It is a good thing the Nigerian Army promptly responded to the alleged torture to death of a hotel manager, Achimugu Etubi, in Umuahia, Abia State, by some of its personnel following the drowning of an Air Force cadet, Emmanuel Onyemereche, in a swimming pool within the hotel premises.
The Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Taoreed Lagbaja, ordered full investigations with a pledge to bring any of its personnel found culpable of wrongdoing in the incident to face appropriate legal sanctions. And to dispel insinuations of possible agency cover-up, Lagbaja promised to make the findings of the probe public. This should be re-assuring given the sensitivity and intense public interest the matter has since generated.
But the probe should not be limited to this singular incident. Of equal weight was another torture to death a week earlier in Imo State where another staff of a guest house in Umulogho, Obowu Local Government Area, Ebuka Udemba, was sent to his early grave after being locked-up in the generator room for allegedly stealing the phone of an army officer.
The hotel owner, the army personnel and another individual were fingered in the torture that led to Ebuka’s death. A common thread runs through the two incidents. Both involved the death of civilians after alleged torture in the hands of personnel of the Nigerian Army.
Coincidentally, the incidents happened in two Southeast sister states of Imo and Abia. As a matter of fact, the Obowu Local Government Area of Imo State shares common boundary with Umuahia, the Abia State capital.
Is there anything in this association or the temperament of the personnel of the Nigerian Army in that zone that predisposes them to easy resort to the torture of civilians? Why the uncanny coincidence in the circumstances leading to the death of the two hotel workers?
These questions arise because of what appears as crass mismanagement of the two incidents leading to avoidable loss of human lives. Or is it a measure of the value we now attach to human lives? In verity, the deaths were clearly avoidable. Why those who tortured the hotel workers resorted to self-help remains confounding. It also puzzles what remedies they sought to procure by their acts of indiscretion that have now aggravated matters that should ordinarily lend themselves to resolution through due process.
What were the issues? The account of the owner of the Umuahia hotel, Steve Ihedigbo, will be relied upon in the case of Etubi’s torture and subsequent death.
According to him, he was alerted around 6.45 pm on the fateful day that someone was missing around the pool side. When he arrived at the hotel and went to the pool side, he was told the cadet did not jump into the swimming pool. “They were going outside to check whether he went outside or inside the toilet. Up till 8pm, he was not found but I was told that they started looking for him since 5pm”.
At about 9pm, policemen were there and everybody was searching for him. The fire service was called and they brought a vehicle and ladder. The cadet’s father also came and told me that his son should be released and I told him I didn’t understand what was going on. The father told me that his son’s colleague told him that his son did not swim. We called three divers who went into the pool and found him and brought him out, he recounted.
Ihedigbo said when he was brought out, everybody was surprised because he did not look like a drowned person as no water was coming out of his mouth or nose. The police came the next day and arrested the manager and three other staff for questioning but later released them on bail.
But things turned awry when some army personnel stormed the hotel the next day, insisting they wanted to interrogate the staff. The manager later went to the army base at the Agricultural Development Project ADP where she was interrogated till late in the evening and released with an instruction to bring three other staff unfailingly by 8am the next day.
They complied with the order and after interrogation, Ihedigbo said an order was given for them to be beaten. They concentrated on Etubi, beating him to a pulp. He said they were hitting him on the neck and the head and when he died, they put him in a tricycle together with the other staff and took them to the hospital where he was confirmed dead.
He was piqued that the other cadet who accompanied Onyemereche to the hotel that ordinarily should be the prime suspect, was among those who tortured and beat up his staff. He has therefore accused the army personnel from the ADP base, Umuahia, of torturing his manager to death. That is the Abia incident.
The one that happened in Imo is another account of similar torture of a hotel worker for allegedly stealing a phone belonging to an army officer who visited the place for relaxation. The state police command said “Ebuka Udemba was tortured and locked up inside the generator room by the owner of the hotel and two others at large, where he suffocated to death on the allegation that he stole a customer’s handset.” The police said the hotel owner has provided information that will lead to the arrest of the other two suspects.
A community source corroborated this narrative. The source said those who tortured Ebuka were the hotel owner, the soldier whose phone was allegedly stolen and one other individual. “They mercilessly beat up the 25-year old boy and locked him up in the generator house and he died there,” he lamented.
The hotel owner is in the custody of the police. But the whereabouts of the soldier and the third suspect that took part in the torture are not of public knowledge. Even then, the police have not been forthcoming in disclosing the identity of the soldier whose phone was allegedly stolen and who actively participated in the torture. They only spoke of two other suspects.
This has given rise to apprehension that the soldier may get away with his illegal action if the Army high command does not intervene to bring him to justice. That is why the scope of investigations ordered by Lagbaja should be expanded to include the equally inhuman and callous torturing and locking up of Ebuka in a generator house, only for him to be suffocated. That treatment should ordinarily offend public sensibilities.
The two incidents expose all that is bad in the temperament of military personnel in handling disputes or security issues involving the civilian population. For a country that has been under uninterrupted civil rule more than 25 years, our military should have been sufficiently tamed to imbibe and uphold the culture of democratic engagement. Sadly, events of the two incidents speak to the contrary. Not even in the military era was our collective psyche assailed in this callous manner.
The issues relate to alleged death in a swimming pool of an Air Force cadet and stealing of a telephone handset belonging to a soldier which our laws have copious provisions for their resolution. Even as the death of the cadet in that suspicious circumstance assails public sensibilities , its handle requires diligent investigation to get at the root of what actually transpired.
Neither mob action nor the resort to self-help by some personnel of the Nigerian army holds the key to their resolution. The police in liaison with the relevant military authorities are in a better stead to investigate the matter and fish out the culprits to face the raw teeth of the law.
The army high command can reverse the resort to jungle justice by its personnel through the firm and decisive manner it brings to book its officers and men found culpable in these avoidable deaths.
