Abacha’s Adam’s apple – In Touch
By Sam Omatseye
All we want Major Al-Mustapha to do is produce the CCTV tape on Abacha’s last hour. Or else, he should keep mum. This is no time or topic for theatre.
Dennis Amachree, a seasoned senior man in the State Security Service, writes a book about his time and stewardship of decades. And he dismisses it without any facts or rigour. Just flippant words like calling him a boy, a man that is older than Mustapha.
“I was seven years old when Nigeria had independence,” responded Amachree in a phone call with this essayist. “And he is calling me a boy. At independence, we were flying the flag of this country and singing the Nigerian anthem. He is 66 years old and was born in 1960 just a new-born baby that year,” Amachree intones in a sardonic voice. NigerianPolitics Coverage
“I retired as an assistant director, which in army terms will be a brigadier. Al-Mustapha retired as a major.”
Al Mustapha needs to respond with facts and not spite. In telling the story in his book, DSS@40, he did not publish arbitrarily. Amachree sent the book to the Directorate of State Services for vetting. That shows he is a man of the institution. An organisaton man. The top brass told him he should launch the book to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the service.
So, it was not an Amachree project alone, even if it was the story of his career. The DSS appreciated his institutional integrity. They decided to launch the book as a DSS affair. He lives in the United States. They provided him business class tickets to attend the event. It was not a public presentation, but it was conducted in the presence of all key men in the security community nationwide, including state directors of the service and some members of the diplomatic community.
That tells you that the book enjoys institutional backing. Secondly, it has not run foul of institutional memory. Those who were in the service then are now top men in the service, and they know the story. They do not yell even when the public or even the media errs. If it is not urgent to deny, they do not ruffle their feathers. Closed lips is their mantra. Unless it is time to unveil it.
Does Mustapha have any evidence that he was with Abacha when he died? No. so let him give us the CCTV. Will it show the girl’s coital conquest? Did Mustapha have CCTV in his bedroom?
Amachree said his director called him and asked him to arrest a certain young lady that morning.
“He called me twice that morning,” he recalled. ‘‘The first time he asked me ‘how is Lagos.’ And I said ‘it is calm.’ He said he would call back in 30 minutes. But he called me ten minutes later and asked me to interrogate a young lady in Ogudu in Lagos.”
Amachree sent two men to the address. The gate was locked, and the operatives knocked several times without any response. They lingered before they opened it. The young lady was living with her mother, he said.
Once he entered his office, she said, “I did not kill him. He died on top of me.” Amachree had heard that Abacha had died. He had not found out how. It was from her lips that he knew she was the finality of the big elephant. The endgame of an era.
“I calmed her down, and asked her tell me what happened,” he said. She had gone to Abuja to attend the conference of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria. She is a pharmacist. Her elder sister was not only residing in Abuja. She was Abacha’s lover. At Abacha’s expense, she was lodging at the Nicon Noga Hilton Hotel for not less than six months. And Abacha had just bought her a new SUV. She showed off the car to her sister by taking a ride around town. While they were at it, she stopped over at the Villa. No appointment needed. Abacha saw his lover and gazed with zest at his lover’s sister.
“You want am?” she asked the general inpidgin English.
He said yes, and she said amen and translated her armour to sister and general for a coital night, for the sin in his sinews. The man had waxed fat and doughy in those days. Was he still doughty like a general between the sheets? Amachree describes her as smallish and dark-skinned Igbo girl.
Well, while at it, the commander stopped moving. The pharmacist lover called “oga, Oga…” She tested his pulse. The French call orgasm le petit mort, which means the little death. This was not a little death. It was the big one. Abacha had gone, so was army rule.
“You know, Abacha was on pacemaker,” revealed Amachree. Maybe the machine snapped in his chest. It means he had undertaken a major heart surgery. He also had liver disease. The girl was a more potent pacer. She was flown to Abuja, and she and her sister were locked up for about six months before they were released. They are still in the country, and alive, said Amachree.
“We have to protect their identities” he said.
The girl is the genuine hero of democracy. She deserves an anonymous award for felling a goliath. She did not need a gun nor a poisoned apple. She was the apple, Abacha’s Adam’s apple. NADECO home and abroad fought shy. The U.S or EU could not dare. All the big-time names, like now President Tinubu, Segun Osoba, Frank Kokori, Akinrinade, the media, all the redoubtable generals of the army were puny at the stakes. Wole Soyinka’s poetics failed.
For irony, many Igbos fled home and forswore June 12. A smallish Igbo belle unleashed the death knell. He was 54.
“The girl had the look of a teenager,” said Amachree. United States vice president Nelson Rockefeller fell in coital collapse over his 27-year-old secretary.
Military tanks, bullets, bazookas, packaged in a little fireworks of a beauty, stopped the five leprous fingers, the five parties scrambling to endorse him for president. Dostoyevsky said beauty will save the world. An Igbo beauty saved Nigeria. She deserves an anonymous monument. If we have the unknown soldier, why not the unknown heroine? She was our beloved slut, the Rahab of our time. The first righteous democrat of the republic. It was unintentional heroics, accidental patriotism. She deserves an altar. All politicians and office holders should pay homage. She sacked the army. One woman division. One woman apple, a general’s death. For irony, a Cameroonian young lady hid Abacha in a wardrobe when soldiers came for him on the night of the Orkar coup at Alexander Avenue in Ikoyi. This time, a girl could not save him. She saved us instead, in between her legs, like the woman in Gunter Grass’ novel Tin Drum. NigerianPolitics Coverage
She tops Delilah who meant evil. Different from Marita Lorenz that CIA sent to kill Castro but fell in love and bore him a child. Different from Jael in the Bible who downed a general Sisera by charming him into her tent, giving him warm milk for water and running a pole through his head. In the battle of the sexes, females always win. Ask your mother.