BY Ochereome Nnanna
THIRTEEN years into his detention and trial, it had seemed that Major Hamza al Mustahpa was now ready to spill the beans on Yoruba leaders.

On Monday, August I, 2011 when he made his umpteenth appearance before a Federal High Court presided over by Justice Mojisola Dada, the former Chief Security Officer of the late General Sani Abacha had sensationally disclosed that he had video evidence of how leaders of the Yoruba ethnic umbrella, Afenifere, were used by the military regime of General Abdulsalami Abubakar to scuttle June 12 and paper over the murder of Chief MKO Abiola.

He had told an enthralled, capacity court audience how Abubakar directed his CSO, General Abdullahi Mohammed, to ask the Central Bank of Nigeria to bring out huge sums of money running into billions of naira for peacekeeping and diplomatic duties only to divert same to the bribing of Yoruba leaders and the building of his palatial private bunker at Minna. To spice up the “promo” of the video, the detainee gleefully said that the Yoruba leaders, who had gone to Aso Villa angry and unwilling to speak with media reporters came out smiling, telling expectant journalists that it was time to move the nation forward. An excited Justice Dada, concerned for total transparency and disclosure, quickly agreed to admit the video evidence in her court to verify Al Mustapha’s claims.

Came Thursday, August 4, 2011 . The nation held its breath as the eight-minute long video was played. Just as in all his other disclosures in the past week, there was nothing new or concretely evidential of monetary inducement of the Aso Villa visitors which made them change their minds to let bygones be bygones since both General Abacha and Chief Abiola were dead. Mustapha had just taken the nation on a sensational jolly ride through a familiar route.

His hint that Abiola died in the presence of a prominent US diplomat, Susan Rice, was not new. The bit about the huge amounts Abubakar withdrew from the vaults of the CBN was also nothing new. That was normal practice during the dark days of General Ibrahim Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar. To these chaps, the CBN vault was a booty they were entitled to by successfully assuming power as military rulers. There was also nothing new that in those days, tribal, political and community leaders and elite were routinely bribed to sell their birthrights, failing which they were often silenced (killed, put in jail or driven into exile).

There was nothing new about the portrayal of Abubakar as a man who grew stupendously rich over night simply as a result of emerging as Abacha’s successor.

After all, Abubakar only copied the successful experiment of his predecessor, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who also became a multi-millionaire farmer after ruling Nigeria for 43 months. Nobody bothered about the sources of Obasanjo’s wealth and those of other “generals” who retired with him in 1979, simply because he had done the unprecedented noble act of handing over power to civilians as promised without attempting to sit tight like other military despots all over Africa and the Third World then.

Abubakar knew that if he ran a short tenure and handed over to a favoured section of the political elite he would go home a “hero”, and all atrocities committed along the way would be conveniently swept under the carpet.

Al Mustapha set out to portray the Yoruba leaders and Abubakar in a bad light, perhaps as a means of drawing sympathy to his case. If that was his tactics, he did not hit the bull’s eye. He confirmed what we already suspected about Abubakar, but he was unable to make his case against the Afenifere leaders. That someone went into a meeting angry and came out smiling is not a credible evidence that he was corruptly compromised. Not necessarily so. Al Mustapha’s tendency to name only those who have died in these alleged sleazy deals also calls the credibility of his allegations to serious question.

But at the same time, as much as we do not have concrete evidence of financial inducement we cannot dismiss the fact that the Abubakar regime was openly partial to Yoruba political interests, given some of the things that followed immediately after Abiola’s death till deep in Obasanjo’s presidency. I personally do not believe Al Mustapha’s allegation of plans to allow Abiola to occupy the presidency “for a brief period”. This bit might be a mere play to the public gallery. The June 12 election annullers were forced to cede power to a Yoruba they believed they could manipulate. The idea of a “brief” stint in the Presidency by Abiola was simply inconceivable, and that was why the decision to “balance” the killings was made.

Al Mustapha only ended up exposing further the evil that sectional imperialists used the military to perpetrate on fellow Nigerians whose only sin was that they believed they had the right to vie for the highest office in the land. The visit of Yoruba leaders to Aso Villa is being made to sound like the visit of some local elite from a colonised foreign territory to the palace of Queen of England, where they left with a smile because they were well treated.

And here was a country where Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe bore the torch for its independence and Action Group, a political party led by the Yoruba political elite championed the motion for Nigeria’s independence ahead of the rest. In 27 years of sectional military domination a part of the country had reduced the rest to mere outsiders who were beaten with the stick whenever the carrot would not do.

The excesses of the Babangida/Abacha/Abdulsalami dispensation of 1985 – 1999 signalled the burning out and implosion of sectional imperialism. Any wonder that when Obasanjo was elected president in 1999, he made up his mind to demolish and rebuild the military to rid it of its sectional, neo-colonial virus. Today, Nigerians are gradually taking back their country. I wonder if this would have been possible had Abiola simply gone home to sleep when his election was annulled. If he had not fought for his mandate, where would this nation be today?

In his desperate attempt to draw sympathy to his long and wicked incarceration, al Mustapha’s diversionary outbursts only called back to mind the evil regime that he and others perpetrated and how he is left to carry the can. The charge against him was that he was instrumental for the murder of Mrs Kudirat Abiola. None of these “disclosures” seemed to address the issue.

Still, I will like to call for amnesty for al Mustapha. Thirteen years of trial seems to suggest government has little evidence to go on against him. Otherwise he would have been convicted long ago. This trial is no longer objective. Let the President instruct the Attorney General of the Federation to enter a nolle prosequi and end the charade of a trial, followed by a full-scale probe of events surrounding that era. We need to know.

 Saro-Wiwa vindicated

NEARLY 16 years after he and eight other Ogoni activists were hanged by the Sani Abacha regime, the truth has finally come out that Ken Saro-Wiwa was not merely shouting wolf about environmental degradation in his native Ogoniland. If anything, independently verified facts have shown that, perhaps, Saro-Wiwa and his fellow travellers possibly under-estimated the magnitude of the disaster they fought to draw the world’s attention to.

Thursday, August 4, 2011 was the D-day for the submission of the report of the Presidential Committee on the Environmental Survey and Clean-up of Ogoniland headed by the Most Reverend Matthew Hassan Kukah. The survey, done in conjunction with the United Nations Environmental Programme, UNEP, concluded authoritatively that the land, air and water in Ogoniland are severely polluted as a result of decades of oil and gas exploitation (mainly by Shell) and routine spills that left the local communities  throughout the Niger Delta endangered and impoverished.

The reports also disclosed that it would take, at least, 30 years for the cleaning of the environment to be concluded at the cost of about $1 billion. When the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, MOSOP, drew up their Ogoni Bill of Rights demanding resource control, youth and the intelligentsia from other Niger Delta communities saw them as troublemakers and did not lift a finger in support. The Ogoni were thus isolated, which made it easy for the Abacha regime to crush their agitations with severe iron fist.

But barely four years after Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues were hanged at Justice Ibrahim Auta’s verdict, the Ijaw variant of Ogoni activism erupted after their summit at Kaiama in Bayelsa State in December, 1998. Thus, the tone was set towards the prolonged armed struggle by (mainly) the Ijaw. Earlier in 1967, the Igbo had to declare secession in an attempt to escape the highly oppressive Nigerian state, but Saro-Wiwa and the Ijaw were very enthusiastic in joining the rest of Nigeria against the secession, believing that they were liberating themselves from Igbo domination.

Little did they know about the grand imperialist agenda of their “traditional allies” wooing them against their immediate neighbours.
After these series of vindications (of the Igbo, Ogoni and Ijaw), it is up to the people of Nigeria to vow to themselves: never again! Otherwise we will be back to it sooner than later because Nigeria’s history runs around in circles!

The task of cleaning up the Niger Delta, as the President has hinted, is now beyond Nigeria as a nation. We need global help to force Shell and other oil drillers in Nigeria to cough out the money for the immediate clean-up work, more so as we lack the clout US wielded to force BP to tackle the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

One day, we as a nation will honour Saro-Wiwa and Co for their sacrifices.