You
were part of the last military administration that handed over powers
to the civilians in 1999. Now 15 years after, how do you feel about this
democracy?
Well, democracy is good. Nobody is against it. Even as a military man, I like democracy if it is followed in the real sense of democracy.
We say we are following the American model of democracy, but are we really doing what the Americans are doing?
Here the president and governors use government machinery to campaign for elections. You can’t see that in America or the United Kingdom. In fact, I remember that when the Prime Minister of the UK uses an official aircraft for a private trip, he was asked to pay. But here it is not so. We misuse everything.
Over there, when you go for elections everything is free and fair. But here if you are in the opposition, you are on the losers’ side from day one. So, while you use your hard earned money to campaign, those in government are using government money. Even if you go to the tribunal, they use government money. You use your own money and at the end you are suppressed and so on and so forth.
So that is what is bad about this democracy. We are not following what democracy should be. Democracy is to allow everybody to do what he or she likes within the law and we are to respect everybody’s idea.
What is your impression of the national conference since it started?
Were there things you found amiss or are there things you are not too comfortable with? Let me start from the leadership. The leadership is okay, it is a selection of highly experienced people. The chairman, for instance, was a judge under me when I was minister of FCT and I know him very, very well.
The deputy was my colleague in the federal cabinet under Babangida administration. He was minister of foreign affairs when I was minister of transport and aviation. These are people I know very well as highly principled persons. The majority of delegates have seen that when things were trying to get out of hand, people felt that he should try and apply some sticks and when he did that, things started moving but he is also a very amiable person and people are satisfied.
You are part of the Committee on Power Devolution at the ongoing conference and one would like to know if some of the issues you raised about the country were addressed during your discussions?
Well, it depends. You know most of these committees overlap. Our committee dealt largely with resource control and when we could not agree on the matter initially what the chairman said was that by our rules, we have to suspend discussions till the next day. So, we discussed resource control and the legislative list because we felt that there are some issues that should be moved from the exclusive list to the concurrent list. The majority felt that we shouldn’t start breaking the police into federal and state. We said it should be retained on the exclusive List.
We said that to fill the gap at the local level. We said we should encourage the various communities to have trained and recognised vigilante groups. We said they should provide them with a kind of uniform and pay them some stipends even if it’s one third of the salary of the police. This will create jobs for youths at the local level; they get something to do ad they know the people in their localities.
What is your take on the rising insecurity in Plateau State? For some time now, we have been having peace but recently we started having these bombings. I have told people that it is not only in Jos that we are having these bomb attacks. We have to summon courage and continue to pray to God, so that the security agencies will be able to apprehend some of these people. It is not a conventional war. Like we always say in the military, if it is a conventional war, you know the people you are fighting; you know their uniform and you know them when they are coming to fight you. But in this case even as I am talking to you, I don’t know your mind.
So it is very difficult and that is why America is still battling with it. Even in Iraq that they conquered by war, you still have bombs going off there. Look at Afghanistan, look at Ireland, once in while bombs still go off there. So terrorism is not what you say you are giving it a time frame to end it. You can only minimise it.
There is this feeling that Northern elders know these boys but are shying away from speaking to them in the language they can understand. Could this be true?
I would not say it is not true, the only thing is that I don’t know them. I can say it is true but if you ask me who they are, I don’t know.
There was a time leaders from the North East were called to discuss this issue. I was there as the chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum. I told one of the former governors whom while I was driving with him through the streets and I saw people selling petrol in jerrycans near a major petrol station. I asked him, why do you allow these people to do this (hawking petrol) and he said they are very useful during election. He said: “We use them to deal with opposition.” I said that is the beginning of Boko Haram.
This is because he is no more there and maybe these boys are no getting the same type of relationship. We know what happened because they were given arms to deal with opposition. When the governors that were doing this were no longer there, nobody was caring for them again, the boys already got arms and they had to use it to get money for themselves. So there is always a reason for something. Last week when T.Y. Danjuma was being honoured with a chieftaincy title in Lafia, Nasarawa State, he said that he believes that some of the sponsors were in the crowd and should appeal to Boko Haram to stop.
I think that it is a general knowledge. We cannot say there are no persons behind them not only in the North, even in the South. As long as they don’t come out of it and as long as we don’t have the confidence to pinpoint, we will continue to walk in the darkness.
How do we get out of this wave of insecurity?
Pray hard.
Prayer?
Yes, prayer. People don’t believe in prayer; I don’t know why. I believe in prayer.
As a military man, how do we get out of the present insecurity across the country? As a military man?
Well, as I told you this is not a conventional war.
Remember during the Biafra war (Yakubu) Gowon said it was a police action and people were being killed. I was among those at the borders and when we started capturing some of the arms that were never in the Army inventory, we wondered where they came from. I was sent to Lagos to tell the government that these people, Biafrans, were serious. Look at the arms going into the region.
How long can we continue with this police action? It was then Gowon had to declare a full scale war. So, the whole thing had to be changed to full scale war. It took us three years. But in the present situation, it is a different thing all together.
You can be sleeping and somebody will just come and throw bomb at your house and run away. Look at the missing Chibok girls, we can’t even find them and yet they are within Nigeria here. Maybe they have been taken out, we don’t know. This is why we are going to America to get sophisticated weapons and equipment that can see under the sea and over the sky. Possibly they will be able to help us.
Every country has its own level of sophistication. We should not be shy about it. Let us go to anybody who can help us.
One of the governors in the troubled states said Boko Haram has more sophisticated weapons and more motivated than the Nigeria Army. Does this mean that he knows these insurgents?
Maybe, they are more motivated because for those people to take on such an assignment, definitely, they must have been highly motivated.
Do you know that during wars, America send sweets and biscuits to its soldiers? I know because I schooled there. During the Liberian war when I was in charge of Logistics, I brought that idea and I was buying sweets and biscuits of different sizes, put it in C130 and send to our troops. So, when I visited them, I was happy to see them eating biscuits in their trenches and feeling very happy. I also did that during the war in Sierra Leone. So anything we can do to motivate our troops we should do it to make them highly motivated. As to whether Boko Haram is more equipped, I doubt that one. I doubt it because these are people that come, hit and go. Not that you can see them face to face and engage them in a gun battle.
You were once the minister of FCT and so many ministers have come and gone since your tenure expired. How would you compare your administration with those of your successors?
Well, a lot of differences and a lot of reasons also. For instance, development in the capital city is much more now because there is more money. In our days where a barrel of oil was $11, we are talking about 1980 to 1999.
Those days too only four states Rivers, Lagos, Kano and FCT could make budgets up to N1billion but today even the local governments have budgets of over a billion. So you can see the difference. There is a lot of money and may be because of a lot of money too, a lot of corruption, because the more you have money the more you are corrupt. Corruption is high at the federal level, when it comes to the state level, it reduces and when it comes to local government level, there is also corruption. That’s why I said there are different reasons.
Are you saying that the civilians in this democratic dispensation are more corrupt than the military in their days in government?
I don’t want to say yes or no. I have no instrument for measuring corruption but what I can say for real is that the military has the guts to deal with corrupt people. We dealt with them instantly, locked them up, removed them from office; there is nothing like this ‘he is my supporter,’ ‘I need him for future election or this is my brother.’ No, we will deal with ourselves, those who are not innocent we remove them.
There was a case of a military administrator who was removed because he took N2 million to go on a small pass; N2 million from the treasury, to go and do what? He said he was going on a small trip and the people there reported that they are suffering because this man took N2 million to go to his home town. Is it because this is not his state? You know in the military they don’t post you to your state and it was found to be true and he was removed instantly. So that is the difference with the military administration.
If we don’t know, we don’t know but where we know we take action immediately. I was the military governor of the then Bendel State under Gen Buhari-Idiagbon, Honestly, we were allowed N1, 000 for a one day conference. We didn’t know anything like security votes. We were allowed only N1,000.
The money is meant for the boys who were helping us. May be because they have worked very hard and you say okay, take N100, N200 and so forth. Every governor has a liaison in Lagos, there’s a place to stay, you can eat, then what do you take N10, 000 for, not to talk of the millions they take and now they move around with dollars.
We were not even allowed to open accounts abroad and because of that I have no overseas account now. There was nothing that (former president Olusegun) Obasanjo didn’t do thinking I was close to Abacha and also involved in operating overseas accounts and he checked everything. I have no account overseas. At the time I was appointed military governor I had only £150. But the situation is different today.
I will say there is complete breakdown of law and order and we need this strong political will to move things forward. We need very courageous not only those at the helm of affairs but the advisers too because the advisers are weakening those at the head. The foundation must be strong before the head will know what to do.
What led the country to this magnitude of corruption we have in the system today?
When people begin to talk about military dictatorship, you start wondering whether the military will see you and kill you. They felt that the military could not allow them do certain things and so they want the so-called democracy as if there is no dictatorship going on now.
There is dictatorship going on, a lot of things have been left undone, we haven’t upheld the constitution which we swore to uphold; the governors among us don’t follow the constitution they swore to uphold. So which is which?
So I will say things started going bad as the civilians took over. Some of the things civilians are complaining of now have been on for 10 or 15 years. Look at the zone thing now. They said zone is a military thing, it is not good. It is not good but they are using it for political allocation of votes, they haven’t dispensed of it.
I know some zones at this conference that are saying that it should be turned to regional governments and some of us said we can’t go back there again because there were reasons to decentralise , we can’t go there again. So there are some laxities in the so-called democracy and they think the thing is a licence to do what you like, which is not. That is the bane of the whole thing.
In your days as the minister of FCT, many people believed you were so powerful that you were even controlling Gen. Sani Abacha the then Head of State. How true is this perception?
I don’t know whether it was true or not. As far as the military was concerned, I was the most senior army officer after Gen Abacha. Brigadier Gen. Oladipo Diya, became my superior because he was Chief of General Staff. We put him there for political balancing because Abacha came from the North and I also come from the North. Secondly, as the minister of the Federal Capital Territory, once you came to see Abacha for anything, the next person to pay courtesy call on was me.
By our constitution, the Federal Capital Territory is like a state and when you go to a state, you call on the governor there. So when you come to Federal Capital to see the head of state, you see me too. Sometimes if the head of state is not available, you see me and in most cases. I represented the head of state in some places. So, I was all over the place because of the position I held. But I was cool headed too, I didn’t misuse my position.
If I was not cool headed I would have been removed; I never misused my position. I never reported any officer or minister to Abacha. I normally go to Abacha in the morning if I have any official thing to discuss. I did not have to stab anybody before him.
Any minister that had any problem would come to me and I would tell them how to answer him and when they go to Abacha, he would tell them the same thing. When we were lieutenants, we knew each other in and out and that’s how we developed our friendship.
Many Nigerians had expected you to become the head of state when Abacha died being the next most senior officer. What happened? Were you short-changed?
No, no, no. I explained this in an interview with one of the newspapers some time ago. There were two methods of succession in the military. One is protocol, the other is by seniority. If we had voted to go by seniority, I would have been the one to succeed Abacha but we went by protocol and General Abdusalam Abubakar was next as far as protocol was concerned since Gen. Diya had already been removed. So, Abdulsalam being Chief of Defence Staff, was next in hierarchy as far as protocol was concerned. That’s what happened and there were no hard feelings about it. There were speculations at that time that it was Major Hamza Al-Mustapha that deprived you of the opportunity of succeeding his boss. What is the truth about it? It was not Mustapha. He didn’t even know about it.
It was done before the ministers and members of the Provisional Ruling Council. Sometimes people will talk about Mustapha as if he was God, No, it is not like that.
Does it mean that Al- Mustapha wasn’t wielding the kind of powers that people thought he did?
No. As the Chief Security Officer (CSO) to the Commander-in-Chief, there was no doubt that he had the powers to lock you up and the powers to investigate you. He had those powers.
Don’t you fear the police? When you sit in your house and police knock at your door, what will be your reaction? What have I done?
Was the report true that you wept when you saw that you were side-lined in the choice of the person to take over from Abacha. Was that not the truth?
No. No. No. I did not weep because I was not the one to take over. I wept for the death of my friend, Abacha. I did not weep for leadership. Leadership comes from God and He knows why it turned out that way. Today, I am a free man; I walk through the streets and nobody abuses me. I feel happy. So how can I weep for being side-lined when I know the system? It is either this way or that way.
Why should I weep? If they had brought a new system that was unknown to us, that would have been different.
What really happened to your friend Abacha? There were so many stories at that time and one account said he died after an all-night party and an encounter with some Indian prostitutes. What exactly happened to him?
He died of natural causes. People think he was killed by a woman or that he was poisoned but there is nothing like that.
There is a report, a copy of which I have in my possession. The wife sent part of his body to Germany for analysis to find out whether he was killed by poison but there was nothing like that. She was not satisfied. They said she should go to London. She also took it to London and London gave the same report.
So the stories about some Indian girls giving him apples at a party in the Villa that night is not true.
But was he sick or having symptoms of any disease before he died?
Yes, he was sick. Even if you noticed at that time, his lips were like almost peeling.
Does he smoke?
No. He doesn’t smoke. It was his kidney.
NEW TELEGRAPHWell, democracy is good. Nobody is against it. Even as a military man, I like democracy if it is followed in the real sense of democracy.
We say we are following the American model of democracy, but are we really doing what the Americans are doing?
Here the president and governors use government machinery to campaign for elections. You can’t see that in America or the United Kingdom. In fact, I remember that when the Prime Minister of the UK uses an official aircraft for a private trip, he was asked to pay. But here it is not so. We misuse everything.
Over there, when you go for elections everything is free and fair. But here if you are in the opposition, you are on the losers’ side from day one. So, while you use your hard earned money to campaign, those in government are using government money. Even if you go to the tribunal, they use government money. You use your own money and at the end you are suppressed and so on and so forth.
So that is what is bad about this democracy. We are not following what democracy should be. Democracy is to allow everybody to do what he or she likes within the law and we are to respect everybody’s idea.
What is your impression of the national conference since it started?
Were there things you found amiss or are there things you are not too comfortable with? Let me start from the leadership. The leadership is okay, it is a selection of highly experienced people. The chairman, for instance, was a judge under me when I was minister of FCT and I know him very, very well.
The deputy was my colleague in the federal cabinet under Babangida administration. He was minister of foreign affairs when I was minister of transport and aviation. These are people I know very well as highly principled persons. The majority of delegates have seen that when things were trying to get out of hand, people felt that he should try and apply some sticks and when he did that, things started moving but he is also a very amiable person and people are satisfied.
You are part of the Committee on Power Devolution at the ongoing conference and one would like to know if some of the issues you raised about the country were addressed during your discussions?
Well, it depends. You know most of these committees overlap. Our committee dealt largely with resource control and when we could not agree on the matter initially what the chairman said was that by our rules, we have to suspend discussions till the next day. So, we discussed resource control and the legislative list because we felt that there are some issues that should be moved from the exclusive list to the concurrent list. The majority felt that we shouldn’t start breaking the police into federal and state. We said it should be retained on the exclusive List.
We said that to fill the gap at the local level. We said we should encourage the various communities to have trained and recognised vigilante groups. We said they should provide them with a kind of uniform and pay them some stipends even if it’s one third of the salary of the police. This will create jobs for youths at the local level; they get something to do ad they know the people in their localities.
What is your take on the rising insecurity in Plateau State? For some time now, we have been having peace but recently we started having these bombings. I have told people that it is not only in Jos that we are having these bomb attacks. We have to summon courage and continue to pray to God, so that the security agencies will be able to apprehend some of these people. It is not a conventional war. Like we always say in the military, if it is a conventional war, you know the people you are fighting; you know their uniform and you know them when they are coming to fight you. But in this case even as I am talking to you, I don’t know your mind.
So it is very difficult and that is why America is still battling with it. Even in Iraq that they conquered by war, you still have bombs going off there. Look at Afghanistan, look at Ireland, once in while bombs still go off there. So terrorism is not what you say you are giving it a time frame to end it. You can only minimise it.
There is this feeling that Northern elders know these boys but are shying away from speaking to them in the language they can understand. Could this be true?
I would not say it is not true, the only thing is that I don’t know them. I can say it is true but if you ask me who they are, I don’t know.
There was a time leaders from the North East were called to discuss this issue. I was there as the chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum. I told one of the former governors whom while I was driving with him through the streets and I saw people selling petrol in jerrycans near a major petrol station. I asked him, why do you allow these people to do this (hawking petrol) and he said they are very useful during election. He said: “We use them to deal with opposition.” I said that is the beginning of Boko Haram.
This is because he is no more there and maybe these boys are no getting the same type of relationship. We know what happened because they were given arms to deal with opposition. When the governors that were doing this were no longer there, nobody was caring for them again, the boys already got arms and they had to use it to get money for themselves. So there is always a reason for something. Last week when T.Y. Danjuma was being honoured with a chieftaincy title in Lafia, Nasarawa State, he said that he believes that some of the sponsors were in the crowd and should appeal to Boko Haram to stop.
I think that it is a general knowledge. We cannot say there are no persons behind them not only in the North, even in the South. As long as they don’t come out of it and as long as we don’t have the confidence to pinpoint, we will continue to walk in the darkness.
How do we get out of this wave of insecurity?
Pray hard.
Prayer?
Yes, prayer. People don’t believe in prayer; I don’t know why. I believe in prayer.
As a military man, how do we get out of the present insecurity across the country? As a military man?
Well, as I told you this is not a conventional war.
Remember during the Biafra war (Yakubu) Gowon said it was a police action and people were being killed. I was among those at the borders and when we started capturing some of the arms that were never in the Army inventory, we wondered where they came from. I was sent to Lagos to tell the government that these people, Biafrans, were serious. Look at the arms going into the region.
How long can we continue with this police action? It was then Gowon had to declare a full scale war. So, the whole thing had to be changed to full scale war. It took us three years. But in the present situation, it is a different thing all together.
You can be sleeping and somebody will just come and throw bomb at your house and run away. Look at the missing Chibok girls, we can’t even find them and yet they are within Nigeria here. Maybe they have been taken out, we don’t know. This is why we are going to America to get sophisticated weapons and equipment that can see under the sea and over the sky. Possibly they will be able to help us.
Every country has its own level of sophistication. We should not be shy about it. Let us go to anybody who can help us.
One of the governors in the troubled states said Boko Haram has more sophisticated weapons and more motivated than the Nigeria Army. Does this mean that he knows these insurgents?
Maybe, they are more motivated because for those people to take on such an assignment, definitely, they must have been highly motivated.
Do you know that during wars, America send sweets and biscuits to its soldiers? I know because I schooled there. During the Liberian war when I was in charge of Logistics, I brought that idea and I was buying sweets and biscuits of different sizes, put it in C130 and send to our troops. So, when I visited them, I was happy to see them eating biscuits in their trenches and feeling very happy. I also did that during the war in Sierra Leone. So anything we can do to motivate our troops we should do it to make them highly motivated. As to whether Boko Haram is more equipped, I doubt that one. I doubt it because these are people that come, hit and go. Not that you can see them face to face and engage them in a gun battle.
You were once the minister of FCT and so many ministers have come and gone since your tenure expired. How would you compare your administration with those of your successors?
Well, a lot of differences and a lot of reasons also. For instance, development in the capital city is much more now because there is more money. In our days where a barrel of oil was $11, we are talking about 1980 to 1999.
Those days too only four states Rivers, Lagos, Kano and FCT could make budgets up to N1billion but today even the local governments have budgets of over a billion. So you can see the difference. There is a lot of money and may be because of a lot of money too, a lot of corruption, because the more you have money the more you are corrupt. Corruption is high at the federal level, when it comes to the state level, it reduces and when it comes to local government level, there is also corruption. That’s why I said there are different reasons.
Are you saying that the civilians in this democratic dispensation are more corrupt than the military in their days in government?
I don’t want to say yes or no. I have no instrument for measuring corruption but what I can say for real is that the military has the guts to deal with corrupt people. We dealt with them instantly, locked them up, removed them from office; there is nothing like this ‘he is my supporter,’ ‘I need him for future election or this is my brother.’ No, we will deal with ourselves, those who are not innocent we remove them.
There was a case of a military administrator who was removed because he took N2 million to go on a small pass; N2 million from the treasury, to go and do what? He said he was going on a small trip and the people there reported that they are suffering because this man took N2 million to go to his home town. Is it because this is not his state? You know in the military they don’t post you to your state and it was found to be true and he was removed instantly. So that is the difference with the military administration.
If we don’t know, we don’t know but where we know we take action immediately. I was the military governor of the then Bendel State under Gen Buhari-Idiagbon, Honestly, we were allowed N1, 000 for a one day conference. We didn’t know anything like security votes. We were allowed only N1,000.
The money is meant for the boys who were helping us. May be because they have worked very hard and you say okay, take N100, N200 and so forth. Every governor has a liaison in Lagos, there’s a place to stay, you can eat, then what do you take N10, 000 for, not to talk of the millions they take and now they move around with dollars.
We were not even allowed to open accounts abroad and because of that I have no overseas account now. There was nothing that (former president Olusegun) Obasanjo didn’t do thinking I was close to Abacha and also involved in operating overseas accounts and he checked everything. I have no account overseas. At the time I was appointed military governor I had only £150. But the situation is different today.
I will say there is complete breakdown of law and order and we need this strong political will to move things forward. We need very courageous not only those at the helm of affairs but the advisers too because the advisers are weakening those at the head. The foundation must be strong before the head will know what to do.
What led the country to this magnitude of corruption we have in the system today?
When people begin to talk about military dictatorship, you start wondering whether the military will see you and kill you. They felt that the military could not allow them do certain things and so they want the so-called democracy as if there is no dictatorship going on now.
There is dictatorship going on, a lot of things have been left undone, we haven’t upheld the constitution which we swore to uphold; the governors among us don’t follow the constitution they swore to uphold. So which is which?
So I will say things started going bad as the civilians took over. Some of the things civilians are complaining of now have been on for 10 or 15 years. Look at the zone thing now. They said zone is a military thing, it is not good. It is not good but they are using it for political allocation of votes, they haven’t dispensed of it.
I know some zones at this conference that are saying that it should be turned to regional governments and some of us said we can’t go back there again because there were reasons to decentralise , we can’t go there again. So there are some laxities in the so-called democracy and they think the thing is a licence to do what you like, which is not. That is the bane of the whole thing.
In your days as the minister of FCT, many people believed you were so powerful that you were even controlling Gen. Sani Abacha the then Head of State. How true is this perception?
I don’t know whether it was true or not. As far as the military was concerned, I was the most senior army officer after Gen Abacha. Brigadier Gen. Oladipo Diya, became my superior because he was Chief of General Staff. We put him there for political balancing because Abacha came from the North and I also come from the North. Secondly, as the minister of the Federal Capital Territory, once you came to see Abacha for anything, the next person to pay courtesy call on was me.
By our constitution, the Federal Capital Territory is like a state and when you go to a state, you call on the governor there. So when you come to Federal Capital to see the head of state, you see me too. Sometimes if the head of state is not available, you see me and in most cases. I represented the head of state in some places. So, I was all over the place because of the position I held. But I was cool headed too, I didn’t misuse my position.
If I was not cool headed I would have been removed; I never misused my position. I never reported any officer or minister to Abacha. I normally go to Abacha in the morning if I have any official thing to discuss. I did not have to stab anybody before him.
Any minister that had any problem would come to me and I would tell them how to answer him and when they go to Abacha, he would tell them the same thing. When we were lieutenants, we knew each other in and out and that’s how we developed our friendship.
Many Nigerians had expected you to become the head of state when Abacha died being the next most senior officer. What happened? Were you short-changed?
No, no, no. I explained this in an interview with one of the newspapers some time ago. There were two methods of succession in the military. One is protocol, the other is by seniority. If we had voted to go by seniority, I would have been the one to succeed Abacha but we went by protocol and General Abdusalam Abubakar was next as far as protocol was concerned since Gen. Diya had already been removed. So, Abdulsalam being Chief of Defence Staff, was next in hierarchy as far as protocol was concerned. That’s what happened and there were no hard feelings about it. There were speculations at that time that it was Major Hamza Al-Mustapha that deprived you of the opportunity of succeeding his boss. What is the truth about it? It was not Mustapha. He didn’t even know about it.
It was done before the ministers and members of the Provisional Ruling Council. Sometimes people will talk about Mustapha as if he was God, No, it is not like that.
Does it mean that Al- Mustapha wasn’t wielding the kind of powers that people thought he did?
No. As the Chief Security Officer (CSO) to the Commander-in-Chief, there was no doubt that he had the powers to lock you up and the powers to investigate you. He had those powers.
Don’t you fear the police? When you sit in your house and police knock at your door, what will be your reaction? What have I done?
Was the report true that you wept when you saw that you were side-lined in the choice of the person to take over from Abacha. Was that not the truth?
No. No. No. I did not weep because I was not the one to take over. I wept for the death of my friend, Abacha. I did not weep for leadership. Leadership comes from God and He knows why it turned out that way. Today, I am a free man; I walk through the streets and nobody abuses me. I feel happy. So how can I weep for being side-lined when I know the system? It is either this way or that way.
Why should I weep? If they had brought a new system that was unknown to us, that would have been different.
What really happened to your friend Abacha? There were so many stories at that time and one account said he died after an all-night party and an encounter with some Indian prostitutes. What exactly happened to him?
He died of natural causes. People think he was killed by a woman or that he was poisoned but there is nothing like that.
There is a report, a copy of which I have in my possession. The wife sent part of his body to Germany for analysis to find out whether he was killed by poison but there was nothing like that. She was not satisfied. They said she should go to London. She also took it to London and London gave the same report.
So the stories about some Indian girls giving him apples at a party in the Villa that night is not true.
But was he sick or having symptoms of any disease before he died?
Yes, he was sick. Even if you noticed at that time, his lips were like almost peeling.
Does he smoke?
No. He doesn’t smoke. It was his kidney.
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