by Mohammed Bello Doka
23 July, 2026.
Consider the similarities. Obasanjo became Head of State in February 1976 after the assassination of General Murtala Mohammed. He did not win an election. He ruled by decree, not by law. There was no functioning legislature. The Supreme Military Council held all power. He banned the National Union of Nigerian Students, arbitrarily dismissed all university teachers, and deployed soldiers to campuses where students were shot dead during protests. In February 1977, an estimated one thousand soldiers stormed Fela Kuti's Kalakuta Republic in Lagos. The compound was burnt to the ground. Residents were beaten, raped, or otherwise physically abused. Fela's mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, then seventy-six years old and a veteran of Nigeria's struggle for independence, was thrown from a second-floor window. She died from her injuries after eight weeks in a coma. This was state-sponsored violence against a civilian population. This was textbook military dictatorship.
Abacha, on the other hand, seized power in November 1993 by forcing the interim civilian government of Ernest Shonekan to resign. He banned political parties, dissolved democratic structures, and assumed total control. His regime executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists in November 1995 after a sham trial that rejected vital defence evidence. Human rights lawyer Femi Falana has described these as state-sanctioned murders carried out to protect oil interests. The Oputa Panel later established that both the Ogoni Four and Ogoni Nine were victims of the Abacha junta. Abacha's regime also engaged in mass detentions, torture, and extrajudicial killings. The number of political detainees during his tenure reportedly exceeded the total recorded throughout the entire British colonial period.
But here is the hypocrisy that the Lagos-Ibadan Evangelical Media refuses to acknowledge. To this day, they continue to pontificate about the evil Abacha did when he jailed Obasanjo and General Oladipo Diya for alleged coup plots against his regime. They present this as proof of Abacha's tyranny, his paranoia, his brutality. They use it as evidence that Abacha was a dictator who could not tolerate dissent and would crush anyone who threatened his hold on power. The headlines scream about the injustice, the illegality, the cruelty of imprisoning a former Head of State and his deputy.
Yet these same media houses shamelessly ignore the fact that Obasanjo, when he was Head of State, signed the execution orders for over thirty people involved in the coup plot against General Murtala Mohammed. These executions were carried out by firing squad at the Kirikiri Prison shooting range in Lagos on March 11, 1976, with seven more following on May 15, 1976. Among those executed were General Iliya Bisalla and Lieutenant Colonel Buka Suka Dimka. This was the very government in which Obasanjo served as second-in-command and by virtue of which he later became Head of State after the coup. He was not a bystander. He was the deputy to Murtala Mohammed. When Murtala fell, Obasanjo rose. And in that rising, he signed the death warrants of over thirty men who had dared to challenge the military establishment. He executed them without a democratic mandate, without civilian oversight, without due process as understood in any civilized society. This is the same man the media now calls a democrat, a statesman, a hero.
What is the difference? Abacha jailed Obasanjo and Diya for plotting against him. He did not execute them. He imprisoned them. Obasanjo executed over thirty men for plotting against Murtala Mohammed. Abacha is condemned as a tyrant. Obasanjo is celebrated as a leader who took tough decisions in difficult times. Abacha is called a monster. Obasanjo is called a patriot. The media decides who is the villain and who is the hero based not on facts but on tribal affiliation. It is a shameless display of ethnic bias dressed up as journalism. As the ancient Greek philosopher Thucydides wrote, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." In the Nigerian media landscape, the Yoruba are strong and the Northerner is weak. The media decides who is a hero and who is a villain based not on facts but on tribal affiliation.
The Nigerian media, particularly the Lagos-Ibadan axis, has perfected the art of selective outrage. It is a profession that has abandoned the sacred canons of objectivity and fairness for the more lucrative business of ethnic cheerleading and regional propaganda. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more glaring than in the contrasting portraits painted of two men who, by every textbook definition, ran identical military dictatorships. One is called a dictator, a tyrant, a looter. The other is called a hero, an elder statesman, a democrat. The facts say otherwise. The media wears tribal marks.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a military dictatorship as a form of government where the military holds total control of a country, typically after seizing power through a coup, suppressing dissent, and justifying its rule as necessary for national security. Such regimes are marked by human rights abuses such as killings, torture, and disappearances. By this definition, both Olusegun Obasanjo and Sani Abacha were military dictators. There is no ambiguity. There is no grey area. Yet the media has chosen to see one and ignore the other.
The recent amplification of Dennis Amachree's memoir is a case in point. Amachree, a retired DSS Assistant Director, claimed that Abacha died of a cardiac arrest during an intimate encounter with a pharmacist at the Aso Rock Guest House in the early hours of June 8, 1998. According to Amachree, the woman panicked after discovering Abacha was unresponsive and left the villa. When she was later located in Lagos, her first words were: "I did not kill him, he died on top of me". The Lagos-Ibadan media ran this story with front-page urgency. The headlines screamed: "Abacha Died on Top of Prostitute", "Shocking Details of Abacha's Last Moments", "How Abacha Died in Bed with a Pharmacist". The choice of words was loaded, moralistic, and designed to humiliate a dead leader and, by extension, his ethnic group and his legacy. No verification was required. No corroboration was sought. They simply ran with it because it damaged Abacha.
Imagine if a retired DSS officer released a memoir claiming Obasanjo died or almost died in a similar situation. The treatment would be entirely different. The headlines would be euphemistic: "Obasanjo's Medical Emergency", "Personal Visitor Found at Villa", "Unconfirmed Claims Surface". The language would be cautious: "alleged", "unsubstantiated", "mischievous", "politically motivated". The story would be buried on page five or treated as a distraction from his statesmanship. Editors would call it reckless and demand verification before publishing. You will never see the Yoruba media frame Obasanjo with the same vulgarity they use for Abacha. Even when Obasanjo's own son, Gbenga Obasanjo, formally accused him in a Lagos High Court of having an affair with his wife, the media treated it with restraint. His first wife, Oluremi Obasanjo, in her memoir Bitter-Sweet: My Life with Obasanjo, detailed a pattern of physical and psychological abuse. His daughter, Iyabo Obasanjo, in an open letter, accused him of domestic violence, family neglect, and manipulation. His estranged wife, Taiwo Obasanjo, publicly called him a wicked husband and the greatest impostor of all time. These are serious allegations that would destroy the reputation of any public figure. But the media did not amplify them. They did not put them on the front page. They did not scream about them in bold headlines. When Abacha is involved, restraint goes out the window. When Obasanjo is involved, the media looks the other way.
This double standard is not just unprofessional. It is dangerous. As the Roman historian Tacitus observed, "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." In Nigeria, the more corrupt the media, the more numerous the ethnic biases. The Lagos-Ibadan media has failed the Nigerian people. It has made Nigerians believe that the problem we have in the country is the people in this or that region. An average Igbo man sees the Hausa and the Yoruba as the problem of this country, likewise the Yoruba and the Hausa man sees the same. This is the success recorded by the media so far.
But the North is not blameless in this tragedy. The Northern political and business elite have consistently failed to invest in the media. They have watched for decades as the Lagos-Ibadan axis dominates the narrative, shapes public opinion, and determines who is remembered as a hero and who is remembered as a villain. They have done nothing. Up to this day, business elites like Aliko Dangote, Abdulsamad Rabiu of BUA, and others continue to face biased reportage from the Lagos-Ibadan Evangelical Media. Their companies are subjected to relentless negative coverage, their motives questioned, their achievements downplayed. Yet they cannot see the importance of investing in the media to tell their own story. They would rather spend billions on cement factories and sugar refineries than a fraction of that on newspapers, television stations, and online platforms that could protect their interests and shape the narrative in their favour.
Even Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, the Chief Security Officer to Abacha, has in numerous fora decried the biased reportage he faced during his trials. He has spoken about how the media tried and convicted him before any court did. He has complained about the unfairness, the prejudice, the ethnic bias. But to this day, Al-Mustapha himself has not found the wisdom to invest in the media. He has not established a newspaper, a television station, or a media foundation to counter the narrative. He has not learned the lesson that the pen is mightier than the sword. He continues to complain while his opponents continue to write the story.
The philosopher George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The North has forgotten the past. It has forgotten that the media is a weapon. It has forgotten that he who controls the narrative controls the future. The Yoruba understood this long ago. They invested in newspapers. They invested in radio and television. They built an empire of influence that stretches from Lagos to Ibadan and beyond. The North built nothing. And now they pay the price. What in the world is the North thinking by neglecting investment in the media? What strategic miscalculation has led the political and business elite of the region to abandon the battle for the narrative? Do they not understand that the image of their leaders, their businesses, and their people is being shaped by adversaries who have no interest in fairness? Do they not see that their silence is interpreted as consent, their absence as weakness?
When a people refuses to write their own story, they have no reason to cry foul when their opponents portray them in a bad light. The story of Obasanjo and Abacha is not just a story of two military dictators. It is a story of media bias, ethnic prejudice, and the catastrophic failure of the Northern elite to invest in the one institution that could have protected their legacy. The Lagos-Ibadan media wears tribal marks. That is a fact. But the North wears the mark of negligence. And that is a tragedy.
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