The Buhari, Awujale in Babarinsa’s book

Buhari held our commonwealth in his hands; he was a steward of a nation’s hopes and fortunes. It is thus no surprise that Nigerians are sifsifting through the records of his years in power, weighing promises against outcomes. And there is little doubt now: whatever he intended as his best fell painfully short of what the country needed.

On Saturday, July 12, 2025, I reached the last page of ‘One Day and A Story: Reminiscences of an African Journalist’, Dare Babarinsa’s woven walk through newsrooms, nations, cities and nuances. The book contains memories that leave you sitting still for a moment, as though history itself had paused to breathe.

Had I been in Nigeria, the date would have been Sunday, July 13, a day that wrote itself into memory with unexpected weight. It was the day Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s immediate past president, and Oba Sikiru Adetona, the Awujale of Ijebuland, two men whose names walked through the pages I had just turned, took their final leave of the world.

Buhari, stoic, elusive, both soldier and statesman, ruled twice but healed little. For all the power he held, he could not build a hospital fit to mend his own breaking body. In the end, it was not Nigerian air that he last breathed. He passed, not in Daura or Abuja, but in a distant London ward wrapped in foreign sheets, in irony. His life, and the choices that shaped it, found no refuge in the nation he once commanded.

Babarinsa’s prose does not flatter nor flinch. In the chapters Buhari features in, the General emerges, not as saviour, but as shadow; an era of decree and fear, etched in the ink of a journalist’s memory.

Reading the book was like sitting the ghosts of headlines past, their truths still burning, their exits marked by the turning of a final page.

Babarinsa’s prose does not plead for forgiveness. It recalls Buhari’s years as a military dictator with unflinching detail, where the images are stern, the atmosphere heavy, and history uneasy. The legacy that emerges from the pages of the book is not heroic, but haunting; not golden, but grey.

The Awujale was a royal figure whose influence spanned generations, whose presence was larger than life. His was a different kind of authority, cultural, enduring, layered with tradition and contradiction.

To finish Babarinsa’s book on the same weekend these two men exited the stage felt less like coincidence and more like history nudging gently at my shoulder, whispering that stories never truly end, but they fold, they echo and they wait.

And so I closed the book, not just on a life’s recollections, but on a moment suspended between memory and mortality, where words, like lives, leave marks long after the final breath.

The book recalls a time of fear and silence, when General Buhari ruled with a clenched fist and an unblinking stare. Buhari, Babarinsa recalls an interview with Dele Giwa in his time as Editor of Sunday Concord, had warned he would “tamper with the freedom of the press,” and he kept his promise with Decree 4, a law so cruel it punished the truth itself. Journalists were jailed for reports that embarrassed officials, whether true or not. The era was marked by tribunals that passed death sentences retroactively, by young men executed in the cold morning light, and by Fela Kuti being dragged before judges for carrying his own money and jailed for 25 years.

The book shows that even dictators can be betrayed. Buhari’s fall was a palace coup announced by crackling radio broadcasts, a promise that his stubborn rule was over. Into that vacuum walked Ibrahim Babangida, all charm and easy smiles.

The then Brigadier Joshua Dongoyaro, on Radio Nigeria, announced Buhari’s overthrow. “The concept of collective leadership has been substituted by stubborn and ill-advised unilateral actions, thereby destroying the principle upon which the government came to power,” Dongoyaro said.

Babarinsa remembers his first cover story for Newswatch: the execution of three young men found guilty of alleged drug trafficking by a military tribunal. Bartholomew Owoh (26), Bernard Ogedegbe (29), and Lawal Ojuolape (30) were shot at the shooting range of the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos. Their death sentences were handed down by a tribunal led by Justice Adebayo Desalu, assisted by four military and police officers. Despite widespread public outcry, the regime enforced the executions under a retroactive decree.

The author also recalls covering, in May 1985, the proceedings of the Exchange Control and Anti-Sabotage Tribunal (Lagos zone), presided over by Justice Oladipo Williams. At that tribunal, 26-year-old Gloria Ogbonna was sentenced to five years in prison for attempting to take $1,800, £16, and 2,700 Italian Lira out of Nigeria. In the same session, a British-Arab woman, Mehmet Bahia Bin Chambi, received a 42-year prison sentence for trying to export N98 million. She was additionally fined N98 million, while her companies and those of her business associates in Nigeria faced combined fines totaling N2.4 billion.

Before his removal, Buhari never advertised any plan to return the country to democratic rule. Babaginda endeared himself to the people: He freed Buhari’s political prisoners detained without trial, welcomed exiles back home, and surrounded himself with respected scholars, jurists, and poets. He made the country believe again. For those exhausted by Buhari’s repression, Babangida seemed like salvation itself. They fell for it. Journalists who had watched people rot in detention now praised the regime’s consultations and grand gestures. They wanted to believe in change, in a softer, more enlightened rule. But that promise ended in violence too, in betrayal sealed with a parcel bomb that killed Giwa and marked the decline of his baby, Newswatch.

The book also reminisces about Yorubaland, at a time kings clashed over memory and myth, over whether or not the race’s most important king is the Ooni or the Alaafin, and over whether Oyo or Ife is the race’s most important town. The Awujale distanced the Ijebu from Oyo and Ife. According to him, the Ijebu migrated from Whydah.

Babarinsa notes that Oba Adetona, once a close friend of Oba Sijuwade, felt the Ooni remained distant during his own troubles, when Governor Olabisi Onabanjo’s administration in Ogun State nearly deposed him during the Second Republic. In the years that followed, both the Alaafin and the Awujale became known for their sympathy toward the Modakeke people in their conflict with Ile-Ife.

My final take: Buhari and Oba Adetona gave what they could and left the rest to history’s judgment. But, unlike the Oba, Buhari held our commonwealth in his hands; he was a steward of a nation’s hopes and fortunes. It is thus no surprise that Nigerians are sifting through the records of his years in power, weighing promises against outcomes. And there is little doubt now: whatever he intended as his best fell painfully short of what the country needed.