Daily Independent Online.
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Friday, August 13, 2004.
The ‘abduction’ of Ibori
By MajiriOghene Bob
My interest in and focus on the trial of the Governor
of Delta State as an ex-con and supposed offender had been a passing one. For
me, I thought that it was just the sleaze and the mud that politicians fling
around to accumulate or garner points to discredit an opponent. Watchers of the
American presidential race must have noticed that most of what John Kerry does
today is attack the achievements and perceived non-achievements of the Bush
administration. If my naïve political arithmetic and radar is
alright, it is my conviction that Kerry would lose the American presidential race if he continues to
engage in what logicians refer to as argumentum ad hominem- an attack on the person rather
than on the person’s ideas
and ideals. For those of us who
are privileged now to present our arguments in the court of public opinion, and
in the safety and comfort of our privacy, our stand should be a siddon look
stand: my knowledge of the rudiments of law says that a person is presumed
innocent until the law damns him or her. But beyond this passing interest in the trial of a governor
known as the champion for the call of a control of the inherent resources and
natural endowment of all states in
Nigeria, there is a certain curiosity on my part to find out what would
actually happen at the end. Would the political vampires who hound the governor
eventually get to sink their fangs in his neck and drink his blood? As a student of literature and of the
arts, I have found out that it is possible to guess what the end of a tale will
turn out before the narrative is given a logical or illogical conclusion. In
this case, I have not been able to place the pieces in the
jigsaw puzzle and by and by, the intrigue and the tension the trial has generated
promotes stimulating suspense for
me.
It is mostly to be abreast of the events as they unfold that I tune to NTA network news to catch the
latest on the Ibori odyssey. And that is why I have decided no longer to
maintain a distance but get a
little involved and let others see that there is another dimension to this panorama from the spectrum of the
calumny that is at the heart of this
accusation. On set or in the court of this litigation against Ibori, the
cameraman had shown a tendency to highlight the two sides as best as possible
by placing in a spotlight, the protagonists of this case as against the
antagonists. I have never seen Ibori in court and I guess this is because our
holy political document says he should not be there. But on two occasions now,
the cameraman lets his camera fall on the profile of one of Ibori’s
antagonists and I remember the villain now so well as I think any prisoner in
Dachau ( one of Hitler’s concentration camps where Jews were boiled), would recognize Hitler any day.
My father used to tell me that those who must behead
a gorilla must also remember that they too have a head that resembles the head
of an urangutang.
Mike Igini became the student union leader of the University of Benin in 1992
or 1993, exactly the same way that Chris Ngige became the governor of Anambra
State. He had a political godfather who was not academically a
godfather and sage. The young godfather was unable to pass certain
courses in my department in English in
Uniben even up to his final
year as a law student. One fateful morning, Mike Igini and a group who posed as
people who were concerned about the spate of failures that law students who
take electives from my department recorded, abducted the lecturer in question.
They took him somewhere and made him sit on the bare floor where Igini towered
over him like Lucifer, as the trial judge, the prosecuting counsel and court
bailiff. This incident made Uniben standstill for a whole week.
A lot of us were appalled and our pride wounded that
a very well respected lecturer from our department could be brought so low by
one who hardly knew how to cross his t’s and dot his i’s. Yes, the
man was strict and strictness was the injection that we needed if we were to
save our educational sector from the morass and turpitude that had infected
it. In the Nigerian law school of
that year, a distinguished teacher in that school also complained very bitterly that law
students, who were supposed to have a semi-mastery of the English language are
unable to spell the word, ‘chaos’, preferring to have the cake as
kahos and eat it.
If you visit the library of the Nigerian Observer of that year, you may probably come
across a piece with the title,
‘The Abduction of Afejuku’. In it, I expressed my surprise that a
leader of the student union
government of a citadel of learning as Great Uniben! could have the effrontery
to kidnap a lecturer mostly because his political godfather was unable to spell well and pass his
exams. I called for his expulsion
from Uniben. Mike Igini was not expelled and I guess this was because the
authorities wanted a political settlement of the matter. The said political
godfather of the man who abducted our lecturer was eased out of the school with
a pass in English and the school
once more settled down to normal academic business. Less than a month after
this, students in tertiary institutions all over Nigeria began to blaze the
Igini trail: if they did not abduct a lecturer, they killed or maimed him.
One of the things that has struck me from this
scenario is that it has really gone down to prove that the university is a
microcosm of our macrocosm, our larger political environment. Those who
abducted their lecturers while undergraduates are still in the business of
abducting their governors and getting paid for it. It seems to have fallen into
place for me: Igini, now in the camp of Ibori’s political enemies has polished the bring-down bogey
syndrome that Emeka Omeruah said was the business of journalists during the
Buhari regime.
And all the people that he has sought to pull down
incidentally happen to be people from his backyard: from his lecturer, to the
leadership of his Alumni Association in Lagos in 1995 and now , the Governor of
his State. Anybody who is ignorant
of his antecedents may mistake him for a crusader out for justice and prudence
and good governance. But we know better now, don’t we? The likes of this
fellow are the political vampires and opportunists who traverse the length and breadth of
Nigeria to feed on people who seem to have an Achilles heel and gain a
promotion based on the nocturnal constitution of the dark kingdom. I hope he does not succeed with Ibori: the
lecturer he abducted is still there in Uniben. The association he also
abandoned because he could not manipulate is also still there.
