PEOPLE AND POLITICS  BY  MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

Bamaiyi and Co.: time to end their trial

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

Come this October it will be exactly eight years since the five-some of Lt-General Ishaya Bamaiyi, Police Commissioner James Danbaba, Lt. Col. Jubrin Bala Yakubu, Major Hamza al-Mustapha and  Mohammed Rabo Lawal were arrested and subsequently arraigned before a Lagos State High Court on a four-count charge of conspiracy to murder Chief Alex Ibru, publisher of The Guardian newspapers, and one Mr. Isaac Seiyo Porbeni.

 

This would make the case probably the longest running high-profile murder trial in the country in recent times. Certainly it has been the most controversial given the widespread suspicion that their prosecution has been motivated more by vendetta on the part of former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, than by any concern for criminal justice. Bamaiyi as army chief and al-Mustapha as the Chief Security Officer to the Head of State were key players in the regime of General Sani Abacha which sentenced Obasanjo to death in 1995 for conspiracy to stage a military coup but which death sentence was later commuted to life as a result of intense international pressure.

           

To make Bamaiyi’s case worse he had strongly opposed moves by the General Abdussalami Abubakar regime that succeeded Abacha’s of pardoning and selling Obasanjo as the man to stop Nigeria from falling off the cliff to which the cancellation of the results of the presidential elections of June 1998 had taken the country.

           

This view of the prosecution of Bamaiyi and Co. for their role in Obasanjo’s past ordeal at Abacha’s hands sees the remaining three-some of Danbaba, Yakubu and Lawal as hapless collateral damage in the long running saga.

           

Following the arrest and arraignment of Bamaiyi and Co. in October 1999, they filed an application for bail on December 16. A little over five months later, i.e on May 19, 2000, the court refused the application. The accused then appealed to the Court of Appeal in December. Again they were refused bail. It is now nearly eight years since the refusal but the trial shows no sign that it would soon come to an end. Since January 2000 when the four-count charge was amended to six-count and one prosecution witness testified, the case has been held in an excruciatingly painful legal limbo.

           

At least three things lend credence to the suspicion that Bamaiyi and Co. have languished in prison custody all these years more for Obasanjo’s revenge than for criminal justice.

           

First, the crimes of conspiracy to murder or attempted murder are baillable and with the termination of Abacha’s regime following his sudden death in June 1998, there were no compelling circumstances to have militated against the courts granting the accused their bail applications; with the collapse of the regime in which they were key players they were hardly in a position to interfere with any witnesses or with the investigations. They were also unlikely to skip bail.

           

Second, with or without the rejection of their bail applications, the courts had the constitutional obligation to try them expeditiously. Well over seven years of trial - or more accurately of legal rigmarole - cannot be anybody’s idea of speedy trial.

           

Possibly, the painfully slow trial may have been due to no fault of the courts and could instead have been completely the fault of a negligent prosecution that has been in no hurry to see justice done. In which case one option open to the courts after two years of trial, was, according to some legal experts, to have thrown out the case due to lack of diligent prosecution. The courts’ disregard of this option can only fuel suspicion that they were working in cahoots with a negligent prosecution to punish Bamaiyi and Co.

           

However, by far the most credible reason to suspect that Bamaiyi and Co’s trial was motivated more by presidential vendetta than by criminal justice was the kid-gloves with which the State handled several kingpins of the much dreaded Odua Peoples’ Congress (OPC) – notably its earstwhile feuding founders, Dr. Frederick Fasehun and Gani Adams, who has doubled as its grassroots war commander - over their arrest and prosecution for a string of killings by OPC militants in ethnic clashes that spanned much of Obasanjo’s tenure.

           

In what Tell magazine aptly described as “A Trail of Blood” in its edition of October 30, 2000, the OPC wantonly spread mayhem over a long period starting from the early months of Obasanjo’s regime. All this time the authorities merely wrung their hands in seeming helplessness until the debacle of October 15, 2000 when the organisation virtually took over the city of Lagos for four days spreading death and destruction in its wake. On that occasion its principal targets were the so-called Hausa which meant anyone who looked like a Northerner.

           

The October 15 mayhem was apparently sparked by an obviously foolish attempt by the organisation to invade Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State, and install a Yoruba oba on the city in replacement of the Hausa/Fulani dynasty that has ruled it since the overthrow of the Yoruba Afonja dynasty during the pre-colonial Fulani Jihad. The OPC had apparently felt obligated to invade Ilorin as part of its self-proclaimed brief of championing the interest of the Yoruba wherever they were.

           

In apparent anger at being thwarted by the police, the OPC militants headed back to Lagos and decided to vent their anger on the helpless Northerners resident in the city. They succeeded beyond their wildest dream; for four days they held Lagos by the jugular and no one seemed able or willing to stop them.

           

The October mayhem may have been OPC’s most daring breach of law and order but it was only one of several before and after. Among others it had attacked Hausas in Sagamu in July 1999, Igbos and the Ijaws in Ajegunle not long after, everyone else at Ketu, Mile 12 and Apapa, the police on several occasion mostly in Lagos, and had even fought at least a couple of civil wars between the Fasehun and Adams factions mostly in Mushin. In all these attacks which led to the killings of scores, if not hundreds, of Nigerians, the culpability of Fasehun and Adams as OPC’s leaders seemed rather glaring. Yet neither the Lagos State nor the Federal authorities made any serious attempt to arrest them and charge them to court for their organisation’s criminality.

           

This was until the October 15, 2000 Lagos mayhem. After this the authorities had little choice but to declare OPC illegal. Subsequently they arrested Fasehun who had voluntarily turned up at a police station. Adams went into hiding from where he told Sunday Punch (October 29, 2000) that his declaration by the police as a wanted man was an exercise in futility because he was being guarded by the spirits. The Lagos State police commissioner who declared him wanted, he said, “doesn’t know that it is the heavenly warriors who are guarding me… Even if I sleep in police station they cannot arrest me because the people who are guarding me are spirits.”

           

Anyone who, like me, thought Adams was merely talking a whole load of superstitious rubbish had, as the Americans would say, another think coming; for many months the police could not find him. And when they eventually did it was only to invite him to the Aso Villa to parley with the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria along with other ethnic war lords over how to end militia wars in Nigeria!

           

Meantime Fasehun who had been arrested and arraigned before the courts was soon set free by the courts because the Lagos State Ministry of Justice said it didn’t have enough evidence to link him to OPC’s wanton killings and destruction.

           

Clearly the contrast between the treatment of Fasehun and Adams, on the one hand, and Bamaiyi and Co., on the other, couldn’t be sharper. Fasehun and Adams led an organisation which was near-universally condemned for having so much blood on its hands while Bamaiyi and Co. were merely suspected of attempted murder of two people. Yet the OPC leaders got only a slap on the wrist while Bamaiyi and Co. languished in jail for well over seven years without proper trial. In the circumstances it is difficult not to conclude that the difference between the two was what offense Bamaiyi and al-Mustapha had committed against the powers that be.

           

Nothing better underscores the crudity of the double standards with which the authorities handled the two cases than the campaign Fasehun himself undertook early 2002 for the release of Bamaiyi and Co. As part of this campaign Fasehun said in an interview in the Weekend Vanguard of June 8, 2002 that Bamaiyi and Co. should either be released on bail or they should be given speedy trial. “Let the nation maintain its position on determining justice alright,” he said, “but let them also be convinced that the justice meted out to them is not selective justice. That’s why I said they should be set free.”

Alluding to the widespread suspicion that Bamaiyi and Co. were being punished less for their alleged crimes than for their offence against Obasanjo, he said “I know President Obasanjo is a good Christian and therefore would not be involved in a vendetta.”

           

Over five years after Fasehun’s plea, Bamaiyi and Co are still in jail. And the OPC kingpin was not the only one to cast doubt on the fairness and equity of the Bamaiyi and Co’s trial. In May 2002 when the Human Rights Violation Investigations Commission – a.k.a Oputa Panel, so-called after the name of former Supreme Court judge, Chukwudifu Oputa, its chairman – submitted its report to the president, it, in effect, recommended Bamaiyi and Co’s release. “The President,” it said, “may wish to consider a political solution as an alternative to the on-going protracted judicial process or else accelerate the hearing of the cases.”

           

Not to be left out of those concerned with the undue delay in the Bamaiyi and Co’s trial, the then governor of his native state of Kebbi, Alhaji Adamu Aliero, sought the intervention of President Obasanjo. Sources close to the governor said the president told him he could not intervene because the matter was purely judicial and completely within the competence and jurisdiction of Lagos State where the crime was allegedly committed. However, when Aliero sought the help of his then Lagos State counterpart, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the governor reportedly gave him the impression that he was merely acting under orders from above. This may sound unlikely given the well-known antipathy between Tinubu and the former president, but then on the OPC matter there was clearly a congruence of interests between the two.

           

Now that Obasanjo is no longer president, Bamaiyi and Co. should get their bail AND get a speedy trial. Indeed given the reasonable suspicion that their trial was essentially political there is a good reason to suggest that the state should enter a nolle and set them free. After all their alleged crime was no worse than that of Dr. Makanjuola, the self-exiled former permanent secretary of the Ministry of Defence and Obasanjo’s kin, who was caught red-handed along with others by his minister, Lt-General Danjuma, stealing over four hundred million Naira but whose prosecution was suddenly and inexplicably withdrawn by the Federal authorities.

           

In any case were Bamaiyi and Co. to have been convicted and given the maximum sentence of life for attempted murder, there was a good chance that sooner or later they would get State pardon given the essentially political nature of their alleged crime.

           

Justice delayed, they say, is justice denied. President Umaru Yar’adua therefore has a duty to bring an end to this unjustifiable delay in bringing justice to Bamaiyi and Co.