Adeyemi Adefulu, a Lagos-
based lawyer who was jailed by
Gen Muhammadu Buhari during
his regime 30 years ago, says
the former head of state remains
the country’s hope for change.
Adefulu, a Member of the
Federal Republic (MFR),
believes Gen Buhari is on a
rescue mission.

Story highlights:
– I was in the gulag for 18
months, 16 of which I spent in
the Abeokuta prison.
– The open and vocal agitation
of many well-meaning citizens,
including Prof Wole Soyinka, for
my release was an act of grace
for which I will forever be
grateful.
– President Jonathan has been
such a disappointment in many
critical areas of our national life.
I found Lola Shoneyin’s piece on
Buhari titled: “How My Father’s
Jailer Can Offer Nigeria A Fresh
Start” very engaging, although it
dredged up some very painful
memories. It took me down the
memory lane; indeed, it was a
vivid reminder of an awful road
on which l, and others like Audu
Ogbeh, now an ardent Buhari
backer, travelled. It was my
painful duty as the “Captain” of
the detainees, to receive Lola’s
father, Tinuoye Shoneyin, an
engineer, into the Abeokuta
prison and to make him as
comfortable as possible in the
extremely difficult prison
environment, providing him with
clothes, a towel and toiletries.
Shoneyin had, as a matter of
courtesy, responded to the
invitation of the government of
Ogun State, then led by Col
Oladipo Diya, who later became
the deputy to Gen. Sani Abacha
(the late Head of State), to
answer some questions and had
expected to be back home that
evening. He was not to return
home for six months!

Lola’s account dwelt on the
torture that she (at such a young
age) and her family had to
endure and the telling effect of
such an experience on the
family. Many detainees never
recovered from the torture and
the injustice that this experience
represented. In many cases,
mine included, there was no
accusation, much less a charge.
One slight misstatement in
Lola’s account was that the
detention was at the behest of
Col. Tunde Idiagbon, the
erstwhile deputy to Gen Buhari.
I doubt if that is quite true. The
problem with autocracy is that
once the atmosphere has been
established, or allowed by the
leader, many tin gods at the
various levels of the strata will
for any number of reasons,
exploit the situation for the
purpose of settling personal and
petty scores, including
disputations over girlfriends!
So, in the case of Lola’s father,
the local despot at the time was
Col Oladipo Diya, who was
mean, brutal and sadistic and
locked up as many people as he
wanted, for good, bad or
sometimes no reason at all. He
flogged civil servants for
lateness, taxed the people on
every imaginable score, and
signed for nearly 20 people who
had been sentenced to death
(none of whom his predecessor
permitted to be killed), to be
executed by hanging in one day.
He revelled in making people
suffer wherewith he was
promptly given the name of
“Kunya” (meaning tormentor
which was the direct opposite of
what his name “Diya” means in
Yoruba language. He was,
indeed, the harbinger of torment
and suffering. He, it was who
saw a ghost in every situation. If
the sun was too bright, he
blamed it on the dethroned
politicians.
He was a cruel task-
master, who tried irrationally to
get water out of stone. At a
stage he rounded up contractors
who had done various jobs for
the state government and
dictated that they should either
pay certain arbitrary fines or be
locked up in prison.

In jail for 18 months

I was in the gulag for 18
months, 16 of which I spent in
the Abeokuta prison. Prior to
this time, I had presided over
three ministries in four years
and three months. There was
never an accusation or a charge
of any sort against me. His
investigators were surprised at
how clean my affairs were and
how I could succinctly explain
every transaction I was involved
in, including providing
photocopies of cheques that
even pre-dated my
appointment. “Were you
expecting that this type of thing
would happen? Why did you
leave a thriving law practice for
a job like this?” they asked me
repeatedly. Therein lies the
dilemma of our country that
needs good people to preside
over its affairs, yet castigates
the few who dare to get in the
fray. “The punishment for the
wise, who refuse to take part in
the government of their people,”
said a Greek philosopher, “is to
be ruled by fools.”
I came to understand that
Diya’s grouse with me was that
I was so close to the late Chief
Olabisi Onabanjo, my governor,
and that there was no way of
getting Onabanjo without
getting Adefulu, his political son
and confidant! “Onabanjo did
nothing Adefulu did not know
of,” Diya was reported to have
said repeatedly. So l had to be
purged! Oluokun, the head of
state security, himself a
dastardly character, was Diya’s
hatchet man. When all efforts at
intimidation and harassment
failed, they changed tactics and
tried to recruit me as an
informant against the late
Onabanjo. It soon became clear
to them however, that I was not
going to be party to their pursuit
of crass injustice and motive
hunting. I asked Oluokun
pointedly to cock his gun and
shoot and kill me because under
no circumstances would I be
part of such villainy. In any
case, unless I wanted to become
a liar, such incriminating
evidence did not exist except in
the figment of Diya’s convoluted
imagination. The late Onabanjo
was the quintessential leader –
open, fair-minded, as straight as
a spoke and a great lover of the
people; a man who, to this day,
several years after his demise, I
still hold in the highest regard.

Time heals

Genevieve Magazine at the time
of my incarceration, my family
was at a more delicate stage
than the Shoneyins, because it
was younger and less endowed.
My first son Adeoye, was just
under 10 years and our last
daughter, Dayo was three
months old. I was 37 years old
at the time of the coup. My
family was subjected to a long
and extremely humiliating
deprivation. It was the unjust
compensation I received for a
job to which I gave the very best
of my life at a very young age
(try as you may, such injustice
never leaves you. The wound
may heal but the scar is there
and sometimes stares you in the
face).
I tried hard to be strong and for
the most part, I was. The
knowledge that I had served
with the very best of my ability
in a job I truly enjoyed, gave me
peace of mind and assurance.
The open and vocal agitation of
many well-meaning citizens,
including Prof Wole Soyinka, for
my release was an act of grace
for which I will forever be
grateful. The only time I broke
down was the day my son,
Adeoye, turned 10. With a
smuggled recorder, I had
recorded a birthday message for
him and his young siblings
admonishing them to be strong
in the knowledge that God was
on our side. After recording the
message, I wept profusely. It
was terrible! My co-prisoners,
including my Deputy Governor,
the late Chief Sesan Soluade,
and the present Emir of Suleija,
Alhaji Anwal Ibrahim, the
erstwhile Governor of Niger
State, and the others, tried hard
to console me. I had been the
strong one, the encourager of the
brethren, but I guess the cup had
become too full and it ran over.

Heheheheehe

Tinibu $200 billion at work

While time heals, the impact of
such injustice endures. It leaves
a telling effect which you carry
for the rest of your life. Ironically,
when I was finally released, I
was in hospital where I had just
undergone an emergency
operation.
Liberty had come at
last but it met me totally broken
and incapacitated.

At my release and after, no one
offered any apology for this
gruesome and very unjust
recompense. Nobody, without
due process, should ever have
the power to visit such
humiliation and injustice on any
human being. The irony of
dictatorship is that a leader can
be so conscientiously wrong in
his crusading mission.
The
Buhari regime was very wrong
in my case as in the case of
several others. I, along with
many others, had come into
office with the purest motive of
service. It was what I had
always wanted to do. I thought
it was my life’s mission and
when the opportunity came I did
the work as if my life depended
on it. I left a lucrative practice to
serve my people. I was totally
accountable, yet I was unfairly
thrown into jail for no just cause
for 18 months!

Our nation’s survival first

That was many years ago and
since I have focused on re-
building my life and raising my
family. I have prayed and tried
hard to forgive my unjust
tormentors but I know that the
scar is there and people like Lola
Shoneyin stroke that weak point
now and again, albeit
unwittingly. Obviously this is
not an experience that can be
wished away because it
evidently affected my being and
changed my life fundamentally.
It makes me appreciate people
like Mandela so much – 26
years on Robben Island (have
you been there?) and he came
out with no bitterness and no
guile! Such men are rare!
Understandably then, it has
taken some effort for me to
embrace Buhari’s candidacy. I
have never voted for him. I did
not even like him. But as my
friend, Audu Ogbeh said to me
once, “so much has gone wrong
with our polity that our
emphasis now must not be on
ourselves but on the survival of
the nation.” I have no doubt he
is right. This is a time when the
overriding interest must be that
of the country. As a student of
history, I know that while
constitutions can be copied and
adopted, in the end every nation
will only learn by its national
experience. The history of many
of the democracies we admire
today is replete with
unimaginable and odious
occurrences that characterised
their development. It is obvious
to me that the trust we reposed
in President Jonathan in 2011
has been wantonly squandered.
The sobering state of our nation
and real politic has made me
take another look at Gen Buhari.
How viable is he for our polity
given the available options? Is
the General the devil he is
portrayed to be, or a victim of
circumstances or a
misunderstood individual?

Jonathan, a disappointment
To me, President Jonathan has
been such a disappointment in
many critical areas of our
national life. There has been
unprecedented violence and
blood-letting under this
administration, which, naively in
my view, treated the Boko
Haram insurgency with kid
gloves and a total lack of
resolve. Today, Boko Haram has
established a formidable force
and has succeeded, before our
very eyes, in changing the map
of Nigeria. The President
appears to have turned deaf
ears to the voices of wisdom
and surrounded himself with
cronies, whose main pre-
occupation is to exploit him.
Some of his spokesmen have
made a virtue of rascality and
turned public relations upside
down. Miscreants, who should
be in jail for their past deeds, are
the ones now threatening that
our collective vote must go a
particular way or there will be
insurrection.

We never heard of “democracy”
at gunpoint till now.
To the discerning, it is clear that
the Boko Haram insurgency has
been employed as a source of
inscrutable abuse, or how else
do we explain a Nigerian private
plane filled with raw US dollars
being impounded abroad? How
many such plane-loads
escaped without being caught is
anybody’s guess, yet our troops
are said to be so ill-equipped
that the insurgents have better
arms. All this, despite the huge
sums that have been voted for
defence under this
administration; one wonders
where all that money went.

Then the massive corruption in
every sphere of public office –
pension funds stuffed into
pillows and mattresses among
others. The disgusting state
pardon for a man, who, before
an incredulous world, broke the
terms to a court order and left
Britain dressed as a woman!
This is not how a leader should
exercise such hallowed
prerogative power. The
President’s conduct sent a
chilling message down the
spine of the polity that
corruption and stealing are the
way to go.

You can add to that the
company of shady men wanted
abroad for all manner of crimes,
including drug offences, who
have been installed in positions
of leadership in the PDP or have
been fielded as senatorial
candidates. The management or
lack of it of our foreign reserves
(which have become totally
depleted) and reports of billions
of missing dollars dominate the
air. Everybody who is working
hard is in trouble. Joblessness
has risen to record levels. The
youths are, justifiably restless
because they have no future in
the present dispensation. The
tales of woe are just endless.
Billions of dollars have
disappeared into petroleum
subsidy, yet, even the cost of
kerosene, the poor man’s fuel, is
at an all-time high. It is the oil
sheiks that are being subsidised
not the ordinary people. To say
the ship of state is clearly adrift
in Nigeria is an understatement.

A land that should be flowing
with milk and honey has
become the laughing stock of
the international community. We
simply can no longer tolerate
this grotesque level of gluttony
and of corruption. There is an
urgent need for a change.
Otherwise, we face a huge
problem and social dislocation
ahead, beyond what we already
have.

Buhari means well
These are the reasons why I
have embraced Buhari. If you
look at his past, and some of the
statements credited to him, he
is not an easy man for a person
like me to embrace. But 30
years is a long time and I
honestly believe he has had
enough time to reflect and to
change. He is no more a
military officer. He has retained
a sharp, social conscience for
the people. I am impressed with
the hunger with which he has
fought for elections. I want to
believe that it is out of an
earnest desire to work for the
people and to do some things
right that Gen Buhari has
struggled so hard to win the
nation’s leadership through the
electoral process. While he may
not be a saint, he is certainly not
a villain.
His choice of a very
good man in Prof Yemi
Osinbajo, for a Vice President
gave me the assurance that Gen
Buhari was listening to the
comments on his areas of
weakness. There are enough
checks and balances in a
democratic set up to make fears
of a return to dictatorship a
joke. I am also impressed by his
modest lifestyle, unlike many of
his ilk who live in opulence and
indulgence.This says something
about the man. I can trust this
man with my wallet in a way i
cannot do with Jonathan, who
appears to have forgotten where
he came from. Jonathan has
lost the golden opportunity to
fundamentally affect the lives of
the ordinary folks.

I am persuaded that it will be a
tragedy for us to continue in this
drift for another four years. While
Buhari is far from being my ideal
candidate and I worry about
some of his deficiencies, my
perception is that although he
may be short on the skills
required for the modern
management of a state –
technology, economic
management among others –
his record shows that he has the
ability to enlist support. I hope
this time; he will choose the
right people and avoid those
who will use his name to do
iniquity. While Buhari may not
be the ideal candidate we need,
he is, certainly the best we have.

There is a time in the history of
a nation when an individual is
needed to rescue it or perform a
historic role. As it was with
Winston Churchill who provided
Britain with the much needed
war-time leadership, Gen
Charles de Gaulle who restored
the confidence of France,
Madiba Nelson Mandela of
South Africa, who championed
the cause of majority rule and
showed the way to national
reconciliation and our own Gen.
Olusegun Obasanjo, who
provided leadership to a country
on the brink after the Abacha
years, my belief is that this is the
hour for Muhammadu Buhari to
stop the torment of a
hemorrhaging nation and
restore its confidence.

Lastly, the General owes me
one. I will still like Buhari to
vocalise an apology and offer
some succour to people like me
whom his government
brutalised in the past. It is the
least he can do. To do so is not
weakness. Indeed, it is strength
to admit the mistakes of the
past and to promote national
reconciliation. For now, even.
ahead of the apology, and in the
national interest, i have thrown
in my hat with Gen. Buhari. So
has Lola Shoneyin’s father. Now
87, but still spritely and alert,
my big brother and comrade,
Tinuoye Shoneyin, always a big
heart, is enthusiastically by my
side at political rallies and party
support meetings. Our jailer has
become our hope. Life is indeed
nothing if not an agglomeration
of ironies..

Source: The Nation

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