Her mother was assassinated, her father died in prison after being jailed by the military. Today, Hafsat Abiola is one of the most prominent civil rights activists in Nigeria, fueled by a desire to ensure her parents’ deaths were not in vain.
The daughter of Nigerian politician and philanthropist Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola, Hafsat was at her second year studying at Harvard, United States, when her father was sent to prison by Nigeria’s junta after he claimed the country’s 1993 presidential election.
Although MKO Abiola garnered almost 60% of the vote, the West African country’s military rulers annulled the results and eventually charged the former businessman with treason. His imprisonment prompted a wave of demonstrations, led partly by Hafsat’s mother and Abiola’s second wife, Kudirat.
In 1996, Kudirat Abiola was shot in the head when the car she was traveling in was attacked on a Lagos expressway. Hafsat was still in the United States with her siblings when news came of her mother’s assassination.
“All five of us were in the U.S. when we heard, and we stood in a circle, and we held hands,” remembers Hafsat. “We just stood there, and then I said to my siblings that we won’t let her down, and really since that time we’ve been trying to make sure that we do not let her down.”
Two years later, in July 1998, MKO Abiola died while still in custody. Everything Hafsat has done ever since is done through the prism of her loss and her desire to continue the legacy left by her parents.
After Kudirat’s assassination, Hafsat founded an NGO in her mother’s memory, the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND), a group working to strengthen Nigeria’s civil society…
Read More: cnn.com
