October 19 marked the 29th anniversary of the assassination of Dele Giwa, crusading journalist and founding chief executive of the Newswatch, in what remains one of the most horrific acts of preternatural malevolence ever carried out in Nigeria.
Because of the passage of time and the twists and turns on the political landscape, the anniversary generated less attention and fewer reminiscences than in previous years. But three weeks later, the circumstances of Giwa’s death leapt onto the front pages and headlines, propelled by a crack-brained theory resurrected by Chris Omeben, the since-retired deputy inspector- general of police who had supervised the investigations.
But first, some background.
Just two days before that heinous murder, a senior official of the Directorate of Military Intelligence had accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition for the purpose of staging 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 in the streets.
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, military intelligence 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. He asked for directions to Giwa’s home so he could, as a demonstration of his good faith, stop by on his way to Ikeja airport to board a flight to Kano.
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.
Several hours later, an emissary showed up. Giwa’s son, Billy, collected the parcel and handed it to his father who was seated at the dining table, in company of Kayode Soyinka, the London correspondent of Newswatch visiting from the UK. The envelope, which bore the seal of the Presidency, was marked “To be opened by addressee only.”
“This must be from the Presidency,” Giwa said as he collected the package from his son.
Those were the last words he would speak in calm repose.
He placed it on his laps, and as he opened it, the package exploded, pulverising his pelvis, setting a section of the house on fire and reducing the cars 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 at the time in another section of the house.
If they had all been killed, the investigating authorities would have passed off the blast as an accident waiting to happen. After all, they had 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, and a perfect murder would have been committed.
Soyinka, the visiting Newswatch correspondent who had witnessed the incident, came to be named the suspect. If he was not complicit in the crime, senior state security officials and the police hierarchy said, how come he had survived it when his host seated across from him had perished?
It was to this infantile theory, unworthy of a village talebearer, that Omeben had recourse recently, the same threadbare and wildly implausible theory that Col Ajibola Togun and his assigned to the investigation. Soon after he began work with his accustomed energy and commitment – failure was not in his dictionary — he was transferred from Lagos to Kaduna military intelligence colleagues have been peddling since the murder.
My brother Herbert Tunde Dare, a senior police officer with the Special Branch, had been but kept on the case.
Concerning his work, he was as secretive as an oyster. Taking advantage of the relaxed atmosphere of Yuletide, I asked him in late December 1987 how the investigation was shaping up.
“Oba,” he replied, using the name we reserved for each other, “they are not serious.” By “they,” he meant the authorities. He went on to add that he was not even allowed to ask the basic questions on which a proper investigation must be grounded.
Some two months later, he was summoned to Lagos to file a preliminary report on his investigations. He 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 by road.
Somewhere between Jebba, in Kwara State, and Mokwa, in Niger State, in the dead of night, he was killed in a curious accident.
Announcing his death, the police said he had lost control of his car while trying to overtake another vehicle and crashed it. He had died instantly. The wreck of the car he was allegedly driving was never produced. The police said a driver and an aide assigned to him, both un-identified, were injured in the accident but had been treated at an unidentified hospital and discharged.
The announcement, his one-time boss in the Special Branch told me, could only have been designed to pre-empt an enquiry into his death.
In a panegyric marking military president Ibrahim Babangida’s 70th birthday, the columnist Mohammed Haruna cited Fawehinmi’s unsuccessful efforts to enter a private prosecution in the Giwa murder — unsuccessful because he was blockaded on every front – as proof that the fiery attorney was pursuing the wrong persons.
Haruna went on to add that the murder might have resulted from marital conflict. The guard at the Giwa residence, he claimed, had positively identified the driver of Giwa’s former wife, Florence Ita, as the bearer of the parcel-bomb that killed Giwa. And, by way of further insight, he added that a flour magnate whose shady business deals Newswatch had uncovered might also have had a hand in the murder.
If these were viable or even plausible leads, why were they not pursued diligently? Why were Omeben and Togun and company so fixated on Kayode Soyinka?
Babangida for his part has consistently blamed everyone except his administration for the failure to investigate Giwa’s murder forthrightly and bring the perpetrators to justice.
Hear him in his own words, in this interview with Karl Maier, as reported 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 24 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 outpouring was Babangida’s answer to the question, “What happened to Dele Giwa?”
These people who were so powerful that they could prevent a military government and the police from bringing to justice the perpetrators of one of the most dastardly murders of our time: Who are they? Why were they not prosecuted for interfering with the course of justice?
And a final question: Where is the “report” Babangida talked about?
Portions of this article first appeared in the October 18, 2011, edition of The Nation.
NATION
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