Ponder the following exchange inside the Justice Oputa Panel on Human Rights Abuses, 1999:
Sgt. Rogers: I have participated in three operations.
Male Panel Member: Human beings were killed in those operations.
Sgt. Rogers: Only one person.
Male Panel member: What about the other two?
Sgt. Rogers: Those were Alex Ibru and Abraham Adesanya
Male Panel Member: So Mustapha was lying?
Sgt. Rogers: It takes more than the spirit of a man to accept such responsibility…….
Female Panel Member: You accepted a while ago that you were involved in three operations and only one person died. You did not tell us who that person was.
A huge sigh from the audience, an expression of disgust and outrage, engulfed the panel hall. It was disgust about the gruesome murder of an innocent woman. It was indignation that the death was sponsored by her nation which she loved and cared for. It was outrage that the killers had been free for at least three years and were inside that hall. It was fury about what Kudirat’s assassination and the search for justice through our courts tells us about our system of justice.
Twenty five years ago today, in broad daylight on June 4, 1996, a point-blank shot in the head snuffed life out of Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, wife of Chief M. K. O. Abiola, winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. She was a loving mother, successful business woman, and democracy activist. She was a strong pillar of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) which was engaged in a fierce struggle for the restoration of democracy in general and, in particular, the June 12 presidential mandate which had been unceremoniously and unjustly annulled by the Babangida military administration.
At the Oputa Panel, Sergeant Barnabas Jabila Mshiela (aka Sgt. Rogers) an operative of the Strike Force based in the Presidency during the Abacha military regime, confessed publicly to the killing. He also implicated the former Chief Security Officer (CSO) to the regime, Major Al-Mustapha, Mohammed Abacha, and others. Al-Mustapha and his co-defendants also participated in the Oputa proceedings.
In its effort to bring Kudirat’s killers to justice, Lagos State Ministry of Justice took over the case and charged the defendants to court in 2000. Sgt. Rogers confessed again before Justice Ade Alabi, repeating his statement at the Oputa Panel that he did it on the order of Major Hamza Al-Mustapha who gave him the guns for the operation. In other words, he was only an obedient servant.
But it wasn’t only Mustapha. Rogers also implicated Lateef Sofolahan who allegedly provided information about the victim’s movement and Mohammed Abacha who, according to him, witnessed the exchange and provided the car and the driver for the job. In a separate case against Mohammed Abacha, which ended up at the Supreme Court, these allegations by Sgt. Rogers were tendered unchallenged. But by a 4-1 majority decision, the apex court found Abacha not guilty.
What is important for my focus here is not the “not guilty” verdict in favor of Mohammed Abacha. Rather, it is what the Supreme Court accepted as facts of the case in 2002:
- Mohammed Abacha visited Al Mustapha. He saw Al Mustapha whispering to Sgt. Rogers. But he didn’t know what was discussed.
- Mohammed Abacha saw two guns taken out of a bag and handed over to Sgt. Rogers.
- Al Mustapha was Chief Security Officer (CSO) and Sgt. Rogers was under him.
- Katako (Mohammed Abacha’s driver) drove Sgt. Rogers and others to the scene of the operation in Mohammed Abacha’s car.
- Sgt. Rogers fired the shot that killed Alhaja Kudirat Abiola.
In an article for the Premium Times in 2013, Femi Falana (SAN) observed that all the judges on the panel of the apex court “made similar profound findings based on the proof of evidence before them.” Furthermore, the dissenting Justice Ejiwunmi (late) quoted by Falana affirmed that “there was evidence that the Appellant (Mohammed Abacha) allowed his driver Mohammed Katako to drive Rogers, and that the said Rogers fired and killed Kudirat while being driven by Mohammed Katako. The Appellant (Mohammed Abacha) had seen Al Mustapha hand over machine guns to Rogers and his boys.” In other words, though the court decided 4-1 in favor of Mohammed Abacha, the facts of the case were not in dispute between the dissenting Justice and the majority.
Now, the Mohammed Abacha acquittal is not my focus. But it highlights for me what is wrong with our system of justice especially with regard to the handling of the case against Al Mustapha and the search for justice for Kudirat Abiola.
As we know, Al Mustapha’s case also went through twists and turns until it culminated in acquittal at the Court of Appeal. Sgt. Rogers had appeared before the Justice Oputa panel in 2001. In a widely circulated video of his evidence before that panel, he confessed to firing the shot that killed Kudirat Abiola on the orders of Al Mustapha. At the same proceeding, Al Mustapha went off on a different mission. He focused on the post-Abacha transition to accuse Abdulsalam Abubakar of all kinds of crimes.
Al Mustapha played the victim. But he and other defendants had also perfected a strategy of delay and distraction to frustrate the proceeding and ultimately justice. Thus, what began as a straightforward case of conspiracy and murder, with a heavy weight of evidence, dragged on for more than ten years due to defence tactics. Sgt. Rogers retracted his statements against Al Mustapha and others, claiming that prosecution had influenced his confessions. And while the trial judge Mojisola Dada saw through the machinations, refused to acknowledge the retraction, and found Al Mustapha and others guilty of the murder of Kudirat, the Appeal Court threw out her judgment and dismissed the case against the defendants on grounds of witness self-contradiction.
What I find stunning is that the Appellate Court wasn’t guided by the same principle that the trial court had followed. First, as Falana observed, there had been many Appeal Court cases that affirm the right of a trial judge to reject statement retraction by witness provided the judge is persuaded of the truth of the original statement.
But, second, in the Mohammed Abacha case decided by the Supreme Court in 2002 as observed above, the Apex Court had accepted the evidence of Sgt. Rogers and other prosecution witnesses even though the Court majority had inferred a conclusion of not guilty despite affirming the evidence. If the Supreme Court thus affirmed the evidence in 2002, shouldn’t this be a reference point for the Appeal Court in 2013? Will we ever have an answer to this question?
Perhaps. In 2017, after a long hiatus, Lagos State approached the Supreme Court asking it to set aside the ruling of the Appeal Court and convict Al Mustapha for the murder of Kudirat Abiola. Perhaps, then, we can expect the Court to go back and confirm the veracity of the evidence it had accepted as facts in 2002.
What about the confessed killer, Sgt. Rogers and his accomplices? Before the Oputa Panel, Rogers had declared himself a born-again Christian with more than “the spirit of a man.” But at the Appeal Court, that spirit apparently left him, and was replaced by a satanic lying spirit. Will he ever pay for his crime?
Does the arc of the legal universe tend toward justice as that of the moral universe does? How is it that a family still hasn’t secured justice for their loved one after twenty-five years, even with a public confession by the culprit? If we cannot achieve justice in this case, how can we ever hope to achieve it in other cases without confession? I am thinking here of Chief Bola Ige, Dr. Marshall Harry, Chief Ogbonaiya Uche, Ayo Daramola, Funsho Williams, Isyaku Muhammed, and others too numerous to mention.
Kudirat Abiola fought for democracy, inspiring millions of women and youth. 25 years after, we can honor her memory by selflessly doing our part to advance her cause and ensuring that her assailants are brought to justice.
(The Nation)
