THIS memory lane reportage is deliberately coming a few days to the actual commemorative date for strategic reasons. Next Monday. March 28, 2016, Easter Monday specifically, marks the second anniversary of my gestapo-like abduction initiated, coordinated and executed by one Barrister James Opara at the blood-curdling instance of the former governor of Abia State, Mr. Theodore Ahamefule Orji (Ochendo). This reaffirmation (I knew this fact from that day of lawlessness, ghastliness and beastliness) was made by the state’s erstwhile Information and Strategy (what propagandistic strategy?) Commissioner, Don Ubani, in a recent telephony. Ubani also virulently spun some belated yarns about Ochendo, which are off record! (By the way, when a father curses his son over parental marital tiffs, the son flippantly reveals secrets without solicitation!)
That I survived to commemorate the ugly incident is God’s grace. I give Him thanks and adoration, endlessly. This is the first and last time I will publicly commemorate the barbarism shrouded in bloodthirstiness. The trauma engendered by this despotic and horrific manifestation of T. A.-sponsored invasion in the embarrassing presence of some members of my immediate family is unprecedented in recent human history.
If I had died, my innocent blood would have been on the head of Opara. It would not have been my battle but the Lord’s. Even now, the seed that Opara sowed is flourishing and he would soon start harvesting fatalities in his family for death was his grand plan for me. All my life, I have never seen that kind of atrocious wickedness. (I will expatiate on his callousness presently). The God that I worship is a God of vengeance and having done nothing to the monster called Opara, karmic nemesis will soon catch up with him, if it has not already, and his lineage up to the seventh generation. He cannot escape earthly and heavenly damnation for his unwarranted cruelty to me.
Devilish Opara mechanistically directed the abduction with his police accomplices, who were at his service, using his rickety SUV (a brown Nissan Pathfinder) number-plated LSD 205 BL) to move me handcuffed from one police station in Lagos to another before finally bundling me into a waiting Abia Line commercial bus in Jibowu, Yaba, Lagos, en route to Umuahia at 2.30 p.m. Please note that the abduction started from my home at 6.05 a.m. Having discharged his prey, after riding in a cab as an outrider-cum-escort, Opara jubilantly entered his dilapidated SUV driven by another dishevelled bunkum like his master back home to savour his dollarized payment for successfully, but fleetingly, kidnapping the Lord’s annointed. It will never be well with the Opara clan in the name of Jesus. And so shall it be.
The dastardly plot was for me to spend the weekend in various cells in Umuahia before any reprieve could come my way possibly on Monday or thereabouts. Unfortunately, for the mongrels, a call to the former IGP, Mohammed Dikko Abubakar, by Dr. Kalu, who was abroad, made all the difference. Once more, it will continue to be well for M.D. Abubakar. He reminds me of a friend of mine and one of his predecessors, egbon Tafa Balogun, How I wish this gory incident occurred during egbon’s time!
In my entire existential trajectory, I have never been so assailed, assaulted, battered, brutalized and manacled for 24 hours amid excruciating pains, especially for a man used to comfortable life right from aristocratic birth to zestful adulthood. That was the first time I ever entered police torture chambers called cells. All the cops who facilitated this horrible stone-age descent will end up in bandits’ hands
In the ensuing suit, U/11/C/2014, between the Commissioner of Police and this writer, the police declared stupefactiously that one of my articles entitled “Buffoonery by Mezie Abia Organisation” was seditious…bla, bla, bla. It never occurred to the CP to ask his benefactor what gave rise to that article, which was a lucid and combustible response to the scurrilous advertorial by the ad hoc state creation that bordered on idiocy! Anyone interested in these inflammatory matters should get copies of The Sun between January and March 2014 and read other equally “seditious publications” by me like “Kalu: T. A. Orji’s self-delusion”; “Go to Akwa Ibom, weep for Abia State”; “T. A. Orji’s 7-year demystification of Kalu”; “Demystifying a master strategist”; among other damning essays, most of which ludicrously constituted separate charges according to the misguided CP.
Even before the Federal High Court sitting in Lagos gave its damnable judgment on the suit, eminent lawyers, Itse Sagay (SAN), Fred Agbaje and Fred Keyamo, among others, had dismissed the case as lacking in merit having died with colonialism. Is it to be assumed that the Abia State high-powered legal team in this matter did not know that sedition was extinct in the country with the end of colonialism! Ignorance is bliss indeed. .
Why is it that lawyers are mostly used for such murderous and other dirty jobs? Does it have to do with their professional joblessness or unemployability of a majority of them? Why would a lawyer, so called, be championing criminality just because of the peanuts he expects when he knows that his mission is barbaric, patently illegal, unconstitutional, uncivilized, ungodly, lethal, unjustifiable, irrational, irresponsible and indefensible? Do these lawyers and agents of malicious wickedness not realise that they have immediate and extended families? In the case of Opara, his younger brother, Christian Opara, is a sports editor in The Guardian. How would he feel if someone arranges for Christian’s abduction the way he did for me? If the scoundrel called James Opara has a family, how would he feel if one of them is abducted the way he engineered mine? The Oparas will definitely have a taste of James’s inhumanity to me either soonest or in the future. I may have forgiven his principal, Theodore Orji, but Opara’s case is beyond forgiveness/forgetfulness and I will continue to pray fervently that he and his generation reap the whirlwind, fire and brimstone of this his atrocity shortly. Nobody should sermonize to me on the need for forgiveness! If his uncanny behaviour had resulted in my extinction, there would have been no forgiveness in death.
If Opara were not a bloodsucker, he would have briefed his benefactor (Theodore Orji) on the need to engage me, their potential victim, on a cerebral discussion and explore possibilities of addressing whatever grey areas existed. If that did not work, extra-judicial channels like kidnapping and illegal detention could stupidly follow. Alas, there was no time for decency and intellectual exploration. This columnist, in their warped and imbecilic thinking, must be taught the lesson of his life and with Opara His Excellency should consider it done at all costs!
Before I continue, a brief recap is pertinent for readers that may not have followed the tragic event that escaped fatality by a whisker. Shortly after my appointment as the media advisor to the former governor of Abia State, Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu, in January 2014, I began writing articles in defence of Dr. Kalu—who was the tirade peg of oppositional calumniation—with his successor as the gang leader having unleashed rabid dogs on his predecessor over political disagreements. Just six highly volatile articles I did on these pages, Theodore Orji masterminded the foregoing with Opara as the brainless executioner! Of course, the moment I came on the pitch, the harbingers of scurrilous, vicious and mischievously malicious cock-and-bull figments about Dr. Kalu ran for cover! Ever since, oppositional water has found its level to avert cataclysmic consumption occasioned by their communicative asininities and stupidities.
The foregoing summaries and other related issues concerning the matter have been well documented by multifarious stakeholders in copious online and offline channels. Any interested reader could google “Wabara’s abduction” and be amazed by volumnious interventions. The space here is circumscribed as to capture even a fraction of what happened that hellish morning at my Aguda, Surulere, Lagos, residence before I swiftly moved house to another part of town after the gory seizure incident. For those who did not follow the attempted murder aborted by God, the full story is online and I am ready to send the soft copy to anyone who is interested.
It still amazes me the ease with which the Abia and Lagos State police commands were brought into this illegal and unconstitutional assignment. What kind of compromise could have informed such murderous intentions, nonchalance and unprofessionalism? What it means is that with “pepper” those paid with our taxes to protect us are also the ones who will expose/maim/kill us depending on terms of engagement. In other words, our life, protection and safety in this country rest in our own hands and of course God ultimately. Do not be deceived that the police are your friends because they could be your worst enemies if the hounders’terms and conditions are right, usually cheaply! The commitment, overzealousness, passion and excitement with which they manhandled, criminalized, dehumanized and gruesomely carted me in handcuffs from Lagos in the Abia Line bus on a tortuous 12-hour journey to the CID cell in Umuahia showed that with “motivation/blood money”, our cops can move mountains! Avoid Nigerian cops as much as possible. In corruption ranking, they come next after the INEC. It still baffles me that the Abia State Police Commissioner, Mr. Adamu Ibrahim, could consent to such dictatorship by sending his boys to carry out the heinous crime all the way from Umuahia to Lagos. What could have been the pressure or benefit?
On receipt of the petition against me by Ochendo, I had expected the police to follow a logical and constitutional process of inviting me for questioning and thereafter possibly charge me to court if they have enough grounds for litigation. Alas, the “action budget” could not allow for such finesse! After all, power is might in all its crudity here.
It is unsurpassably incontrovertible that Ochendo’s tenure in Abia State is inerasably the most unconscionable, repressive and autocratic regime both under military and civilian rule in the state’s history.
I thank God that I survived on grounds of His wholesomeness, mercy and favour to commemorate this sadism. Not many were this lucky between 2007 and 2015! As for the so-called Barrister James Opara, the gods have already ambushed him—it is a question of time. May bad things continue to assail him all the rest of his government messengerial life of transiency. Amen.
Ochendo’s family counsel, Chukwunyere Nwabuko, who was garrulously grandstanding on the court premises in Umuahia after the chief magistrate read his script from Government House, must have been humiliated, humbled and diminished when Justice Okon Abang of the Federal High Court sitting in Lagos lampooned the former governor and the chief magistrate for their uncivility informed by power inebriacy.
In no particular order, it is apposite to thank some people who God used to liberate me from the clutches of death in the hands of Opara and his co-conspiratorial merchants of death: my family, Dr. Kalu, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, Alhaji Sule Lamido, former IGP, M. D. Abubakar (who swiftly intervened and got me released Saturday night, March 29, 2014, at 10 p.m. from the last of copious cells I was incarcerated in Umuahia), immediate-past Force Public Relations Officer, Frank Mba—whose spirited efforts to stop the police rascality in Lagos were rebuffed by my wild and effusive captors—Femi Adesina (most especially), Richard Akinnola, Levi Obijiofor, Okey Ndibe, Simon Kolawole, Dan Amor, Adonis Eric Osagie, Steve Nwosu, Onuoha Ukeh (more especially), Ralph Egbu, Michael John, pulchritudinous Funke Egbemode, Kenneth Ugbechie (especially), Ikenna Emuwa, Robert Obioha, Airtel MD/CEO Segun Ogunsanya, Emeka Oparah, Emmanuel Onwubiko, Michael Jegede, the NGE and the NUJ…the list is inexhaustible! God—not me— will reward you all and punish Barrister James Opara, the most bovine sadist in the world. It is not yet over!
I cannot end this anniversary explication without recalling the evergreen words of Jutice Okon Abang of the Federal High Court: “The action of the governor is barbaric, archaic, unconstitutional and undemocratic.”
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