Activist Sues Police,Billionaire Emeka Offor N1b For Illegal Detention

Nigeria’s top human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, has slammed a one billion naira lawsuit against the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar, and a controversial government contractor, Emeka Offor, for the brutality meted out to an international businessman, Comrade Bony Okonkwo, who was arrested  by the police on Saturday, July 13, 2013, and released after 18 days in solitary confinement.

Okonkwo, a social activist and businessman based in South Africa, was arrested in his home in Ilasamanja of Lagos by a team of Special Anti-Robbery policemen over comments he made on a listserv against the shady businessman.

Policemen reportedly sent from the police headquarters in Abuja handcuffed Bonny detained him in several police formations in Lagos before driving him  to Abuja in the trunk of a police Prado vehicle for criticizing Offor in an online forum, according to a statement from the Falana and Falana Chambers signed by Samuel Ogala.

In the suit with motion number M/10933/2013 filed today at the Federal Territory High Court at Jabi with Mr Justice Afam Okeke presiding, Mr Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), is demanding “compensatory damages suffered by Comrade Okonkwo as a result of the breach of his fundamental rights to fair hearing, freedom of speech, dignity of the human person, personal liberty and freedom of movement”.

Okonkwo’s problem began when he wrote an article in an online forum called “Mbala Obodo” which is dedicated to indigenes of Oraifite in Ekwusigo Local Government Area of Anambra State, where the activist suggested that the S1.3million recently donated to Rotary International for polio eradication by the businessman should have been channeled to poverty reduction in Offor’s Oraifite town or to the payment of poor people whose life savings deposited at Afex Bank owned by the businessman collapsed in 2006.

For the almost three weeks Okonkwo was detained at the police station in Garki, he was not given access to his two mobile telephones, international travel passport and family members, says Adaeze Ekwueme, a member of the legal team which secured the activist’s release who also disclosed that he was arrested and charged with defamation based on a letter from Fortress Chambers in Lagos signed on June 28, 2013, by one Godson Ugochukwu, said to be Offor’s lawyer.

“We are convinced that if Comrade Okonkwo’s fundamental right of freedom of speech which he exercised duly in his comment on the donation to Rotary International could be treated in any way as defamation, the police should not have been involved at all.

Says attorney Ogala: “Defamation has always been treated as a civil matter on our statute books, and not a criminal one. Also quite disheartening is the Gestapo-manner in which the police from the office of the Inspector General have acted in this matter.

“The deployment of a team of special federal anti-robbery policemen to effect the arrest of a harmless, innocent citizen gives the impression to all reasonable members of society that the police have allowed themselves to be used in this matter in a most unconscionable manner.

“Most amazing is that this crude and primitive blackmail and torture of a law abiding citizen under the leadership of IGP Abubakar who has on more than one occasion publicly warned his officers and men against behaving like barbarians, all the more so with the courts awarding huge damages against the police for the unpardonable public conduct of these security men.”

Quoting Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka and George Mangakis, a leading Greek author who was detained in brutal circumstances during the military dictatorship in the South European nation, Ogala added: “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny”.

Though Okonkwo has been freed since August 31 on the orders of the Hon Kabir Lamido, the chief magistrate of Dutse Alhaji Court in Kubwa, a satellite town in FCT, his passport has not been released to him.

“As if this step is not enough to frustrate this businessman based in South Africa who is now constrained to stay only in Nigeria”, complained lawyer Ekwueme, “the police authorities have just transferred Okonkwo’s wife, who is a police officer, out of Lagos, thus enhancing the widely held speculation that the police leadership is in cahoots with Offor  to deal a mortal blow to not just Comrade Okonkwo but also his family”.

Offor’s relationship with the police high command has always been a topic of controversy.

At the dawn of democracy in 1999 he used to have more policemen attached to him than any state governor. At the height of his well-publicized quarrel with the then Anambra State governor, Dr Chinwoke Mbadinuju, Offor was accused of using “the federal might to overrun his state”.

Hearing in the matter between citizen Okonkwo, on the one hand, and IGP Abubakar and Offor, on the other, will start on October 30.