In 1986, I wrote an article for The Guardian criticising a Nigerian Television Authority series on the media in particular, and its programming in general. NTA struck back in a prime-time special that reeked with libel on a grand scale. Stamped all over it was what American case law calls “actual malice.” Stunned speechless as I watched the broadcast at Rutam House, I knew I would have to file a defamation lawsuit.
Halfway into the broadcast, I was summoned to Editor Lade “Ladbone” Bonuola’s office to take a phone call. It was Dr Olu Onagoruwa on the line, saying that the content of the broadcast was defamatory through and through, and that if I was minded to pursue the matter at law, he would handle the case free, except for filing fees.
The day the case opened, I had in my corner a team of six lawyers led by Onagoruwa. When it became clear that the other side would be represented by relatively junior counsel, he handed the case to his nephew,Tokunbo Onagoruwa.
I will never forget the consummate skill with which the younger Onagoruwa subdued a principal witness for the NTA and one of the tin gods there at the time. In the face of withering cross-examination, the fellow cut a pathetic figure. Even I the plaintiff began to feel some pity for him
As I narrated the proceedings to Onagoruwa later that day at his chambers, a broad smile spread across his face. That smile signified the joy a master gets from knowing that his pupil has mastered the trade.
We won the case, and N30,000 in damages. A few days after NTA paid up, I received a cheque in that amount from Dr Onagoruwa’s chambers, together with a copy of the court’s judgment.
I had no claim whatsoever on his generosity. Before he represented me, I had met him only occasionally, in company of the late Kayode Awosanya, editor of Gbolabo Ogunsanwo’s news-magazine New Nation, of which I was a contributing editor. Previously, Awosanya was Onagoruwa’s protégée at the Daily Times, where he was a senior reporter and Onagoruwa was Editorial Legal Adviser and a doughty sentinel-at-large of press freedom.
But the Press and human rights were his twin constituencies. Wherever freedom of the press was being derogated and human rights abused, there you found Onagoruwa always in the victim’s corner, always formidably prepared, a profile in forensic brilliance as he expounded recondite points of law.
He seemed foreordained, therefore, to serve as lead counsel in the civil suit that the Nigeria Union of Journalists brought against a senior aide of Rivers State military governor Alfred Diete-Spiff (now His Royal Majesty King Alfred Diete-Spiff) who flogged Minere Amakiri, a reporter for the Benin City-based Observer almost insensate, allegedly on his principal’s orders, and for good measure shaved his head with broken glass.
Amakiri’s crime?
He had ruined the governor’s birthday, they said, by publishing a story that teachers in the Rivers State had given notice of a strike to back their demand for unpaid salaries. The truthfulness of the publication was never disputed.
The Amakiri case is the subject of a riveting book, in which Onagoruwa expounded the principles of press freedom with magisterial skill.
It was notorious that, as editorial legal adviser to the government-controlled Daily Times, Onagoruwa would be an early casualty of an NPN victory in the 1979 general elections.
His sympathies for Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s UPN were well known. Later, his erudite commentary in signed newspaper articles and pronouncements on the lecture circuit marked him out as an implacable adversary of military rule.
I recall sharing a public platform with him during the Buhari-Idiagbon era, at which he declared, within earshot of Government House, Ilorin, and without the slightest tremor of voice or twitch of countenance that, by enacting the infamous Decree Four, the regime had declared war on the people of Nigeria. It made no difference to Onagurowa that the occupant of Government House was Idiagbon’s local enforcer, Group Captain Salaudeen Latinwo.
So unyielding was Onagoruwa’s opposition to the structural adjustment programme and other depredations of the Babangida era that the services were mandated to destroy him.
They went from one media house to another peddling forged documents purporting that he had cheated at the Bar finals in the Nigerian Law School. They found no takers. They prosecuted him for carrying and using an unlicensed weapon. The “weapon” at issue turned out to be an off-the-shelf spraying device to stun would-be assailants.
They suborned a relation to file a criminal complaint against him, charging that he had failed to remit some money he had received on her behalf in a land transaction. It turned out that the complainant had sold the property to two different persons, and Onagoruwa was holding the money against the claims that were sure to follow.
In the dark days after June 12, 1993, when the two official political parties engaged each other in a brutal fight to demonstrate which of them could better assist discredited military president Ibrahim Babangida throttle the popular will, the National Reformation Movement (NRM) led by Chief Anthony Enahoro came closer than any other single organisation to expressing that will with eloquence and commitment.
Onagoruwa was its irrepressible general secretary.
This glittering résumé would however be marred by a single misjudgment: Onagoruwa’s decision to serve as Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice in the military regime of the debauched dictator, Sani Abacha.
Onagoruwa often contested this view fiercely, insisting that President-elect Moshood Abiola had urged him to accept the appointment; that he had gone into cabinet to help realise the progressive agenda, including the actualisation of the June 12 mandate, and that his presence on the Abacha team had in the final analysis, been beneficent.
I myself can bear witness that Abiola had indeed urged Onagoruwa to accept to serve in the Abacha cabinet. I should add, in parentheses, that Abiola was also responsible for the inclusion of Chief Solomon Lar in the cabinet. A Jos-based mining industrialist was originally penciled for the Plateau slot. But Abiola had demurred, on the ground that the man had a reputation for stinginess and could not therefore be counted upon to display the generosity of spirit the moment demanded.
The plan, as another member of the cabinet Chief Silas Daniyan stated for the record, was that Abiola’s nominees would go into the Abacha cabinet for a stipulated period, first to help legitimise it in the public consciousness, and then to soften the ground for the validation of the June 12 mandate. You could accuse them of credulity or perhaps even naiveté, but that was the agreement.
But with each passing day, it became clearer that Abacha had seized power to entrench himself, not to help validate Abiola’s mandate. Those who had thought they could do business with him finally saw their error, but not those they had pressed into Abacha’s service. And so, when the latter were asked to pull out of an agreement that the other party had virtually abrogated, they sat tight, inventing one self-serving rationalisation after another.
To his credit, Onagoruwa resigned, but long after he should have done so, and arguably not entirely on his own terms. By then, the damage was already done.
He had become alienated from the progressive community. Abacha sent his goon squad to murder his son Toyin, a young attorney full of promise. The regime and its immediate successor used every means at their disposal to block his elevation to the rank of Senior Advocate – an elevation he had earned several times over. Then came the stroke that left him partially paralysed, but thankfully unimpaired mentally.
It took the intervention of the Chief Justice of the Federation, Mariam Aloma Mukhtar, to break the choke-hold that a cabal in the Legal Privileges and Ethics Committee had kept on Onagoruwa’s translation to Senior Advocate.
When it finally came, restitution was almost meaningless. It came virtually as a mere adornment. It came when Onagoruwa could not profit much from it. This unconscionable delay was of a piece with the string of persecutions he suffered in a long career marked by great learning, courage, public service, and commitment to justice.
Gabriel Olusoga Onagoruwa died last week, aged 80.
This article draws on two previous columns written on Onagoruwa’s 70th birthday and on his taking silk.
