June 12: The heartbreaking story of how Kudirat Abiola road in Lagos got its name

On June 4 2001, the administration of former governor Bola Tinubu rolled out drums to rename the newly-dualised Oregun road after Kudirat Abiola, the second wife of MKO Abiola, winner of the June 12, 1993 Presidential election.

Dualised at N990 million, the road from Ojota to Oregun in Ikeja local government area of the state will now be known and called “Kudirat Abiola Way”, the state declared at the ceremony which attracted activists and pro-democracy campaigners who led several campaigns and protests against the military junta which ended with the death of the tyrannical dictator Gen Sani Abacha.

At the centre of the road’s name is the heartbreaking story of Kudirat Olayinka Abiola, who was assassinated at age 44 in Ikeja by gunmen on Abacha’s killer squad. The arrest of Abiola on treason charges in 1994 after declaring himself winner of the annulled 1993 election threw Kudirat, who was ordinarily tuned to private life, into activism. She stood in gap at a time when her husband’s political family was in disarray with no coordinating figure to lead their demand for the release of the incarcerated business mogul.

She led several campaigns and joined forces with other pro-democracy campaigners like Chief Anthony Enahoro and other groups to mount pressure on the government for the release of her husband. According to a website dedicated to her memory, in the summer of 1994, Kudirat was actively involved in sustaining the oil workers’ 12-week strike against the military regime. The strike, which succeeded in isolating and weakening the government, was one of the longest in Africa’s history by oil workers. In December of 1995, when the pro-democracy groups decided to march for freedom in Lagos, Kudirat joined Enahoro at the forefront of the march, braving the intimidation and bullets of heavily armed government forces sent to disperse them.

With her rising profile, the military government believed she was growing too influential and becoming popular like her incarcerated husband, they decided to silence her as the only politically outspoken and the most senior among Abiola’s wives, after the death of Simbiat Abiola in 1992.

Several accounts say Kudirat left Abiola’s residence in Opebi, Ikeja on June 4, 1996 in her husband’s white Mercedes Benz 300 S-Class car. As they approached the 7-Up end of Oregun Industrial Estate to link the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway around 9:40am, her assailants who had been trailing opened fire on the car, killing Kudirat and her driver, while her protocol officer, Lateef Shofolahan was said to have ‘miraculously’ escaped unhurt.

According to a June 1996 African Research Bulletin report, a group calling itself the “Committee for the Release of Moshood Abiola” reportedly “claimed responsibility for the killing, stating that it killed Mrs. Abiola because ‘her campaign to free Moshood Abiola was driven by a consuming ambition for political limelight at the expense of her husband”. The police also placed a $45,000 bounty on the killers of Kudirat. Shofolahan would later be indicted as the insider who connived with Major Hamzat Al-Mustapha, Abacha’s former Chief Security Officer (CSO), Abacha’s son, Mohammed; and former head of Mobile Police Force Unit, Aso Rock, Rabo Lawal.

Her assassination sparked outrage in the country, members of the civil society groups were the worse hit by the pain. At a book launch in November 1995, Kudirat who was firmly committed to her husband’s political aspiration, was quoted to have said: “June 12 is worth defending with our lives, otherwise our children will continue to be slaves in their own fatherland”.

In honour of her rare bravely and exemplary heroic, the Lagos state government named the popular Oregun road after her in June 2001. At the inauguration of the road in 2001, Tinubu had said the road renamed after Kudirat “is our authoritative declaration of her triumph over her killers and another monumental testimony to her march into immortality”.

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Not just in Lagos, in faraway New York City in the United States, the north-east corner of Manhattan’s 44th Street and Second Avenue opposite Nigeria’s United Nations Mission in New York was also renamed as “Kudirat Abiola Corner” in January 1998. The move sparked a series of controversies among Nigerians in the United States. Abacha’s regime was also “furious that the street on which Nigeria’s U.N. mission and New York consulate is located was to be named after her,” the IPS News Agency reported on September 25, 1997.

According to the account of Joe Igbokwe, an 83-page book to discredit the heroic of Kudirat was produced by apologists of the military dictator, Nigeria’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations (1990-1999), Professor Ibrahim Gambari (now Chief of Staff to President Buhari) and other senior staff of the Nigerian Embassy were mobilized to discredit Kudirat in a bid to stop the naming of a New York street after her. The street is the only place in the U.S with a Nigerian name.

Born in 1952, in Zaria, Kaduna State, Kudirat was one of the high flying students at Muslim Girls High School, Ijebu Ode, Ogun State where she was the Head Prefect in her final year. According to her memorial website, she married Abiola at 21, and their union produced seven children – Hafsat, Abdulmumin, Yusau, Kafilat, Jamiu, Hadi and Moriam.

Kudirat’s daughter, Hafsat Abiola-Costello, who is also a civil rights activist, while speaking on her mother’s murder has said “If the only way we could have saved her life was to have her silent in the face of tyranny and oppression, then there is no point”.