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NEWS INSIGHT
Murdered Nigerians, and our Reputation by Ely Obasi
How many Nigerians have been murdered so far this year (1997)? How many Nigerians were murdered outside Nigeria last year? We're not talking about those who got taken out by illnesses. Not about those who committed crimes and got themselves beheaded in Saudi Arabia, or hanged in Asia. This concerns folks like Chika Samuel Obi, the 37-year-old insurance company president, who was sitting in his office last week when death paid him a nasty visit. Someone might have the figures. But that's not all that's needed right now. Something else is. How many of these murders actually got solved? Getting solved here does not stop merely at the apprehension of the suspects that "allegedly" pulled the triggers. Getting solved goes right down to the point at which a conviction and appropriate sentence is secured. Whoever has these figures, please post them on this platform. There is a lot these figures will tell us about the relationship between our security and our reputation. Not just in the United States. But all over the world, including our homeland Nigeria. Years ago I got involved in a journalistic investigation in the freeway shooting death of Augustine Newton Osebor. Osebor was killed in a stand-off with a Swat team on a California freeway in the early 1980s. It was a very bizarre case. His family charged that the whole incident had been a set-up that put the young man in the firing line of the Swat team. So they hired a private investigator. That was money down the drain. The investigator turned up a number of interesting things, but not enough to effect anything the family would regard as justice. Three years later, on a whirlwind business tour of the United States, in Washington DC, Houston and around California, I made efforts to find out what else had happened in the case. All I came up with was that the fact that he was Nigerian didn't help matters, especially over allegations he had robbed a bank before the cops went after him. But did Osebor really rob a bank? In another case I followed in the early 1990s, a Nigerian student near Washington DC was shot dead in his apartment. Days before, he had told friends that he was being followed, and he knew his life was in danger. He gave specific identities of his suspected assailants. I personally saw a telex message he sent to his brother who was a professor at the University of Lagos, exactly 24 hours before his death, stating clearly that he knew he was about to be murdered. Yet the coroner ruled the death a suicide. In the autopsy report which was made available to me, the guy was shot at the upper side of the left side of the forehead. He was right-handed. The gun found beside his body was much longer than he could possibly have held. There was no gun powder on the skin where the single bullet entered, meaning that the barrel of the gun that killed him was not terribly close to his head. Yet the death was ruled a suicide. Case closed. Later when I raised the matter with a friend who knows about such things, he said normally security agencies (all over the world) don't pursue cases with a lot of enthusiasm if they have cause to believe that such cases might have come out of skirmishes between factions of a criminal group. Or between one criminal group and another. The suspected assailants the dead Washington DC student had talked about were Nigerians who had arrived in the US the week before. The family had had severe in-law problems. We give US examples here because information is relatively easy to get in America. The stories from other parts of the world are worse. (This article was Posted by late Obasi on January 21, 1997) Back to: News Index, or USAfrica Homepage |