BY ABRAHAM OGBODO
Dear CDS,
I am writing to bring your attention back to Okuama. Perhaps it is not a very nice thing to do because Okuama invokes memories that are not too pleasant in the military. But my options are very slim, sir. If you were any ordinary person that I could walk up to or call on the phone to raise matters, I would have gladly done either instead of doing this tedious letter-writing like the Great Apostle Paul. Sometimes, seeing the President is easier with some of us than seeing, not just a serving General, but the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS).
For instance, I know that the President lives in Aso Rock Villa, Abuja, or on Bourdilon Street Ikoyi, Lagos. I can just call my Oga, Bayo Onanuga, to say I want to see the Jagaban, and that may be it. The President may only ask one or two questions to be reassured. “Is he that stupid boy that is always writing nonsense about me and the APC?” “Yes Your Excellency”. ”Shebi he used to edit The Guardian Newspaper before?” “Yes Your Excellency.” “Were ni o! Tell him to come, joor.”
I am not too vast in martial protocols. With you, it may not go that smoothly. Instead of talking or explaining for thorough understanding, the boys around you may bark orders at me and call me a bloody civilian. They might just be shouting as if I am a small boy or their junior in the military. I am retired, and I have long crossed 60 years of age. Such a rude encounter could be detrimental to my physical and mental health.
As they say, prevention is better than cure. And so, sir, kindly permit this medium of communication. Maybe, after now, we shall become good friends and can be talking one on one. I even hear your beautiful wife is my sister from Urhobo. That is another level that has ‘’serious cultural implications’’ as my good friend, Dr. Reuben Abati would say.
That in-law matter would be appropriately introduced at the appropriate time. For now, I want to remain focused on the main purpose of this open letter. It is to tell you that six indigenes of Okuama that were arrested by your men between August 17 and 20, 2024, are still in your custody. Soon, it will be a full year since their arrest.
Their names are Prof. Arthur Ekpekpo, Chief Belvis Adogbo, Denis Amalaka, Miss Mabel Owhemu, James Oghoroko and Denis Okugbaye. The roll call has, however, experienced some modifications over the months. James Achovwuko Oghoroko is no longer living. He is a dead detainee, so to say. He died in your custody last December. And he died in spite of his middle name. In Urhobo, *Achovwuko* is a distress call. It is an invitation to the world to act with dispatch; to offer a most needed help. Pa Oghoroko would have repeatedly sung with his own name as he was dying.
He reportedly passed on December 4, 2024. Nobody helped. The only meaningful help in the circumstance would have been releasing him to his family. That did not happen. And the man died. Another, Pa Denis Okugbaye, who was in the line to die due to ill health, was quickly released to Senator Ede Dafinone, who represents Delta Central in the Senate.
As you know, sir, journalists have so much in common with soldiers. Just as soldiers don’t fight their own wars, but the wars created for them by politicians, journalists too don’t create their own stories but report the stories created by newsmakers.
These newsmakers may include government and its institutions such as the military. In the matter of the death of Pa Oghoroko, the press reported that he died as a result of torture by your men. This is not good at all for your image and that of the military. Even prisoners of war (POW) are not tortured to death by their captors.
This is contained in the Geneva Convention of 1949. Maybe I should re-establish the context of the Okuama story, which is gradually building into a saga. It started with the incident of March 13, 2024. That was the fateful day that 17 soldiers, including four officers, were gruesomely murdered by yet-to-be identified killers.
It was a most despicable act of cruelty. The entire nation was pained by the untimely death of the service men. The military, in their preliminary investigation, pinned the killings down to Okuama; a fishing community on the bank of the Forcados River in Delta State. Sir, it will not serve any purpose bothering you with details of your own story.
The reprisal attack by the army induced an aftermath that all stakeholders are still struggling to manage. The community was completely razed with no building standing except the Anglican Church building. Everyone living in Okuama became homeless overnight. There was a humanitarian crisis that had to be dealt with irrespective of the facts of the original crime of murdering 17 servicemen in cold blood.
The Delta State Government had created a camp to receive and care for the displaced persons. That effort revolved around me as the chairman of the management committee of the IDP Camp.
My dear CDS, I can tell you for free that the people I managed in that camp for eight months, between April and December last year, were victims; comprising mainly women and children. I did not see any killer or criminal among them for a day.
This is to say the people of Okuama are themselves victims of an unprovoked act of aggression as much as the Army, which lost 17 men in a non-kinetic operation. The criminals, however, must not go unpunished. They must be fished out and made to face the law. The task before everybody is to apply all constitutional means to look for the people who killed our 17 soldiers.
Sir, I want us to stay on a single narrative at this point. Let’s not talk here and there like market women. I am saying this because when the whole thing happened, you had come out almost immediately to name one Endurance Amagbein as being responsible for the killings.
That lead was never followed up effectively. Instead, the searchlight was exclusively focused on Okuama, culminating in the arrest of the six individuals earlier mentioned. Even the king of Ewu Kingdom, of which Okuama is part, His Royal Majesty, Clement Ikolo, was arrested, detained, questioned, and released after more than 20 days. It was a humiliation. But it is well. Anything can happen under an emergency where basic rights and privileges of individuals could be suspended for the sake of the larger good.
I advise that we move forward to create a fresh beginning on some assumptions. First is the assumption that the Army has strong evidence connecting the persons in its custody for more than 10 months, with the crime. The next point is not an assumption. It is a fact. It is the fact that Nigeria operates a criminal justice system that assigns institutional roles as to how crime is determined and offenders punished.
The military institution has no direct role in that arrangement except as assigned to it by the court or police, both of which play adjudicatory and prosecutorial roles, respectively, in the pursuit of criminal justice. The military, which has higher kinetic capability than the police can be invited to stabilise combustible civil situations for the police to move in.
That is where it ends. No soldier is permitted in the Nigerian legal system, and legal systems elsewhere in the world, to incident criminal matters in court and thereafter stand before a magistrate or judge to prosecute the case. The most that happens is for the soldier to enter court, as the case may be, as a witness to either the prosecution or the defendant.
Sir, I have listened to you speak in press interviews and other forums. You come across as a very fine and intelligent officer. As CDS, you have no brighter professional feather to aim at. Nobody is going to promote you to the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, except by processes known to the constitution. In other words, after this time, you would be shown the exit door.
You would have successfully anchored as a professional soldier and, therefore, good to go home in retirement and join your people in your community. This is why I keep saying that only criminals and not communities should be taken out in the event of a conflagration. For instance, if your community in Zango Kataf council area in Southern Kaduna is to be taken out the same way you people have taken out Okuama, where will you go after retiring as CDS?
I have digressed, sir. On the Okuama detainees, I am truly confused. What point is the military trying to make by holding them in detention against all known statutory provisions and rules of engagements? Are you saying, sir, that after about 10 months, enough evidence has not been gathered to charge these detainees for the crime of killing those 17 soldiers?
I hear that the body of the one that has died is still being detained in a military morgue? What for, please? I don’t understand. Has the whole thing become some entertaining sports for the viewing pleasure of some people? Also know sir, that if there is any law that permits this, in view of the enormity of the crime, the army is not the institution prepared by law to keep people that are awaiting their day in court.
You know you are my in-law. I will feel so guilty if I do not tell you the truth. And the truth is that the military is on an unnecessary power show against the citizens of Nigeria. The army is only bringing a bad name to itself with the continued detention of these people. I am not even calling on your beautiful wife to play a Queen Esther here.
I am just asking the military to recognise that we are in a democracy and follow due process in the Okuama matter. You definitely have the powers to foreclose this matter one way or the other. To play Pontius Pilate and allow what is clearly an injustice to fester unchecked, neither ennobles nor discharges you of ultimate responsibility.
The military should not cultivate that image of impunity under you. I reject it on your behalf in Jesus Name! Sir, I love you too much not to tell the truth. The world is now a global village. In this twilight of your career, when you are also in the limelight, every of your acts or omissions will either count for or against you in the unknown court of natural and social justice.
General Olusegun Obasanjo didn’t believe this until he had reason to warm up for the job of the Secretary-general of the United Nations sometime in the early 1990s. He didn’t go far with his quest because late Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti and others had gone ahead to present OBJ’s dossier on human rights abuse to the world. I want you to be properly guided. It doesn’t take too long to complete 360 degrees and return to the starting point.
Perhaps you do not even have any blame after all my dear CDS and in-law. I cannot understand, for instance, why the court has not been urgent and definite in the interpretation of Chapter Four of the 1999 Constitution in the Okuama matter.
Enforcement of fundamental human rights is a matter of urgency and necessity and does not require an elegant display of all the fine points of law to determine. Also, the Attorney General of the Federation, Chief Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), is doing as if he does not live in this country or operate his office from this country.
But I hasten to add that neither of these omissions will detract from the weight of your own responsibility or duty in the matter under review. This is the point about individual responsibility underscored by Prophet Ezekiel in the bible. You shall be judged according to your deeds and misdeeds and not the acts or omissions of others. The Okuama saga has become a misdeed. Do well to stem it, sir. Thanks and God bless you.
A Concerned Bloody Civilian.
