He reflected on an incident during his recent appearance on the Leadership Podcast, recalling the tense atmosphere surrounding a particular performance during Abacha’s presidency.
At the event in Abuja, the Akwa Ibom cultural group was set to perform, and he had been tasked with introducing them.
Ali Baba narrated, “The first close encounter I had with death was with Sani Abacha. When Abacha was president, Ernest Shonekan had been removed so I went to do an event in Abuja and it was time for the Akwa ibom cultural group to perform. At the time, Abacha was wearing one of those sunglasses that could be folded.”
The comedian recalled his audacious move to address Abacha directly to ask him to remove his sunglasses.
“So then they started dancing I stopped them and faced Abacha, saying, ‘your excellency, sir, it’s almost 10; why are you wearing Dark shades? Don’t you want to see their performance? Remove this shade na,'” he narrated.
“He then removed the glasses and was talking to someone and when he kept the glasses I told the troupe to continue. As soon as they started, I saw the DSS officers going backstage to wait for god knows who o.”
Alibaba recalled how, in a moment of fear, he sat next to the iron-fisted president instead of going backstage, where the DSS operatives were.
“I went down the stage to where Abacha was and sat on the ground next to him. He made jokes of me and asked why I refused to go backstage and I said , ‘Don’t worry, sir, they can come and arrest me here.”
In an interesting turn of events, Abacha gave him the sunglasses as a gift.
See the full interview below: