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IGP Mohammed Abubakar |
Nigeria’s top human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, has slammed a one
billion naira lawsuit against the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed
Abubakar, and a controversial government contractor, Emeka Offor, for
the brutality meted out to an international businessman, Comrade Bony
Okonkwo, who was arrested by the police on Saturday, July 13, 2013, and
released after 18 days in solitary confinement.
Okonkwo, a social activist and businessman based in South Africa, was
arrested in his home in Ilasamanja of Lagos by a team of Special
Anti-Robbery policemen over comments he made on a listserv against the
shady businessman.
Policemen reportedly sent from the police headquarters in Abuja
handcuffed Bonny detained him in several police formations in Lagos
before driving him to Abuja in the trunk of a police Prado vehicle for
criticizing Offor in an online forum, according to a statement from
the Falana and Falana Chambers signed by Samuel Ogala.
In the suit with motion number M/10933/2013 filed today at the Federal
Territory High Court at Jabi with Mr Justice Afam Okeke presiding,
Mr Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), is demanding
“compensatory damages suffered by Comrade Okonkwo as a result of the
breach of his fundamental rights to fair hearing, freedom of speech,
dignity of the human person, personal liberty and freedom of movement”.
Okonkwo’s problem began when he wrote an article in an online forum
called “Mbala Obodo” which is dedicated to indigenes of Oraifite in
Ekwusigo Local Government Area of Anambra State, where the activist
suggested that the S1.3million recently donated to Rotary International
for polio eradication by the businessman should have been channeled to
poverty reduction in Offor’s Oraifite town or to the payment of poor
people whose life savings deposited at Afex Bank owned by the
businessman collapsed in 2006.
For the almost three weeks Okonkwo was detained at the police
station in Garki, he was not given access to his two mobile telephones,
international travel passport and family members, says Adaeze Ekwueme, a
member of the legal team which secured the activist’s release who also
disclosed that he was arrested and charged with defamation based on a
letter from Fortress Chambers in Lagos signed on June 28, 2013, by one
Godson Ugochukwu, said to be Offor’s lawyer.
“We are convinced that if Comrade Okonkwo’s fundamental right of
freedom of speech which he exercised duly in his comment on the donation
to Rotary International could be treated in any way as defamation, the
police should not have been involved at all.
Says attorney Ogala: “Defamation has always been treated as a civil
matter on our statute books, and not a criminal one. Also quite
disheartening is the Gestapo-manner in which the police from the office
of the Inspector General have acted in this matter.
“The deployment of a team of special federal anti-robbery policemen to
effect the arrest of a harmless, innocent citizen gives the impression
to all reasonable members of society that the police have allowed
themselves to be used in this matter in a most unconscionable manner.
“Most amazing is that this crude and primitive blackmail and torture of
a law abiding citizen under the leadership of IGP Abubakar who has on
more than one occasion publicly warned his officers and men against
behaving like barbarians, all the more so with the courts awarding huge
damages against the police for the unpardonable public conduct of these
security men.”
Quoting Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka and George Mangakis, a leading
Greek author who was detained in brutal circumstances during the
military dictatorship in the South European nation, Ogala added: “The
man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny”.
Though Okonkwo has been freed since August 31 on the orders of the Hon
Kabir Lamido, the chief magistrate of Dutse Alhaji Court in Kubwa, a
satellite town in FCT, his passport has not been released to him.
“As if this step is not enough to frustrate this businessman based in
South Africa who is now constrained to stay only in Nigeria”, complained
lawyer Ekwueme, “the police authorities have just transferred Okonkwo’s
wife, who is a police officer, out of Lagos, thus enhancing the widely
held speculation that the police leadership is in cahoots with Offor to
deal a mortal blow to not just Comrade Okonkwo but also his family”.
Offor’s relationship with the police high command has always been a topic of controversy.
At the dawn of democracy in 1999 he used to have more policemen
attached to him than any state governor. At the height of his
well-publicized quarrel with the then Anambra State governor, Dr
Chinwoke Mbadinuju, Offor was accused of using “the federal might to
overrun his state”.
Hearing in the matter between citizen Okonkwo, on the one hand, and IGP
Abubakar and Offor, on the other, will start on October 30. - SAHARA REPORTERS
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