June 18, 2026
Olu Fasan
The decision of President Muhammadu Buhari to name June 12 as Nigeria’s “Democracy Day” was motivated by self-serving politics, not principled conviction. Before he became president in 2015, Buhari never once publicly condemned the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election. However, in 2018, as he prepared to seek re-election the following year and faced deepening unpopularity in the South-West, Buhari changed the annual “Democracy Day” from May 29 to June 12 to curry favour with the South-West, which had turned the annulment into an ethnic issue. Professor Wole Soyinka said at the time that Buhari took the decision “with an eye on electoral fortunes, undoubtedly.” He was right!
Equally opportunistic were the so-called pro-democracy politicians. Most of those parading themselves as democrats today, including those in the ruling APC who rode on the coattails of June 12 agitations to advance their political careers, are by no stretch of the imagination true democrats. They were utterly devious and duplicitous in both the pre-annulment events and post-annulment shenanigans. They secretly colluded with General Ibrahim Babangida, who annulled the election, and hobnobbed with General Sani Abacha, whom Babangida accused in his memoir A Journey in Service of instigating the annulment. Prior to Abacha’s death on June 8, 1998, five political parties, populated by today’s “democrats,” endorsed him as the sole presidential candidate in April 1998, calling him Nigeria’s “saviour.”
