Ahmed Yahaya Joe
“You see, we are very smart people.”
– General Ibrahim Babangida, p.61 This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria (2000) by Karl Maier
While Minna’s hilltop oracle is not known for idle chatter or vainglorious engagement according to the historian Max Siollun in Soldiers of Fortune (2013) only few Nigerians were aware that the military coup of 1983 which Babangida is reputed to be the “moving spirit” of was not executed in response to any adverse political events.
Rather, it was planned first and the plotters waited for the right moment for elected civilian leaders to make mistakes that would justify its execution as the main architect adds elsewhere;
“We could have toppled that government in 1982, before the 1983 election. But then, we said no, because the people might go against us.
We knew damn well that they were not going to conduct that election freely and fairly, and, therefore, we waited for the right time.”
– ThisDay newspaper edition of February 12, 2009
Between our reigning lion and pursuing fox, will the 2027 election be conducted freely and fairly?
Irrespective of the answer to that million Naira question if the power of incumbency is anything to go by the outcome of the next presidential polls would decidedly favor President Bola Tinubu.
Add into the fray on election day a deeply entrenched and well-oiled nationwide “structure” including the skillful deployment of “stomach infrastructure” lest of all a fragmented opposition in disarray, unless the “Immortal Game” of 174 years ago repeats itself across Nigeria’s polling booths.
Soon after the resounding success of the December 31, 1983 coup that consigned Nigeria’s Second Republic to political oblivion, a select group of military governors were sworn into office and duly dispatched to the 19 states.
Most were very senior officers – Major-generals, Brigadiers and few Colonels however a relatively young officer stood out to superintend Niger State, Lieutenant-Colonel David Alechenu Bonaventure Mark.
The Zungeru-born police barracks boy was still in primary school when CP Fidelis Oyakhilome, assigned to the former Rivers State, enlisted in the Nigeria Police in 1959!
“The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps and a lion to frighten wolves.” – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)
Mark as current main opposition chieftain is no fantasist. Neither is Tinubu as a sitting leader. Both are seasoned disruptors with proven track record in plying political craftsmanship to the hilt. It is not in any an attempt at grandstanding to presume between them a political sufficiency of shrewdness, subtlety, subterfuge and even skulduggery like an awful lot of coffee in Brazil!
By the time Mark earned his first generalship star he was already a strategic member of “the army’s stock of professional coup merchants and artisans,” with the June 12 standoff his magnum opus in strong-arm tactics;
“Some officers were so rabidly anti-Abiola that they threatened to physically eliminate him if he became president. Babangida quotes Brigadier David Mark (director of strategic studies at National War College) as saying ‘I’d shoot Chief Abiola the day NEC (now INEC) pronounces him the elected president.’”
– p.243 Siollun
The Immortal Game earlier referred to was a very famous chess match between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky at a world tournament that took place on 21st June, 1851 in London.
Against all odds, Anderssen was both rooks, a bishop and his queen down yet achieved a decisive checkmate against his fellow German opponent before delivering a fatal blow against him with just a bishop and two knights.
Can the Mark-led opposition similarly convey a knockout punch against Mr. President in 2027?
Hopefully, Asiwaju would come around writing his memoirs detailing the precise roles he actually played during those heady days when the likes of Mark were going gung-ho over the June 12 mandate.
The overwhelming need for that cannot be overemphasized against the background of Chief MKO Abiola’s own clever by half confession that;
“If you want to go to Kano by road and you later decide to go by air as long as you get to Kano there is nothing wrong with that.”
Bashorun’s proverbial quip was a rebuttal to all those who had openly questioned his rationale for naively supporting General Sani Abacha to overthrow the Shonekan-led Interim National Government.
While Tinubu has ever since maintained a stoic silence on his specific role in that very poorly thought-out political fiasco, two Abiola acolytes have nonetheless put their disagreement with their erstwhile principal in print.
Frank Kokori in a 340-page The Struggle for June 12 (2014) and former Ekiti governor John Kayode Fayemi;
“The irony of it is great, though, that a man who won the right to power by popular democratic means, should wait on extra-democratic forces to consummate that right.
The trouble is, the people may be predictable, electoral orientation and inclinations more so.
But the art has not been discovered to hold a man with a gun to his words.
This is the tragedy of Abiola’s strategy.”
– Out of the Shadows: Exile and the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Nigeria (2005)
Orwell reminds us in his classic Nineteen Eighty-Four published in 1949 that, “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
While no political observer expects President Tinubu to be reminiscent of former Goodluck Jonathan in cluelessness without an epic electoral contest, the fear of a retired general schooled in Mao’s dictum of “politics is war without bloodshed,” heading an fledging coalition should be the beginning of political wisdom in the Villa.
What to do with an opposition leader that is a gilt edged product of a bygone era when “with no external enemies to fight, military heroism tended to be sought in the political arena rather than on the battlefield”?
The motley of high falutin subscribers of the Asiwaju brand including assorted Bourdillon hangers-on should become more politically circumspect, that’s all!
The veracity of Nigeria’s longest serving Senate President (2007-2015) predicting General Sani Abacha’s hidden agenda right from inception in a Newswatch magazine interview published on April 11, 1994 that his erstwhile boss would spend exactly 5 years in power and would attempt to contest a multi-party presidential election with only himself as the candidate should still remain instructive for any discerning Nigerian despite the ensuing decades.
Little wonder the avid golfer and founder of the Oturkpo Golf and Country Club reportedly inspired by St. Margaret’s in Dublin is described by a pundit;
“The same David Mark who saw tomorrow in 1994 is in charge of a democratic onslaught against the incumbent president today.
Mark is a trained marksman. It would be scary to have a reticent sniper gentleman officer leading a coalition against a self-sure president and his over-confident party.
My dictionary says that a sniper is a marksman.
It says a sniper is a dead shot with uncommon skills. His missile is long-range, his position concealed. He employs stealth and camouflage techniques to remain undetected and is rarely detected.
His training is specialized, his tools are high precision and his sight telescopic. The marksman’s engagement of targets is with pinpoint accuracy.
God help those at the receiving end of his shots.”
– Nigerian Tribune newspaper edition of 4th August, 2025
A colossus that has no doubt earned his stripes in the trenches, Mark is not without his controversies ranging from his over-entitled disdain back during the Babangida-era as Communications minister when declared that “telephones are not for the poor” to his political Achilles heel known in Benue South as Young Alhaji.
Meanwhile, immediately after General Yakubu Gowon had enunciated “No victor, no vanquished” doctrine, Colonel Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma was dispatched to chair a court martial in Grenada following a failed coup attempt on the Caribbean island.
The undergraduate turned army officer would soon after a course in the United Kingdom assume duty as GOC of the Port Harcourt based 3rd Division with Mark as the czar of his Signal Corps apparatchik.
Subsequently, it was a newly decorated Major David Mark fresh from India that would return to the Garden City in 1976 when Danjuma had been elevated to become army chief in Lagos to serve as chairman of the implementation committee on the “abandoned properties” wrangling.
Dozens of years later another raging controversy surfaced in the mid-2000s those two officers separated by quantum of seniority would meet again on another national assignment as recounted in Olusegun Adeniyi’s Power, Politics and Death;
“On Monday, January 8 (2010), Mark received in audience a group of prominent citizens, among them Lt. General T.Y. Danjuma and former CJN Salihu Modibbo Belgore. In the course of discussion Mark had casually asked Belgore, “Your Lordship, the logical thing to do now is to make Jonathan the acting president. How do you think we can navigate this situation legally?”
Belgore had said the constitution recognized the Doctrine of Necessity, which he said the senate could apply.”
– See details in pp. 219-220
While the rest as they say is still living history, Mark started his active military service at Nigerian Military School, Zaria as a 14-year lad in 1962 before coming under the steadfast tutelage of then Major Ibrahim Babangida;
“When I went to teach there in 1970, it was a modest institution, both in scope and size. Major-General David Ejoor, the first Nigerian Commandant of the Academy, was still in charge, and the now famous class of the Third Regular Combatant course was in the last six months of its three-and-a-half-year course duration.
Meeting with that class when I arrived in September 1970 was a pleasure.
Made up of some of the brightest young men I ever had the privilege of working with, members of the Third Regular Combatant Course, all forty-five, were admitted to the NDA on September 3, 1967, barely weeks after the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in July.
That class was a handful!
I interacted so well with them that these fine officers, many of those still alive and now retired generals, admirals, vice marshals, and grandfathers, got branded all sorts of names in later years, from ‘the Course 3 Mafia’ to the so-called ‘IBB Boys.’”
– pp. 77-78 A Journey in Service: An Autobiography (2025)
Why is Babangida still politically quotable 32 years after leaving office?
It is chiefly because of his keen eye in mentee recruitment and high emotional quotient that still inspires unusual loyalty from his past subalterns and even peers to date;
“Every formation he has led or served in he knew every officer’s children by their first names. Every friend he has made around the world, whether it is 20 or 30 years ago, if he meets you he will call you by your first name.” – p. 68 Soldiers of Fortune (2013) by Max Siollun
Since apparently between lion of Bourdillon and the barracks fox there are so many wolves and much traps ahead of 2027 all the foregoing should be considered a cautionary tale!
