By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
“The first
thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” – William Shakespeare, Henry
VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2
Tamuno Igbikiberebima is an unlikely star in an action movie. He is a lawyer employed with Nigeria’s national hydro-carbons monopoly. On 17 December, 2020, Tamuno was home in Rumuigbo, in Obio/Akpor Local Government Area (LGA) of Rivers State, in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, contemplating Christmas in the season of COVID-19 and on his phone in front of the gate into his premises, when a Toyota Camry car pulled up beside him.
From
the bowels of the car, a young man emerged armed with what the police later
confirmed to be an AK-47 rifle and ordered him into the car. Tamuno had the
presence of mind to ask why, to which the young man reportedly responded that his
mission was to waste him. Tamuno takes the story from here:
“When I noticed how he was handling the gun, it appeared to me that he is not proficient in gun handling. I told myself that ‘ordinarily one-to-one this man cannot beat me.’ ….When he faced the nozzle of the rifle down trying to cock the gun, I started struggling with him.
“In the process both of us shot
one bullet on the ground. When he saw a crowd coming, he left the rifle and ran
into the car.”
Tamuno
and his neighbours mobilised and chased after the wannabe assassin, capturing
him before handing him over to the Nigeria Police. This is how he explained
what drove him: “most likely their intention was to kidnap or assassinate me. I
think it is important for me to do it in front of my gate. It would be more
honourable instead of following them to wherever they wanted to take me to.”
Tamuno
was lucky not to have had his life ended in front of his gate. Ken Asuete was
not so lucky. Like Tamuno, Asuete was a lawyer in Rivers State, representing
the All Progressives Congress in Rivers State while the party was in opposition
at the federal level before the 2015 presidential election.
Despite being a relatively young
lawyer, Asuete had built a significant portfolio of party political clients and
had begun to make a name for himself. On the night of 28 August, 2016, some
unknown men cornered Asuete along Onuchiolu Road in Aluu, Ikwere LGA on the
outskirts of Port Harcourt, the State capital, killing him.
Ken
Asuete’s fate was by no means limited to lawyers associated with the APC. On 12
March 2020, unidentified gunmen abducted Soalabor West, a lawyer who aspired to
contest for the governorship ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party, from his
farm also in Aluu.
Six
days later, while Soala’s family was still in negotiation with the supposed
abductors, his decomposing remains bearing machete cuts and bullet wounds were
discovered in a bush near the Elekahia Pipeline in Port Harcourt.
Unlike
Ken Asuete and Soalabor, Sampson Worlu did not get the opportunity to put his
lawyering skills to use before he was killed. In November 2015, Sampson was
admitted to the Nigerian Bar in Abuja. The week, thereafter, he headed to
Owerri, Imo State, to commence his National Youth Service Corps programme. He
never made it to Owerri.
Despite
collecting the sum of N1.5 million from Sampson’s heart-broken family, his
abductors killed him. He was 32.
Lawyers
like to claim that theirs is a vocation without females. Like their male
counterparts in Rivers State, female lawyers have not been spared.
Isaac
Obe was the president of Eleme Youth Council in Rivers State when he was killed
at home with a friend of his in what was suspected to be gang hit at the end of
April 2017.
Isaac’s younger sister, Mary, swore at her brother’s funeral
that she will “fight his killers to the end.” Seven months after the killing of
her brother, in the early hours of 29 November, 2017, gunmen entered Alode,
and, in the same community and manner in which they killed Isaac, assassinated
Mary.
Paulette Ajayi, another female lawyer, was luckier than Mary
Obe. In early October 2020, unknown gunmen abducted Ms. Ajayi from her
residence in Rumuokwurushi in Port Harcourt, from where they ferried her into
hiding in the appropriately named Okomoko Forest in Etche LGA. On 8 October,
the police rescued Ms. Ajayi in an encounter in which one of the suspected
abductors, Chinedu Chigbu, sustained fatal gun-shot injuries.
Promise Frank Igwe was a lawyer in
Port Harcourt. In early April 2019, he reportedly received a telephone call
inviting him to meet with someone at a rendez-vous, in a bar in Ozuoba
community in Obio/Akpor, Rivers State.
While
he waited on a Friday morning, unidentified young men dressed in black alighted
from a vehicle, reportedly shot him four times in the chest and then escaped.
The only thing they took from Promise was his telephone handset. He died on the
spot.
This
pattern of killing of lawyers in and around Port Harcourt is not history.
Around
20 November 2022, unidentified gunmen killed Lazarus Jerome in Ahoada, Rivers
State. The following day, his lawyer, Nathan Akatakpo, met the same fate in the
same neighbourhood.
Five
years after the crime, in July 2020, the High Court of Rivers State convicted
Chinwendu Alozie, Wilfred Jumbo, and Gift Amadi for the murder of Sampson
Worlu, sentencing them to death.
Three months after he was killed,
the police in Port Harcourt organised a news conference at which they paraded
five men as suspects in the killing of Ken Asuete. There has been no conviction
but these two are exceptions to a pattern of impunity.
Former
First Vice-President of the Nigerian Bar Association, John Aikpokpo Martins,
says of these attacks on lawyers in Rivers State that “it is so normal to kill
a lawyer for defending others.”
Increasingly,
many Nigerian lawyers now live on the horns of a choice between silver and
lead.
Rivers
State only illustrates a trend that appears to have become normalized in the
country. In neighbouring Imo State, former chair of the Nigerian Bar Association
in Owerri, Ndionyenma Nwankwo, was matcheted to death in February 2021 in an
attack in which the principal suspect was his chauffer, who remains at large.
The following month, in March 2021, Frank Onwuachi, Chair of the NBA in
Otuocha, near Onitsha, was similarly liquidated.
They
are by no means the only NBA leaders to have been killed. In September 2018,
Emeka Agundu, Chair of the Association in Obollo-Afor, Udenu LGA of Enugu
State, was shot dead.
In December, 2018, Adeola Adebayo, Secretary of the Association in Ikole-Ekiti
in south-west Nigeria was abducted and murdered.
In
August 2002, then Chairman of the NBA in Onitsha, Anambra State, Barnabas Igwe
and his wife, Abigail, also a lawyer, were both brutally murdered by unknown
persons.
The
year before that, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of
Justice, Bola Ige, was killed in his house in Bodija, Ibadan, Oyo State on 23
December 2001.
According to the United Nations
Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, “where the security of lawyers is
threatened as a result of discharging their functions, they shall be adequately
safeguarded by the authorities.”
Sadly,
a government – such as we have in Nigeria – that is unable to guarantee basic
safety and security for its citizens, however, cannot do much to help lawyers.
In
the past, the response of the NBA was to launch an appeal fund to assist
lawyers in emergency in parts of the country, which was poorly subscribed.
Today, the emergency affects lawyers all over the country and requires the Bar
Association to re-imagine itself and its capabilities.
*A Lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
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