Dear President: All Nigerian people are happy that you
are taking the nation in a new direction after decades of a culture of
impunity. Your directive that the police respect the dignity of the
human person of all our citizens could not have come at a better time. We are
enamored of your directive that the police review their indiscriminate
allotment of orderlies to non-state actors who are just wealthy men. I am one
of the several victims of the use of the police hierarchy by a private
individual in our hometown of Oraifite in Ekwusigo Local Government Area of
Anambra State, to humiliate, intimidate, brutalize and falsely imprison
innocent citizens for several months.
On July 13, 201, while attending an early religious service
in Lagos, I received a telephone call from my son who was being held captive in
my house by the Anti-Robbery Squad from the then Inspector General of
Police. He told me that the Federal SARS needed me immediately. My apartment
was also thoroughly searched before I got home.
On my return, I was promptly arrested, beaten up, my two
BlackBerry phones taken from me by policemen who then handcuff me before and
whisked me away in the boot of their Toyota Prado vehicle. I was taken to the
Lagos State Police Command headquarters in Ikeja, where I was forced to write a
statement over the so-called defamation of a private citizen, Emeka Offor.
After I wrote the statement, they took me to the Adeniji Adele Special Anti -
Robbery Squad cell meant for armed robbers, hired assassins and kidnappers and
detained for 7 days. On the eight day, they transferred me to the Agboju Police
Station cell where I spent one night before they bundle me into the boot of the
same Toyota Prado and drove me all the way to Abuja in chains on July 12, 2013.
I was to be detained at the Gariki police station till July 30, 2013.
Mr President, it is now two years and a half since Mr
Justice Peter Afere of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court 25
sitting in Apo, Abuja, on Monday, April 7, 2014, gave judgment in a suit I
brought against the then Inspector General of Police, M. D. Abubakar, for gross
abuse of my human rights. The learned judge agreed that I was subjected to
acute human indignity and I was accordingly awarded five million naira in
damages. Though the compensation pales compared with the N50m awarded the
immediate past Central Bank governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi who is now the Emir
of Kano, by the Federal High Court in Lagos on April 3, 2014, for the
harassment suffered at the hands of the secret police which lasted a few hours
on February 20, I was nevertheless consoled that an important point has
been established by the judicial pronouncement and decision.
Most Nigerians still find it difficult to believe, but it is
true that the only offence I was accused of by the police was that I had the
effrontery to write an article in an online newspaper published by my townsfolk
in which I suggested that the one million dollars pledged by Emeka Offor, the
controversial Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain and government
contractor from my hometown, to give to Rotary International to fight
polio in India and Pakistan should have been utilized to rehabilitate people
dying of hunger in our place, or pay off depositors who put all their life
savings at Offor’s owned Afex Bank which collapsed in 2006 principally due to
unconscionable insider dealings.
The charge of character assassination is intriguing,
to put it very mildly. We live in a country where citizens daily and freely
criticize top government officials, including you who hold the position of President
and Commander in Chief. Why a mere suggestion concerning a private individual
should attract this kind of brutal response against me from the police
personally assembled by the then IGP remains a mystery. It shows how low
Nigeria sank in the Goodluck Jonathan days. Jonathan may not personally have
been involved in scandalous acts, but he allowed his officials, friends and
contractors to run riot. There was no discipline, no order. Jonathan provided
the kind of leaders known in leadership theory as laissez faire leadership.
Everyone behaved as he or she liked. No control.
As I have already indicated at the beginning of this open
letter, Mr President, I was not the only victim of police brutality sanctioned
right from the very top during the Jonathan years. My hometown of Oraifite
became practically a wasted land –all because the PDP government and the police
allowed themselves to be used to make their barely literate contractor and
agent feel good. Let me cite a few other instances.
On Thursday, March 27, 2014, the Anambra State Special
Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) arrested Chief Arthur Eugene Nworah, a successful
businessman from Oraifite with a base in Onitsha. The team was led by Chief
Superintendent Nwafor from the SARS office at Awkuzu in Oyi Local Government
Area. Like in my own case, Chief Nworah was denied access to his wife and
lawyer for two weeks and kept in a cell for hardened criminals. His sole
offence was that he published an article in our local online newspaper narrating
how Offor caused him to lose seven 20-feet containers worth N970m to the
Customs Service. When he went to court, the police fabricated childish stories
claiming that Chief Nworah engaged in kidnapping and gun running. Of course, he
was set free by the court, which had harsh words for the police authorities.
SARS operatives arrested and detained three brothers for
four months on Offor’s instructions. The three siblings, Ifeanyi, Tochukwu and
Chinedu from the Igboanuzue family in Oraifite, were not happy how their sister
named Joy died on December 5, 2013, apparently out of neglect. They made their
feeling known to their elder brother based at home,Sunday Igboanuzue, an
ally of Offor’s in town union politics. They were quickly thrown into solitary
confinement for a whole four months till the court ordered their freedom on
Friday, March 21, 2014.
SARS men also arrested two cousins, Ifeanyi Nwokolo and
Muozube, on Offor’s instructions and threw them into a cell for violent
criminals. They were quarrelling over land ownership, and the verbal
altercation was near the palatial home of Emeka Offor; the noise was considered
capable of disturbing the wealthy government contractor! They were actually
forgotten in detention until the court ordered their release. In a similar
vein, members of the village Ayaka cultural troupe were arrested by SARS men
from the state headquarters and kept in cells for months with tough, callous
criminals. Their offence was being suspected of having a hand in a publication
in an online town newspaper, which was considered unflattering to Emeka Offor.
Yet, these are old village peasant entertainers who can barely read or write.
They were left in detention to die until the court came to their rescue.
It is clear that our hometown is not the only place where
Offor used the police top hierarchy to settle personal scores. On Thursday, May
1, 2014, The Guardian published a report filed by its correspondent
in Awka, Chuks Collins, where the president general of the Oko Town Union in Anambra
State, Cyprian Nwammuo, asked IGP Abubakar and the then State Commissioner of
Police, Usman Gwary, to stop being Offor’s stooges in the crisis between the
governing council of the Federal Polytechnic and its host community. Nwammuo
narrated how Offor, a former truck driver with Julius Berger, thoroughly abused
the traditional ruler of the town, Professor Laz Ekwueme, a laureate of the
Nigerian national Order of Merit (NNOM), the nation’s highest honour for
intellectual attainment. According to the town union president, Professor
Ekwueme was on April 13, 2014 queried by Offor for having the temerity to
challenge the action of a governing council put in place by him! Interestingly,
the polytechnic was built personally by Professor Ekwueme’s elder brother, Dr.
Alex Ekwueme, and handed over to the government before he became the country’s
vice president in 1979.
Our highly respected President, history will be kind to you if you use your good offices to find out how, during the Jonathan presidency, a controversial private individual pocketed the leadership of the Nigeria Police Force and used it to terrorize his own people at Oraifite in Anambra State.
Assurances of our highest regards.
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