The Sacking of Malu

by

Mohammed Haruna

Early in January 1999, former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, instructed me, as his Chief Press Secretary, to investigate the case of Mr. Niran Malaolu, the Editor of The Diet (a Lagos based daily, now defunct), convicted of concealment of a conspiracy to overthrow General Sani Abacha's regime in December 1997.

This was the conspiracy said to have been led by Lt. General Oladipo Diya, Abacha's second in command. General Abubakar had decided to review the convictions of all those jailed over Diya' s coup attempt as part of his broad gesture at healing the wounds inflicted on the nation by Abacha's five-year tyranny.

To carry out the review, the Head of State had asked General Victor Malu, who had presided over Diya's trial, to make a presentation for a review to the Provisional Ruling Council. At that time Malu was a member of the PRC as the General Officer Commanding, 82 Division, Enugu.

To carry out my boss's instruction, I obviously needed to speak to Malu, who had all the papers on this case. I also needed to speak to Malaolu's employers and to the Nigerian Union of Journalists and the Nigerian Guild of Editors. All three of them had tried in vain to secure Malaolu's release.

I first met with Malu a few days after I received my instructions and apparently my boss had told him to give me his highest cooperation. He did. Not only did he give me the draft of the paper he intended to present to the PRC, he was prepared to allow me access to all the relevant documents of the case. My first encounter with him and several others later left me with the impression of someone who seemed tough on the outside but who, deep inside, was a very compassionate man.

Malu regarded all the mass media talk about Diya's being a "phantom coup" as propaganda of the vilest kind since Diya himself had admitted his part in the conspiracy to overthrow Abacha. Diya's rationalisation had been that he was "set up" by the then Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Ishaya Bamaiyi, acting on Abacha's instructions. But the central issue really was not the whys or hows of the conspiracy. Rather, it was whether or not one participated.

In convicting Diya of the December 1997 coup attempt, Malu did not have the slightest doubt, on the weight of the evidence before him, that Diya and several of his co- conspirators like Major-Generals Olanrewaju and Adisa, were guilty as charged. As for Malaolu, Malu personally suspected that the Editor was a victim of running his mouth too wide. An audiotape of Malaolu's phone conversation with an American diplomat had him telling the diplomat that some senior military officers were meeting over the suspected murder in prison of Major-General Shehu Musa Yar'Adua, with intention to overthrow Abacha whom they suspected of ordering the alleged murder. To Malu, Malaolu's cross-examination and the evidence against the editor suggested the case of someone pretending to know more than he did. The audiotape, however, tied Malu's hands and he could not but convict Malaolu.

Not surprisingly, Malu agreed with me that I should recommend a pardon for Malaolu. The big, but pleasant, surprise, however, was that he thought Diya and all his other military co-conspirators should also be pardoned although they should remain cashiered to discourage future coup attempts. He thought that with Abacha gone and in the new spirit of national reconciliation pursued by General Abubakar, the crimes against Abacha's regime should be buried with the late dictator.

I made my recommendation for a pardon for Malaolu about mid-January. I think Malu made his own before mine. Three months later the Head of State had yet to bring our recommendations before the PRC. I was to discover later that this was due to a stiff opposition to the pardon mounted by Bamaiyi and Company. Malu became so exasperated by General Abubakar's delay that he once told me he believed General Abubakar was afraid of Bamaiyi.

Somehow, I did not care to repeat this to my boss because 1 did not think it was a wise thing to get involved in what was essentially a military affair, even though it also involved national security and the pardon itself would have enhanced General Abubakar's already positive image as a healer and a compassionate leader.

As events turned out, General Abubakar merely bided his time and did not delay the pardon because he was afraid of Bamaiyi. At least this was my impression in retrospect. On the day the pardon was announced in May following one of the longest meetings of the PRC, Malu was simply beside himself with joy. "Mohammed," I recall him saying almost in ecstasy, "Congratulations. We have done it at last!" I told him I thought he was the one to be congratulated because of his fearless and steadfast opposition to his chief, Bamaiyi, in his pursuit of what he believed was right for the country. Did Malu pursue the pardon of those he jailed with such zeal to salve his conscience? I do not think so. For anyone who might have thought so, clearly the evidence to the contrary was his testimony before the Oputa panel, as Diya's jailer, in the petition brought before the panel by Diya himself. Those who thought Malu would be on the defensive at the panel clearly got more than they bargained for. For, not only did Malu robustly defend his judgement in Diya's trial, Diya, by his own sorry performance at the hearing completely dispelled any doubt that he actively participated in, indeed eventually led, a conspiracy to overthrow Abacha. After that sorry performance, his supporters could still quibble over whether or not it was right to overthrow Abacha's tyranny, but they could no longer claim that it was a phantom coup. If Malu acquitted himself well over his role in jailing Diya and Co, for conspiring to oust Abacha, President Olusegun Obasanjo's well-known Abachaphobia made the army chief a marked man thereafter. In appointing Malu as his army chief, Obasanjo was obviously aware of his unapologetic stance on Diya's trial. Obasanjo must also have been aware of Malu's independent mindedness and his outspokenness.

Even then I suspect the Commander, in, Chief never reckoned that Malu, unlike many Abacha loyalists he has inexplicably surrounded himself with, would turn out to be a rebellious army chief. Malu, it seems to me, has turned out to be the classic case of Man proposing but God disposing. As far as I could tell, he was not in the top rank of the possibilities for the job of army chief as General Abubakar prepared to hand over power to Obasanjo. He was, no doubt, senior enough, competent enough and experienced enough to fit the bill for the job but like his air force counterpart, AVM Isaac Alfa, I think he got the job less for those qualities than for Obasanjo's strategy, recommended by some of his closest allies, that he should divide the North in order to rule Nigeria. Malu and Alfa, based on this consideration, were expected, as Christian Middle Belters to stand solidly behind Obasanjo on any policy or action, which the so-called core North was likely to oppose.

Malu, if not Alfa, proved a thorough letdown for his bosses and as such his sack was inevitable. The press has been full of at least two examples of the disappointment he has turned out to be, apart, of course, from his robust defence of his loyalty to Abacha. First, he was said to have virtually forced his reluctant Commander-in-Chief to allow the army to intervene to stop the OPC massacre of Northerners in Lagos last year.

Second, and even more significantly, he has been loudly critical of his Commander-in- Chief's romance with the Americans, a romance which has led to an illegal defence pact under which the American army, of all armies, is supposed to train the Nigerian army in peace keeping operations! Yes, the same American army which left Somalia, tail between legs, because the Somali factions it was supposed to contain gave it a bloody nose, whereas, the Nigerian army it is supposed to re-train had acquitted itself in even more difficult peace-keeping operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

This rather incongruous role for American troops in the country has fuelled suspicions that the real reason for their presence in Nigeria is less to secure the Nigerian State than to secure the Obasanjo regime against the machinations, real and imagined, of the so-ca1led core North.

There has been widespread criticism of Malu for his loud criticism of Obasanjo's romance with the Americans. In principle, Malu was wrong to have criticised his Commander-in-Chief openly, but in practice I doubt if he had much of a choice, especially as he reflected the predominant view of the army top brass and the generality of the officer corps, if not the rank and file. His choice, clearly, was between loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief and loyalty to his nation whose interest, as he and many of his officers see it, is hardly served by American troops nosing around our military installations well beyond the need for re-training and re-orientating our troops. Malu made his choice - which for me was the right choice - knowing fully that the price to pay may very well be his job as has now turned out to be the case.

Many of his critics say if he didn't like his Commander-in-Chief's policies he should have resigned first before condemning them. Again, that is the principles of it. In practice, Malu made the right choice in criticising his boss as army chief and waiting for the sack, because this way the criticisms were bound to be more telling.

Obasanjo' s romance with the Americans, is of course, not Malu's first test of his loyalty to the nation vis-à-vis his loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief. Diya's trial was probably the first and he has been criticised for fiercely expressing his loyalty to Abacha as opposed to his loyalty to the nation. Such criticism has come, especially from those who believe the overthrow of Abacha's tyranny was in the national interest. May be so.

Certainly, Malu was, in my view, wrong to defend his wearing of the controversial Abacha badge because, if nothing else, wearing such badges leads to personality cults which is an abhorrent thing. He was also wrong in my view, to defend Major Hamza A1- Mustapha as a brave officer who merely carried out his brief as Abacha's chief security officer. Everyone knew that Al-Mustapha went well beyond his brief and became a security threat to the nation by holding his boss as a hostage to power.

Even then, Malu's spirited defence of his loyalty to Abacha, wrong as it is, does not detract from the propriety of his choice in criticising his new Commander-in-Chief's romance with the Americans. Hopefully, Obasanjo has learnt the real lesson of this rather unwholesome episode of having to sack his service chiefs less than halfway through his first term. The real lesson, as Obasanjo would surely agree as a born-again Christian, is that it is God that giveth power and taketh it away and not any scheming by human beings. As such the only way to secure it is to do what is right by God.

The writer was a one time editor of the New Nigerian newspaper