Al-Mustapha: the canary’s song this time  By Mohammed Haruna   Newsdiaryonline Tue Aug 23,2011

In its edition of December 4, 2000, The Comet, The Nation’s forerunner, published an editorial which seemed to have endorsed the rather theatrical testimony by Major Hamza al-Mustapha, the Chief Security Officer of the late Head of State, General Sani Abacha, before the Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission President Olusegun Obasanjo had set up in1999 chaired by retired Supreme Court justice, Okwudifu Oputa, to investigate human rights abuse under the military regimes that had ruled the country up until then.  

That editorial must have resonated well with public opinion in the South-West, not only on account of the newspaper’s ownership and control, but also because its position tallied with widespread suspicion in the region and elsewhere that there was some truth in al-Mustapha’s claims before the Oputa panel that Chief MKO Abiola, the presumed winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election who died on July 7, 1999 after about four years in detention, was murdered, presumably to kill and bury demands for the restoration of his mandate. “June 12” had been annulled by military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, General Abacha’s military predecessor. Abacha who had died mysteriously inside the Aso Villa, al-Mustapha also claimed, had been murdered.

Chief Abiola died shortly after a visit by two senior American officials, its former ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Thomas Pickering, and an under-secretary of state, Ms. Susan Rice, in company of Ambassador Baba Gana Kingibe, among other things, Chief Abiola’s running mate in the 1993 presidential election, and Alhaji Gidado Idris, then Secretary to the Government of the Federation. Abiola was served tea by the Americans after they had requested Kingibe and Gidado to allow them private audience with Abiola, a request that the two obliged. Abiola suddenly took ill after drinking his tea and was rushed from Aguda House, the presidential guest house where he had been moved to for the meeting, to the presidential Aso Clinic. He died shortly thereafter.

The reader will recall that in al-Mustapha’s rather theatrical testimony before Oputa, he talked about how teacups with false bottoms must have been used to poison Abiola. The reader will also recall how he placed the blame on the man’s death squarely on the shoulders of General Abdulsalami Abubakar, the head of state under whose watch Abiola died.

The public, especially in the South-West, Abiola’s region, seemed to have been regaled by al-Mustapha’s theatricals. This much was obvious from the editorial of The Comet in question. “Al-Mustapha: Let the ‘canary’ sing publicly,” was the title of the editorial.

“Now that somebody who should know has confirmed our worst fears,” The Comet said in the opening paragraph of the editorial, “Nigerians deserve to hear everything from Mustapha since he has himself, under oath promised to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. He should be allowed to tell his version of the events and if he incriminates anybody or groups of persons, they too should have their days at the Oputa Commission.”

The newspaper concluded its roughly 21 inch editorial by insisting the State should reject al-Mustapha’s request, for his own safety and security, to tell the rest of his story to the commission in camera. “The State,” it said, “must allow al-Mustapha to say all that he wants to say, both lies and truth. This ‘canary’ must be allowed to sing. This is the only way to heal the land.” As such, the newspaper said, al-Mustapha deserved “maximum protection” to tell his story in public.

For the second time since his Oputa testimony about a dozen years ago, al-Mustapha has been singing his song about who killed Abacha and Abiola all over again. His encore begun early this month when he opened his defence in his prosecution for the murder of Alhaja Kudirat, Abiola’s then most senior wife. This time, however, the ‘canary’ did not stop at accusing General Abubakar of the murder of Abacha and Abiola. He  went on to accuse the general of bribing the leadership of the Pan-Yoruba cultural group, Afenifere – more specifically the late Senator Abraham Adesanya and the late Chief Bola Ige – with unspecified but huge sums of money not only to sell out on “June 12”, but also to keep quiet on the sudden and mysterious death of Abiola.

Predictably all hell has been let loose since. With the notable, but not so inexplicable, exception of Ganiyu Adams, the commander-in-chief of Odua Peoples’ Congress, the Yoruba ethnic militia, virtually all those who had hailed al-Mustapha for his testimony before Oputa twelve years ago now want him crucified for the unpardonable sin of lying against Yoruba leadership, especially the dead. (Ganiyu Adams has been consistent in his charge that the Yoruba leadership had long sold out on “June 12” for material consideration and, perhaps for this reason, there had been no love lost between him and the late Adesanya.)

Al-Mustapha - and Adams - would not be  the only one to have accused the Yoruba leadership of selling out on “June 12”. Long before him the Senate president, David Mark, had done so in his famous interview with Newswatch which the newsmagazine ran as the cover story of its April 11, 1994 edition and for which it suffered a ban.

Abacha’s coup against the short-lived Interim National Government of Chief Earnest Shonekan, Mark said in the interview, was, in reality “not a coup against the ING but as it turned out it was a coup against democracy, supported and nourished by politicians who behave like chameleons. Surprisingly it was Abiola’s close associates who were urging Abacha to take over. They dined with Abiola in the afternoon but in the night urged Abacha to seize power and forget June 12. I never believed human beings could be so treacherous, unprincipled and shameless.”

The obvious difference between al-Mustapha and the others is that he has now named names and specified the price.

Strangely those who have now turned round to ridicule al-Mustapha’s old song as fairytales by the moonlight still seem to believe it has a ring of truth as far as it concerns General Abubakar. Apparently the irony of their double standards seems lost on them.

In his column last Tuesday my good friend and ace columnist with The Nation, Dr. Olatunji Dare, for example, said it was up to me as the former head of state’s chief press secretary, to respond to al-Mustapha’s charges “that Abubakar withdrew large deposits from the national exchequer for private use on taking power” even though he had himself described al-Mustapha’s allegations in court as “fact-free effusions” in the same piece.

The fact was that al-Mustapha did not accuse my former boss of withdrawing huge sums from the treasury “for private use.” His allegation was that the general used the monies to bribe some Afenifere chieftains. If Dare believed, as he obviously did from the opprobrium he poured on al-Mustapha over his claims, that the former Abacha chief security officer was an inveterate liar why should anyone contemplate for one moment that he was telling the truth in the case of my former boss? Is it because, as Dare said, the late veteran journalist, Malam Abidina Coomassie, whom al-Mustapha also accused General Abubakar of killing, had made similar allegations and had dared the general to sue him and he had declined?

Surely Dare should know that if declining to sue for libel is sufficient proof  that an allegation against someone is  true then only God knows how many people in this country would have stood guilty in law as charged in the court of public opinion.

If Dare was inclined to be fair-minded about al-Mustapha’s allegations of treasury looting against General Abdulsalami, he would have noted that virtually all the monies in question that were withdrawn from the Central Bank of Nigeria in July 1998 were returned in September as was acknowledged by the CBN itself in its letter dated September 17, 1998.

In any case the columnist did not have to drag me into the controversy. I was not General Abdulsalami’s chief press secretary when all this happened. My very senior colleague, Chief David Atta, was and he is still alive as far as I know. I took over from him in October, at least two months after the withdrawal in question.

However, I do not, of course, have to be General Abdulsalami’s spokesman to see that al-Mustapha is a desperate man clutching at a straw. The mystery and sequential deaths of Abacha and Abiola might make it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone not to believe the two were murdered. But nothing could be more unfair than to accuse Abubakar of responsibility for the deaths simply because they happened under his charge.

It was common knowledge that as Abacha’s Chief of Defence Staff, he was outside the power loop which al-Mustapha prided himself with presiding over. Indeed, he was to have been sacked on the very day he took over as head of state. And both himself, the Army chief, General Ishaya Bamaiyi, were kept in the dark, indeed in undeclared detention within the Villa by al-Mustapha’s cabal, for hours after the man died. Throughout their isolation no one suggested to them that they were suspected of complicity in the death of Abacha. In any case, it is not logical that Abubakar would have been chosen to succeed Abacha if there was the slightest suspicion that he had a hand in his predecessor’s death.

As for Abiola’s death it is, as I’ve said on these pages on May 16, 2001 and again on October 31, 2007, an irony that the man whose first act in coming to power in1998 was to arrange for Abiola’s family and political associates, not to mention senior American officials, to see the prisoner of conscience in readiness for his release would be the one accused of killing him.

The fact is that the particulars of al-Mustapha’s allegations against both the Afenifere leadership and General Abubakar do not stand close examination, precisely because he imagines himself a victim of a grand conspiracy to keep him in jail all these 12 years since his trial begun over the murder of Alhaja Kudirat, Abiola’s wife.

But this is a subject matter of another day.

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 Babangida, the man who re-engineered Nigeria- By Mohammed Haruna

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