Exactly 35 years ago today, on Wednesday, 28 August 1991, the gates of the Maximum Security Prison, Kirikiri, were finally flung open, and two young student leaders walked out into the Lagos morning after four months of detention by the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida, carrying with them the belongings with which they had entered the prison and the memory of a struggle that had already begun to shape their lives in ways neither of them could then have fully understood. They were this writer, Abdul Mahmud, then President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), and Bamidele Aturu, then National Mobilisation Officer of NANS, two young men who had committed the unforgivable offence, in the eyes of a military junta, of insisting that Nigeria deserved something better than the political contrivance that the regime called a transition programme.
The events that brought us to Kirikiri had begun several months earlier, between 29 April and 2 May 1991, when the Babangida junta moved against the central leadership of the Nigerian student movement and arrested student leaders across the country. The immediate offence was political, and there was nothing clandestine about it: we had called for the resignation of the military junta and demanded an end to what we regarded as its contrived political transition programme, proposing instead a Government of National Unity that would oversee a genuine, inclusive and credible transition to democratic rule. The student movement had understood something that the political class of the period sometimes struggled to acknowledge, namely that a transition designed by an unelected military government could not become democratic simply because the junta gave itself a timetable and announced a succession of political stages, and that the people whose country was supposedly being returned to them had a right to participate in determining the terms upon which that return would occur.
