Some 34 years after Dele Giwa, crusading journalist and founding editor of the defunct Newswatch was killed in what remains one of the most horrific acts of preternatural malevolence ever carried out in Nigeria, nothing has been established beyond the fact and the manner of the murder.
“Who killed Dele Giwa?” has been a recurring question ever since. Whodunit?
Former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, with whom Giwa enjoyed a cozy relationship, that he was not loath to advertise, has been and remains a principal suspect in the murder. No arrests were made, and no suspects have been arrested, and no persons have been charged, much less prosecuted in what passed for the official investigation of the murder: a travesty perfused by obfuscation, intimidation, blackmail, perjury, denialism, and all the bureaucratic weapons that officialdom can conjure up.
There was ample reason for regarding Babangida as a principal suspect in the murder.
Just two days before that ghastly incident, a senior official of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, had accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition to stage a socialist revolution in Nigeria.
The charge was preposterous. Giwa had nothing but contempt for socialism. He was a shining advertisement for capitalism and the market economy. But he had, in a widely discussed column, warned that if the structural adjustment programme on which the government was pinning all its hopes for economic recovery failed, the authorities would be stoned publicly.
Alarmed at the charge, Giwa quickly briefed his attorney, the late and much lamented Gani Fawehinmi, and asked him to pursue the matter at law. The following day, a security chief, Colonel Halilu Akilu, called to reassure Giwa that the accusation had resulted from a misunderstanding; that the matter had been cleared, and that Giwa should think nothing to it.
Asked by Giwa’s wife, Funmi, why he had been calling repeatedly, Akilu said it was to obtain directions to Giwa’s home so he could stop by on his way to the airport to board a flight to Kano, as a demonstration of his good faith. Akilu then went on to intimate that a parcel from the commander-in-chief, most likely an invitation to some official event, was on its way to Giwa’s home.
A few hours later, the emissary arrived. Giwas’s son, Billy, collected the parcel and handed it to his father who was seated at the dining table, in the company of Kayode Soyinka, the London correspondent of Newswatch, who was visiting from the UK. The envelope, which bore the seal of the Presidency, was marked “To be opened by addressee only.”
Giwa had said, “This must be from the Presidency.” Those were his last words. As he opened it where it lay on his lap, the package exploded, pulverizing his pelvis, setting a section of the house on fire and reducing the cars parked in the garage to smouldering heaps of mangled metal.
Giwa died as he was being rushed to a nearby hospital. Miraculously, Soyinka survived, and so did Giwa’s wife and baby daughter, who were in another section of the house.
If they had perished with Giwa, the authorities would have passed off the blast as an accident waiting to happen.
Had they not publicly accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition? The ordinance had exploded, killing its procurer, they would have said. There would have been no witnesses to suggest anything to the contrary.
A perfect murder would have been committed.
If the foregoing narrative provides largely circumstantial evidence, the murder weapon unequivocally implicated the Military Intelligence establishment. It was not the kind of thing you could purchase off the shelf at a hardware store, nor the kind that could be assembled in a journeyman technician’s workshop, nor yet the kind that could be fabricated at the local blacksmith’s foundry.
Yet the official investigators looked everywhere except where the evidence pointed.
Kayode Soyinka, the visiting Newswatch correspondent who had witnessed the incident, came to be named a suspect. If he was not complicit in the crime, senior state security officials said, how come he had survived the blast when his host seated across from him had perished
My brother, Herbert Tunde Dare, a deputy commissioner of police with the Special Branch, had been assigned to the investigation. Soon after he set out with his accustomed energy and commitment – failure was not in his dictionary – he was transferred from Lagos to Kaduna but kept on the case. He had been summoned to Lagos to file a preliminary report and had planned to return to Kaduna the same way he had travelled to Lagos: by air. But at the last minute, the police authorities came up with an assignment that warranted his returning to base by road.
Somewhere between Jebba and Mokwa, in Niger State, he was killed in a curious motor accident. Announcing his death, the police said he had lost control of his car while trying to overtake another vehicle and crashed. He had died instantly, they said. The wreck of the car he was alleged to be driving was never produced. The police said an unnamed driver and an unnamed aide assigned to him for the trip were injured in the accident but had been treated at an unidentified hospital and discharged.
Francis Karieren, the one-time test cricketer and retired police chief and my brother Herbert’s former supervisor at the old ‘E’ Brand of the Police and a consultant on security matters with the Editorial Board of The Guardian, of which I was a member, said the official announcement of Hebert’s death was anomalous. In laying the blame on Herbert’s shoulder, the police broke sharply with tradition, he said, adding, “They never do that to their own.”
They did so in Herbert’s case to pre-empt further inquiry. Case closed.
Fed up with the dilatoriness of the police in the investigation of the murder of his client, Gani Fawehinmi decided to institute a private prosecution. The court of first instance allowed itself to be misled to hold that Fawehinmi’s court filing was libellous, and it went on to order Fawehinmi to pay damages in the amount of N5 million, then a huge fortune, failing which his office housing probably the nation’s richest Law Library would be auctioned.
An appellate court set aside this egregious ruling.
Read Also: How I fell out with IBB over Dele Giwa’s death
The Oputa Truth and Reconciliation Commission, before which Babangida and his military colleagues declined to appear, made a finding that there was evidence to suggest that Babangida and his security chiefs, Brigadier General Halilu Akilu and Colonel A. K. Togun, are “accountable for the death of Dele Giwa by letter bomb.” It recommended that the case be reopened for further investigation “in the public interest.”
Hear Babangida’s testimony in his own words, in this interview with Karl Maier, as recorded by Maier in his book “This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria.”
“It was emotive. There was a lot of passion. I think one of the problems was that the people, or more or less the media … up to now nobody seemed to say okay let’s look at these things dispassionately. But from the word go, the government did it. That’s the first reaction. The media, his friends, and most important, the lawyers, the crusaders in this thing. Then anybody who would want to say something different from the popularly held belief, you were seen as part of it. So they succeeded in getting only one side of the story dished up.
“But we carried out investigations,” Babangida continued. “We had leads. There were questions we asked but nobody went into this thing about the so-called questions that we asked. But the circumstantial aspect of it. . . Akilu spoke to him twenty-four hours before. But somebody had to talk to somebody. That’s the harsh reality of life. But unfortunately nobody wanted to listen. I suspect the media, whatever human rights groups, if they tried to look at this dispassionately, like normal intelligent people would, we may have gone (sic) somewhere. But people have already made up their minds. That government is guilty, period. The report, they are not interested.”
This Joycean effusion was Babangida’s answer to the question, “What happened to Dele Giwa?
The murder has been memorialized on every anniversary and featured betwixt. For all practical purposes, however, the matter was dead until two weeks ago, when the Incorporated Trustees of the watchdog Media Rights Agenda breathed life into it through a petition before the Federal High Court, Abuja.
Ray Ekpu, Giwa’s colleague at Newswatch witnessed the saga first-hand and has reported it in absorbing detail in the first instalment of his reprise in The Guardian (“Dele Giwa is dead, Dele Giwa is no dead (1),” February 20, 2024, as a preface to this latest development in the case.
The court, per Justice Inyang Ekwo, has asked the Attorney General of the Federation to bring Giwa’s killers to justice because the killing violates the right to life under the Nigerian Constitution and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.
Is this, finally, the momentum the attentive public has been yearning for?
