By Dan Amor
A calculated insult and the guilt preceded his death, stealing from the actual murder all its potential impact and drama. There never was a crime more dramatically rehearsed, and the tale only provides it could not have been otherwise. Yet there are no clues to be uncovered, no enigmas to be revealed; for this was a murder almost predicted like its predecessors.
*Bola Ige
As a principled and astute politician, even though he agreed to serve in former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s cabinet, Chief Bola Ige did not preach to Nigerians. But he provoked questions and left us in no doubt as to where he stood. He shared none of the current tastes for blurred conflicts, ambiguous characters and equivocal opinions. Nor was he disdainful of strong dramatic situations building up for firm climaxes. From the critic’s point of view, the plot of Ige’s senseless murder in December 2001, in its high velocity treachery, summarizes modern Nigeria in one word: “shame”.
In his epic novel, Shame (1983), Salman Rushdie, the Indian born
controversial English writer, paints the picture of a disconcerting political
hallucination in Pakistan, which he calls “Peccavistan” – existing fictionally
as a slight angle to reality. The major thrust of the novel is that the shame
or shamelessness of its characters returns to haunt them. Yet the recurrent
theme is that there are things that cannot be said, things that can’t be
permitted to be true, in a tragic situation. To this end, fiction and politics
ultimately become identical or rather analogous. That so banal and damaging an
emotion could have been so manifestly created from within the Yoruba nation
itself, was a ringing surprise to us keen observers of that macabre drama. But
the truth or falsehood of the accusation or counter-accusation is not of the
first importance.
The critical issue that must enlist our concern here is
Nigeria’s sick criminal justice system and the poverty of integrity of its
police force. Nineteen years after the well-planned assassination of the Chief
Law Officer of the world’s largest black nation (Chief Bola Ige was Minister of
Justice and Attorney General of the Federation when he was killed), his killers
are still walking the streets of our cities without challenge. In short, no
justice for the Justice Minister. In this sense, Nigeria is back in mediaeval
times. The Orwellian qualities and nightmarish implications of the
investigations make one sick since the whole exercise is as absurd as it is
puerile.
Only in Nigeria that a patriotic, brilliant and hardworking
lawyer who turned in a prime suspect to the police for prosecution, be arrested
and arranged by the same police before a court of law just to engage our false
sense of judgement. Did the police not declare Fryo wanted in connection with
Chief Ige’s murder? Only in Nigeria would a prime suspect in such a heinous
crime be declared winner, released from detention and sworn in as Senator of
the Federal Republic in an electoral contest for which he did not even
campaign.
The senseless and cowardly assassination of Chief Ige therefore
serves to reassert the vulnerability of men and women and to poignantly
underline their impotence. For, it is a well known fact that the vulture that
eats the flesh of its neighbour knows what awaits it at death, as even the eyes
that weep still see. To portray a credible part of moral degeneration is deadly
enough in itself; yet, to do so in a dimension and style requiring undiminished
pity is to court disaster. The attempt would be brash even in fiction or epic,
with all of their additional resources for portraying subtle changes and for
building sympathy.
Little do we know that because we lack the intellectual
precision and moral discipline to dissect with admirable lucidity and
illuminating temper, the insularity and complexity of our turbulent society, we
have resorted to primordial solutions to our national problems. Our recent
experience in the hands of the military is replete with the shameful fact that
almost two-thirds of our men and women of conscience and nobility of outlook or
high integrity were either murdered or banished into exile in foreign lands and
the rest condemned like guinea-pigs to a life of forced idleness in our
stinking, unhygienic prisons and police cells.
If we detest our memory of the unparalleled crudity of that dark
era, what do we say of the murderous clouds hanging ominously over the entire
nation in a so-called democratic dispensation? The truth is that Nigeria is
still detained in the past. For the police not to have unraveled the enigma
embedded in the mockery killing of the Attorney General and Justice Minister of
the federation, nineteen years after, shows that nothing has changed. From Dele
Giwa, Chiefs Mashal Harry, A. K. Dikibo, Chief Funso Williams, Abayomi
Ogundeji, the Igwe couple, etcetera, the story remains the same: fate makes
everything invisible and works its inexorable course. Remember the story of the
emperor who wore no clothes? Only the innocent saw that he was naked.
Why waste our time asking who killed Chief Bola Ige while the
obvious question should be: why was Chief Bola Ige killed? It is patiently
disastrous that our integrity as a nation has been consumed by a democracy gone
mad. And if we are to grasp reality in the face of madness, it is the reality
of Ige’s death that we must grasp. But this is one reality that sears us
whenever we attempt to comprehend it, and so we try, by the use of our
superficial investigations, to prove that the reality does not exist, despite
our emphatically underlined knowledge to the contrary.
We watch humanity grotesquely tormented, cruelly and with
mockery impaled. Nearly all the characters suffer some form of crude indignity
in the course of the tragedy. Yet, indeed, the overriding critical problem in
this matter is the conspiracy of silence among the people of Nigeria. In spite
of our pretensions, Ige’s death confronts us like a raw, fresh wound where our
every instinct calls for a thorough examination. This problem, moreover, is as
much one of political will and courage as of dramatic effect.
Whether we believe it or not, our lives and freedom are hostages
of our limited knowledge of the day after, the waywardness of chance and the
decaying of our national institutions. It is only in fighting for others that
we can circumvent these limitations. President Muhammadu Buhari was said to
have promised to revisit these cases of high profile killings. More than four
years after his promise, nothing has been heard from the presidency. Can anyone
get justice in this country? Why was Chief Bola Ige killed?
*Dan Amor, a public affairs analyst, resides
in Abuja
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