Ose Oyamendan was in Washington DC in the summer of 1998 when he heard the shocking news about the death of MKO Abiola, the charismatic billionaire businessman and media mogul who should have been President of Nigeria. Abiola had won the 1993 election and was expected to usher in a new era of democracy in the country but that result had been annulled. Instead, he was imprisoned by General Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria’s military ruler, and he died a few years later in highly suspicious circumstances.
Oyamendan tells Abiola’s story in his new feature documentary, MKO, which receives its world premiere in International Competition at Sheffield Doc Fest.
“The thing about him dying was that we had actually heard rumours they [the army] were going to kill him,” the Nigerian-American filmmaker and journalist tells Business Doc Europe. Oyamendan himself had had to flee to the US after the 1993 election, a period when, as he has written, “soldiers roamed the streets, silencing dissent with bullets.”
While still in captivity, Abiola held a meeting with Thomas Pickering, the US undersecretary of state, and Susan Rice, then the US ambassador to Nigeria. There is compelling evidence that he was poisoned during this meeting. He was given tea and moments later he collapsed.
Pickering agreed to speak to Oyamendan for the documentary. Rice declined but she is one of the few major players in the story who doesn’t appear on camera. Somehow, Oyamendan has persuaded almost everyone else involved, from Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka to Babangida himself, to talk to him. All the heroes and villains are here.
At the time of the death, there had been counter-rumours that Abiola was about to be released. “His wife and kids had gone to see him. They thought they were returning to Lagos with him. It [the death] was very confusing. It was one of those things – did I hear that right?”
Video exists (which the director has seen but wasn’t able to include in the documentary) that shows the last moments of Abiola’s life, during that fateful meeting with Pickering and Rice.
“He came into the meeting. You could see he was happy. He didn’t really seem agitated. He was talking clearly…he just took a sip, a couple of sips [of the tea] and within three minutes, he started reacting. He said he had to go to the bathroom.”
That’s when the situation became very bleak. Abiola can be heard off camera reciting the Muslim prayer for the dead. It’s clear then that the life is ebbing out of him.
Oyamendan can still remember his “feeling of emptiness” after Abiola’s death. “You feel like you have gone to war and that you’ve lost the general of that war,” he elaborates.
It was, he suggests, definitely an end point but he wasn’t sure what came next.
Now, close to three decades later, the director has made a film which finally pieces together all the circumstances that led to the death. He conducted over 800 hours of interviews with those involved – politicians and diplomats as well as family members.
“In this series of interviews, there were a lot of people making claims and some of them were not true. There are a lot of people trying to cover their tracks.”
Oyamendan’s “process” was straightforward. He would listen to everyone and then carefully sift through their testimony looking for the nuggets of truth.
“Going into this film, my first objective was that I am going to take my biases out of it. I am going to take out whatever preconceptions I have.”
He was always respectful but, as he also notes, he is an activist who “was brought up to question and fight authority.” In this case, he was determined to “shine a light” on events that the Nigerian government has continually attempted to conceal.
Serving the story remained paramount. The director was ruthless in cutting out elements that didn’t advance the narrative. He knew the background inside out but was still sometimes startled by what he heard.
“The shocking thing for me was the strength of the opposition to telling the story,” he says. A former president of Nigeria tried to warn him off, telling him this was “a dead story” and that he should “let it die.” Other politicians were equally angry that the documentary was being made.
In the course of his research, Oyamendan also discovered just how many risks had been taken by some of the figures fighting for democracy in Nigeria.
What kind of President might Abiola have made if he had been allowed to take office? One interviewee suggests that he could have had as big an impact in Nigeria as Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
“I think he [Abiola] would have been a better president than what we had,” the director says. “He had lived life. This was a guy who was born dirt poor and rose to become a billionaire. He knew the whole gamut of society. As a philanthropist, he spent a lot of money – he literally sent thousands of people to school in Nigeria, UK and America. Most of them he never met.”
A key point is that Abiola was elected fairly and would therefore have been “answerable to the people” unlike the country’s military rulers. He was also one of the best connected politicians of his era with a huge range of global contacts. He would have got things done.
Oyamendan acknowledges that an Abiola presidency would also have faced daunting challenges. Some of the figures earmarked to be in his cabinet later turned against democracy. Western governments would have chafed against his demands for financial reparations for slavery and colonialism. The Americans would still have been keen to get hold of Nigerian oil. Even so, as the director points out, MKO represented the possibility of a better, fairer Nigeria. His supporters came from every part of Nigerian society and they didn’t vote for him simply on narrow religious or tribal grounds.
“They just felt this was the guy for us and they felt it was important to get the military out of power.”
After Abiola’s arrest, Sani Abacha became the military ruler before himself dying in murky circumstances.
US president Bill Clinton didn’t intervene on Abiola’s behalf. “There is a bit of naivety especially in Africa – people always feel these foreign powers will come and save them. Nobody is coming. They have to save themselves. That is what this showed,” the director notes.
“To understand Nigeria today, you have to understand that colonial powers never thought of it as a country. They thought of it in terms of economics….they just pulled together this vast expanse of land that they could exploit,” he goes on to explain why Nigerian politics are so fractious. “There are about 250 ethnic tribes in the country. Before they were fused together, a lot of these people had little or nothing in common. Now they have been forced to live together. When the British left, there was a lot of suspicion.”
Abiola looked as though he would be the first leader to cut through the layers of mistrust but the opportunity to remould the country was taken away from him.
Not that the director believes Nigerians should still be indulging in self-pity. “Yes, the British left a very unbalanced political structure and system, but Nigeria has been independent now for 66 years. At some point, you have to grow from being a victim and use whatever your situation is for your own benefit,” he reflects. “You can’t blame the colonialists forever.”
Oyamendan met his producer Véronique Bernard through the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA). He told her he was looking for a producer and she took up the job. She also brought aboard Genie-award winning Canadian Paul Cadieux as executive producer. Another of the exec producers is US documentary maker Mark Jonathan Harris, who has been involved in three Oscar-winning films.
In advance of the Sheffield premiere, the filmmakers cut a trailer and put it online to test audience interest. There was no fanfare or publicity but the trailer has already racked up 150,000 views. A potential distributor is lined up for Nigeria and the filmmakers are also now actively targeting the close to 17 million Nigerians who live outside the country.
Young Nigerians are reminded of Abiola by the ”Democracy Day” public holiday now held every year on the date of the election he won – and the MKO documentary is also bound further to burnish his legacy. Attempts to write him out of history have clearly failed.
