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“How My Father’s Jailer Can Offer Nigeria A Fresh Start” very engaging, although it dredged up some very painful memories. It took me down the...
memory lane; indeed, it was a vivid reminder of an awful road on which l, and others like Audu Ogbeh, now an ardent Buhari backer, travelled. It was my painful duty as the
“Captain” of the detainees, to receive Lola’s father, Tinuoye Shoneyin, an engineer, into the Abeokuta prison and to make him as comfortable as possible in the extremely difficult prison environment, providing him with clothes, a towel and toiletries. Shoneyin had, as a matter of courtesy, responded to the invitation of the government of Ogun State, then led by Col Oladipo Diya, who later became the deputy to Gen. Sani Abacha(the late Head of State), to answer some questions and had expected to be back home that evening. He was not to return home for six months!
Lola’s account dwelt on the torture that she (at such a young age) and her family had to endure and the telling effect of such an experience on the family. Many detainees never recovered from the torture and the injustice that this experience represented. In many cases, mine included, there was no accusation, much less a charge. One slight misstatement in Lola’s account was that the detention was at the behest of Col. Tunde Idiagbon, the erstwhile deputy to Gen Buhari. I doubt if that is quite true. The problem with autocracy is that once the atmosphere has been established, or allowed by the leader, many tin gods at the various levels of the strata will for any number of reasons, exploit the situation for the purpose of settling personal and petty scores, including disputations over girlfriends! So, in the case of Lola’s father, the local despot at the time was Col Oladipo Diya, who was mean, brutal and sadistic and locked up as many people as he wanted, for good, bad or sometimes no reason at all. He flogged civil servants for lateness, taxed the people on every imaginable score, and signed for nearly 20 people who had been sentenced to death (none of whom his predecessor permitted to be killed), to be executed by hanging in one day. He revelled in making people suffer wherewith he was promptly given the name of “Kunya” (meaning tormentor which was the direct opposite of what his name “Diya” means in Yoruba language. He was, indeed, the harbinger of torment and suffering. He, it was who saw a ghost in every situation. If the sun was too bright, he blamed it on the dethroned politicians. He was a cruel task-master, who tried irrationally to get water out of stone. At a stage he rounded up contractors who had done various jobs for the state government and dictated that they should either pay certain arbitrary fines or be locked up in prison.
In jail for 18 months
I was in the gulag for 18 months, 16 of which I spent in the Abeokuta prison. Prior to this time, I had presided over three ministries in four years and three months. There was never an accusation or a charge of any sort against me. His investigators were surprised at how clean my affairs were and how I could succinctly explain every transaction I was involved in, including providing photocopies of cheques that even pre-dated my appointment. “Were you expecting that this type of thing would happen? Why did you leave a thriving law practice for a job like this?” they asked me repeatedly. Therein lies the dilemma of our country that needs good people to preside over its affairs, yet castigates the few who dare to get in the fray. “The punishment for the wise, who refuse to take part in the government of their people,” said a Greek philosopher, “is to be ruled by fools.”
I came to understand that Diya’s grouse with me was that I was so close to the late Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, my governor, and that there was no way of getting Onabanjo without getting Adefulu, his political son and confidant! “Onabanjo did nothing Adefulu did not know of,” Diya was reported to have said repeatedly. So l had to be purged! Oluokun, the head of state security, himself a dastardly character, was Diya’s hatchet man. When all efforts at intimidation and harassment failed, they changed tactics and tried to recruit me as an informant against the late Onabanjo. It soon became clear to them however, that I was not going to be party to their pursuit of crass injustice and motive hunting. I asked Oluokun pointedly to cock his gun and shoot and kill me because under no circumstances would I be part of such villainy. In any case, unless I wanted to become a liar, such incriminating evidence did not exist except in the figment of Diya’s convoluted imagination. The late Onabanjo was the quintessential leader – open, fair-minded, as straight as a spoke and a great lover of the people; a man who, to this day, several years after his demise, I still hold in the highest regard.
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