Professor Olufemi Odekunle's Arrest by Al-mustapha 1

Professor Olufemi Odekunle's Arrest and Trial and His Experiences in Prison (Text of an Interview Published by TELL, a Lagos-Based Magazine, August 31, 1998, No.35 pp10-24.) [Professor Olufemi Odekunle has spent his entire career studying criminals and the raw materials that spur them within society. He sits often in the relative comfort of his office and pays short clinical visits to prisons. Then in 1994, he got a job in Abuja, the nation's seat ofpower as the chairman, Advisory Committee to the Chief of General Staff, CGS, on Socio-Political and Economic Matters.He wrote papers. He lectured others in a professorial manner.He learnt a lot about criminality and its influence in the seat of power. He fought the subtle abuse of power; he rode with the powerful and mighty. He almost believed he was just doing his job until the wee hours of one Saturday last December.Odekunle slept late on December 20, 1997, for he was preparing to go home for the long Christmas holiday. Everything was packed and the children were back home from schools, including two teenage sons and a teenage daughter. Ilesa, Osun State, where Odekunle was born 56 years ago, would be sweet, he must have thought.After 12years of trying, he had just completed his country house.Then crime came crashing into the sanctity of Odekunle's home. At 3 a.m., plain-clothes members of the Strike Force forced down the door of Odekunle's Abuja home and seized him from his matrimonial bed. He was beaten blue and black in front of his wife and wailing children. The children, including a toddler, were detained in the house for many months while the head of the family went to hell. The invaders not only arrested Odekunle, they arrested his three cars, including two private ones, all his personal documents,his passports, his children's birthcertificates, his educational certificates and his share certificates. The invaders simply decided to clean him out believing that the professor was on a journey of no return.Now, Odekunle is back to tell his story. He was an inner player in the bitter struggle within AsoRock battlement until the blood-curdling climax last December when Odekunle, along with General Oladipo Diya and many top military officers and civilians, were arrested for allegedly plotting to topple the evil regime of General Sani Abacha. A graduate of the University of Ibadan, 1968, he got his Ph.D. in sociology and social psychiatry from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in the United States in 1974. He has worked at the Ahmadu BelloUniversity, ABU, Zaria, the intellectual power house of the old North since 1970. There, he collided with what he called "The Northern oligarchy." His clinical training under the wings of the famous Professor Adeoye Lambo must have fore warned him about the danger of his AsoRock adventure.Now that he is free from the horror of the arrest, the torture in the Aso Rock chambers of the devil, the trauma of the trial before a secret military tribunal, the nightmare of the Jos prisons,and the agony of his family, he believed he is duty-bound to tell Nigerians the story from the valley of death.He spoke about the inside working of the Abacha presidency, the story of the arrest and trial of Diya and company, the all-pervading influence of the Northern oligarchy, the need for arestructured federation if Nigeriais to survive and the danger of dictatorship.