Opinion: Nigeria’s hostages in law: Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

In 1991, Nigeria was in the full throes of the interminable transition to civil rule programme of General Ibrahim Babangida.

The effort by the regime in 1991 to relocate their terminal date from 1992 to 1993 coincided with a planned meeting in Ibadan, south-west Nigeria, of the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS).

At the time, the security agencies had secreted on major campuses around the country assets masquerading as students. University of Ibadan was no exception. The unsuspecting NANS leadership were taken by surprise when the SSS swooped on their meeting, abducted their entire lot and dumped them at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos with notice to no one. The abductees included then President of the NANS, Mahmud Aminu; their Svengali, Bamidele Aturu, as well as other notables in the movement such as Naseer Kura and Funso Omogbehin.

To make the grab look lawful, the regime issued a back-dated order for their detention under the State Security (Detention of Persons) Decree No. 2 of 1984 effectively making them hostages in law. On a routine professional visit to the Kirikiri Prisons in 1991 to see some other detainees, the then Officer in Charge (O/C) of Records at the facility pulled me aside and whispered about the presence in the prison of the leadership of the NANS. Until then, nearly 10 days after they went missing, no one knew where they were. If Mungo Park had made the journey, the history books would probably have recorded that he “discovered” the then leadership of the NANS in Kirikiri Prisons.

The lead lawyer for such matters then was Kanmi Isola-Osobu, a brilliant Life Bencher who was also lawyer to Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Kanmi’s office was opposite Adekunle Police Station in Yaba, Lagos; beside Dr. Tunji Otegbeye’s hospital. There were no cellular phones. I visited Kanmi’s office on a Monday afternoon to brief him about the students in the hope that he could lead the legal proceedings on their behalf. He was busy. With a familiar glint lighting up his face, Kanmi later informed me that he had been busy lubricating the struggle.

The case went before Nureini Abiodun Kessington, whose court at the time had a deserved reputation as the graveyard of bloated professional egos. With subversive invention, Kessington promptly ended the abduction of the student leaders and ensured that they were released with no substantial interruption to their academic careers or lives thereafter.

Those of us who became active against military rule then were inspired largely by two things. One was the hope that the end of military rule would see the end of such practice; the other was the dutiful resistance of some courageous judges like Kessington. In hindsight we may have been naïve about the nature of power and about the resilience of its methods. A quarter of a century after the end of military rule, the practice continues to prosper. To make matters worse, courageous judges appear to have become extinct.

First, the politicians discovered they could emulate the soldiers. In January 2017, Audu Maikori had been a lawyer for nearly sixteen years. He was a leader in entertainment law in Nigeria and president and Chief Executive Officer of a thriving start-up in the sector known as Chocolate City Group, with interests in radio, television, events, movies, and music. A son of Southern Kaduna, Audu was also a powerful voice and amplifier for the sufferings of the people under the predatory rulership of then Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai.

On or around 17 February 2017, police officers from the Kaduna State Command of the Nigeria Police Force abducted Audu from Lagos and embarked on a cross-country dash with him; first to Abuja where he was detained in the police cell in Asokoro. The following day they ferried him to Kaduna for further detention. After two days of detention, the police in Kaduna granted him bail.

It was in Kaduna that Audu discovered that his abduction was in connection with a post on his twitter feed about crisis in Southern Kaduna. A fortnight after Audu’s release on bail, then governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai while headlining the Social Media Week in Lagos on 4 March, promised that he was “trying to link the dates of [Audu’s tweets] to attacks that may have happened the next day on Fulanis and if we are able to establish that causation,…. we know what it means.” Under his orders, the police snatched Audu again and this time detained him in nasty conditions in the State Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). He had become a hostage in law.

Audu subsequently sued el-Rufai and the Police. On 27 October 2017, John Tsoho, then a judge of the Federal High Court, issued a judgment invalidating Audu’s abduction from Lagos. The judge held that “a warrant of arrest issued by a Magistrate in Kaduna was not valid for execution in Laos, except and until endorsed by a court in Lagos. Not even a warrant issued by a State High Court can be validly executed in another State without endorsement by a competent court within the State where it is to be executed.” He awarded N40 million in damages against Governor el-Rufai. After the Court of Appeal reaffirmed the essence of the judgment by the Federal High Court, el-Rufai appealed to the Supreme Court to assert his right to abduct Nigerian citizens at will and hold them as his own hostages in law.

Two years later, judges and magistrates invented jurisprudence to ground the practice of hostage taking through law. Unlike in Audu’s case, the police officers who abducted Steven Kefason from Port Harcourt on the orders of Nasir el-Rufai in May 2019 could not even be bothered with a warrant. After snatching Steven, they secreted him in a cell in Mini Koro, Rivers State overnight before ferrying him by road in a brutal ride to Kaduna. Over three days, they denied him food, access to communication or personal sanitation.

In Kaduna, Steven was interrogated in equally brutal conditions under the personal supervision of the Governor’s legal adviser. The reason for the abduction – it turned out – was a tweet by Steven around 20 April 2019 in which he said that “while over 12k Kajuru IDPs are living in a terrible condition, their LG Chairman, Cafra Caino, was hosting his old school mates to a birthday party at Kajuru Castle….” The facts were not in dispute but el-Rufai nevertheless instructed the abduction of Steven on charges of incitement and injurious falsehood. One month after Steven’s initial abduction, the Magistrate in Kaduna denied him bail on 20 June 2019 because, according to the Magistrate, “while on bail, [he] further made social media posts further insulting the person of the Governor and that of the Chairman of Kaduna and Kajuru LGAs respectively.”

On 27 February 2020, Peter Mallong, a judge of the Federal High Court in Kaduna, denied Steven’s request for judicial review of his abduction and the decision of the Magistrate claiming, in an extraordinary travesty of jurisprudence that he was bound by the decision of the Magistrate to deny bail because the issues were the same and the parties were largely the same. Following his abduction, Steven suffered as hostage in law for over six months with no redress and came close to losing his life. The injustice of the judgment cried out to the Heavens for redress.

In July 2023, Peter Mallong died at 60.

Those who wonder how the country ended up with the utterly shameful charade being orchestrated in a squalid courtroom in Ekiti in the case of Dele Farotimi have Peter Mallong to thank for having written the manual on judicial enablement of the practice of rendering citizens into hostages in law. This narrative has wider ramifications.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]