PERSPECTIVE

Mrs. Abacha’s schizophrenia

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

As a minor actor in the story of the public humiliation of the former First Family of the Abachas, I have often wondered if both the media and Obasanjo have not since over-done their acts of vengeance against the family for all the terrible things that its head did in his five years as probably the country’s  most brutal military dictator. My doubts as to whether the media and Obasanjo have not punished the former First Family enough were recently heightened by the media reaction to the July 11 Supreme Court judgement which over-ruled the judgements of the lower courts, by a majority of four to one, that Mohamed Abacha, the country’s former First Son, had a prima facie case to answer over the murder of Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, a wife of Chief M.K.O. Abiola, whose putative victory in the presidential elections of June 1993 was annulled by military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, an annulment which was not without a little encouragement from General Abacha, Babangida’s side-kick at the time.

Almost to the last, the media has come down hard on the Supreme Court for its exoneration of Abacha Jnr. In a two-part editorial on July 29 and 30, The Nigerian Tribune, for example, called the Supreme Court’s judgement “objectionable and odious”. The court, it said, “had no basis to shield Abacha from trial”. The Guardian of July 29 agreed. The court’s decision said the paper, “is a legal atrocity capable of breeding disenchantment and eroding public confidence”.

By its judgement, the media has argued, the court seems to have allowed itself to be used by the executive to strike a “Money-For-Freedom” deal with the Abacha family as part of what Tribune described as “a larger script written in the service of ambitions (presumably Obasanjo’s second-term bid) constructed round the 2003 elections”. The Guardian was equally uncharitable. The court’s judgement, it insinuated, may have been swayed by regional sentiments rather than by the facts. “It may have been purely coincidental, but nonetheless striking that the four justices in the majority are of northern extraction, which Abacha is… It was, in our view, a matter of prudence, assuming equality of competence, for the panel of justices to have been more representative of federal character to obviate the ugly insinuations now making the rounds”.

Are the papers right to say that Mohammed Abacha does have a prime facie case to answer over the murder of Alhaja Kudirat? My impression as a layman is that he does. His presence in Major Hamza Al-Mustapha’s office when so-called Sgt. Rogers, who has since admitted to firing the shots that killed Kudirat, brought out a bag full of guns from a corner in the office of Abacha’s Chief Security Officer, and even his (Mohammed’s) instruction to a diver, Katako, in his late elder brother’s company, to drive Rogers around in Lagos, which the driver did, may not be sufficient evidence to put Mohammed on trial, but the fact that after the event he gave the murder suspects money to beat the rap, suggests to me that he does have some questions to answer.

Even then it seems to me the primary concern of the media has not been justice over Kudirat’s murder. Rather the papers seem to be concerned that a fish bigger than Rogers, who had admitted committing the murder having turned state witness, and bigger than Katako and Alhaji Lateef Shofolahan, Kudirat’s driver, should be caught. The Guardian, for example, says its position should by no means be construed as suggesting “that Abacha be nailed”. Yet the paper could not hide its anger that “the scion of a leader who tore the rule of law into shreds is now a major beneficiary of the rule of law.” This thinly veiled obsession with nailing a big fish over Kudirat’s murder is also betrayed by the paper’s position that Abacha Jnr. got away because the five-member panel that considered the case was overwhelmingly northern. Obviously, the paper conveniently forgot the division of the north into the far north and middle-belt which virtually all southern media and southern politicians, including President Obasanjo himself, have strenuously tried to foster. The paper forgot that all the four judges who ruled in Mohammed’s favour are from the middle-belt and two of them are Christians.

Even more important than these dubious arguments about regional sympathies is the fact that whereas the papers have found the court’s judgement condemnable, they have been glaringly silent on the executive’s blatant breach of the rule of law in insisting, apparently at the president’s personal intervention, on detaining Abacha inspite of the implication of the Supreme Court’s ruling and that by another court that he is free to go home. The papers may not like the rulings of the courts, but the rule of law demanded that they be obeyed, particularly by President Obasanjo, until they are reversed or over-turned. Instead, Obasanjo has, himself, said Abacha would not be released because he has other cases pending without saying what those caes are and whether or not they are bailable.

Obasanjo hardly helps his government’s case against Abacha by disobeying the courts’ rulings. If indeed there was a Money-for-Freedom deal between himself and the Abachas, wrongly as it is,  and if Mohammed has refused to honour his own side of the deal after he was freed by the courts, the answer is not to disobey the courts. An answer, as The Tribune has argued, is for the prosecution to do more work on its case and represent it before the courts.

Unless the prosecution works harder than it has done to prove its case, the continued detention of Mohammed can only shift public sympathy in Abacha’s  favour. Yet I have no doubt in my mind that the Abacha family is essentially the architect of its own terrible fate. Naturally the former First Lady, Mrs. Maryam Abacha does not think so. Since her husband’s death she has blamed just about everyone but the family itself for her family’s woes. She seems to reserve the greatest blame for my former boss and her husband’s successor General Abdulsalami Abubakar. For example, recently she told the Hallmark newspaper (September 4), that “It was Abdulsalami who caused all these problems. After he told me they were going to close the case file, he didn’t. He passed the file to Obasanjo’s people, Gusau Aliyu (the NSA to Obasanjo) and they started sending for Alhaji (Mohammed, her son) and saying this and that”.

She has not only blamed Abubakar for instigating Obasanjo against her family – as if Obasanjo needed any instigation after what her husband did to him – she has blamed Abubakar also for inventing a case against Abacha to start with, where none existed. Her husband, she has insisted, never stole all those monies I had announced, as Abubakar’s Chief Press Secretary, as recovered loot. “My husband”, Mrs. Abacha has said, “was keeping the monies for Nigeria. It was security money. You know that time because of the problem with America and those European countries, my husband was advised by some of his colleagues, and all those African states were advising him. You know some of them have been there for long; they have a lot of experience. So they warned him that America may freeze the assets. They advised him not tot put the assets in Western countries. So he kept some of the monies in Nigeria”.

Evidently Mrs. Abacha must be suffering from a serious bout of schizophrenia, for her to believe that her husband did absolutely nothing wrong. Certainly, the way she sees things was not how most Nigerians including some of her husband’s closest friends(?) like Chief Michael Ani, Abacha’s super minister of finance, saw things. The reader may recall that early in November 1998, that is a little over four months after General Abacha’s death, Ani called a press conference in his Ikoyi residence at which he told a stunned world that his boss had repeatedly ignored his advice against Alhaji Ismaila Gwarzo’s withdrawal of huge sums of foreign currency direct from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) without the knowledge of his ministry. Ani told the pressmen that by December 1997, 912 million dollars had been withdrawn by Gwarzo, Abacha’s National Security Adviser. An additional 419 million dollars, Ani said, had been withdrawn between January and May 1998, just before Abacha’s death in June. Ani claimed that he had helped the Abubakar administration recover 700 million dollars from abroad.

Ani can be accused of cowardice and of the vulgar act of kicking his mentor when he was down and out, as many papers and commentators did, following his gratuitous press conference. However, he can hardly be accused of telling lies. So if Mrs. Abacha should blame anyone other than her family itself, for its woes since its compulsory retirement from high office, she should begin with Ani. For it was Ani’s dishonest attempt at extricating himself from the financial shenanigans of the Abacha regime that first exposed the Abacha loot to the public.

Even then, Ababuakar did his best to put a lid on the matter. Among other things, his Attorney-General and himself, told the world towards the end of his tenure that there was no evidence to try any members of Abacha’s  family and any of his ministers for fraud at the Ajaokuta Steel project and over the abuse of security votes, inspite of glaring evidence to the contrary. He signed Decree 53 of May 1999 on the forfeiture of the assets of certain public officials and members of Abacha’s family, including Ani and Mohammed, all in a bid to close the file on the Abacha loot. And as Mrs. Abacha herself told Hallmark, on the eve of his departure from office, Abubakar gave the family N5,000,000 and three 505 station wagons and also promised, presumably based on a commitment from Obasanjo as the incoming president, that the family will be given all the privileges due to previous First Families.

In the light of all this and many more which one cannot reveal without embarrassing Abubakar, surely he should be the last person that Mrs. Abacha should blame for her family’s terrible fate. Mrs. Abacha knew very well that Abubakar still tried to close the loot file inspite of the fact that her family refused to fulfill its side of the deal, which was that Mohammed should return a comparatively miserable 50,000,000 dollars to government. She knew, or ought to have known, that this breach was a perfect excuse for the in-coming government to reject the deal, which, of course, it promptly did.

In the circumstance, if Abubakar stands guilty of anything at all, it is certainly not of vendetta against the Abacha family. On the contrary it is of bending over backwards to cover-up the First Family’s misdeeds. It is those misdeeds more than Ani, more than even Obasanjo whose vengeance seems to know no bounds, that Mrs. Abacha should blame for the terribly fate of her family.

 

Still on Ayagi, Garkuwan Obasanjo

Last week the Printer’s Devil butchered my article on Ayagi by obliterating a big chunk from the middle of the second paragraph. Consequently, the reader might have been at loss as to the meaning of the paragraph. The missing section is reproduced below just for the record:-

For obsequiousness, Ayagi’s article, which was apparently meant to be a savage counter-offensive against the Arewa Consultative Forum for its persistent criticism of Obasanjo, is truly the article to beat. Idang, please move over.

Ayagi’s article’s obsequiousness obviously renders it useless both as a shield for Obasanjo and as a counter-offensive against the ACF, but then isn’t it a paradox of power that leaders often, if not always, prefer praise-singing to truth, which is their only shield against failure (if you pardon the mixed metaphor)?

Obasanjo, says Ayagi, is “an extremely fair, balanced, honest, transparent and objective leader”. As military Head of State back in 1979, says Ayagi, Obasanjo “conducted the best, the fairest and the most transparent election in Nigeria”. Not done yet with heaping superlatives on the president, Ayagi goes on to assert that “it is not easy today to get a finer, more honest, transparent and dedicated Nigerian than President Obasanjo”.