By Olatuni Dare
Some 34
years after Dele Giwa, crusading
journalist and founding editor of the defunct Newswatch was killed in
what remains one of the most horrific acts of preternatural malevolence ever
carried out in Nigeria, nothing has been established beyond the fact and the
manner of the murder.
“Who killed Dele Giwa?” has been a recurring question ever since. Whodunit?
Former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, with
whom Giwa enjoyed a cozy relationship, that he was not loath to advertise, has
been and remains a principal suspect in the murder. No arrests were made,
and no suspects have been arrested, and no persons have been charged, much less
prosecuted in what passed for the official investigation of the murder: a travesty
perfused by obfuscation, intimidation, blackmail, perjury, denialism, and all
the bureaucratic weapons that officialdom can conjure up.
There was ample reason for regarding Babangida as a principal suspect in the murder.
Just two days before that ghastly incident, a senior
official of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, had accused Giwa of
illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition to stage 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 publicly.
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, a security 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.
Asked by Giwa’s wife, Funmi, why he had been calling
repeatedly, Akilu said it was to obtain directions to Giwa’s home so he could
stop by on his way to the airport to board a flight to Kano, as a demonstration
of his good faith. 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.
A few hours later, the emissary arrived. Giwas’s son, Billy,
collected the parcel and handed it to his father who was seated at the dining
table, in the company of Kayode Soyinka, the London correspondent of Newswatch,
who was visiting from the UK. The envelope, which bore the seal of the
Presidency, was marked “To be opened by addressee only.”
Giwa had said, “This must be from the Presidency.”
Those were his last words. As he opened it where it lay on his lap, the package
exploded, pulverizing his pelvis, setting a section of the house on fire and
reducing the cars parked 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 in another section of the house.
If they had perished with Giwa, the authorities would have
passed off the blast as an accident waiting to happen.
Had they not 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.
A perfect murder would have been committed.
If the foregoing narrative provides largely circumstantial
evidence, the murder weapon unequivocally implicated the Military Intelligence
establishment. It was not the kind of thing you could purchase off the
shelf at a hardware store, nor the kind that could be assembled in a journeyman
technician’s workshop, nor yet the kind that could be fabricated at the local
blacksmith’s foundry.
Yet the
official investigators looked everywhere except where the evidence pointed.
Kayode Soyinka, the visiting Newswatch correspondent
who had witnessed the incident, came to be named a suspect. If he was not
complicit in the crime, senior state security officials said, how come he had
survived the blast when his host seated across from him had perished
My brother, Herbert Tunde Dare, a deputy commissioner of
police with the Special Branch, had been assigned to the investigation. Soon
after he set out with his accustomed energy and commitment – failure was not in
his dictionary – he was transferred from Lagos to Kaduna but kept on the case.
He had been summoned to Lagos to file a preliminary report and 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 to base by road.
Somewhere between Jebba and Mokwa, in Niger State, he was
killed in a curious motor accident. Announcing his death, the police said he
had lost control of his car while trying to overtake another vehicle and
crashed. He had died instantly, they said. The wreck of the car he was
alleged to be driving was never produced. The police said an unnamed driver and
an unnamed aide assigned to him for the trip were injured in the accident but
had been treated at an unidentified hospital and discharged.
Francis Karieren, the one-time test cricketer and retired
police chief and my brother Herbert’s former supervisor at the old ‘E’ Brand of
the Police and a consultant on security matters with the Editorial Board of The
Guardian, of which I was a member, said the official announcement of
Hebert’s death was anomalous. In laying the blame on Herbert’s shoulder,
the police broke sharply with tradition, he said, adding, “They never do that
to their own.”
They did so in Herbert’s case to pre-empt further
inquiry. Case closed.
Fed up with the dilatoriness of the police in the
investigation of the murder of his client, Gani Fawehinmi decided to institute
a private prosecution. The court of first instance allowed itself to be misled
to hold that Fawehinmi’s court filing was libellous, and it went on to order
Fawehinmi to pay damages in the amount of N5 million, then a huge fortune,
failing which his office housing probably the nation’s richest Law
Library would be auctioned.
An appellate court set aside this egregious ruling.
The Oputa
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, before which Babangida and his military
colleagues declined to appear, made a finding that there was evidence to
suggest that Babangida and his security chiefs, Brigadier General Halilu Akilu
and Colonel A. K. Togun, are “accountable for the death of Dele Giwa by letter
bomb.” It recommended that the case be reopened for further investigation
“in the public interest.”
Hear Babangida’s testimony in his own words, in this
interview with Karl Maier, as recorded 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 twenty-four 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 effusion was Babangida’s answer to the
question, “What happened to Dele Giwa?
The murder has been memorialized on every anniversary and
featured betwixt. For all practical purposes, however, the matter was dead
until two weeks ago, when the Incorporated Trustees of the watchdog Media
Rights Agenda breathed life into it through a petition before the Federal High
Court, Abuja.
Ray Ekpu, Giwa’s colleague at Newswatch witnessed the
saga first-hand and has reported it in absorbing detail in the first instalment
of his reprise in The Guardian (“Dele Giwa is dead, Dele Giwa is no dead (1),”
February 20, 2024, as a preface to this latest development in the case.
The court, per Justice Inyang Ekwo, has asked the Attorney
General of the Federation to bring Giwa’s killers to justice because the
killing violates the right to life under the Nigerian Constitution and the
African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.
Is this, finally, the momentum the attentive public has been
yearning for?
*Dr. Dare is a commentator on public issues
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