebration of scholarship and more a mirror held up to Nigeria’s soul: a nation caught between the performance of unity and the reality of enduring marginalization. Until the Igbo, and other marginalized groups, are granted not just a seat but a voice at that table, the spectre of division will haunt Nigeria’s future as insistently as its past.
Chinua Achebe’s immortal words, which I started this review with, hangs over General Babangida’s memoir like a specter, exposing the fundamental asymmetry of Nigerian historiography. For decades, the story of Nigeria’s coups, civil war, and military rule has been told by the “hunters”—the victors, the regime apologists, the architects of state-sanctioned amnesia.
“A Journey in Service” is but the latest chapter in this tradition: a narrative that reduces the Igbo experience to footnotes, framing their resistance as rebellion and their marginalization as inevitability. To Ndigbo, I say this: The time for silence is over. The time for myth-breaking, truth-telling, and reclaiming our place in the national story is now.
For too long, Igbo voices have been muffled by fear, trauma, or the corrosive lie that “the past should stay buried.” We watched as our fathers, uncles, and brothers returned from the Civil War to find their homes occupied, their bank accounts frozen, their ambitions throttled by quotas and state-sponsored exclusion. We internalized the unspoken rule: Speak too loudly of Biafra, and you risk annihilation. But what is left to fear?
The guns of 1967 are rusted; the generals who orchestrated our silencing are retired or dead. Official Nigeria, enfeebled by its own contradictions, no longer holds the power to erase us. The windows are open—but we must now kick down the door.
Babangida’s memoir, like all victors’ chronicles, thrives on misspeaks. Where is the Igbo perspective on the 1966 pogroms, when thousands were slaughtered in Northern cities while the military stood complicit? Where is the testimony of the Asaba Massacre survivors, their bodies piled in the streets like firewood? Where are the accounts of the Ahiara Declaration, where Biafra’s intellectuals articulated a vision of self-determination rooted in justice, not tribalism? These stories exist—not in archives or state-sanctioned textbooks, but in the memories of aging veterans, in the diaries of the displaced, in the songs of widows who still mourn husbands lost to a war their children cannot fully comprehend.
To the Igbo intellectuals, soldiers, and civil servants who lived through these eras: Your silence is a surrender. Your stories are not yours alone—they belong to a generation of Ndigbo denied the right to mourn, to question, to exist in Nigeria’s historical consciousness. Ochiagha Ebitu Ukiwe, your resignation over the OIC crisis was an act of principle; now give us the memoir that dissects Babangida’s duplicity. Ogbuagu Ike Nwachukwu, your diplomacy averted regional chaos; now tell us how the Aburi Accord’s collapse was engineered. Admiral Alison Madueke, your naval exploits and injuries during the war are legendary; now confront the moral weight of your choices against the backdrop of the misrepresentations and lies. What legacy do you wish to leave—complicity in silence, or courage in truth? Your autobiography needs a rewrite and revision!
This is not merely about correcting the record; it is about psychic survival. When Babangida reduces the Civil War to “30 months of strategic maneuvers,” he erases the child in Uzuakoli who licked bark for sustenance. When he lauds SAP’s “economic ingenuity,” he mocks the Igbo trader in Onitsha who watched his life savings evaporate overnight. Our stories are weapons against this erasure. They are the antidote to the poison of statecraft that labels us “troublemakers” for demanding justice.
Consider the Aba Women’s Riots of 1929, where Igbo women defied colonial taxation with nothing but unity and resolve. Their courage is barely mentioned or recorded in British archives but in oral chants passed down through generations. Today, we face a similar imperative: to weaponize our truths. Let the professor in Nsukka publish her father’s wartime letters. Let the retired soldier in Enugu narrate how the “no victor, no vanquished” lie cost him his pension. Let the filmmaker in Awka resurrect the Biafran press—the cartoons, the radio broadcasts, the defiant editorials that sustained a nation-in-exile.
The urgency of this call transcends nostalgia. Today, Nigeria teeters on the brink of renewed fragmentation. The secessionist agitations of IPOB, the rise of ethnic militias, and the federal government’s heavy-handed repression are all symptoms of a nation that refuses to confront its wounds. Why? Because the root cause—the unaddressed trauma of the Igbo people—has festered in silence. Babangida’s memoir, for all its evasions, inadvertently hands us a tool: By exposing the gaps in his narrative, it invites us to fill them with our own.
To the Igbo diaspora in Houston, London, and Johannesburg: Your distance is not an excuse. Digitize your family archives. Fund documentaries. Crowdsource oral histories. To the youth chanting “Biafra or Death” on Twitter: Know that your rage is justified, but it must be rooted in the facts of history, not the fumes of propaganda. To the traditional rulers and elders: Your legitimacy hinges on defending our collective memory, not brokering compromises with a state that devalues it.
Chinua Achebe, our oracle, tasked us with a sacred duty: “It is the storyteller who makes us what we are.” If we cede this role to others—to the hunters, the coup plotters, the architects of SAP—we surrender our humanity. Babangida’s memoir is not a full stop; it is a provocation. Let us answer it with a tsunami of truth-telling—books, films, podcasts, art—that drowns out the sanitized narratives of power.
To the archivists, journalists, and survivors: Unearth the evidence.
To the playwrights and filmmakers: Resurrect the dead.
To the living: Speak, before silence becomes your epitaph.
Babangida’s memoir is a challenge—not to venerate his past, but to dismantle its illusions. Only then can we begin the true journey: from the lies of hunters to the roar of lions.
The door is ajar. Walk through it. Write as though your children’s future depends on it—because it does. Scream into the silence until the walls of official Nigeria crumble. The hunters wrote their history; now let the lions roar ours.
As Nigeria grapples with renewed coup rumors and democratic backsliding, this memoir is a cautionary tale. Babangida’s life mirrors the nation’s journey: hopeful beginnings, tragic detours, and unresolved quests for redemption.
Perhaps the book’s greatest lesson is that leadership, to be truly transformative, must prioritize people over power—a lesson we’re still learning.
©️Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)
Political Analyst & Cultural Critic
