Opinion
By Ambassador Lilian Onoh
SINCE 1993, when the Military Government created their own two political parties, chose two candidates, and foisted them on the electorate, Nigeria has never recovered from the abolition of personal political ideology and the new paradigm where the next leaders are selected by whoever is in power.
Unlike the 2nd Republic, when real men who had grown up with ideological views were in office, all the rulers since 1993 have been foisted on Nigerians by their predecessors; and in Buhari’s case, by external decision. The country has not had many politicians with any ideology since that time, leading to a sham democracy dictated by political godfathers surfeit on ill-gotten wealth and power. Nigerian politicians jump from party to party, eat their own vomit and speak from all their orifices at once without any sense of shame. They are never held to account.
In 1983 when Abubakar Rimi, a sitting governor, left the People’s Redemption Party (PRP), he resigned his position as state governor in a principled decision that stands as the final full stop to ideological politics in Nigeria. I doubt that there are up to a hundred politicians or citizens in Nigeria today that can tell what any of the political parties stand for or what ideology any single politician in Nigeria actually believes other than greed and power.
This is the result of burying the whole sordid background that led to 12th June 1993 under tonnes of paint for the whitewashed narrative. Nigeria has descended into a country ruled by men with absolutely no ideology, vision or purpose other than personal aggrandisement and accumulation of wealth so gross that it has turned one of the most promising countries in the world into one of the world’s poverty capitals and a terrorist killing field, with Boko Haram being the only group with a recognisable ideology that can largely be summarised as kidnapping and raping innocent young girls under the ideology of forbidding Western Education, all the while using Western made guns, phones, internet, cars, motorbikes, jeeps and even wearing that most Western clothing – blue jeans and T-shirts.
Without a truthful historical reckoning of the road that led to 12th June 1993 and the enthronement of politics by selection, the psychological destruction of successive generations will be almost irreversible.
The standard mindset in Nigeria is that merit is a waste and all that is required is to do whatever is necessary for a “godfather” in the system to get you in – be it a university placement, teaching deployment, medical residency, civil service, police, army, private sector jobs and even where to be placed as a tout (airport, motor park, market).
If Nigeria does not face the real June 12th reckoning – the total abolition of personal and political ideology and principles – history has a surfeit of lessons of what will become of it.
An excerpt from “Diplomatic Bedlam: Interactions with Humans, Mutants, Variants and Quadruple Variants” by Ambassador Lilian Onoh, former Nigerian High Commissioner to Namibia and former Head of Mission in Jamaica.
A.I
June 3, 2026
Tags: Ambassador Lilian Onoh June 12TH