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Nigeria Former Military President, General Ibrahim Babangida (Rtd), says nobody in Nigeria has for once given him credit for conducting the freest and fairest election in Nigeria. The 1993 election was between late Moshood Abiola, a philanthropist and successful businessman and Bashir Tofa.
MKO Abiola of the then Social Democratic Party (SDP) defeated Tofa of the defunct National Republican Convention (NCP).
Shortly after Abiola was declared the winner of the election, Babangida came on National TV to annul the election.
In a fresh interview with Channels TV, Babangida expressed displeasure at how Nigerians have not given him the credit of conducting the election nor care to listen to his explanation as to why he annuled the June 12 election which his friend, Abiola, won. He says all Nigerians concentrated on was that he anuled the election.
“He cancelled the freest election but nobody gives me the credit for conducting the freest election in the history of this country.Nobody has ever sat down to say the two persons are friends, what went wrong? We tried to rationalise why we had to do what we did but nobody is prepared to listen to us. I have never seen anybody write anything on this to try to give people a different version altogether. He (Abiola) knew my feeling. I knew his feeling about the country generally because I do talk about Nigeria with the presumed winner of the truly democratically freest election. We even talked about it during the crisis itself.”
Watch a clip from the interview below
