 |
| Comrade Bonny Okonkwo. |
My 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.
Comrade Bonny Okonkwo.
Source: Sahara Reporters
Leave a Reply