On Monday, April 7, 2014, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court in Abuja delivered a well-received and sound judgment in which five million naira exemplary damages were awarded against Police Inspector general Mohammed Abubakar for allowing his men operating from his office in the Special Armed Robbery Squad (SARS) to arrest an international businessman and dehumaise him between July 17 and August 2 of last year. In the judgment, Mr Justice Peter Afere of Court 25 at Apo in Abuja Metropolis agreed that the police, who were acting at the behest of a very controversial Nigerian government contractor, Emeka Offor, grossly abused the basic rights of Comrade Bonny Okonkwo by arresting, handcuffing and putting him in the boot of a sport utility vehicle (SUV) and driving him to Abuja for almost a whole day. In Abuja, he was denied access to his wife, lawyer and telephones.
On Monday, April 7, 2014, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court in Abuja delivered a well-received and sound judgment in which five million naira exemplary damages were awarded against Police Inspector general Mohammed Abubakar for allowing his men operating from his office in the Special Armed Robbery Squad (SARS) to arrest an international businessman and dehumaise him between July 17 and August 2 of last year. In the judgment, Mr Justice Peter Afere of Court 25 at Apo in Abuja Metropolis agreed that the police, who were acting at the behest of a very controversial Nigerian government contractor, Emeka Offor, grossly abused the basic rights of Comrade Bonny Okonkwo by arresting, handcuffing and putting him in the boot of a sport utility vehicle (SUV) and driving him to Abuja for almost a whole day. In Abuja, he was denied access to his wife, lawyer and telephones.
Okonkwo was kept in an overcrowded cell meant for dangerous and violent criminals where he was manhandled by both police and criminals. Okonkwo’s sole offence was that he wrote an article in an online forum for Oraifite people in Ekwusigo Local Government Area of Anambra State where he suggested that Offor erred by donating a whopping sum to Rotary International to erase polio in some developing nations when there are hundreds of thousands of people in their Oraifite hometown dying of absolute poverty. Okonkwo also noted that the money could have been used to ameliorate the woeful condition of depositors of Offor’s Orient Bank who lost their life savings when it collapsed in January 2006.
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For expressing these innocuous views, a special squad of the police force meant to deal with armed robbers and kidnappers as well as arsonists came in a large contingent to arrest a harmless, innocent citizen. Yet, the police officers live in a country where every minute citizens abuse the president and other key government officials in the media, including alternative media, and no one harasses them. How has Offor, a mere private citizen, become so special? The truth is that in a civilized environment, Inspector General Abubakar would have long resigned. He has brought the reputation of the police to an all-time low. In fact, he should be made to pay the N5m exemplary damages because the policemen who perpetrated this evil against citizen Bonny Okonkwo were sent from his office. They went for the illegal and immoral operation on his own instructions. In any case, the IGP himself has been shouting from the rooftops that any police officer whose improper conduct leads to judicial penalties against the force must be disciplined. Therefore, such a disciplinary action must start with him. President Goodluck Jonathan should be pressed by civil society organizations and well-meaning citizens to compel Abubakar to retire immediately, at three months ahead of his scheduled retirement on July 30. The police under his leadership have fallen to utter public disrepute, a force used by the likes of Emeka Offor as thugs and touts and houseboys.
It is a colossal tragedy that IGP Abubakar has made it possible for a character like Offor to be able to have SARS settle numerous personal scores against his own Oraifite people. The instances are legion, the latest being the use of SARS operatives to arrest on Wednesday, March 26, 2014, a well known businessman based in Onitsha, Chief Eugene Nworah, for accusing him of masterminding his loss of nine 40-foot containers estimated to be worth N970million.
To be sure, if there is any individual who should associate closely with the police, it should not be Offor. In fact, were Nigeria a disciplined and civilized society, Offor would have long been taken away from circulation so that he would not contaminate law abiding citizens. The reasons are self-evident. Take his name. Emeka is not his name. His full name is Wilson Orakwue Offor. You can find out from his kinsmen from the Irefi quarters of Oraifite. You can also find out from Merchant of Light Secondary School in Oba, Idemmili South of Anambra State, or from Abbot Boys Secondary School in Ihiala, Anambra State, which he attended in the early and mid 1970s. The truth is that Emeka is the name of his younger brother, from the same mother and father! The young man is now forced to bear the name of Menkus, which is a modern corruption of Emeka. Why did Wilson Orakwue Offor adopt his younger brother’s name? The answer is simple: he was in the 1980s and 90s running away from the long arms of the law after a countless number of acts, including one which led to his dismissal as a driver with Schumberger. These notorious activities saw him move surreptitiously from Delta State to Edo State, to Cross River State, to Kogi State and to Benue State, doing all kinds of things.
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Offor made news headlines for the first time in the early 1990s when General Sani Abacha was ruling Nigeria as a military dictator. Abacha and his secretary to the government, Alhaji Giddado Idris, decided to award the turn around maintenance (TAM) contract of the 125,000 barrel per day Warri Refinery and Petrochemical Company to Offor’s Chrome for reasons we need not mention here. It was the first time an African would be given such a technical and huge contract which the nation a whopping $98m. The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the late Engineer Dalhatu Bayero, who raised professional and patriotic questions, was forced to sign the contract awarded to Chrome which was ostensibly in technical partnership with a nondescript Romanian company. To cut a long short story, the refinery has not recovered to this day.
Following this ignoble example, all NNPC fat cats and their collaborators in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources have since engaged in an unholy alliance with key officials in The Presidency to perpetrate similar evils in all other the other refineries. Today, none of the four refineries is producing at a reasonable capacity. Thanks to the example set by Offor. Elsewhere the police would have investigated the case as a serious fraud. But in Nigeria, the police have practically been privatized to the initiator of the fate that has befallen all our refineries, forcing our nation to become a huge importer of petroleum products whereas we are a major crude oil exporter. Still any wonder why Nigeria is such a mess?
There are numerous cases of unimaginable forgeries by Offor while bidding for contracts. Whether it is in the power sector or the gas sub sector or the oil sub sector, the story is the same. We cite here just one of the more recent ones. In 2010, he forged the bank bonds of Intercontinental Bank plc (now Access Bank plc) when he was bidding for a natural gas pipeline contract traversing Edo, Delta and Bayelsa states. The bank authorities were horrified that such a prominent person could descend so low when they were contacted to confirm that the bonds came from Intercontinental Bank. Rather than the police going after such a person and prosecuting him in accordance with the law, the same person is now using the police hierarchy as a toy, with the police at all levels acting at his whims and caprices. Still any surprise why our country is considered in some quarters as a failed state?
And talking of falsification of documents, who does not know that Offor attempted to falsify the NNPC audited accounts prepared by KPMG while he was bidding for the 58-kilometre Trans Nigerian Pipeline contract? Or has anyone forgotten how Offor ran down Afex Bank in a very dubious manner? When Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) examiners looked into the books of Afex, formerly Orient Bank, they wrote in their report that the bank was distressed by largely internal credit facilities granted without regard to extant CBN guidelines; and the greatest beneficiary was, of course, Offor, who was the chairman. A good number of people who kept their life savings in the bank have either died in penury or are in abject poverty today.
Just two months ago, Offor’s Global Scan System was thrown out of Apapa Wharf and other ports in Nigeria for ineptitude. It was thrown out by the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is the Coordinating Minister of the Economy. How did Offor’s Interstate become the new owner of the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company since last November 1? As everyone knows, both the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) and the National Council on Privatisation (NCP) wrote a report disqualifying Interstate on both financial and technical grounds. Yet, when the result came out Interstate was qualified for not just Enugu but also the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company! The great Nigerian singer and social critic, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, would call this Nigerian government magic at work. Unfortunately for Interstate, they have already proved grossly incapable of managing the Enugu Disco. Power supply in the whole of Southeast is now worse than ever before in the history of the Southeast. To avoid paying for electricity from the nation’s three hydro plants in Niger State which is a little more expensive than power from thermal stations, Offor’s Interstate regularly rejects as much as 200Megawatt supply for Enugu at a time the place complains of poor electricity availability! But Interstate has more than tripled the estimated electricity bills in order to stay afloat, refusing to give consumers prepaid metres. And the police are looking the other way!
Why should the police force be privatized to Offor? His personal lifestyle does not inspire confidence. He is a knight of the Anglican Church, yet he is a committed polygamist, a situation akin to a serving Catholic priest being fully married and flaunts his marital status everywhere! Only on Wednesday, January 3, 2013, 59-year-old Offor married his third wife, 24-year-old Adaora Ufondu, at a high profile ceremony at Oraifite where such leading musicians as P Square and Flavour played. He married his first wife, Nkiru Offor, from Otulu in Oru West Local Government Area of Imo State in 1980. He married the second, Joy Offor, from Ubahu Orodo in Mbaitoli LGA, also in Imo State, in 2002.
Offor does not care about his mother, a woman from Ishan in Edo. Nor does he care about his siblings who depend on relatives and friends for survival. Even his younger brother, Menkus, whose identity he stole, is managing to get by, thanks to the kindness of other people who do not have even a fraction of what his elder brother possesses through the notorious Nigerian government system.
It is cataclysmic that that under Mohammed Abubakar’s leadership, the Nigerian Police Force has become a terror deployed by Emeka Offor against the common people of Oraifite—all because of filthy lucre. The Nigerian people never knew that time would come when the police would be so cheap and so ridiculous. Great kudos to people like Femi Falana, the great lawyer and humanist, who recognize that the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.
Ubadike is the executive director of a public advocacy group in Lagos.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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