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ν Filmmaker: We mortgaged ‘MKO’ to complete 13-year project
By Beifoh Osewele
Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, Hannatu Musawa, and filmmaker Ose Oyamendan have made a strong case for preserving the history of June 12 beyond its annual commemoration as a public holiday.
Speaking at the October 1 national premiere of MKO, the documentary on the late Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election and the struggle that followed, Musawa warned that a generation of Nigerians was growing up without fully appreciating the sacrifices behind the day.
“For too many young Nigerians, June 12 is simply a public holiday. This film turns it back into our memory,” she said.
Oyamendan, who spent almost 13 years bringing the story to the screen, echoed the concern, saying June 12 remained “a significant part of our history” and that Nigerians needed knowledge of their past to better understand their present.
“You build strength from knowledge,” he said.
For Musawa, that knowledge begins with remembering what happened on June 12, 1993, when Nigerians voted across religious and ethnic lines.
“On June 12, 1993, Nigerians stood as one people. Across religion and ethnicity, we came together and gave Moshood Abiola that mandate.
“That mandate was unfortunately denied. But the voice behind it was never, ever silenced,” she said.
Oyamendan said it was precisely the danger of losing such national memory that strengthened his resolve to tell the story through the voices of those who participated in, witnessed or had intimate knowledge of the events.
“When you don’t tell your story, somebody will tell it for you and it’s not always roses,” he said.
Musawa recalled that the battle against the annulment extracted enormous sacrifices from Nigerians.
“It was carried by men and women who paid with their freedom, their comfort and, perhaps, their lives. MKO himself gave his fortune, his liberty and, in the end, he gave his life,” she said.
The premiere consequently became not only a film screening but also a moment of remembrance as the gathering paid tribute to the heroes and heroines of the June 12 struggle, both known and unknown. A minute’s silence was observed in their memory. Oyamendan said preserving that history also came at considerable personal and financial cost to the filmmakers.
According to him, the project took nearly 13 years and cost more than $1 million, forcing the producers at a point to give up financial interests in the film to secure the money required to complete it.
“We have a film we do not own because we had to mortgage it to gap financiers just to complete it,” he said.
He described the long filmmaking journey as “another youth service, only much, much longer.”
Musawa, meanwhile, situated President Bola Tinubu within the history documented by the film, recalling his involvement in the struggle against the annulment.
“Mr President, it is fitting that you are our chief guest. You were not a spectator of June 12. You stood in that struggle, and you paid its price with exile,” she said.
Oyamendan similarly drew a link between the political vocabulary of 1993 and that of the present administration.
“There was Hope ’93 and now there is Renewed Hope,” he said.
But beyond contemporary political symbolism, the filmmaker said his larger concern was ensuring that the lessons preserved in MKO reached Nigerians who did not experience that period. He wants the documentary, he said, to reach “schools, towns, villages and anywhere where there are people.”
Oyamendan described the premiere as significant for Nigerian history, saying the documentary was conceived partly to “lay a foundation for tomorrow to remember yesterday.”
That purpose dovetailed with Musawa’s argument that younger Nigerians must understand that the democratic freedoms they inherited did not come without a price.
Her concern was that if June 12 survived only as a date on the national calendar, stripped of the people, sacrifices and resistance behind it, an important chapter of Nigeria’s democratic history could gradually lose its meaning.
For Oyamendan, film offered one means of preventing that loss.
His documentary draws on extensive archival material and interviews with key actors, witnesses and personalities connected with the June 12 era, bringing different voices into one account of the election, its annulment and the tumultuous years that followed.
The filmmaker’s quest took him across countries and continents in search of the people and materials needed to reconstruct the period, culminating in the film that premiered on October 1.
Musawa said the finished work had therefore restored June 12 from the abstraction of an annual holiday to the realm of lived national memory.
“This film turns it back into our memory,” she said.
And for Oyamendan, that memory must not remain confined to the premiere hall or cinema circuit. His ambition is that Nigerians everywhere, particularly generations born after the struggle, should encounter the story and draw knowledge from it.
President Bola Tinubu, who was Chief Host of the premiere, did not address the gathering.
MKO opens in cinemas nationwide on October 2.
