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Let us take a trip down the paved lane of our memory. Let us remember the closing days of the Buhari government. Let us remember how there was general outcry that human rights had gone away, that that government wore only a face of stone...
Let us take a trip down the paved lane of our memory. Let us remember the closing days of the Buhari government. Let us remember how there was general outcry that human rights had gone away, that that government wore only a face of stone.In those horrendous days, people were simply bundled like firewood and dumped in NSO cells, brutally beaten and mercilessly manhandled. It was obvious to many that human rights had fled the land and that the government had become a terror to its people. For that government, human rights was not a philosophy in retreat; it was a philosophy that had gone out of fashion. August 27, 1985, Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon, the iron-fisted duo, were kicked out of Dodan Barracks and Ibrahim Babangida, the chief of army staff, was kicked upstairs as military president. Babangida stepped in with a smiling face, a sharp contrast to Buhari’s demure demeanour, Babangida put a smile on the glum faces of many Nigerians who had been grabbed in the streets by the government before his, thrown into various cells and visited with brutality when his government broke open the dungeons and the dishevelled men in captivity crawled out into freedom. Such a scene was both chilling and thrilling. The wounds, the scars, the haggard looks of the detainees were the grisly evidence of the Buhari government’s dehumanisation policy, a situation where man had become wolf to man.Our thrill came from the fact that by unlocking the cells and asking these hapless inmates to go home, Babangida had raised our hopes that human rights which had died in our land was about to be resurrected. He said so in fact.Now, by the gift of hindsight, it does appear that Babangida was merely playing to the gallery. He was playing the games that most new government play; they smile coquettishly at you and you all fall in love with them; then a little while later, they show you the dagger in their teeth. Each government often releases with great fanfare, prisoners put there by its predecessor and before you say Kirikiri, the new government has filled the dungeon with its own prisoners. The situation returns to the status quo ante.In the past few months, the human rights posture of this government has been vigorously and virulently assaulted with the butt of police rifles and that philosophy, hitherto the corner-stone of Babangida’s administration, is fast becoming something of a mirage, a will-o’the-wisp. Tony Ukpong, a reporter with the Weekly Metropolitan newspaper, has been in detention since December 20, last year. He is still there, no trial. Femi Aborishade, editor of the Labour Militant, was arrested and detained since February 6 this year. He is still there, no trial. Officers of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, arrested in Jos, June 5, during SAP riots are still in detention, no trial. Many more are languishing in prison, without trial.The latest in the invidious round of arrests involves the editor of The Republic newspaper, Paxton Idowu; veteran labour leader, Michael Imoudu, 86; social critic Tai Solarin, 66; and Gani Fawehinmi, 51, celebrated lawyer, crusader, rebel. In response to the challange by the government that if anyone had an alternative to the IMF/World Bank imposed structural adjustment programme, SAP, which excited riots last month, he should step forward with it, some Nigerians including Fawehinmi, assembled at the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, office to jawjaw. However, when the venue was suddenly unavailable to them, these comrades of Karl Marx retired to Fawehinmi’s chambers to conduct the business of the day. Before they could settle down to say their bit, security men had descended on them like vultures in search of prey and halted proceedings. The predators found their prey. They took Imoudu, Solarin and Fawehinmi away. A few hours later, the two old men, Imoudu and Solarin were set free. Only Fawehinmi, who has been a regular customer of the security agents, particularly since he instituted legal action against two of them, Kunle Togun and Halilu Akilu, over their alleged murder of Newswatch’s first editor-in-chief, Dele Giwa, was kept in detention. Before anyone knew it, Fawehinmi had been given a one-way ticket to Maidugiri, Nigeria’s new Siberia. He is being detained there without trial, and government officials have attempted to put the reason for his incarceration under the dubious umbrella of state security.Duro Onabule, chief press secretary to the president, says: “If what he and his colleagues were going to say were capable of inciting another round of disorder, then the security agents had a reason to pre-empt that.” Pray, do the security agents have the gift of clairvoyance to be able to determine what these fellows were likely to say even before they said it?If Fawehinmi was arrested because he did not have a police permit to hold a symposium in his house, then, we have taken a trip to Oceania. When we do get to Oceania, George Orwell’s territory of suffocation and repression, we will need a police permit to speak to our neighbours. But the most bizarre form of power drunkenness is the arrest of an innocent pregnant woman, Florence, who happens to be the wife of the editor of The Republic. The editor, Idowu, was wanted by the security agents in connection with an article in his paper. When they went calling, the editor was out but his teacher wife was home. They decided that arresting the wife was as good as arresting the husband, after all are wife and husband not one flesh? They asked the lady whose only association with the newspaper is that her husband labours there, to follow them in the dead of the night. The hapless lady obeyed. She spent a night with the police and they only let her off the hook when her husband appeared and they promptly put him away and turned the key until the padlock answered.What was the lady’s offence? Guilt by association (she married the editor) or guilt by default (she didn’t tell him to stay home). What does this recent show of teeth portend? Is it a resurgence of the military mind? Is it an overt sense of panic or paranoia? We may never know.What we do know, however, is that human rights eloquently enunciated in August 1985, is by June 1989, in rapid retreat. This column was first published in the Newswatch edition of July 3, 1989 |