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Nigeria took too long to honour my parents’ sacrifice - Abiola’s son on Jun 12 legacy

Jamiu Abiola, son of the late Chief MKO Abiola and Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, has said Nigeria took far too long to acknowledge the ultimate price his parents paid for the country’s democracy.

Speaking in a televised interview on Wednesday, Jamiu recounted the pain of losing both parents in the 1990s and the silence that followed their deaths, saying it compounded his grief.

“For a long time, it felt as though history was being written without my father’s name. It wasn’t just painful as a son, it was painful as a Nigerian. Because the truth was being left out,” he said.

Chief MKO Abiola won the annulled June 12, 1993, presidential election — considered Nigeria’s freest and fairest — but was arrested after declaring himself president and died in military custody in 1998.

His wife, Kudirat Abiola, a vocal pro-democracy advocate, was assassinated in Lagos in 1996.

Jamiu credited former President Muhammadu Buhari for taking the first official step toward correcting the historical omission by declaring June 12 as Democracy Day in 2018 and posthumously conferring the nation’s highest honour, the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR), on MKO Abiola.

“That was a moment of truth. It corrected a long-standing omission and finally placed my father’s legacy where it belongs in the national memory,” he said.

He also applauded President Bola Tinubu for recently awarding his mother the posthumous honour of Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR).

“President Tinubu has always stood with our family, even before it was politically convenient. He was the first to publicly honour my mother as governor of Lagos in 1999,” Jamiu noted.

Jamiu lamented that his father’s national legacy faded into regional memory after the election annulment despite MKO’s pan-Nigerian appeal.

“This is not just about the Abiola family. It’s about the integrity of our national history. When a country remembers its true heroes, it sends a message to future generations that sacrifice, courage, and service to the nation matter,” he added.

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