January 14, 2005

Suppressed Oputa panel report held Babangida and his
security chiefs accountable for the murder of Dele Giwa

A special commission investigating human rights abuses by
three decades of Nigerian governments has found three former military rulers
responsible for unlawful killings.

The findings of the so-called Oputa panel were suppressed
by the government for three years and were published for the first time by a
civil society group on the Internet this month.

The panel,  led by a retired Supreme Court judge,
recommended that former military rulers Ibrahim Babangida, Muhammadu Buhari and
Abdulsalami Abubakar be investigated for suspicious deaths and extra-judicial
killings and barred from governing Nigeria again.

Both Babangida and Buhari remain prominent political
figures in the oil exporting nation and are possible contestants in the 2007
election, when President Olusegun Obasanjo, also a former military ruler, must
stand down after two terms.

“We recommend to the Federal Government that all the
former heads of state be considered to have surrendered their right to govern
Nigeria and Nigerians at any other time in the future,” the panel said in its
concluding remarks.

The panel, which heard evidence for two years from 1999 to
2001, was set up by Obasanjo to show that the country had turned over a new leaf
with elections in 1999 after 15 years of military dictatorship.

Buhari, Babangida and Abubakar refused to appear before
the panel, and challenged its legality in the courts. Obasanjo never published
the report.

A Washington-based civil society group, the Nigerian
Democratic Movement, published it on the Internet this month.

LETTER BOMB

The panel held Babangida and his security chiefs
accountable for the murder of Dele Giwa, an investigative journalist killed by a
letter bomb in 1986.

General Babangida ruled Africa’s most populous country
from 1985 to 1993, when he annulled an election that would have swept Moshood
Abiola, a civilian, into power. Army general Sani Abacha took power in a coup
the following year.

General Abubakar, who was president from Abacha’s death in
1998 until Obasanjo’s election a year later, was accountable for Abiola’s death,
the panel said. Abiola was imprisoned by Abacha in 1994 and died mysteriously
after drinking a cup of tea in detention in 1998.

Retired General Obasanjo, himself a former military ruler,
won landmark elections a year later.

The panel said Buhari and his military high command, who
ruled Nigeria in 1984-1985, had a case to answer in the execution of three
convicted drug traffickers, because they were killed under a retroactive decree
whose legality was questioned by experts.

In hundreds of pages of evidence and findings, the Oputa
panel was highly critical of all Nigeria’s military governments, including
Obasanjo’s 1976-79 regime, which have ruled the former British colony for 30 of
the 45 years since independence.

“Personal enrichment was largely the driving force for
military interventions in politics,” the panel said.

“The military tended to treat the state as conquered
territory and proceeded to treat the proceeds of state as spoils of war to be
shared among the members of the military, the conquering forces of occupation.”

It blamed the security services for becoming instruments
of torture and oppression. It recommended a wholesale reform of the secret
service and military intelligence, and urged human rights training for the
police and armed forces.

“Under military rule, the security and survival of the
head of state and his regime at all cost becomes an obsession … Regime
security became an excuse for the excesses of state security agencies, leading
to gross human rights violations,” the panel said.

It was also highly critical of Nigeria’s wealthy elite,
accusing it of bankrolling coup plotters and playing a critical supporting role
in the abuses by the military.