The prayers began early Monday at the Uphill residence, where a man who once held the fate of Africa’s most populous nation in his hands marked a birthday that few of his contemporaries have lived to see. General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, the retired soldier Nigerians know simply as IBB, turned 85 on August 17, 2026, and the country he ruled for eight turbulent years paused, however briefly, to reckon with him again.

He did not celebrate quietly. From his hilltop home in Minna, Niger State, Babangida used the occasion to do what he has increasingly done in his ninth decade… talk.

On Badeggi 90.1 FM, in a special programme timed to the milestone, he revisited two of the rawest chapters of his rule: the 1985 execution of his childhood friend, General Mamman Jiya Vatsa, convicted by a military panel of plotting to overthrow him, and the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, the decision that still shadows his name three decades later. Of Vatsa, a man he had known since their days together at what was then Bida Middle School, Babangida said his hands were tied once the tribunal returned its findings. It was, he suggested, the kind of choice that power sometimes forces on those who hold it, and one he has clearly never stopped carrying.

That willingness to revisit the hardest parts of his record, rather than retreat from them, has become the signature of Babangida’s late-life public presence. He has leaned on his own memoir to close accounts the country never fully settled with him, including correcting what he has called the mistaken framing of the January 1966 coup as an ethnic conspiracy, an intervention historians and commentators are still weighing.

The tributes arrived from the top of government. President Bola Tinubu, in a statement issued by his spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, offered a verdict that read almost as an epitaph in advance: that Babangida, whatever one makes of him, shaped Nigeria more than any other leader in its history. His eight-year reign, Tinubu said, left permanent marks on the nation’s politics, its economy and its very map, a reference to the states, agencies and institutions Babangida’s government carved into being. The president wished him continued health and “many more years to come.”

Others wrote with the intimacy of men who served under him. In a birthday tribute published in ThisDay, a longtime associate who governed Niger State, served as a federal minister and sat on Babangida’s Armed Forces Ruling Council under his command, described him not as history remembers him but as he knew him personally: boss, mentor, family. Their bond, he wrote, was forged in the demanding work of national service and had simply outlasted the decades.

It is a strange kind of birthday portrait that emerges from all this: a man simultaneously being thanked by the state he once ran by decree and pressed, gently but insistently, to keep explaining himself. That tension is the whole of the Babangida story. He came to power in a 1985 palace coup, ruled through years that expanded Nigeria’s infrastructure and institutions, and then, in June 1993, annulled an election most Nigerians believed the businessman Moshood Abiola had won. A decision that convulsed the country, ended his rule within months, and has never stopped being litigated in Nigerian memory.

At 85, he seems to understand that better than anyone arguing about him. As one columnist wrote this week, reflecting on his own public defense of Babangida’s memoir, the general must be judged as the other uniformed rulers of his era are judged, inside the context of a period when military government was the African rule rather than the exception, and democracy the rarer thing.

Whether that context absolves him remains, as it has for thirty years, a live argument in Nigerian public life. What is no longer in dispute is his staying power. Vatsa is gone. Abiola is gone. Much of the officer corps that surrounded Babangida in the 1980s has passed. He remains in Minna, in the newspapers, on the radio on his own birthday, still narrating the decisions that made him one of the most consequential and most contested men his country has produced.

Happy 85th birthday, General.

Ogbeni Olawale Dawodu writes in from Abuja