The Congress Hall of the Transcorp Hilton Hotel assumed a celebratory mode on the penultimate Thursday. A gathering of the country’s most influential citizens, ranging from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to former presidents and heads of state to super rich industrialists, met to bless the presentation of General Babangida’s memoir, A Journey in Service. They also helped to raise a whopping N17 billion for a proposed presidential library in his name. Readers might wonder why Babangida is setting up a presidential library so late in his retirement from office in 1993.

I understand that Babangida has had a presidential library tucked away in his sprawling compound atop the now famous hill in Minna for quite a while. It is said to have been established in 1998. A report by Baba Yunus Muhammadis of Africa Islamic Economic Foundation, Tamale Ghana, who visited the library and reported in the Vanguard Newspaper of July 21, 2016 said, ‘the IBB Presidential Library possesses a huge wealth of materials, comprising thousands of presidential gifts and artefacts and hundreds of thousands of textual, electronic, and audio-visual records, which document the inner workings of General Ibrahim Babangida’s military government, the Armed Forces Ruling Council, at its highest policy level that historians will for decades mine as they write and judge the history of the period.’

The library even had a distinct pedigree as it was properly put together by Mu’azu Wali, a retired head of the National Library and Walin Kontagora, who served as its foundation Librarian/Archivist before he passed on in 2021. Over the years, the Babangida Library has even been the venue of the annual IBB Legacy Dialogue, which has served as a forum for discussing national, African and world issues and volunteering solutions here and there. As the library has been on the ground for some time, I guess the former president is dissatisfied with its modest form and now wants to build a befitting structure to bequeath to the nation. In this regard, he is on the well-worn path of many predecessors in many other countries.

The Presidential Library concept is said to have originated in the USA, where they have had a presidential government system for over 200 years. However, it was Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR), the 32nd president, who served a record of four terms from 1933 and died in office in 1945, who is credited with starting the presidential library. At the beginning of his 2nd term in 1938, FDR realised that he and his staff had accumulated a large quantity of papers, books, memorabilia, including other materials that could be a source of information on his heritage. His staff had earlier intimated to him the difficulties they encountered while looking for material on the tenures of past presidents. The staff found that a lot of the papers had been lost due to poor storage, some destroyed deliberately, and others even sold for profit. FDR sought the advice of historians and scholars who supported him to establish some sort of repository to preserve the evidence of his presidency for the future generation.

He raised private funds for the facility, which he built on his estate in Hyde Park, New York, while in office and turned the building over and its collection to the US government for operation. Since FDR began the tradition, all the subsequent US presidents have established libraries in the same pattern – raise private funds for the projects, build it and turn it over to the state to run. These libraries have been built in various locations across the country and, as the reader would expect, in the hometowns of the presidents. Nevertheless, these libraries are centrally run from the Office of Presidential Libraries within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). All of them can be visited at their locations, and as they are also digitised, they can be accessed via their websites.

Here in Nigeria, the idea of a presidential library has had a lacklustre beginning and slow acceptance. Since independence, we have had quite a handful of presidents and heads of state, yet it was only Olusegun Obasanjo that has ever instituted a presidential library. The Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) now sits pretty well in Abeokuta. Modelled after the FDR project in the USA, the OOPL was built between 2005 and 2007 when Obasanjo was serving his last term as president. I guess President Obasanjo built on the success of the Africa Leadership Foundation (ALF) he had run since 1988 in Otta Abeokuta. The ALF managed activities around governance, democracy and leadership. The Otta Farmhouse Dialogue series was particularly outstanding in the 1990s as a sounding board for policy input into government and other sectors of Nigerian national life.

The OOPL had the imprint of the celebrated researcher and librarian, Nyaknno Osso, whom Obasanjo brought into State House as Special Assistant to the President on Library, Research and Documentation from 1999-2007. Osso did all the groundwork for the project and even continued to run  OOPL after his tenure in the State House.

Now that President Babangida has thrown his hat into the ring to build a presidential library, I reckon that others will soon be following suit. Now is the time to put a proper institutional framework in place to oversee the presidential libraries. We will continue the discussion next week.