Tag: Rewane

Friday, October 6, marked the 22nd anniversary of one of the most dastardly political murders of recent memory.

Chief Alfred Ogbeyiwa Rewane, elder statesman, industrialist, philanthropist, and a pillar of the progressive community, was shot dead in his home on Oduduwa Crescent, in the more tranquil section of Ikeja GRA, in Lagos.

For the previous five years and indeed starting from Muhammadu Buhari’s military regime and through the depredations of the Babangida years to the loathsome Sani Abacha, Rewane had been an incisive and outspoken critic of government.

Those uniformed potentates sought at every chance to stamp themselves on the public consciousness as patriotic redeemers who had come to free Nigeria from a shameful past and lead it to a glorious future.

Drawing copiously on Nigeria’s history, Rewane showed with facts and figures in editorial advertisements that what the men of the moment were trumpeting as progress was nothing of the sort, and was in some instances actually a regression.  He supplied  that vital link with the past, without which a nation is condemned to grope and founder.

That fateful Friday, October 6, 1995, he was getting ready to leave for his Western House office in Lagos when a pick-up van marked with the logo of one of his many companies pulled up at the gate. Accustomed to such visits, the gatekeepers dutifully admitted the van and its occupants into the premises.

These were no visitors but intruders with murder on their minds. Drawing their guns, they overpowered the security guards, locked up all the residents and headed for Rewane’s bedroom.  There, they shot him in the chest.  They waited some five minutes to be sure he was dead; then they drove off.

In Ibadan, Chief Bola Ige was about to set out for Lagos for a meeting with Rewane

scheduled for the late afternoon when his phone rang.  The caller told Ige tersely and with more than a hint of triumph that the meeting would no longer hold because “we have taken care of Rewane.”  That call was placed within 15 minutes of the gruesome intrusion into Rewane’s home.  The caller did not identify himself.

This was no random killing.

The bullet that felled Rewane was not the type you could buy off the shelf at a gun shop or from a street vendor.  It was, according to insider accounts, specially designed to dissolve in body tissue, leaving no residue and hence no trace of its manufacture.  Only secret service operatives or persons engaged in syndicated crime pack that kind of ordnance.

The killers had demanded nothing from Rewane.  Not cash, of which he kept a huge pile in mint-fresh banknotes handy.  Not gold jewellery, of which he was very fond, and of which his wife and members of his household could have supplied a truck-full.   Not the key to his safe, which doubtless held priceless documents.

Rewane was not only a major financier of NADECO, the umbrella organisation at the

spearhead of the struggle to terminate military rule, he used his enormous personal wealth to give aid and comfort and sustenance to political activists whom the authorities had marked for ruin.  He refused to succumb to the fear that Abacha’s terror machine had loosed on the land. The only question was when that machine would strike at Rewane.

So, this could not have been an “armed robbery.”

In the hours following Rewane’s murder, the police willfully ignored these important clues. They did not even make the pretence of searching for his killers. To create the illusion of momentum in the investigation, they seized several members of Rewane’s domestic staff – some of them had worked for him for so long that they were virtually members of the family – plus some vagrants in the Ikeja area, and charged them with armed robbery and murder.

Five of the eight would die in prison custody, awaiting trial.

Testimony before the Oputa Commission of inquiry into human rights violations as well as depositions at the murder trials of some of the principal actors of the Abacha regime would show what it required little imagination to figure out all along: Rewane had been killed by agents of the Nigerian state.

For 14 years, six judges and at least as many prosecutors and defence attorneys would partake, wittingly or unwittingly, in an unconscionable mockery of the judicial system remarkable even by Nigeria’s standards.

Finally, in January 2011, some 15 years after their arraignment, charges against two of the surviving suspects, Lucky Igbinovia and Effiong Elemi Edu, were dismissed by the Lagos High Court, Justice Olusola Williams presiding.

“It appears to me that all the Police did was to visit the scene of the crime, arrest the workers there and obtain statements from them,” the judge said.  The “confessional statement” on which the prosecution had rested its case was inadmissible, Justice Williams said, because the court was convinced that it was coerced.

No forensic or any evidence of probative value other than the alleged confession was tendered by the prosecution.

The other survivor, Elvis Irenuma, had been discharged and acquitted several years because the prosecution had failed to establish a case against him.

And so today, 22 years later, Rewane’s killers are yet to be brought to justice.

One of several commemorative newspaper editorial advertisements (Punch, October 6) placed on the occasion by his family is in a way a comment on the state of the nation that could well have been written by Rewane himself, and a dire prediction.

Emblematic of the forthrightness for which the late elder statesman was known, it reads:

“After twenty-two years of your supreme sacrifice , nothing seems to have changed.

“True democracy seems to be eluding Nigeria.

“Autocracy by force and Democracy for cash are two sides of the same coin.

“Some of the conspirators of your assassination are still in the closet while others are paying the price installmentally.

“There is a moral decadence of values and culture, with the highest and revered now a subject of ridicule.

“Our ancestors will reject the sale of our heritage to the unworthy.

“Your message is as relevant today as it was back then.”

The reference to those who “are paying the price” of their treachery is particularly striking.

It says to the repellent thug, swindler, racketeer and embezzler widely believed to have led the operation to murder Rewane:  Humiliating imprisonment was only the first installment of the punishment awaiting you.

May the next installment not be long in coming.  As for his confederates, may they be smoked out of their dank closets in due season.