Mr. Madu Onuorah, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Globalupfront Newspapers (GUN) has been in the news in the last few days, after he was abducted from his residence in Abuja by gun-wielding police officers. In an interview after he was released (on bail), he narrates the nasty experiences he and his family went through in the hands of policemen. Theexcerpts:
It is good you are back and have rejoined your family. Can you tell us exactly what happened and how it all began?
I came back early from office and was working at home. WhileI was working on some stories I heard a bang on the gate of my house and later commotion. The people that came in, a man and a woman in mufti, met my 10-year old daughter that opened the gate. I then started hearing my wife’s voice and as the voice was getting louder, I came to the balcony to look and I asked them what was happening and they said I am the one they were looking for.
I came down, I was on my boxer and singlet. On my coming down, I asked them to let me pick my clothes. The moment I came, I saw about 10 heavily-armed persons who were in mufti, none of them was in uniform, just that they were wearing shirts written “anti-kidnapping” and they were shouting, “we are policemen, we are policemen, follow us, follow us”.
And I asked them, “follow you to where?” “We are going to the police station,” they responded very harshly.
I asked, “Can I go and change my dress?” They flatly refused flatly, “you are going nowhere, you are not changing anything.” They even refused that I even change from the bathroom slippers I was wearing. I said I needed to take my medical kits and the regular medication I take. Again they retorted: “You are not going anywhere.”
“Can I get toiletries, how long are we staying,”
“You are not taking anything, you are going the way you are.”
“Can I go and get my phones?”
“No! You are not taking any phone! Let us go, let us go! Now they were getting agitated. As I was arguing with them, they were cocking guns on me. It was a horrible scene; real abduction!
The first time I experienced this kind of thing was on 6th of March, 1998 after the re-instatement of Tijjan Kabba (former President) of Sierra Leone. As a Defence Correspondent, General Sani Abacha came in then, we moved into our hotels in Liberia because Charles Taylor was anti-Tijjan Kabba, his forces invaded our hotel and surrounded us and kidnapped two of my colleagues, that was the same thing that happened in my house last week Wednesday.
That was what was going on in my head and I remembered what then Defence Spokesperson, General Godwin Ukpo told us: “when in such situations, go down, calm down, don’t react” and it was ringing on my head. That moment I remembered that, that day, they kidnapped my colleagues, Chris Agbambu and the late Francis Aigbe. Because of that incident, they had to relocate us to the Officers’ Mess, way inside the town in a secure area so that our aircraft would come before we depart. So, that was the kind of thing that happened in my house, in Abuja, like a war-front and in the presence of my children, in the presence of my wife. They didn’t check the delicate nature of my family background, that it is not certain things you exhibit before a man’s family.
They exhibited the highest level of unprofessionalism in my house and I quietly followed them. But I insisted that I will have my phone, we were already inside the car, almost leaving when my wife brought my phone. Immediately it was brought, they grabbed it and seized the phone from my wife and I never saw the phone again until the next day, Thursday.
They took me to the Lugbe Police Station, in Abuja, dumped me there. The head of the unit that came, insisted that I must be put inside the cell. I was inside the cell with common criminals, yahoo-yahoo people.
Later, the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) came and said they should bring me out in the reception area and that was where they left me, took my slippers, I never wore anything all night. I was awake all night feasted on by mosquitoes.
At some minutes to 5 a.m on Thursday, their leader, the one cocking gun on me recklessly and unprofessionally, came in and said, “Onuorah, oya, come lets go, you are wasting our time. I said, where are you taking me to; he said, “you will know when we get there”.
“I remind you that you didn’t tell me why you kept me here,” I ventured.
“We don’t have time for such questions, let’s go, let’s go,” he replied rather arrogantly.
So, I followed them, entered the vehicle, I kept asking them, where are we going; they said, we will tell you when we get there and they never told me anything until we had passed Lokoja in Kogi State and they started getting calls. That was when they gave me my phone to call my wife. And the moment I finished calling my wife and spoke to people inside my house, they said, we asked you to speak with only your wife and you spoke with people in your house. That is not what we want you to do. It was in the process of our going that they now realized that I was a journalist and the accusation was that my case was very serious.
By the way, we were inside a Toyota Sienna. Of course, they came to my house in two Sienna buses, loaded with about ten of them.
When we got to the Lugbe Police Station, only one of them, I learnt, was from Abakaliki (Ebonyi State), where the rest came from, I have no idea.
What was it like driving in the same vehicle with your abductors?
When we moved in the morning, of course it wasn’t an easy ride, riding among enemies, because that was what they termed me and that was I saw them and that is how we arrived in Ebonyi. We arrived in Ebonyi and they kept me somewhere probably until their commander gives them instructions. It was when the Commander came in and was asking me questions, in the presence of all manner of people that I told him that I wanted to speak with him alone, that was when he took me to his office. I spoke to him and he explained that he is not the one that wants me, trying to do PR, he is naturally a good man because he insisted that I must bath in his office, he went and bought toiletries, that I must bath in his office, freshen up. He asked if he could buy any other thing for me and I said, buy nothing, let’s move to Enugu.
When we got to Enugu, it was the OC (officer-in-charge) of Monitoring that we went to his office. The IPO (Investigating Police Officer) started taking statements.
Of course, there was already a surety on ground and a lawyer. You know I asked for my glasses as they were taking me away from my house but they refused, so it was the lawyer that had to read the petition against me to me. I couldn’t read it. Even to write my statement, I couldn’t write it because I didn’t have my reading glasses. I told them, they said I should dictate for the lawyer to write. That was how we did it. And in between them, the OC Monitoring and the CP (Commissioner of Police), Mr. Kanayo Uzuegbu, were communicating and in the end, they released me, almost about 10.30 p.m. Our brother there took me to an hotel and that was where I slept and because the CP requested for us to come in the morning, we were at the office of the OC Monitoring Unit before 7.30a.m.
We saw the Police Commissioner, Mr. Uzuegbu later in the day about 10 a.m.
What transpired there shows that what those people that came to my house did is becoming a new normal in the Police Force because the Police Commissioner told me pointblank when I was explaining the way I was treated, he said, “It is not important how you were treated, what is important is that you were brought here and you should be brought here.”
He added that I was too arrogant when I started explaining to him that if this woman (the Nun) that wrote this petition is not being influenced wrongly or advised wrongly, the best thing to do and which the police should have advised her to do is to file a case of defamation against me.
Did you get any invitation from the Enugu State Police Command or any Police command to come and answer to a petition against you?
Of course, we didn’t get any notice from them, written or verbal from the petitioner or the police. The police never invited me. The police never called me. The police never sent the Abuja police to call me before they decided to mobilize policemen from the Eastern Region of Nigeria to the Federal Capital Territory to treat me like a common criminal. I was like an object to them. So, that was what happened and the Police Commissioner was not mincing words. He said that I deliberately and maliciously defamed the said reverend sister, making himself a court of competent jurisdiction which he is not. And he was telling me that if I go and write anything, he will squeeze me and bring me back here and squeeze me and threatened my surety that if he didn’t bring me, he will also lock him up.
Why would a senior police officer, a whole Commissioner of Police, of that rank, talk like that?
I think there is a gap between either the teaching on fundamental human rights or the ability of some of the police officers to comprehend human rights and I think it is necessary for policemen to understand that they are agents of the Nigerian State and that Nigeria exists because the citizens are, and the police should serve Nigeria and Nigerians.
By what they did in my house and how they treated me up to the time we got to Abakaliki (capital of Ebonyi State), they made themselves above the law because if you are arresting me, you either show me a warrant of arrest or you explain to me what I did or where you are taking me to or read my rights to me. Nothing was done. It was a commando style, it was like Charles Taylor boys (rebels), invading my house.
In my 22 years of covering the Defence and Security sectors in Nigeria, I have never seen a thing like this. I think there lts of lessons, Nigerian policemen need to lean about human rights. They do not understand the gamuts of human rights at all, they have no respect for human rights and some of their officers treat human beings as objects of ridicule, like people that are expendable. It is a very ugly experience.
So, they said a reverend sister wrote to Enugu Police. What did she complain about in the petition?
She was alleging that the facts of the publication were wrong. I told the OC Monitoring Unit and even the IPO, I also told the Police Commissioner before he stopped me, if the reverend sister feels that what I published was wrong, she should have taken me to court for libel or defamation and come to the court and prove that there was no problem in the Mamah family. She should have come to the court to disprove the facts of my story, that they never visited any police station, or that there was no court session or that a reverend father did not come to take the case to settle it out of court or that at the other instance, she was not sacked from the Order of Sisters she belonged to. Those were the facts of the story. She never disputed those ones. Instead, she was saying that I defamed her, which was the point the Police Commissioner kept hammering on. The CP who ordered my arrest showed me no Warrant of arrest or any court order. I’m surprised he could do this in this age and now.
What do you say on the reaction of people to your abduction?
When this drama started, this dangerous drama started, my first worry was about my wife and my children who were so traumatized by the experience of seeing an invasion. The whole front of my family compound was filled with policemen, armed with cocked rifles, ready to shoot. They have never seen a thing like that. I don’t know the example they are setting for children. My children were here, even the smallest ones and they were behaving as if they have no respect for family sanctity, respect for anybody. But I think that my happiness is the total condemnation of this action by Nigerians, by professional groups, by my colleagues, even by some policemen themselves, even though they would not want to be on record. Everybody knows that what they did in my house was uncalled for. It was unnecessary. If they had invited me that I had a case in Enugu, I would have gone there.
I covered Defence for 22 years and nothing would have made me not to honour their invitation. But they deliberately lied that they were looking for me, calling my number, my number was not going through, sending text, text message refused to go, whatsapp message refused to go and all that. They cannot even be intelligent in cooking up an alibi. I think they had an intention of humiliating me as a person and the Nigerian media as a group, because the Police Commissioner kept insisting that no journalist is above the law, that journalists are behaving as if they are a trade union, that they are not supposed to react in a group. I dont know what that means.
So, Nigerians rallied round from all walks of life, family members, professional colleagues, my associates, even those that didn’t know me, from far and near and ensured that their plan failed.
The initial plan they had was to dump me in Ebonyi state. If there was no outcry, they would have dumped me in Ebonyi because there was no record that I went to Ebonyi State or that Ebonyi people were looking for me. It was in the process when the alarm was raised, outcry over the abduction that they decided to call Enugu people to come and pick me up from Abakaliki. So the solidarity was massive and total and I am so grateful to God and so profoundly grateful to everybody.
Now that you are on bail, the case continues?
The police Commissioner was insisting that I should go with the two lawyers and agree and make peace, including my surety. And I told that I am not party to their case and the Police Commissioner was insisting that the next time he would call them to come and brief him on the outcome, that I must be here that my surety must bring me. The major thing is that I am not a party to their family case. If they have an issue with me as a journalist that published the story, they should go straight to court and file a defamation suit against me.
You are out, what next?
The Management of Globalupfront Newspapers will consult our team of lawyers and take a decision on what will be our next line of action.
Credit: Globalupfront Newspaper Online
