Amupitan and the ghosts of November

On March 15, 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated by conspirators claiming to act in defence of the Roman Republic. Their intervention, rather than saving Rome, plunged it into further political convulsion.

The warning was immortalised by William Shakespeare in his play, Julius Caesar. Since then, the metaphor, “Beware the Ides of March!” has travelled through history as a reference to betrayal, political treachery and the dangers lurking behind the appearance of stability maintained by merchants of power.

Nigeria has its own dates of political and democratic betrayal. November 17, 1993, is one of them. Other November dates, including those in the present month, portend signs of political adversity.

That morning in 1993 began with the ordinary rhythms of civilian government. In Abeokuta, I reported as a young reporter, notebook in hand, to cover the swearing-in of Chief Olaniyi Adegbenro as a commissioner in the administration of Governor Olusegun Osoba.

That same day, the political landscape was erased. The Interim National Government, headed by Ernest Shonekan, collapsed, and General Sani Abacha seized power, ending one of the shortest and most fragile civilian interludes in Nigeria’s history.

The contrast remains unforgettable. A commissioner was sworn into office in the morning. Before the day was over, the democratic order that made his appointment possible had vanished.

Nigeria had once again passed from the uncertain promise of civilian rule into the grim predictability of military command. The coup was bloodless in method; it was, however, drenched in blood in consequence.

The tragedy acquired a haunting, almost gothic symmetry within the Adegbenro lineage. Thirty-one years earlier, in May 1962, Olaniyi’s father, Chief Dauda Soroye Adegbenro, was named Premier of the Western Region. He was ousted after just eight chaotic days amid a federal siege enforced by men in khaki.

Three decades later, the son could not warm his official seat for a single afternoon. Two generations. Two democratic mandates. Both crushed by authoritarian steel. The Adegbenro family tree stands as a parable of Nigerian statehood: a place where legitimacy is treated as disposable scrap.

That day was not just another military shift in Africa’s long catalogue of praetorian interventions; it was a watershed. It mutilated the popular sovereignty expressed five months earlier, dismantled the most expensive transition programme in our history, and buried the June 12 mandate under heavy leather boots.

Option A4, that ingenious, bottom-up electoral experiment that produced our cleanest democratic verdict, was discarded like a relic of naive idealism.

The mandate of Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, the hope of millions, was crushed by soldiers who mistook raw coercion for governance. Force can seize Dodan Barracks or Aso Rock; it can never manufacture consent.

More than three decades later, those ghosts have returned to walk the corridors of our democracy. First came rumours of a coup around this time last year, initially denied but later confirmed by Defence Headquarters, followed by a court-martial and, now, a trial before a civil court.

The ongoing Federal High Court trial in Abuja of six persons accused of plotting to overthrow President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government brings that dark history back into sharp focus.

On Thursday, November 5, a key milestone was reached when Justice Joyce Abdulmalik ruled, in a trial-within-a-trial, that the suspects’ confessional statements were voluntarily given and not extracted under duress.

This ruling reinforces a fundamental imperative: justice must be served transparently, firmly and without delay. For young officers who view the uniform not as a sacred trust to protect the Constitution, but as a shortcut to state power and ultimate wealth, history offers a stern, unyielding ledger.

General Abacha’s regime was not merely authoritarian; it was a brutal engine of state intimidation, judicial murder and systematic plunder. The junta dissolved the National Assembly, sacked elected governors, prohibited political activity and replaced civil authority with military administrators.

The political transition was converted into a sinister cabaret where five state-sanctioned political parties operated as what Chief Bola Ige famously immortalised as “the five fingers of a leprous hand”.

By September 1994, absolute legal impunity had been codified.

Through sweeping ouster clauses, decrees were promulgated that stripped the courts of all power to question military edicts or executive detentions.

M.K.O. Abiola, having declared his presidency at Epetedo on June 11, 1994, with the stirring words, “From this day, a new government is born”, was hunted down, charged with treason and cast into solitary confinement.

His wife, Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, refused the safety of silence and became the fiercely eloquent face of the June 12 struggle. On June 4, 1996, near the 7-Up Bottling Company at Oregun, Lagos, her Mercedes-Benz was sprayed with bullets by an assassin squad linked to the regime’s Strike Force.

The bloodletting spared no one. Pa Alfred Rewane, the 79-year-old financier of NADECO, was gunned down in his Ikeja home on October 6, 1995. Alhaja Suliat Adedeji met a similarly violent end in Ibadan on November 14, 1996.

Prominent citizens, journalists and activists lived with packed suitcases, listening for the midnight knock of the State Security Service.

Then came November 10, 1995 – a date burned into the global conscience. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the brilliant author and leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, was executed by hanging alongside eight Ogoni compatriots: Baribor Bera, Saturday Dobee, Paul Levura, Nordu Eawo, Felix Nuate, Daniel Gbooko, John Kpuinen and Barinem Kiobel.

The assault extended deep into organised labour, where Frank Kokori paid for NUPENG’s courage with long months in solitary desert confinement. The press was hunted like game: The News, Tempo, Tell, The Guardian, National Concord and The Punch (where I worked) were proscribed. Courageous journalists – Niran Malaolu, Kunle Ajibade, Chris Anyanwu, George Mbah, Ben Charles Obi and others – were jailed as “accessories after the fact of treason.”

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They were condemned by a kangaroo tribunal presided over by Justice Ibrahim Auta. Reportedly, Saro-Wiwa’s final words were: “Lord, take my soul, but the struggle continues!”

Even the military turned on its own, sentencing General Olusegun Obasanjo to life imprisonment and Major-General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua to death (he later died under suspicious circumstances in Abakaliki Prison). Human rights titans such as Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti and Shehu Sani were jailed, while Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka was forced into exile via the “NADECO route.” Gani Fawehinmi remained the intrepid ranger against the cabal.

Simultaneously, the Central Bank was turned into a private vault. Billions of dollars were looted directly from national reserves, creating the legacy of plunder known today as the unending “Abacha Loot”.

This reign of terror ended not through democratic reckoning, but by sudden demise. Abacha died in Aso Rock on June 8, 1998, and Abiola died in suspicious circumstances in detention on July 7, 1998.

Many who were hounded, exiled or suppressed by that dictatorship today occupy the commanding heights of the Fourth Republic. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then a NADECO senator forced into exile, now sits in Aso Rock.

Chief Olusegun Osoba remains a revered elder statesman. David Mark later served eight years as Senate President. Their trajectories remind us that Nigerian democracy is led not by angels, but by survivors – men whose biographies braid resistance, compromise, power and political survival.

Yet military adventurers are not the only ghosts haunting the republic. There is a quieter, equally insidious ghost that stalks our political landscape: the sabotage of electoral integrity from within. Just as praetorian forces assault democracy from the outside, the subversion of the voter roll dismantles public trust from within.

This truth was brought into sharp relief this November, just last Monday, the day after my column on INEC’s “passwords, pixels and panic” was published in this space, when the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof Joash Amupitan, announced “the completion of the commission’s voter register cleansing exercise” ahead of the 2027 general elections.

The figures disclosed by Amupitan are staggering: over 1.6 million invalid registrations – 1,608,660, to be precise – were excised from the national voter register following biometric screening through the Automated Biometric Identification System and statutory adjudication.

Behind these statistics lie the ghosts of illegal manipulation: multiple registrations, manipulated photographs, unusual registration patterns and the inclusion of deceased citizens on the voter roll.

Prof Amupitan acknowledged public concerns that these irregularities represented deliberate attempts to undermine the credibility of the 2027 polls. Even more telling was his admission that a significant number of these ghost records dated as far back as 2011 to 2023, having accumulated through successive registration exercises under differing operational standards.

Amupitan’s disclosure serves as a timely reminder that preserving democracy requires constant vigilance on all fronts. While the courts deal with those who plot to overthrow the Constitution by force of arms, the electoral umpire must exorcise the phantom voters that threaten to subvert the ballot box.

Although the proposed nationwide voter revalidation exercise has been deferred until after 2027 following stakeholder concerns, the commission’s reliance on Section 19(2) of the Electoral Act 2026 to purge 1.6 million invalid records demonstrates that institutions can clean their own houses when held accountable.

As Nigeria prepares for its upcoming presidential and National Assembly elections on January 16, 2027 – coming precisely twenty-four hours after Armed Forces Remembrance Day – the coincidence is heavy with meaning. On January 15, we lay wreaths for soldiers who died to keep the nation whole. On January 16, citizens will march to the ballot box to exercise the sovereignty those soldiers swore to protect.

As the country awaits the publication of the final voter register on December 15, 2026, the burden on Amupitan and INEC is clear: democratic credibility cannot survive on compromised records.

To the soldiers contemplating a shortcut to power through the barrel of a gun: military intervention is never a cure for governance failures; it is a terminal disease.

To civilian politicians and electoral managers currently holding power: democracy is endangered not only by soldiers in tanks, but also by elected officials and administrators who subvert the ballot, disregard court orders, intimidate the press, manipulate security agencies and pollute the register of voters.

If elections are rigged, if ghost voters are weaponised and if institutions are hollowed out, civilian leaders actively cultivate the fertile soil in which praetorian ambitions take root.

We must immortalise those officers and patriots who refused to bow: Colonel Abubakar Dangiwa Umar, who resigned as Military Governor of Kaduna in August 1993 rather than support the annulment; Rear Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu and Commodore Dan Suleiman, who lent military gravitas to NADECO. They proved that conscience can outlast power.

The old Yoruba proverb cautions: Àgbà tó bá fi ọwọ́ bo ojú, ó mọ̀ pé ohun tí ó ń rí kò dára – the elder who covers his eyes knows that what he sees is foul. Nigeria must stop covering its eyes.

What does true vigilance require today? It requires an electoral umpire whose independence is beyond compromise, a system in which results are auditable in real time and voter registries are purged of ghost names.

It requires courageous courts, a constitutional security sector and a civic curriculum that teaches the history of June 12 and November 17 from primary sources, so our children understand that democracy was not a gift from benevolent generals – it was bought with blood, exile and sacrifice.

The night of November 17, 1993, was long, but its shadows must not reclaim our future. The ongoing judicial process against constitutional subversion must reach a swift conclusion, just as Prof Joash Amupitan and INEC must ensure that the final register published on December 15, 2026, is unflinchingly clean.

Only then can the election of January 16, 2027, proceed without the shadow of the gun or the phantom voter hanging over the ballot box.

We must remember as an active verb. Our guard must never be lowered. Vigilance must be constitutional, civic and eternal.