by Mike Smith
The original Bring Back Our Girls protesters led by Oby Ezekwesili and others pushed ahead with their campaign. However, the counter-protesters and their backers, whoever they were, began to target them specifically. The site of the protests were the country’s Unity Fountain, a monument celebrating the coming together of such a diverse nation. Tellingly, however, the fountain, a series of white columns with Nigeria’s states listed on them, did not function, its black hoses strewn across an empty pool. One of Abuja’s major centres of power was located just across the street, the heavily secured Transcorp Hilton hotel, where politicians and businessmen hammered out deals in suites on the posh ninth and tenth floors and dined at a private restaurant whose windows overlooked the newly built city below.
The counter-protesters setting up at the Unity Fountain wore red shirts that mimicked the Bring Back Our Girls demonstrators, though with a slight change. The slogan written on the shirts was ‘Release Our Girls’ instead of ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ – in other words, they were not demanding that the government act; they were directing their plea to Boko Haram or, for the conspiracy-minded among them, to the northern politicians they believed were holding the girls as part of an anti-Jonathan plot. At first, the legitimate protesters sought to continue their rallies at the same location despite the rowdy crowd gathering nearby. One of the protest organisers, a civil society activist and professor named Jibrin Ibrahim, claimed the counter-demonstrators had been paid 3,000 naira ($20) each to attend and questioned who was responsible.40 A counter-protest leader, Abduljalal Dauda, said the demonstration was independent of the government, though he added that participants may have been given 1,000 naira or so by organisers to cover their transport since they lived outside Abuja.
The Bring Back Our Girls leaders urged their followers not to respond to the provocations, remain calm and ignore them as much as possible. It worked at first, but the counter-demonstrators were not going to go away easily, and some of their leaders were spouting badly misinformed conspiracy theories, hinting at a vaguely defined international plot against Nigeria. Dauda made reference to a widely believed rumour in Nigeria: that the United States predicted the country’s break-up by 2015.41
‘The truth of the matter is that even the same people in the United States of America said that Nigeria would disintegrate in 2015’, Dauda, chairman of a Nigerian youth council who said the young men at the protests were his ‘constituents’, told me. Felicia Sani, head of an organisation of market women, chimed in at that point. I had earlier told her I was American. ‘As we didn’t disintegrate, you are trying to disintegrate us’, she said. A short while later, Dauda sought to explain in more detail, though I had difficulty following his logic.
‘So what I am trying to tell you is this’, he said as we sat in chairs in the grass near the Unity Fountain surrounded by counter-protesters he was supervising: There is international conspiracy. Not only in Nigeria. There is international conspiracy. I’m not saying opposition is doing it. Opposition cannot destroy our country. Some people are interested in destroying this country. It happens in Arab Spring. It started with youths. We have seen it clearly. It is social media. Now the issue of Bring Back Our Girls – it has gone viral in the world. Why it has gone viral? Because you post it. But if you didn’t give somebody anything, why would you ask somebody to bring it back to you? We said release. That is why we changed the language from bring to release. These people, we didn’t give them these girls. You abduct them, and now we are asking to please release the girls healthy and alive. We have suffered enough. As a young person in this country, I would never want what I passed through [for] my children to go and pass through it. We have gone in a harsh situation [...] We have generals in the north, they are not saying anything. We have to come out and say something because the destiny of this country lies in their hands [...] You see these youths? We brought them, with the different ideology and different thinking. Our agenda is Save Nigeria Campaign. We are not interested in 2015 [elections] [...] What we are saying is this: we need our country in the safe hands, so we need the country to be united. That is my point only.
I first met Jude Tabai, the man who presented himself as working in an unspecified security role for the president’s team, while speaking with Abduljalal Dauda and Felicia Sani. It was a short time later, after one of his underlings insistently told me that Tabai wanted to speak with me, that we discussed the situation in more detail. We stood about 20 metres away from the counter-protest organisers, and the more we spoke, the more he seemed to relish explaining to me the sinister forces at work trying to bring down President Jonathan.
‘Why and where are they?’, I asked him after he claimed that the girls had been released by ‘collaborators and co-sponsors’. ‘Good’, he said, his voice climbing, pleased with the chance to tell the story. ‘Because, you know why they have been released? Because of the force the international community came with. Do you know that all those who never spoke against Boko Haram – the heavyweights, the religious leaders, the emirs who never spoke – all got up and start speaking now, that Boko Haram is this, Boko Haram is that, Boko Haram is this, Boko Haram is that. So it is like, why now? Because they now know the gravity of international community taking over this battle.’
His argument as far as I could tell was that the northern elites pulling the strings had got more than they had bargained for and must now find a way out before the plot is uncovered: And basically their only bait to avoid that is to tell the people to push out those girls. And that is why you see them quickly saying that, ‘Give us this and take your girls.’ I’m a psychologist and I’m a security expert. No militant can tell you that, ‘take your girls and just give me one person’ [...] That is a big loss to them, you understand? They will never. If they are actually firm in what they are doing, they will say that ‘give us our prisoners’. They know that nobody will release their prisoners. But they are asking for soft bargaining so that it will just be easy for them to just release those girls. And they believe that once they release those girls, that pressure on them, on both the northerners and all those things, will calm down, and then they can continue the other phase of the battle. But they will never go kidnapping on this level again because that has exposed a lot of things. And they know that if they don’t do it and this thing gets out of this level, it’s going to expose everybody.
We spoke for about 30 minutes before I left him to talk to the original Bring Back Our Girls protesters. They were outnumbered by the counter-demonstrators, who were about 300 in total compared to the original rally’s several dozen. Hadiza Bala Usman, one of the organisers for the Bring Back Our Girls rally, took the high road and sought to keep the focus on the Chibok girls when I asked whether she believed the counter-protesters were sponsored by the government. ‘Well, I’m not aware because I haven’t engaged them in any discussion. It’s just interesting to note that people are coming out after – this is our twenty-eighth day of protesting, twenty-eighth day of sustained protests, and it is important to know that the girls have been abducted for 47 days now’, said Usman, who has been aligned with the opposition in Nigeria and whose late father was a revered northern intellectual. ‘So for people to start protesting two days, 45 days after the abduction of the girls, is quite an interesting thing to note. But I don’t know who they are. I don’t know where they’re coming from. I hear them mentioning the fact that they are protesting for the release of the girls from the abductors.’
She continued as she kept an eye on the Bring Back Our Girls protesters assembling nearby since she was due to start the rally soon: It’s interesting to note that we are citizens that have a social contract with our leader, and we believe our leader, based on our constitution, is mandated to provide security for the lives of every Nigerian, and in the event that security is not provided, citizens would go up to the leader and demand for him to have decisive and concise effort towards providing that mandate given to him [...] We believe in a state; we believe in a nation; we b
elieve in the institution of the federal republic of Nigeria, and we shall continue demanding for our federal government to do everything possible to rescue and return the Chibok girls.
The rally began shortly after we finished speaking, civil society activists, students, Chibok elders and sympathisers dressed in red, some bearing slogans such as ‘We are all from Chibok’ and ‘Bring Back Our Girls’. They chanted Ezekwesili’s call-and-response and listened as others addressed them on the latest news regarding the kidnappings. All remained peaceful, but there was an ominous sign later. The counter-protesters eventually moved toward the rally, trotting in a line, clapping and chanting. They circled the Bring Back Our Girls demonstrators, clearly attempting to provoke them, but no one took the bait. The counter-protesters gave up and returned to their spot on the other side of the Unity Fountain, but it was easy to see how the situation could degenerate if they were allowed to continue to gather there.
They were allowed to continue, of course, and what played out the next day was inane and brutal – simple thuggery designed to end a peaceful protest of dozens of people who were only asking what any citizen should expect of their government. According to journalists and others present at the time, young men who were among the counter-protest rushed over, sought to grab cameras journalists were holding and smash them, broke plastic chairs being used by the rally and hit some of the demonstrators with sticks and bars. Then they were allowed to walk away. Some of those present at the time told me that the police briefly detained a couple of the youths, but later let them go. When I arrived at the rally after the madness had subsided, the pile of broken chairs was still there and the Bring Back Our Girls leaders were shaken. They had earlier warned the police that they were concerned about their safety given the thugs assembling near them and had delivered a letter to the authorities saying so. They explained this to a police officer at the scene and showed him a copy of the letter, but he seemed uninterested. He misunderstood and said he would deliver the letter for them, and they told him again that it had already been delivered. Rumours began to spread that more thugs were on their way, and Bring Back Our Girls demonstrators began warning that everyone should leave. I did not see Tabai, Sani and Abduljalal – the three government supporters I spoke with a day earlier – and cannot say if they were there when the violence broke out.
The same officer who misunderstood the protest leaders was later standing next to a police truck along with several of his colleagues. I walked over and asked him why they had not arrested those who attacked the demonstrators. He told me he did not know who was responsible. I suggested he could talk to witnesses to find out. ‘I didn’t ask them’, he said. It was clear that he had no plans to do so, that he was helpless. There would be no benefit for this man dressed in the uniform of a Nigerian police officer to protect his fellow citizens from harm.
Epilogue: ‘They Should Not Allow Me to Die in This Condition’
It was drizzling rain on a Thursday in September 2013 as I landed in Warri, a hub for the oil industry in Nigeria’s Delta state in the south, where gas-burning petroleum flares spew into the thick, tropical air. Along the bustling banks of the River Warri, flat-bottomed boats with outboard engines load passengers, food and supplies before winding their way deep into the creeks, past soot-covered makeshift oil refineries fed with stolen crude, where fuel is illegally produced for sale or survival. During a previous trip a couple years before, I had taken a boat and visited the village of Gbekebor, where I sat in a tiny community hall with a chief. He told me proudly that the plastic chairs there stamped with the words ‘Donated by Niger Delta Freedom Fighters’, along with goats and rice, were given to them by a prominent ex-gang leader who had participated in the oil militancy of the 2000s. A company believed to be controlled by that same ex-gang leader was later reported to be earning massive amounts of money through a government contract worth more than $100 million, ostensibly to provide security for waterways.1 It was another reminder that the sleazy dealings with money belonging to the Nigerian people seemed to know no bounds.
I thought of that trip after I boarded a taxi at the airport and rode past an overgrown expanse of green brush and vines, dishevelled palm trees extending skyward like upside-down mops. Ramshackle hotels and storefronts stretched down the roadside along with shipping containers transformed into market kiosks. As we pushed our way through traffic, a billboard came into view wishing the former state governor, James Ibori, a happy fifty-fifth birthday. It called him ‘The Living Legend of Resource Control’, a phrase meaning he fought for Delta state to keep more of the revenue earned from crude oil pumped there. In fact, he has been accused of pocketing much of the money – or more precisely, using it to pay for an opulent mansion and luxury cars, among other properties – according to prosecutors.2 He is currently serving time in Britain for money laundering and fraud, having been tried there after a Nigerian court acquitted him of 170 different charges.3
I was not in Warri this time to explore the creeks or look into illicit profits being raked in by corrupt overlords, however. I was there to see Wellington Asiayei, the police officer shot and paralysed outside his barracks room during the Kano attacks in January 2012. It would be the first time we would meet since the days after he was shot, when he spoke to me from his hospital bed, still overcome by what had occurred. I had been given a rough set of directions by his brother, and my taxi driver pushed on through the sopping-wet streets, a tassel dangling from his rear-view mirror with an emblem reading ‘Doctor Jesus’ and music on the radio declaring, ‘up, up Jesus’. I eventually arrived at a dirt road off a larger paved street in Wellington’s neighbourhood and walked with his brother to the front door. We entered the flat inside a fading yellow and white building, and I was led to a room at the back, where I found Wellington, lying on a mattress on the floor, unable to stand.
I knew before my trip that he had not been in good condition, having spoken by phone to his doctor and his wife, as well as Wellington himself. Still, it was jarring to see him there that way, an assistant police superintendent helpless on the floor of his aunt’s spartan home, appearing much weaker and withered than when we had met some 19 months earlier. I knew he had agreed to speak with me because he hoped I would get the word out about his condition since his repeated pleas to the government and the police force for further assistance had gone unanswered. I didn’t blame him, though neither did I have much hope. When I telephoned a police spokesman several weeks before with the aim of tracking him down, the spokesman told me they had been trying to contact him as well so they could figure out when he could come back to work.
I took a seat in a chair next to his mattress, and Wellington, slowly but deliberately, took me through the odyssey he had endured since our last discussion, from road journeys across Nigeria to stem-cell treatments in India, followed by a desperate resort to herbal remedies back in Warri. ‘They should not allow me to die in this condition’, he said.
He had remained in Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, where I first met him, for six months, when his doctors advised him that he should seek treatment abroad since they had done all they could there. At one point during his stay at Aminu Kano, the national police chief, Mohammed Abubakar, visited those wounded in the attacks. According to Wellington, he promised the force would urgently look into his case. He did not hear back from the police force, but he was also not completely without help. The country’s National Emergency Management Agency had covered the bills for his stay at Aminu Kano, and the Kano state government would later contribute 2 million naira, or about $12,000, to his expenses for seeking treatment abroad. He would also continue to receive his salary from the police force. It would not be enough, though, as further complications arose.
I should say clearly that the Nigerian police have a terrible reputation. Poorly paid, low-level cops find themselves reduced to shaking down drivers for bribes, while pay-offs are often required for investigations to move ahead. There have also been more serious allegations again
st police involving torture or rape. I could never know all the details of Wellington’s life and his career; I do not know if he would have been considered a good cop or bad cop or something in between. But his path from his birthplace in a village in the creeks near Warri to his promotion through the ranks of the police, followed by his struggle to find adequate medical help, seemed to me typical of many in a country where the odds of succeeding are long.
He was born on 2 May 1964 in his grandfather’s village of Asiayei Gbene. According to Wellington, his father had many wives and he does not know how many brothers and sisters he has. His father, an Ijaw by ethnicity, was in the army and moved regularly, so Wellington attended primary and secondary school in Ogun state in south-western Nigeria, where he was stationed at the time, many miles away from their home in the creeks of the Niger Delta. He said his father fought on the Nigerian side in the 1967–70 civil war, though Wellington did not seem to remember much from that period. When his father retired from the army in 1977, Wellington returned to the Niger Delta and finished his secondary education in the town of Ayakoromo, also located within the creeks near Warri. In 1982, while living with his uncle in nearby Rivers state, he heard an announcement on the radio that the police were recruiting, so he went to headquarters and signed up. After passing a test to join, he was sent for training at Oji River, slightly further north, and became a recruit constable on 1 September 1983, when he was 19 years old.