Ose Oyamendan’s “MKO” Explains Why Nigerians Are Tired of Hoping

More than three decades after Nigerians went to the polls on 12 June 1993, the central question of that election remains unsettled: who killed MKO Abiola, and why? Ose Oyamendan’s documentary, MKO, which premiered at the National Theatre in Lagos on 1 October, 2026  with President Bola Tinubu as host, returns to the annulled election, the crisis that followed, and Abiola’s sudden death in custody during a meeting with senior American diplomats. The film debuted at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival on 12 June before it reached Nigerian cinemas.

Its list of interviewees is formidable. One of MKO’s wives and some of his children gave accounts of his personal life, and their experiences during the time of his arrest. Ibrahim Babangida, who annulled the vote, sits alongside President Bola Tinubu, a loyalist of Abiola’s, and  Abdulsalami Abubakar, who oversaw the return to civilian rule. Olusegun Obasanjo, Wole Soyinka and Baba Gana Kingibe, Abiola’s running mate, also appear, as do the former American diplomats Thomas Pickering and Walter Carrington. Bukhari Bello, a legal counsel for the NEC gave account of the suspicious legal proceedings. Theodore Zadok, who guarded Abiola during his detention also recounts his version of events and outrightly states that Abiola was killed through contact with an unknown substance on a teacup. Veteran journalists, Dele Momodu, Dapo Olorunyomi, and Olusegun Adeniyi, also contributed deep analyses of the events before, during, and after the 1993 elections. Combined with a deep well of archival footage, these voices make the documentary less a history lesson than a reckoning, and one that explains why so many Nigerians have learned to brace themselves whenever hope is offered.

Abiola’s presidential campaign was built on the slogan ‘Hope ’93’, and the film understands how much that phrase meant at the time. Nigeria had endured years of military rule, with its decrees, its detentions and the  sense that the country belonged to a handful of men in uniform. Abiola, a wealthy publisher and businessman with a reputation for generosity, offered something different. He was a Muslim from the south-west who campaigned across the country, drew support from the north as well as the south, and won in states that were supposedly not his to win. He became a symbol of hope for people who had grown weary of being governed by soldiers, and Oyamendan lets us feel how real that hope was before showing us what became of it.

What the documentary establishes beyond argument is that Abiola won. There was no serious doubt about this at the time, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Those who lived through the election, including many who later served the system that nullified it, knew the outcome. The vote was widely regarded as one of the freest and fairest the country had ever held, and the sense of a nation speaking with one voice is conveyed through the archival material with real force. This matters because the later debates about conspiracy, legality and politics can obscure a simple fact. A man won, and he was not allowed to govern.

The most absorbing stretch of the film belongs to Babangida. As the head of the military government that cancelled the result, he is the obvious villain of the piece, and Oyamendan wisely gives him room to speak rather than simply condemning him. According to his account, he was fighting on two fronts at once, facing pressure from political forces on one side and from within the military on the other. In his telling, he was going to be in trouble whether he annulled the election or not. Whatever one makes of that defence, and many viewers will not accept it, it is a revealing admission. If he truly believed he was cornered either way, then the annulment was not forced upon him but chosen. He had a decision to make, and he made the one that cost the country its democratic moment. The film sets his explanation against the testimony of others and leaves the audience to weigh it, which is the more honest approach.

Tinubu’s Renewed Hope agenda is the most visible descendant of Hope ’93, and the film makes it hard to hear the slogan without thinking of Abiola. But a slogan borrowed from a symbol is not the same as a movement carried by the people. Hope ’93 worked because it gave voice to something Nigerians already felt, a shared hunger for a break from the past. Renewed Hope arrived as a campaign line from an established political machine, and for many, the distance between the promise and the daily reality of rising prices, insecurity and shrinking opportunity has only widened the gap.

The one political moment in recent memory that remotely resembled 1993 was the Obidient movement. Powered largely by young Nigerians who organised online and offline, and who saw Peter Obi as a break from politics as usual, it recaptured something of that earlier national longing. It crossed ethnic and religious lines in a way few movements have managed since Abiola’s campaign. For a brief season, hoping felt less like naivety and more like a collective decision. When the 2023 result went the other way, and the legal challenge that followed ended in disappointment, many supporters did not simply lose an election, they lost the belief that the ballot box could deliver the change they had worked so hard to demand.

Abiola’s story taught one generation that a mandate can be taken away, and the Obidient experience taught another that enthusiasm alone may not be enough to hold on to one. The result is a country where cynicism has become a survival skill. The future now looks bleak to far too many Nigerians, who watch their currency fall, their best and brightest leave, and their leaders promise renewal once more. Hope, which should be a renewable resource, has been spent so often that the people who once carried it now treat it with suspicion. Nigerians are not tired because they have stopped caring. They are tired because they have cared, repeatedly, and been made to pay for it.