Foreword To Okuntimo’s Book on Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni

Sometimes in December, 2008, I found myself among some Nigerians travelling in an 18-seatre commercial bus from Makurdi, the capital of Benue State in the middle-belt part of Nigeria, to Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State on the poor and dusty road which connects the two cities with several others. As we raced towards our journey’s end, a silly drama took place.
A man who gave his name as Joseph and said he was 53 years old then, sat on the same row with me on my right hand side in the van, but we were separated by another passenger who sandwiched us. He told me later that he holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a master’s degree in International Relations from two of Nigeria’s “leading” universities. Joseph had lived in Port Harcourt since 1987, but relocated to Abuja, the axis of corruption and misrule in Nigeria, at the apogee of the violence that swept through Port Harcourt, the under-developed oil city and other parts of the deltaic region.

As our vehicle danced desperately from one deep crack on the road to another, the man started brandishing his head like one stung twice by a wicked bee, and started saying something aloud, “I used to respect Ken Saro-Wiwa, but those things, if he did,  he deserved to die”. Curiously, I questioned, “My brother, wetin dey happen?” I inquired audibly and jokingly in Nigeria’s Pidgin English, the corrupt version of English language. Surprisingly, Joseph was reading one of Nigeria’s tabloid where General Jeremiah Timbut Useni , the fun-loving ex-minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) under the late General Sani Abacha’s blood-spattered junta had granted an interview about Ken  Saro-Wiwa’s hanging on November 10, 1995. I held out my lengthy hand towards that of Joseph holding the newspaper, “please, let me see your paper” I said. “Take my brother, this man is bad” he said in an erratic tone and deposited the paper in my hands.

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I took the newspaper and read the venom filled Useni’s interview with soberness. The Plateau State-born retired general who forayed into partisan politics after his vicious military career, and became the founding chairman of the Democratic People’s Party (DPP), one of Nigeria’s registered political parties had said in the paper that Saro-Wiwa was killed in the national interest, and that the hanged writer and activist was an agent of the western world to destabilize the country.  In the same interview, Useni claimed that he saw Ken Saro-Wiwa in a film made available to him, using nails and other crude methods to torture his Ogoni people.  Jeremiah’s manifesto attracted sweeping and wide spread condemnation across the country.  The DPP swiftly expelled him.  After reading the interview I started my “mobile within classroom” within the bus on the issue.  An intense debate on the issue ensued, but I took the day, and freed Joseph and other passengers from Useni’s lies about Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni.

Back to Joseph, a high school teacher and my co-traveller in 2008.  I am not upset by the cruel untruth Useni told against a dead, but living Saro-Wiwa with indiscreet self-possession. But the way the Joseph of my Makurdi – Port Harcourt episode devoured such falsity without any bit of analysis. His background in academies not withstanding is my deep concern.  Joseph is a high school teacher and a political scientist. He represents 99% of Nigerians of today.  They don’t ask questions, but swallow any lie, distortions and rumour that come their way.  Nigeria, the crawling giant of Africa is a failed state and its people daily contribute to the failure.  The collective failure is rearing wide-ranging ignorance, superstition and unreason amongst the population.  In Nigeria, those who dare to speak against evil are given all sorts of names.  Several times I have been accused like Saro-Wiwa of being a western agent to destabilize Nigeria, or one who works for the America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other intelligence network.  I pity this country and its inhabitants.  The future of this country is riddled with gloom and hopelessness.

On Wednesday, January 20, 2010, The Sun newspaper served us with another Jeremiah Useni – like interview, “Yes! Saro-Wiwa Deserved To Die” – Gen. Okuntimo, Abacha’s Commander in Ogoniland, was the hollering headline. Oh! Time has passed, but my memory of the Okuntimoic horror is still fresh.  About 15 years ago, Major Paul Olusola Okuntimo, now a retired Brigadier General commanded the now defunct gestapo of a Rivers State Internal Security Task Force (RSISTF).  Why did it take Okuntimo too long to speak on the genocide, mass murders, tortures, rape and other inhuman acts which he committed against Saro-Wiwa and his weak and vulnerable Ogoni people?
He directed the RSISTF which comprised of the navy, army, airforce, mobile police and the State Security Service (SSS) between1993-1996 in his incredible terror campaigns to smash Ogoni opposition to Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil and gas mogul. Okuntimo had admitted to foreign journalists of being paid by Shell to convert once peaceful Ogoniland into a violent killing field, “Shell contributed to the logistics through financial support. To do that, we needed resources and Shell provided these”. He revealed to the press then.

I was neither a spectator nor an onlooker, but an active performer in most scenes in that Saro-Wiwa – Ogoni drama. Okuntimo claimed in The Sun “exclusive” interview that the death of four prominent Ogoni Chiefs prompted him to arrest Saro-Wiwa and others for having their hands in their deaths. “No, No, Ken deserved to die, if you were to be the president of the Republic of Nigeria, you will know, Ken had to die because he had to be eliminated at that time”. In several articles I have presented my readers with raw facts about Ken’s innocence of the allegation of murder of our chiefs, and wouldn’t repeat that here, but to respond to Okuntimo’s fabrication in that interview. The Ogbom, Kogi State-born Brig. – General forgets so soon.  I still have a copy of that his secret internal memo where he rolled out the agenda of perfecting the Ogoni genocide in his early days at the RSISTF. Part of the document reads, “Shell’s operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken …. Wasting targets cutting across communities and leadership cadre’s especially vocal individuals … Wasting operations coupled with psychological tactics of displacement/wasting as noted above”. Okuntimo’s memo was coming at a time that Lt. Col. Dauda Komo, the military administrator of Rivers State then, in spite of his later ignoble role in the Ogoni progrom, had set up a panel to probe the activities of Saro-Wiwa and his Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Komo later refused to release the white paper because it will contradict them. Komo had earlier praised Ken and MOSOP for their non-violent and peaceful methods.

This commendation was coming at a time Okuntimo had swaggered of having over 200 ways of killing the Ogonis. The stage was set for the State-Shell violence which swallowed Ogoniland completely. He lied in his interview that Ogoniland was under attack by its Andoni neigbours. It was the RSISTF soldiers under Okuntimo’s command that launched the offensive from the Andoni axis against the Ogoni territory and its locals and portrayed a camouflage, making it an Andoni operation. The late Professor Claude Ake, the celebrated political economist who headed the Andoni – Ogoni panel set up by Komo also revealed this. Okuntimo was every where in Ogoni perfecting, “the wasting operations”.

My memory of that tearful Eastern Sunday, April 3, 1994 massacres of poor Ogoni farmers is still alive. Okuntimo’s troops had emerged from the Ogoni northern border communities of Oloko I and II, launched one of the most destructive and shocking armed attacks on the Ogoni communities there. The terror was horrible, the outcome was pitiable. Decomposing corpses of poor Ogonis littered the bushes and paths there. Did Okuntimo want a roll call of those he killed? Even Dr. Owens Monday Wiwa, a medical doctor and younger brother of the late Saro-wiwa out of empathy who led Hon. Nobel Obani Nwibari, the MOSOP Vice-president then, representing the Tai kingdom of Ogoni and Tayo Lukula, a courageous journalist with The Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper then, to visit the devastated villages were abducted by Okuntimo. They were tortured, detained and charged for murder, most of Owens ordeals’ and the tragedies of the Ogoni are glaringly narrated in a fascinating style in that 389 page book, The Politics of Bones (2005) written by J. Timothy Hunt, the award-wining Canadian journalist.

In the Ogoni village of Korokoro in same Tai, Okuntimo stormed the village in his usual malevolent and frenzied manner in a Shell’s vehicle and personally shot dead poor Uebari N-nah. James N-nah, his elder brother just collected compensation which Shell paid at the US District Court in the Southern District of New York. Not only N-nah’s family, others killed and tortured also collected the shell’s settlement money for some of the crimes Okuntimo committed on their behalf. Even non Ogonis who expressed solidarity with the agony of the Ogoni were made to test the gruesome acts of Okuntimo’s savagery. Three American soldiers led by a major had visited Okuntimo at his Bori cantonment in Port Harcourt, to advise him against using violence against poor unarmed Ogonis were endangered. The men had not finished talking with him, when Okuntimo jumped up like a wild Ogbom masquerade, pulled out a pistol and threatened to blow off the major’s head who led the team. They hurriedly left him. What about the case of Geraldine Brooks, that brilliant Australian-born journalist of the prestigious American’s Wall Street Journal?. She had toured Ogoniland and saw the ruthless military operation, and as a journalist, contacted Okuntimo subsequently, to hear his “own side of the story”. On April 9, 1994, Okuntimo handed her over to the SSS, Nigeria’s notorious secret police and deported her from Nigeria for security reasons. Nick Aston-Jones, the distinguished British ecologist, Uche Onyeagocha, a political activist, lawyer and ex-lawmaker and Oronto Natei Douglas, a lawyer, activist who now works for the Yar Adua government are all alive. They were brutally tortured and detained by Okuntimo for trying to visit Saro-Wiwa in the dungeon where Okuntimo held him and was torturing him. They were lucky as they would all have been dead today. They have told their stories severally. Okuntimo made history in Ogoniland as the first to take a chieftaincy title of Gberemene Fefelo – (king of peace) at gun point. Okuntimo had threatened poor Ogoni chiefs to give him the title or die. That title is not recognized anywhere in   or outside Ogoni, and much more considered an illegality. That is not the way such title is given. Okuntimo is a coward. A man who used sophisticated weapons to kill, main and rape poor and unarmed people is a beast! He has committed war crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) should without delay issue a warrant of arrest against him for crime against humanity now. What evidence do we need to take out and conclude with it ourselves that Okuntimo is a murderer? Okuntimo told us in The Sun interview that he is writing some kind of an autobiographical memoir. This piece should serve as a foreword to his coming nondescript and nonsensical book. 

Naagbanton writes from Port Harcourt the capital of Rivers State

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