Kuje: Did we hand Nigeria over to terrorists in 2015?, By Festus Adedayo
President Buhari visits Kuje Prison after attack on the facility.
By Festus Adedayo
For those who watch the complicated Nigerian security mess from afar, the killing of Japanese ex-Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe in Nara, Japan last Tuesday and the ambushing, same day, of President Muhammadu Buhari’s advance convoy in Dutsinma, about 152 kilometres from his hometown of Daura, Katsina State, both speak to rising global insecurity.
A few hours after on that same Tuesday, that joke went burst. Approximately three hours after shelling the president’s advance convoy with an assortment of bullets, killing two people in the process, around 10pm, terrorists stormed the Kuje Custodial Centre in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, in a night-time attack that left a security personnel and six inmates dead, with about 600 inmates, 65 reported to be detained Boko Haram inmates, at large.
Arriving the prison in a convoy of motorcycles, the terrorists detonated several bombs and deployed Rocket-Propelled Grenades (RPGs), General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMGs) and a profusion of AK-49 assault rifles, AK-47 assault rifles, as well as service pistols to aid their penetration of the prison.
Once inside the prison, the terrorists had what looked like a saturnalia. First was that they reportedly entered the Kuje prison facility through the bush and from its backend. This path was where the Nigerian military armoured tanker guarding the facility was stationed, with its dilating-eyed, readied platoon of sharp-shooters. So they drove in, unchecked and without any shred of resistance. Reports had it that this area that the terrorists trod into the custodial centre was usually manned by army officers who the Army authorities deployed about 12 hours before the attack took place. This location is the first contact of anyone meandering into the facility, which the terrorists also did as they arrived the facility. Strolling in without any resistance the terrorists approached the Civil Defence officers’ point. Were the situation normal, this was where a hailstone of bullets ought to have been rained on the terrorists by soldiers.
Again, in a very suggestive way, the terrorists did not do any violence to the armoured tanker they met, en-route the facility. They did not even rupture a pin of the deadly machine’s parts. If you compare this “magnanimity” of the terrorists with the fit of madness they went into by setting ablaze several vehicles parked about 10 metres off the military tanker in the premises of the Kuje prison, the terrorists deserved a national award for helping to safeguard national asset. In all however, you will conclude, as the Yoruba say when they suspect an admixture of mischief and Satanism, that the snake, in this circumstance of the Kuje attack, indeed had its hidden hands tucked off view.
For two hours and forty five minutes, the terrorists, reportedly numbering about 300, annexed Kuje as a temporary headquarters of their Satanic Empire. Thereafter, they set the prison’s records office on fire. If the maishayi in charge of serving the terrorist comrades their hard drugs-embossed tea was in the mood to follow them to that triumphant rescue of their comrades in Kuje, he would have had a field day serving them while the operation lasted. One after the other, the terrorists, who gained access to the facility by bombing the walls with explosives, reportedly called the over 60 terrorists in captivity by their names and bombed the cell doors open. Shouts of grisly, triumphal Allahu akbar rend the air, entwined by huge balls of fire and booms of bazookas and bombs. Kuje would feel like a theatre of war reminiscent of the bombings in Sarajevo during the Bosnia and Herzegovina war of the early to mid-1990s. Then, the terrorists began a long sermon on Jihadism and winning of souls of the inmates.
Before releasing their comrades in terrorism, comprising 64 high-profile terrorists and more than 260 other hardened criminals who were set free, media reports said that the terrorists peremptorily breached the custodial facility’s security without a single pushback from the security that was usually deployed to Kuje prison. Indeed, said media reports, no single shot was fired by a platoon of security men in Kuje that comprised military, DSS, Police, Immigration/Prisons Armed Squad. More petrifying was the report which indicated that the expended bullet shells that were seen on the floor after the attack were left as terrifying memorabilia of the terrorists’ superiority over the Nigerian state. The Nigerian security, made up of same gallant officers who received garlands from the United Nations in peacekeeping operations in Darfur, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chad, among others, like frightened cats that tuck their tails inside thighs when outpaced, all faded into thin air for the almost three hours of the attack. Gallant officers that they were, they only reappeared when their terrorist comrades had completed their national assignments, on the verge of leaving in a triumphal celebration.
Very unlike him, with his globally celebrated medallion for pussyfooting and national aloofness, President Buhari was in Kuje almost immediately. And I must say that he deserves national commendation for the brilliant performance of the role that the Producer of the national opera cast for him. The second day, being Wednesday, on his way to the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport for an international junket to Dakar, Senegal which he could very well have sent his Vice, Buhari actually honoured Nigeria with his august visit to Kuje. As a symbol of national shame that the attack was, Buhari could have, there and then, announced his decision to abandon the junket, a number of which, in the last two months, have since become the paterfamilias of his departing lame duck administration. So Buhari stopped by at the Kuje Correctional Centre and for about 30 minutes, played his cast role in the surreal drama quite commendably.
Like a knowledgeable cast who understood his role well enough, Buhari openly queried the intelligence gathering system in Kuje which resulted in the attack. He expressed worry at the level of damage done and queried, for optical effect of the camera, “How did the defences at the prison fail to prevent the attack? How many inmates were in the facility? How many of them can you account for? How many personnel did you have on duty? How many of them were armed? Were there guards on the watchtower? What did they do? Does the CCTV work?” Smart Nollywood actor this was!
After effectively performing his cast role, as they say in Shakespearean theatre lingo, Buhari exeunted. Then came unto the scene another of the cast, Garba Shehu. Untutored, this cast immediately provided a poetic enjambment to this inchoate poem of sorrow. This is a cast who always provides comedic relief to every of the grief-stricken drama of the presidency. As if one knew that the Abe Shinzo tragedy in Japan would be alluded to by this actor, Shehu, reacting to allegation that by flying directly from a place of mourning to his junket rendezvous, Buhari did worse than Nero who fiddled while Rome burnt, he said that, not embarking on the trip by Buhari would have meant that government should stop working. No nation stops working because they faced terrorist threats, Shehu said in a quote that sounded like an inspirational talk to a crowd at the graveyard. “To cancel the trip to Senegal would mean that the terrorists are successful in calling the shots, something that no responsible government in the world will allow”, Shehu said so glibly.
Not long after Buhari departed to play his Nero flute, dramatic ironies began to appear in the melancholic drama at Kuje. First was a cast whose lines became a dramatic disjuncture from the whole script. Ahmad Lawan, President of the Senate, said he saw the Kuje snake hiding its hands within its belly. On a visit to the Medium Security Custodial Centre, Lawan said such cataclysmic and huge attack, without a pushback, could only have been made possible with insider collaboration. Similarly, the man in whose hands lies the operations of the prison, Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, while leading his team from the ministry to the custodial centre, shockingly demurred from this well-written script of the presidency. In his usually simulated stoicism, the minister revealed that what happened in Kuje was mysterious and benumbing, so much that he was not ready to disclose its awful details in public. He said he was disappointed by the effete defence of the platoon of the Nigerian Army, Nigeria Police Force, officers of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence (NSCD) and armed officers of the Nigerian Correctional Service, who were armed with sophisticated weapons deployed to the centre who turned their backs while the shelling lasted. As we speak, from Buhari, to the National Security Adviser, the Minister of Interior, to even the Chief of Army Staff, no one has resigned their appointment.
Like many of the Buhari administration’s puerile attempt to hide behind a finger, the raison d’etre of this national embarrassment has since been a subject of discourse on the streets of Nigeria. As they say in street lingo, Nigerians have concluded that the closet burial that Buhari gave his secretly interred body has its legs jutting out for all to see. The Kuje attack, to Nigerians, is the final denouement of the earlier national calamitous opera of the kidnap of train passengers in Katari on March 28, 2022. On that day, at around 7:45 pm, hundreds of passengers, rumoured to be numbering about 970, were abducted by bandits. Eight persons were killed and 26 others injured by terrorists who bombed their train. Several of them were whisked into the bush by the daredevil bandits. Over 150 passengers were declared missing in the encounter.
Negotiations then began between the Federal Government and the terrorists. To rev up the importance of the negotiation, the terrorists released a video that went viral of the abducted passengers sitting under a tree in an unknown location. Media reports claimed that the terrorists demanded the release of their sponsors and commanders in the custody of the Nigerian government as exchange for the abducted victims. This was not the first time the Buhari government would exchange insurgent commanders with abductees. Some months ago when it did, their release paved way for a rev of the insurgency.
Street rationalization cobbled the strands of the Kuje attack together, especially the irresistance of state-funded security operatives to the calamitous Kuje attack. It came to the conclusion that the effeminate, terrorists-sympathetic government of a retired General of the Nigerian Armed Forces, Muhammadu Buhari, unable to rescue its people, agreed with the terrorists that it would feign engagement with other things while the attacks on the Kuje centre was going on. The question then became, what kind of unequal equation would ensure that a government is unable to rescue its people from terrorists while terrorists brazed all odds to rescue their people from the hands of government?
Though it is a route often taken by pacifist and sissy governments, you could say that the Buhari administration, in this equation of what to do with the abducted Nigerians by the terrorists, was before the devil and the deep blue sea. However, the larger indication of the Kuje attack is that terrorists are on the verge of overrunning Nigeria. And Buhari doesn’t care, so far as it is his family members that are doing so. A revelation was made a few years ago that terrorists were all over the Abuja seat of power.
When Buhari was being voted into office in 2015, it was on the understanding that a military General, who had risen to the rank of a Major General, was the right person to shell out the insurgents from their base. However, we miscalculated in not realizing the terrorism-baiting inclination and persuasion of the man we were voting into office. At the end of the day, Nigerians became the proverbial farmer who knew that his new farmland was under the grips of squirrels but stubbornly went ahead to make it a plantation of groundnuts. Shouldn’t he have himself to blame as squirrels devoured his harvests?
A very daringly frightening collation of ten examples of General Buhari’s alleged romance with or terrorism-baiting moves was compiled in a viral post last week on the social media. It gave an indication that, with the voting of Buhari into office in 2015, Nigerians might not have voted a Boko Haram supporter into office but they didn’t vote a non-terrorism sympathizer as well. Beginning with the famous 2012 news report of Boko Haram reportedly picking General Buhari to moderate its talks with the Goodluck Jonathan government, another June 2, 2013 report quoted to have been said by Buhari urging Jonathan government to “stop killing Boko Haram members” with Buhari equating a military offensive against Boko Haram as anti-North, as well as a report on November 26, 2018 attributed to some South African mercenaries who allegedly claimed that Buhari stopped them from fighting Boko Haram insurgents, the impression on the street about Buhari isn’t that he runs a terrorism disdainful government.
If you now add these to a worrying list of Buhari government’s soft landing for insurgents who have killed thousands of Nigerian soldiers, rendered thousands homeless and created so many IDPs in the north, like a February 11, 2020 report that the FG was “setting our killers free” attributed to Nigerian soldiers over the release of 1400 Boko Haram fighters, a fertile ground would seem to have been excavated for the insinuations that arose after the Kuje prison attack. It is on record that in Buhari’s Nigeria, where citizens are forced to enroll to have National Identification Number before they can have cell phone numbers allocated to them and non-possession of which invalidates phone possession, terrorists and kidnappers flaunt the use of mobile phones in negotiation of ransoms. The allegation is that Boko Haram sympathizers and accomplices envelope the government of Muhammadu Buhari and his telecommunication ministry is its base.
If the Kuje permutation above that is being bandied on Nigerian street is real, did those who midwife the attack think of its consequences for Nigeria? Allowing terrorists a free rein in Kuje, a few kilometers away from Aso Rock, is a grim construct that evokes a very eerie feeling of foreboding. One is that it invests on the terrorists a can-do spirit. Who says they cannot try the presidential palace, using the same derring-do methodology? Second, 64 freed lethal insurgents on the street of the FCT makes Abuja equal to stepping on landmines. What kind of government hands over its people to terror-minded enemies like this?
The Buhari government’s perceived relationship with insurgents is a tragic irony and an embarrassment to the country. It reveals that the government has turned Nigeria into one huge and horrific jokesville. However, as bad as it is, our bother now should not be on Buhari as it is a lost battle. It should be on how, in 2023, this country will not clone this same cataclysmic mistake in electing its leadership. We must elect a president whose sprit is riled by terrorism. Since 1999, the only administration that possessed this national anger and the capacity to rout insurgents was Olusegun Obasanjo’s. Since Obasanjo’s departure, the country has oscillated in the hands of the feeble, the unable to the embracer of terrorism.
May the soul of that lone NSDC operative, the only man who was said to have attempted to repel the attack of the Kuje terrorists, rest in perfect peace.
Re: Nigerian Politicians and the Pestilence of Forged, Missing Certificates
The attention of the family of Dr Abyssinia Akwaeke Nwafor Orizu have been drawn to the above article written by Festus Adedayo on Sunday 3rd of July 2022. We wish to express our shock and dismay on how the name of our father, Dr. Akwaeke Nwafor Orizu, a former Nigerian Senate president and a one time acting president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was audaciously listed among high ranking politicians that have paraded fake degree certificates and titles in the past.
This is a grave injustice in lieu of the fact that the article was about high profile Nigerian politicians with dubious certificates. Our father who was never found guilty of falsifying his academic qualifications; in fact his academic qualifications are public knowledge up till this day, but to our chagrin, he was viciously brought into the picture. The reason for including our father’s name in this kind of piece is surprising to us as a family.
1937, He passed the junior Cambridge Exam through private studies.
1939, January 28, He left Nigeria for the USA to become the 14th West African, 10th Nigerian and eighth Igbo man to go to the USA for studies. He registered with Lincoln University Pennsylvania USA.
In 1940, he left from Lincoln to Ohio State Universit,y where he obtained a BA degree in Political Science and Pre-Law.
In 1944, he enrolled in the Graduate School of Columbia University in New York City, from where he obtained a master’s degree in Public Law and Government.
On May 27, 1948, he was awarded a doctorate degree of Law (LLD) by Lane University Jackson Tennessee for what they called his trenchant presentation of the African point of view in his book, Without Bitterness and his educational mission in Africa.
These schools are there for verification which of the certification did he forge to warrant listing him in this group. For the same reason, a University in America honoured him, and the British Colonial Government imprisoned him.
Concerning the ACAE (American Council of African Education);
It was an international organisation founded by our father and duly incorporated under the Membership Corporation Law of the State of New York on April 17, 1944;
It had some offices in some states in America with its head office at 172 MacDonough St. New York. It also had offices in different branches, with its head office in PortHarcourt, Nigeria.
It operated a POOL system whereby the money paid by a few students and money donated by some public spirited persons were put in one central purse from which was supposed to be sponsored to augment the scholarships. Note that, most of them were indigent and contributed nothing. From this fund, the administrative offices were operated both in America and Nigeria. There was a head office in New York and accommodation for the students.
The success in sending out ten students took the colonial government by surprise. With all the roadblocks and impediments they put in place, Orizu still succeeded in sending out more and more students. The British Colonial Government in Nigeria precipitated an enquiry and several unfounded allegations were uncovered. This resulted in the Colonial office in London, represented by Sir Ivor Cummings and the State Department in Washington represented by Dr. Ruth Sloan, to institute an investigation into the activities of the council. After their investigation, they found out that there was no sign that he was using ACAE funds for himself. Secondly, there were no ACAE student not in a University. They commented that for every four Africans studying in America, there were three ACAE students. Orizu was advised to temporise on the influx of the students as the cost of maintaining them could not be carried by the meagre resources of the council.
Dr Orizu was imprisoned for his political activities. His daredevilry in confronting the colonial government and their stooges.
Let it be noted that the same colonial government that imprisoned him gave him free pardon for his unjust imprisonment by means of a Free Pardon Certificate dated August 30, 1960. In effect, this imprisonment was blotted out of his records.
Let it also be noted that all these students studied and came back to Nigeria to assume important posts in the building of the nation.
Your own Yoruba brother, Professor Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa, a one time Education minister, was a beneficiary of ACAE.
One time governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria whose picture appears on the Nigerian ₦1000 note, not Clement Isong an Efic, was also a beneficiary.
Mr Festus Adedayo, all in a bid to prove that our illustrious patriarch and a great Nigerian patriot deserves a seat in his self determined hall of shame went ahead to paint a grotesque picture of how our dear father went to prison for seven years for academic fraud related issues.
For the purpose of clarity, we want the general public to know it is actually true that in the course of our fathers’ quest to join his fellow nationalists in demanding for our nation’s independence he was imprisoned at the Port Harcourt correctional facility. However, it is imperative we state unequivocally that he went to prison on trumped up charges.
Regrettably, without any form of research to balance the other side of the story, which good journalism is all about, the writer regurgitated the British trumped up charges in the stated article. He stated how our father, through his American council on African Education, defrauded African students of their money, while promising them American education. A good journalist would have added that our father was later vindicated of the said accusations.
On this note, we want to make it categorically clear that ACAE never defrauded any student, rather the body raised money through royalties from our father’s book, Without Bitterness, which was a bestseller in the United States of America, and free will donations, to send many Nigerian students to study in America. For a robust understanding of the activities of ACAE, our father’s autobiography, Liberty of Chains, Africa Must Be Free is in the public domain. The number of students that benefited from the programme is duly listed. How the monies were raised is duly listed. How he went to prison without being charged or allowed to defend himself is also well documented.
Interestingly, how he was eventually released without finishing his term was also well documented in the book. Additionally, how Chief Obafemi Awolowo sent a delegation to visit him in prison, and consequently lobby him to join his Action Group was also clearly stated.
The question is: Will Chief Awolowo who many believe is circumspect about people’s personalities visit a fraud and lobby him to join his party if truly he was a fraud? Nigerian and African histories are replete with many nationalists going to prison on several trumped up charges during the colonial era. A serious researcher will not pore for long before finding out that the real reason our father went to jail was because of the moving speeches he was making against the colonial overlords from his seat as a member of the Eastern House of Parliament.
Just a little research would have helped Mr Festus Adedayo to know that our father was a victim of the political climate of his time just like Awolowo who went to prison for a trumped up treasonable felony. Does Awolowo being imprisoned now make him a dubious character? I guess Mr Adedayo will say ‘no’ to that.
We therefore ask that Mr Festus Adayo makes a public apology for citing our father among his dubious politicians of the past. We also demand that he removes his name from the said article.
We also wish to use this medium to advise journalists and opinion moulders that they should strive to carry out in-depth research on any chosen topic they choose to treat. Some people who were labeled criminals in the past, especially during the colonial era, were termed so in order to demobilise them politically. For anyone to continue with such narrative when there was no evidence to prove their criminality will be a clear case of double tragedy. (PREMIUM TIMES)
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist
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