#OccupyNigeria: Appeal Court upholds 10 year jail term for DPO who killed Ademola Aderinto

The Court of Appeal in Lagos, Thursday, upheld the judgment of a Lagos High Court sentencing a former Divisional Police Officer to 10 years imprisonment for the killing of one Ademola Aderinto during the January 9, 2012 protest against fuel subsidy removal in Lagos.

Segun Fabunmi, who served as the DPO of Pen Cinema Police Station in Agege, was found guilty of manslaughter by Justice Olabisi Akinlade of the Igbosere Division of the Lagos High Court.

The judge also convicted Mr. Fabunmi, who was dismissed as a Chief Superintendent of Police, guilty of shooting three other persons – Alimi Abubakar, Egbujor Samuel and Chizorba Odoh, during the protest, “thereby causing them grievous bodily harm.”

Killed while protesting
Killed while protesting

The trial of the former police officer, who joined the Force in 1984, began in 2013 at the high court where he was arraigned by the Lagos State Government on a seven-count charge bordering on murder, attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm.

The trial began one year after Mr. Aderinto, 27, was buried at the Yaba cemetery amidst tears from his family and friends.

After his conviction by the high court, Mr. Fabunmi filed a notice at the Appeal Court in Lagos to challenge the judgment of the lower Court, and urged that it should upturned.

Mr. Fabunmi’s counsel, C.J Jiakponna, had specifically urged the court to allow the appeal and acquit the appellant.

On the other hand, the Lagos State Government represented by the State’s Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Adeniji Kazeem, urged the court to affirm the decision of the lower court and dismiss the appeal for lacking in merit.

After considering the arguments canvassed by the counsel to the appellant (Fabunmi) and respondent (state government), the Appeal Court held that the issue of the identity of the deceased raised by the appellant was not material since it was not in doubt that the appellant shot the deceased.

The court specifically punctured the argument of the appellant saying that the defence of accident and self-defence would not avail the appellant because “these defences were mutually exclusive.”

“The appellant, being a seasoned police officer, could have reasoned to use rubber bullet, teargas etc on the mob rather than resorting to lethal weapon (AK 47),” the appellate court held, adding that the appeal lacked merit.

“The use of AK 47, a lethal weapon, convinced the lower court that the appellant had intention to cause grievous bodily harm and the defence of accident could not avail the appellant since there was clear evidence that he shot at the deceased and other persons.”

#KakandaTemple ~ Nigeria: Of Rights, Patriotism and ‘Briefcase’ Activism

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It was a sad day.

I was sad for the innocent kids murdered in Yobe, just a few days after 20 girls were abducted in Borno, by the same bloodthirsty insurgents. I accepted an invitation to hang out with friends, which turned out to be a wrong move. They are from Borno; from the heart of the wrecked towns and villages. I was challenged by their lecture on the genesis and complexity of the radical ideology that has evolved into this irrational insurgency. I was dejected, and emotionally defeated!

Earlier in the day, I listened to the President, and his indirect concession of defeat in another of his promises to “prosecute (the) war against terror.” It dampened my spirit. His ‘threat’ to withdraw soldiers stationed in Borno to prove a point to Shettima was a extraordinarily dumb wisecrack, because I don’t think Shettima was actually being ungrateful; I think he was only crying, that the soldiers are exposed to undermined danger, yet ill-prepared.

Of course, I’d be similarly devastated and even suspicious, aware of how trillions of naira were obviously cornered in Abuja without me. The Borno issues were badly handled in that chat. They gave away Mr President’s wicked sense of humour. For that, he shouldn’t make any more effort to be funny outside his bedroom. There’s no honour in chuckling at a funeral!

Yet Nigerians remain in their bedrooms and offices tweeting at perceived injustice and incompetence, and expecting such cyber-venting to change the system. What I realise about us is, nobody wants to take the first bullet. Everybody just wants to queue behind you. We need to stand together as citizens, with our demands harmonised in the quest to reclaim the country.

My experience in organising #OccupyNigeria in Minna has taught me a lesson – that you need more than private citizens for an orderly demonstration of rage. The politicians, who have successfully scammed us, know this. Which is why they created so many forums and associations to remain powerful – for, divided they fall. Even a politician in his 90s is a member of a relevance-seeking “elders council”. I renounced membership of a writers association, a supposed intellectual powerhouse of the country, when it refused to be a part of OccupyNigeria protests in January, 2012. The absence of unions, which are ever not willing to hurt their financiers, the government, is always a predication that a proposed peaceful protest may be hijacked, and thus the authorities would give us a bad name just to use us for experiments in brutalities. This was why our OccupyNigeria campaign in Minna was the most destructive in Nigeria. It became a riot, checked only when a 24-hour curfew was imposed. At the end, the state government set up 13-man committee to assess the damage, and their reports will shock you. So, to check violence, we need unions, and all those dormant NGOs in Nigeria misleading, and, sorry to say, swindling, the West in the name of human rights advocacy.

This week, out of frustration with the massacres in the north-east, without a convincing assurance of an end soon, I reached out to some people for a possibility of a protest, to occupy, as they say in the streets of dysfunctional countries, this headquarters of political failures; there is no better time to face these remorseless clowns at Three Arms Zone, Abuja.

But the funny thing about these Abuja-based activists on Twitter is, when you call them and inform them that a certain ambassador or politician wants to have a lunch with them, they’ll be available. None will be in a meeting. None will be on the road driving. None will promise to call back when s/he’s done – with ongoing imaginary events. But, tell them of the possibility of a protest, you hear pim, a very loud silence. This is what we call “Briefcase” activism. Yes, the policemen could be on alert, and they will, as usual, announce on NTA that “all forms of protests are banned”; but, listen, we don’t need such censoring if we’re a team, unions, associations, organisations, and forums, not some cowards exhibiting hypocritical patriotism from air-conditioned offices and rooms.

Still I’m more betrayed by NGO owners and members of civil society organisations who, in the name of rights advocacies, receive huge grants to cover the miseries and protect the sanctity of the people they abandon in times of crises. Anytime you attend social events, you hear rich and pot-bellied Nigerians say, “My name is X, our NGO is into peace-building…” In which country?! I think we need a list of all NGOs and civil society organisations in Nigeria with sources of their funding in order to expose their frauds.

What do they do? You can’t be receiving grants from western institutions and governments to promote peace and human dignity, and we don’t hear or see you. That is fraud, uppercase fraud!

We need the unions, NGOs and rights advocacy groups in times like this because it’s very difficult for nonunion citizens to lead a protest, without a few elements losing their minds or having it hijacked by uncontrollably angry people. Nigerians are very angry right now, and if we must take to the street, we need to harmonise our demands – to check possible violence. We’re all stakeholders in the campaigns to understand the complexity of Boko Haram, and this defeat of our troops.

In this dilemma, we saw a public notice calling Abuja residents to converge at Unity Fountain on Thursday (27th February), just beside the city’s biggest hotel. I couldn’t authenticate the source of the unsigned broadcast. But as much as I’m wary of involvement in knee-jerk reactions to unpopular government (in)decisions, I thought it an opportunity to meet and discuss strategies to adopt in getting the government’s attention.

There was fear, the usual, especially when the police announced that “all forms of protests are banned in FCT” on NTA. And for that, they intercepted us, threw a canister of tear-gas at us, but we defied the threat. At the end, they had to arrest us and had us crammed inside their van. This is the beauty of our democracy – government of the powerful. But we were released, for the obvious reason: the fear of technology, the social media sensationalism, which, they have realised, can ruin their reputation and career with a tweet!

Though the protest ended much too soon, with hope of converging again when our strategies are better harmonised, it introduced me to the patriotism of fellow Nigerians in spite of the armchair critics to whom fault-finding is a permanent job. Whomever initiated the Unity Fountain protest is a genius. The intent was clear: to embarrass guests, from different countries, coming to Transcorp Hilton Hotel for the Centenary jamboree.

Still a mystery remains: even at the venue no one claimed authorship of the broadcast that had us converge- which means the initiator didn’t participate. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)

#KakandaTemple ~ GenVoices: Of Our Monotony and Their Harmony

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I’m happy that I was not a distant witness of Generational Voices. Having been closely involved, and in a deep thought, I see a movement about to be built on the foundations of OccupyNigeria, that deferred revolution. But as beautiful as its grand visions are, we have to resist ideological indoctrination and correctly understand that GenVoices is not OccupyNigeria. This is where our task commences!

Last week, I was in Lagos for the GenVoices telethon and the experience was one that assured me of a will to infiltrate the ranks of the owners of Nigerians by what a speaker at the event called “a threatened generation.” Our predators are the all-powerful families, cliques and friends whose idea of “development” has cost us a sane nation. GenVoices is an audacious rescue mission, exploring the anger of a generation denied an opportunity to be meaningful! Still, GenVoices is not OccupyNigeria. While the former is a stationary car about to embark on a journey, the latter was a moving car that had no idea of where it was going and thus we lost our way when more enlightened passengers in the struggle hijacked the movement for, well, filthy lucre we may charge. OccupyNigeria failed because we were ill-prepared for the cause, and also because we couldn’t harmonise our demands beyond the initial grievance against the removal of fuel subsidy. Some argue that OccupyNigeria was hijacked by the labour union; I prefer to simply refer to it as a revolution deferred. This is my highest uncritically expressed optimism in the young Nigerian. A revolution deferred.

It was easier to sell OccupNigeria. A sentence or two shared on Twitter and Facebook and an offline demonstration inspired a generation to stand up and fight for their rights. That was not magic; it was because what we set out to challenge affected the grassroots in even worse measure. It’s easier to convince a man that fuel price hike is a sham. But if you go to the average Nigerians and begin to tell them of a possibility of complete social change, I fear it wouldn’t be so easy to find sympathisers let alone followers. And that is the slippery ground of mutual incomprehension our generation needs to tread on in this clamour for collective decency. Yes, the generation is polarised. And I’m not even talking about the clichéd thesis of religious, ethnic and regional disharmonies here. Our voices are already monotonous, and unless we seek and amplify the distant voices, the sound of our revolution may be uninspiring. As we’re about to start the car for this rescue mission, we must make attempt to bring the “Us” and “Them” of this generation together; the “them” whose voices are never heard, those in parts of Nigeria where Twitter and Facebook are not known at all, those to whom all of “us”, privileged and educated, are seen as accomplices in the looting of a nation. What about them? How do we assure them of the possibility of a needed change without being seen as agents of delusions and hypocrisy? What’s this generation really without those Nigerian youth outside cyberspace? The last time I checked Facebook had just about 11 million Nigerians, and we have almost a hundred million who, by virtue of age, ought to be registered here.

GenVoices is anybody’s project; it’s an ideal for which all of us must be stakeholders. I understand that it sets out to rouse a definite political consciousness among the youth of this generation who may otherwise be perpetually reduced to “youth” by a clique whose families and friends have been in charge since October 1, 1960—until they’re in their fifties. And, as you know, the life expectancy of a person born here, surrounded by poor healthcare and explicable crises, does not favour such a long process to maturity! So now is the time to drop our escapisms and excuses to unify the voices of this generation if we’re actually ready for a joyful ride into history, as some speakers and panelists highlighted.

Wait, I have to address this: during the telethon, I find the view aired by a certain young panelist, who introduced himself as an aide of a senator, very disturbing. His take was, as an aide you have an advantage to practically be in control of your boss, citing his own records as a senatorial aide. This is, to be polite, ridiculous! There’s a limit to the extent you can influence a politician. If I had been on that panel, my response would have been to ask the young man to go ask the senator-he-controls to “move a motion” against the scandalous wages the lawmakers earn. Well, that may cost him his job. That 469 federal lawmakers defraud the nation, gulping 25 percent of the nation’s budget, which means the basic salary of an individual lawmaker is 116 times the country’s GDP per person of $1,600.00, is the height of ridiculousness. For the Nigerian lawmaker has been ranked by the Economist magazine as the highest paid in the world. Congratulations, Nigeria. This is the only record in our history that no country has ever beaten. And yet we gave a senatorial aide a platform to insult the sensibility of the nation? Ridiculous!

So GenVoices is to end that tradition that reduces the youths to mere aides. We deserve more, more presence as substantial and influential leaders, not as adjunct and inconsequential servants. For this shared belief, we’re all “comrades in struggle” and we must welcome all, including the critics of the movement, one of whom has already attacked me for merely honouring an invitation to the telethon at all. My critic, a blogger named Chukwudi mentioned me in a comment on Facebook where he wrote: “I’m surprised why my good friend Chude Jideonwo like (sic) isolating the core Nigerian youths from the scheme of his programs. Was even surprised to see Gimba Kakanda at the event. The same Gimba kicked against Future Award and wrote long essays to that effect. For Gimba to identify with elitist Gen Voice organized by the same person he criticized his hustle in the past left me mouth agape. Well Gen Voice without involving the core Nigerian youth is an effort in futility and at best show off. The last time I checked, the mainstream of Nigerian youths are not the social media champions.”

Thank you, Chukwudi. And while you have not even read my take on this movement, it’s understandable that you have criticised my participation to that effect. Listen, my criticisms of The Future Awards remain unchanged, purpose of which was to remind Lagos Blogs and mainstream media that Nigeria is bigger than the size of their blogs and televisions, and puncture the delusions of these “social media champions” of which you and I are members. Yet here, I applaud your observation. I was in Lagos to share my views on the divides in our generation, but you have to know that GenVoices, unlike The Future Awards, is not a celebration of “achievements”, rather a mere sampling of our generation’s monotonous voices. I was there simply because I write – a faint voice seeking more notes to amplify. The next phase of our campaign should be to assure ourselves that voices of this generation goes beyond the musicians, actors, politicians, bloggers, activists, and writers. The voices of this generation are also the harmonies of anguish, dejections, and disappointments expressed by fellow citizens outside our media coverage; they’re represented by the fraternities of peasants, artisans and non-union workers across the country. Their voices are harmonised because they’re melodies of the same subject: poverty. Unless we ally in this struggle, this revolution may be dismissed as another of our generational noises. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda

@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)