By EBERE WABARA
[email protected] 08055001948
TODAY, we continue our series on the monstrous Commissioner for Special Services, Legal Matters & Due Process in ex-Governor T. A. Orji’s Office, Barrister James Okpara.
Many distinguished readers of this column and my other interventions elsewhere in this medium had expressed dissatisfaction/displeasure/disenchantment/dismay et al. with my consistent focus on issues pertaining to Abia State from 1999 to 2015, former Governors Orji Uzor Kalu and Theodore Ahamefule Orji alongside the latter’s slavish hangers-on that made a living through messengerial assignations.
Recently, I made a commitment that I will not write anything again concerning Mr. T. A. Orji. The resolution was entitled “My final word on T. A. Orji”. Ever since then there had been misconceptions anytime I reference his tenure (governance) or make tangential mention of his name in passing. When I said I was writing my final word on the erstwhile governor it did not imply and could not have meant that his name should suffer foreclosure in subsequent articles! As long as the state exists, you cannot do without the nomenclature. Even the name of his political godfather, Dr. Orji Kalu, intermittently props up in discussions about God’s Own State. These are irrevocable facts of history that cannot be erased by anyone.
I make these elucidations because references are different from subjects (topics). This is hoping that this clarification answers the insinuations and misconceptions that I had reneged on my promise. Let me also state here that even as I make this declaration it will not stop me from doing my work as the media advisor to Dr. Kalu, meaning that as long as issues concerning him come up, I will respond comprehensively. If the tribe of oppositional irritants compels me to return, occasionally, to the trenches, I will not hesitate to do so not minding this pledge. The bounden point is that I will not generate information/discussion around or about him in any form of topicality.
Now, is it possible to talk of one hustler called Barrister James Okpara without mentioning his former boss, T. A. Orji? If you detach Orji from Okpara, of what relevance/value is Okpara? How can I dignify the bunkum without his cruel and amnesic paymaster of yore that conferred wicked utilitarian pertinence on him?
If this funny character, James Okpara, had not led Mr. Orji by the nose, the dastardly incident of my abduction on Friday, March 28, 2014, would not have arisen. That is what happens when you appoint a misfit as a junior commissioner in the governor’s office. It is incontrovertibly certain that this fellow must have sold the idea of my seizure to his willing governor who did not have the candour to interrogate the leader of the kidnap gang in the person of James Okpara on the propriety of his lethal scheme.
I am sure that Okpara never contemplated the embarrassment and humiliation my kidnap would cause his benefactor. How could Okpara have known considering the errand nature of his medieval portfolio? A trained lawyer doing the indeterminate kind of special services assignment carried out by hooligans would not understand the despicable and deleterious implications of abduction. I begin to imagine the number of political tortures, kidnaps and assassinations that this animal known as Okpara must have engineered and executed long before his misadventure with me. Anyone who mysteriously lost someone between 2007 and 2015 in Abia State should look the inglorious way of Okpara! It is bloody to believe that this Okpara led a team of police invaders right from the state CID in Umuahia to Lagos where he recruited additional policemen from the Aguda police station in Surulere all totalling 17 armed to the teeth to abduct one unarmed and innocent civilian in a democratic setting. I insist that most lawyers are criminals if one of them could have the temerity, fatalism and unconscionableness to perpetrate this kind of unprecedented tragedy.
James Okpara wrote a petition, on behalf of his principal (T. A. Orji), against me to the Abia State Police Command (which I was given to read about 1 a.m. on Saturday, the second day of my captivity, shortly before being clamped into CID cell). I had expected, if the police leadership (ex-commissioner) and a messenger like Okpara had a sense of history and a modicum of democratic demands, that I should have been invited to state my responses to the frivolous and stupid petition. Thereafter the abductors could go to court if not satisfied with my explanations. Rather than take this noble step, taxpayers’ money was wasted on this audacious and costly project. On reflection now, I wonder how much Okpara and his deadly accomplices would have made from this dollar-denominated project (as I overheard). The police commitment, callousness and passion that went into this Okpara’s devilish programme can only be justified by a huge convertibility.
I am still shocked beyond recovery that the former Abia State Police Commissioner, Mr. Adamu Ibrahim, could pander so demeaningly to the ex-governor’s power inebriacy on this matter instead of advising against it. What could have been the motivation? When a major riot takes place in the state, the police commissioner will not hesitate to let you know that he neither takes instructions nor reports to the governor! Why are we like this? Of a truth, indeed, the love of money is the root of all evils. Perhaps, Okpara also misled Ibrahim since he did it with T. A. Orji and succeeded. A lesson for Ibrahim, Okpara & Co: there is no legacy better than a good name no matter the pecuniary challenges or circumstantial exigencies.
As we have bad men represented by Okpara and his band of co-abductors, so do we have good men. Therefore, at every point, I must continue to thank Otunba Femi Adesina and Mr. Frank Mba (both of whom need no introduction) for their especially liberative roles in trying to rescue me from the Gestapo-like kidnappers who laid siege to my former home as early as 5 a.m. that ugliest day!
. We continue the Okpara exposure next week.