Nigeria's Democracy Project: Lessons from the Abacha Regime

Wole Soyinka, Africa's foremost dramatist, made a serious and disconcerting allegation about General Sani Abacha, possibly Nigeria's worst ever dictator on Radio Kudirat, a pirate radio station during the height of his dictatorship. General Sani Abacha was called a "clone" of Ibrahim Babangida, the former dictator from whose heinous misrule the beleaguered Nigerian nation is, arguably yet to recover from. Soyinka's claim, at the time, was taken seriously because of some compelling historical antecedents and also due to a number of what appeared to be carefully orchestrated coincidences the Abacha regime had engineered.