When Securocrats and Lawyers came Calling

By Prof Olatunji Dare

In this business, there are some people you hope you never hear from, like the police or even worse, their military counterpart, and of course, lawyers. They all spell trouble.

You can therefore imagine my state of mind when the senior official at the Nigerian Herald who doubled as my Personal Assistant when I was chair of the paper’s publishing company relayed a message to my office at the University of Lagos that a Major Giwa, military assistant to Governor Salaudeen Latinwo, would like to talk with me.

I had left Ilorin for Lagos only the previous day, after delivering a blistering critique of Decree Four, at a symposium organized by the Kwara State Council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists. I had made it clear that I was speaking as a university lecturer, and that my presentation was to be understood and appraised only in that context.

As if the authors of the decree, General Muhammadu Buhari, head of state and General Tunde Idiagbon, chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters – the Dour Duo as I christened them after their ouster — cared a hoot about subtlety!

I read and reread the presentation and mentally reviewed my answers to question from the audience just to be sure Major Giwa would not find me unprepared. Idiagbon had Kwara as his home base, and Latinwo was known to be his enforcer-in-residence. Friends and relations in Ilorin had in fact warned me after the lecture to expect the worst from Latinwo.

I asked my aide to tell Major Giwa that I had no access to a phone. Would it be okay to call on him during my visit the following week? That would be fine, my aide reported.

With not a little trepidation, I called Major Giwa after settling down in my hotel room.

“How are you, Doctor?” he asked warmly.

“Very well Major,” I replied. I am calling as you had requested. I hope there is no problem.

“No problem at all. Doctor. I just wanted to congratulate you on your Decree Four lecture. You said what you had to say, and you said it without giving offence.”

Oh, was I relieved!

I had hardly settled down as a member of the Editorial Board of The Guardian, on leave from the University of Lagos when I had visitation from Military Intelligence, no less. My visitor came armed with an unsigned and undated memo alleging that, as chair of the Herald’s publishing company, I had pillaged it to set up a company which a certain Major Olatunji was running for me as a front.

He would like me to come to their office at 15 Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, in Lagos, to make a statement.

Could I not make a statement there and then, in my office?

No, said my visitor. I had to come to 15 Awolowo, which was notorious for its unwelcoming ambience, to make a statement and answer some questions

Had my visitor ascertained the identity of the petitioner?

No.

How about the identity of “Major Olatunji”?

No.

The company I am alleged to own, is it listed in the books of the Corporate Affairs Commission?

My visitor could not tell.

“This is irregular,” I protested. Why do I have to respond to such nebulous charges when you have not even ascertained whether there are factually grounded?

The visitor said it was their duty to investigate such allegations whenever they surfaced.

At 15 Awolowo, they made me submit and sign a written statement, and then asked me to go. I never heard from them again. It turned out that the petitioner was a staffer who had been dismissed for misconduct long before I was appointed to chair the Board at The Herald.

Fast forward to May 2015. As part of its preparation to assume power after its historic victory in that year’s General Elections, the victorious APC had put together two days of briefings and discussions on the task ahead. Former British Prime Minister Tony “The Liar” Blair was scheduled to be a keynote presenter.

By pure coincidence, my column, “A visitor, not a guest,” came out in The Nation the very day Blair was going to speak. The article was a damning treatise on his warmongering in Iraq, and his subsequent career as a money-grubbing international hustler. A former student of mine who had read it overnight in the paper’s electronic edition had called, saying that if Blair had any honour left, he would not keep the date.

He was right. Although Blair was already in town, he did not show up for the event. Instead, he was represented by a former minister in the Blair’s Labour Cabinet Peter Mandelson.

I was going through Nigerian newspapers online when The Nation’s editor, Gbenga Omotoso, called from Lagos. Chief Femi Okunnu, the SAN, had called to ask for my phone number so he could talk with me. I asked Omotoso to send me Okunnu’s number instead so that at I could call him from my base in the United States.

“Tunji,” he said preliminaries over.

“Sir,” I responded.

“I have seen your article in today’s paper.” He seemed to be pausing for dramatic effect. I held my breath.

“I have seen it,” he resumed after what had seemed like an eternity. But I have not read it.”

I was straining mightily to hold my breath.

“I have called Lai Mohammed’s attention to it and asked why they invited Tony Blair, of all persons, to be a keynote speaker as the APC prepares for the Inauguration?”

You could have heard me exhale.

You never know with these attorneys. What if Tony Blair, himself a lawyer married to one of the smartest lawyers in the UK, or his solicitors, had called Okunnu on reading my column and asked him to issue a writ of libel against me immediately?

But I need not have worried. Okunnu and I were of the same mind on Blair’s villainy regarding the invasion and destruction of Iraq with Trumped-up evidence. No, I take that back: trumped-up evidence. Donald Trump was then only a concupiscent reprobate, groping and probing and grabbing women as he pleased.

This past week, I got a call from another attorney of the first rank, Wole Olanipekun, SAN, whom I had not met since 1985. Why would he be calling, this learned man who, considering the many titanic election cases he has argued and won in the courts over the years, might well be regarded as the most formidable, if not the foremost, election lawyer in Nigeria?

“Egbon, my name is Wole Olanipekun,” he began disarmingly.

That was cause for relief. You can’t call a man Egbon, and then put him on notice in your very next breath that you would be sandbagging him with a multi-billion Naira defamation lawsuit on behalf of a client next week. That would not accord with the omoluabi ethos.

The more he talked, the more I was reassured of his bona fides.

He was calling about one of my recent articles all right, but you’ll never guess which one. It was not a matter on which even the most creative attorney could have grounded a lawsuit.

He was calling about a lexical matter – specifically the use and abuse of the word “foremost,” which I had discussed in the column for the previous week. He said with touching humility that he “wanted to be educated.”

Next time a lawyer calls me, I will be more relaxed, less worked-up. Such calls do not always spell trouble. They sometimes turn out to be positive feedback. But I will still feel queasy any day I get a call from the custodians of law and order and national security.

The fly in JKF’s ointment

IT first blush, an airport for Ekiti state, to be located in Ado-Ekiti, might seem high-minded compared to other projects his predecessor Ayo Fayose conjured up in an impulse. On close examination, it is just another monument to vainglory.

Dr Fayemi’s admirers, among whom I count myself, cannot but feel disappointed that he has now adopted it.

Think of the dozens of rural health centres that can be built and equipped, the roads that can be fixed, schools that can be rehabilitated, the hundreds of teachers that can be hired, the tens of small-scale industries that can be funded with the resources that will go into building an airport for which there will be little patronage, and which will be a drainpipe on the state’s fragile economy.

The airport in Akure, in neighbouring Ondo State, has lain idle for decades, and the prospects for an airport in Ado-Ekiti are not more promising.

Governor Fayemi should let it remain for now an idea on paper, a dream perhaps, but certainly not one to which scarce funds needed more urgently elsewhere should be committed.