It is getting to 25 years when Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes by Kunle Ajibade was published. A reissue is due. The arrest of Kunle Ajibade gave me nightmares. I was working with him in the same company when he was invited by agents of the satanic military junta of General Sani Abacha. Ajibade honoured the invitation, and then he was let go by the honchos of dictatorship. Then he was invited again, and he went to answer their call because he had not done anything wrong. It was such a sad day when he was not allowed to come back.
Ajibade is the least likely person to be charged with having anything to do with coup-plotting. A very reserved human being of the finest order, he is only interested in literature of the sublime mode. Even as his name was on the masthead of The News magazine as the editor he had been redeployed as the editorial page editor of the newly established AM News newspaper with the famous poet Odia Ofeimun as the chairman of the editorial board of which I was a member.
It did not make any meaning at all that Ajibade was being tried for a report published in The News magazine which he neither wrote nor edited. It was all like a nightmare penned by Franz Kafka, author of The Trial.
Respect for the work of Ajibade belongs to the top echelons. It’s well-nigh impossible to get Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka to write the foreword to any book or even append a blurb to a title. It takes the cake that Soyinka hails the commitment of Ajibade thusly: “I never asked him, but remained convinced that Kunle sometimes came into my office so early in the morning because he was coming straight from an all-night session with his Samizdat colleagues.”
Ajibade was a guerrilla journalist in the dark ages of Nigeria when General Abacha jailed and killed at will. Ajibade was jailed for life, as this book’s title tells, but the life sentence was cut to 15 years, and Ajibade stayed in prison for three years, between 1995 and 1998 – when Abacha died.
Jailed for Life is a comprehensive account of the multiform challenges of committed resistance to military dictatorship. Ajibade captures in his eloquent narrative the wiles of Military President General Ibrahim Babangida who set the journalists running when they published the story “Has IBB Given Up” on April 13, 1992 when they were working in African Concord magazine owned by Chief MKO Abiola. The journalists refused to offer any apologies and instead resigned to found Independent Communications Network Limited, publishers of The News magazine, Tempo weekly and AM News daily newspapers under the leadership of Bayo Onanuga. The onslaught of the Babangida regime made the guerrilla journalists abandon their cosy offices to publish from the wilds. At a time they used an office very close to the seat of power at Dodan Barracks, Lagos!
The government in turn undertook the publication of fake editions of their titles. Ajibade and his colleagues perforce had to open a new bank account different from the one known by the government. The vendors had to pay ahead of time before collecting the papers to be sold.
The struggle to de-annul the June 12, 1993 election led to the stepping aside of Babangida, and the coming of the interim government of Chief Ernest Shonekan. Then Abacha struck, and instead of helping Abiola to power, he bared his fangs by scrapping all democratic institutions. Things got hotter when Abacha announced that some soldiers had plotted to overthrow his government.
The News magazine published the story entitled: “Not Guilty – Army Panel Clears Coup Suspects.” In the words of Ajibade, “The story had relied heavily on the preliminary report of the Special Investigation Panel (SIP) headed by Brigadier-General Felix Mujakperuo. In that report, the panel had said that all the officers who were initially brought before it as coup suspects were not guilty of the offence. But the Head of State thought differently. He was desperate to find the officers and civilians guilty and condemned, just to purge the country of political rivals and potential critics – a necessary first step towards dictatorship.”
Ajibade was invited by the military goons for questioning. As he had no hands whatsoever in the writing and editing of the story, he told his interrogators so. His SSS questioners appeared friendly in that first instance. Ajibade had the courage of his conviction to put these words across to the secret agents: “Is the Head of State not a man like us? I understand he wakes up at 11.00am almost every day, goes to the office at 1.00pm and leaves at 3.00pm for the club to unwind.” This riled the SSS into sharply replying thus: “You’re a foolish man. You’re ill-mannered. The Head of State is old enough to be your father and should be treated with due respect. Even if you don’t respect him, what of the office?”
When Ajibade was asked to make a return for questioning by the SSS, he got handed over to the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI). From May 22, 1995, Ajibade saw hell in the hounding, torture and sentencing. Inside the gulag he was intervolved with Beko Ransome-Kuti, Col Lawan Gwadabe, Chief Bola Ige, and Gen Olusegun Obasanjo. When Ajibade began “to receive a mass of letters and postcards every week from all over the world”, his spirits rose.
Then Abacha died. According to Ajibade, “We soon got to know that, at Abacha’s death, the jubilant crowd that poured into our nation’s unhappy streets was unprecedented in the annals of our history. The dances of joy in the homes of so many people went for a long time. Hilarious voices across the walls hurling enormous curses at Abacha in his grave. The time-honoured theme of good triumphing over evil became a constant refrain in the tongues of the artists, journalists and priests. The international community also heaved a deep sigh of relief. It was as if death had ceased to be the soul of tragedy itself.”
Jailed for Life by Kunle Ajibade deserves celebration as the searing memoir of a true hero of democracy, written by an indefatigable defender of the human essence of freedom from tyranny. There can be no better first-hand account of triumphing over death and dictatorship. Kunle Ajibade is sui generis.