Jamiu Abiola, son of late democracy icon Chief MKO Abiola, has said that Nigeria would have achieved far greater economic progress had his father been allowed to assume the presidency following his victory in the annulled 1993 general election.
Speaking on Thursday during a special June 12 Democracy Day broadcast on Channels Television, Jamiu lamented what he described as a lost opportunity for national advancement during a period of global economic prosperity.
“Nigeria would have been better because, at that time, it was a very special time in global times; that 1993 period was a time when the world itself was having an international economic boom.
“So, we could have tapped into that. But what did we get in return? We got a Kleptomaniac as head of state. I am not going to talk about (Sani) Abacha because he has his problems wherever he has found himself,” he said.
The event, titled “Nigeria’s Democratic Journey: An Inter-Generational Conversation on Building a Better Nation”, marked 26 years of unbroken democratic rule in the country.
Jamiu Abiola, who currently serves as the Senior Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Linguistics and Foreign Affairs, also accused certain figures of attempting to erase his father’s legacy from Nigeria’s political history.
“I wrote a book in 2015 because I came to realise that my father’s name was becoming like a memory that was becoming distant and people were hellbent on rewriting the history of Nigeria without him,” he said.
Jamiu, who is Senior Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Linguistics and Foreign Affairs, expressed the belief that some people were hellbent on erasing his father’s name from Nigeria’s history.
According to him, international dignitaries would often refer to other former Nigerian leaders while ignoring his father’s name.
“Some people wanted to bury his name. Like my father would say: they wanted to shave his head in his absence,” he added.
Jamiu’s 2015 book, The President Who Never Ruled, was written to ensure that Chief MKO Abiola’s name remained prominent in the annals of Nigerian history.
It will be recalled that in 2018, former President Muhammadu Buhari posthumously awarded MKO Abiola the Grand Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (GCFR) Nigeria’s highest national honour and formally designated 12 June as Democracy Day, a move widely seen as long overdue recognition of Abiola’s sacrifice.
