Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Amarike Akpoke is a Contributing Analyst to USAfricaonline.com
In the theatre of the absurd that is often Nigeria’s public discourse, a strange soliloquy recently echoed from the corridors of nostalgia, voiced not by a jester but by Maryam Abacha, the widow of the late General Sani Abacha, a man whose name has become the chilling metonym for kleptocracy in the annals of Nigeria’s history.
With the poise of a miscast oracle and the defiance of a matriarch besieged by facts, Maryam emerges from the shadows, clutching to her chest the relics of denial like a mourner, who embalms falsehood to keep love from decomposing. “Where did he steal the money from?” she asks, with the innocence of a nun and the boldness of a conjurer who believes the rabbit she pulls from the hat never existed until the audience imagined it.
Philosophers call it Stockholm Syndrome, that eerie psychological embrace where the hostage defends the captor. But Maryam’s devotion is not just classic Stockholm; it is a mother-of-the-nation brand, embroidered in gold and denial, sanctified in memory and woven tightly around an authoritarian’s legacy like the traditional zani wrapper she once wore in the presidential villa.
To be fair, history has a peculiar way of teasing forgetfulness, especially in a land where the past is rarely documented and the present never explained. So, when Maryam prays for Nigerians and scolds them for “telling lies” about the late General, we understand. The human mind, when starved of reality, sometimes feeds on revisionism. After all, didn’t the same people once call Abacha a hero while tiptoeing past his prisons?
But what are the facts? Since 1999, Nigeria has reportedly recovered over $3.6 billion from the Abacha loot, each tranche returned like a kidnapped child finally rescued from overseas vaults. From the Swiss Alps to the isles of Jersey, from Liechtenstein to Luxembourg, Abacha’s financial fingerprints are global. Yet Maryam, with all the grace of a mystic, demands witnesses, signatures, signed affidavits by the looted funds themselves.
Oh Maryam! Must we exhume every secret bank account, present video footage of the offshore transactions, and extract ghostly confessions from deceased Swiss bankers before your conscience feels a flutter? Must we invoke spirits from the IMF and World Bank to stand trial in the Abuja city centre, testifying under the baobab tree of your logic?
You asked, “Why are you blaming somebody? Is it tribalism or religious problem?” Madam, it is neither. It is memory, that stubborn, haunted organ of the collective mind that refuses to forget what your husband did to Nigeria in the dark while the oil money flowed and opposition voices cracked in silence. It is the cry of pensioners unpaid, classrooms that turned into chicken coops, and hospitals that became mortuaries under his rule. It is justice knocking on a long-locked vault of remorseless theft.
And yes, we are still talking about Abacha twenty-seven years later, not because he was powerful or loved, but because trauma remembers. Nigeria has been trying to stitch a future with the shredded fabric of that dictatorship. His ghost is not a saint; it is a scar, still red, still tender, still there. Your tribute to your late husband as a misunderstood guardian of Nigeria’s wealth is a tragic poem written in reverse. You speak of prayers and goodness in the hearts of Nigerians. But prayer, without truth, is noise; and goodness, without repentance, is mockery.
In another world, Maryam Abacha might have been a Shakespearean queen, noble in form, deluded in spirit, speaking to ghosts that only she can see. But this is Nigeria, where the past walks hand-in-hand with the present, and the people, though long-suffering, are slowly learning to read the signs of state capture and the folklore of looters.
So, let her speak. Let her rewrite the legacy. Let her mourn not the husband that died, but the conscience that never lived. For even in satire, there must be room for pity. And perhaps that’s all we can offer Maryam now: not vindication, not applause, but a solemn whisper from a wounded nation: “Madam, the money was never kept for us. It was stolen from us.” And even a billion prayers cannot whitewash that. Simple!
