Posted: July 28, 2013 -
Emeka Offor
By SaharaReporters, New York
This is because the majority of the people are preparing for a showdown with the town’s controversial billionaire, Wilson Orakwue Emeka Offor, better known as Emeka Offor.
Several Oraifite indigenes told SaharaReporters that Mr. Offor has committed numerous flagrant violations of the human rights of members of the community. “This man [Mr. Offor] is using his money and contacts with the powers-that-be in Abuja as well as the police to treat Oraifite people as if they are his houseboys,” said a prominent member of the town.
The immediate cause of the current uneasy relationship between the businessman and his folk is the detention since Saturday, July 13, 2013, of a social activist from the town named Comrade Boniface Okonkwo by the police on Mr. Offor’s instructions.
Mr. Okonkwo’s sole offence is that he criticized the shady billionaire in an online forum of Oraifite indigenes for donating a whopping $1.3 million to Rotary International for polio eradication while their town lacks basic amenities and the people wallow in abject poverty.
Several sources told SaharaReporters that Mr. Offor considered the criticism defamatory and consequently directed one Jeff Nkonye of Fortress Chambers in Lagos, who is also the legal adviser to the Oraifite Improvement Union, to write a letter demanding that Mr. Okonkwo retract the accusation within 24 hours and render an unreserved apology to the controversial businessman in two national newspapers as well as the online forum named Mbala Obodo. The lawyer’s letter was dated June 28.
The activist stood his ground. “The next thing we saw,” according to Sylvanus Udedibia, Mr. Okonkwo’s first cousin living with him in Lagos, “was Okonkwo’s arrest by a detachment of policemen from the Federal Special Fraud Unit and the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. They came all the way from Abuja and shot into the air several times to intimidate the family and neighbors in Ilasamaja, Mushin, in Lagos.”
The activist was arrested in a commando-like operation in the early hours of the day as he was preparing to travel to South Africa. Mr. Offor, according to Mike Ofiaeli who is coordinating the campaign for Mr. Okonkwo’s release, had sent Sunday Igboanuzue, a Lagos-based trader, and Godson Ugochukwu, a young lawyer in Lagos, to secretly monitor Mr. Okonkwo’s movements and report to him.
Godson Onyeakosi, who is Okonkwo’s lawyer, stated: “Comrade Okonkwo was not told of his offence until he was whisked away to the Lagos State Police Command where the team from Abuja officially informed their colleagues that Okonkwo had been arrested for allegedly impugning Emeka Offor’s character in an online forum, and that the government contractor had written a petition to the police headquarters to this effect.
A police source in Lagos confided in SaharaReporters that they were shocked that the force high command was dragged into such a silly civil case. The officer said, “Have we degenerated to this level? Have we become so cheap a tool in settling personal scores?”
Since his arrest on Saturday, July 13, Mr. Okonkwo has been kept incommunicado in Abuja, reportedly sharing a very small cell with hardened criminals like armed robbers, kidnappers and murderers, a police source told SaharaReporters. It was gathered that, contrary to common practice, the criminals refused to beat Mr. Okonkwo when on entering the cell he identified himself as a social crusader who was “abducted for criticizing a wealthy government contractor.”
Since his arrest the police have denied Mr. Okonkwo access to his phones, and they have stopped him from meeting family friends, relatives and sympathizers. At the time of filing this report, his lawyer was making frantic efforts to secure his release from the court.
“It is a monumental shame that the anti-corruption fighter should be detained without trial for two weeks now whereas the Constitution provides that no person can be detained for more than 24 hours without trial unless the offence he is accused of committing is not a bailable one, like murder,” said Mr. Onyeakusi, an attorney. “It is unbelievable that acts like this one by even non-government officials could be perpetrated with telling impunity in a so-called democracy. No wonder, a section of the Nigerian people and the international community regard Nigeria as a failed state. We are beginning to see our own version of the Somali warlord, Farah Aideed.”
Several sources said this confrontation was not the first time Mr. Offor’s path has crossed with Mr. Okonkwo’s. “Comrade was one of the few people in Lagos courageous enough to express an opinion different from Emeka Offor’s at the Lagos Branch meetings of the Oraifite Improvement Union when Offor was living in Anthony Village,” recalled an executive committee member who pleaded for anonymity.
“Offor used police to intimidate Okonkwo, but the young man refused to be cowed. Other courageous members were threatened with police. Owen Okolo, who now lives in Abuja, was falsely and maliciously accused of owing him [Mr. Offor] a huge amount of money, with police sent after him. This was around 2007. Isaac Anachuna was dragged by the police to Awka as the first step to Abuja for detention but his Isingwu people immediately taught Offor a hard lesson.
“When Azuka Okwuosa, a former chairman of Nnewi Local Government and a confidant of Chief Emeka Ojukwu, was rising rapidly in politics, Mr. Offor, who had nominated him to be the Commissioner for Works in the Dr. Chinwoke Mbadinuju administration, asked the governor to drop him from his cabinet in 2002. Worse, he caused the police to whisk Okwuosa, who is his cousin, away from Enugu to Abuja to be detained on a false and frivolous charge.”
According to this source, Offor decided a few years ago to humiliate the first senior advocate of Nigeria from Oraifite, Chuks Momah, in whose chambers in Aba, Abia State, Mr. Offor’s cousin, Nnoruka Udechukwu (SAN), was practicing. On the day Momah’s Ifite people were celebrating the popular traditional Afia Olu festival which the senior lawyer was leading, Mr. Offor got the police to disrupt it on the incredible excuse that the people were involved in a public assembly without police permit.
The most humiliating of Mr. Offor’s reckless use of police against rivals, real and perceived, was reserved for Ikechukwu Obiora, a lawyer. The controversial businessman caused the police to arrest Mr. Obiora at his wedding reception. Mr. Obiora, who was to become a senator from 2007 to 2011, had committed the offence of daring to challenge Mr. Offor’s candidate for the Anambra South senatorial ticket, Nnamdi Eriobuna, an indigene of Ihembosi in Ekwusigo Local Government Area, in the 1998 senatorial election.
“Offor has finally bitten more than he can chew,” declared Mr. Ofiaeli. “His cup has runneth over. The heartless arrest and continued incarceration of Comrade Bonny Okonkwo, an innocent person who has been kept in the same place as violent criminals for two weeks, challenges the humanity of all Oraifite people. As Professor Soyinka has said, the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny. Our hometown is unfortunately sitting on a keg of gunpowder, and a few of us have managed all this while to keep the mass of our people in check because we do not want them to take the law into their hands, despite the unbearable provocation. Wilson Orakwue Offor, alias Sir Emeka Offor, must be held squarely responsible for the ongoing situation in our place.”
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