when I went back to Nigeria and was approached to get the government then under the acting
presidency of Goodluck Jonathan to drop the charges against me, I refused. “I do not want the
government to drop the charges against me,” I said. “The charge against me is that I have committed
an offence by approving the allocation of a plot of land to my wife. That is the kernel of the charge
against me. I want a judge to rule that it is an offence to do so. Every Nigerian is entitled to a plot of
land in Abuja if he is above the age of 18. If my wife applied in 2001, and I got to the FCT in 2003,
and she finally got a piece of land in 2006, I do not see how that can be an offence. It is not like I got
there and on my first day I said to people, bring my wife’s papers to approve an allocation for her.” I
still stand by this position.
I never had a chance to confront Umaru directly about this so, as I said, the most I can do is make
some observations and draw certain conclusions from what I have learnt from those close to him. The
first thing I would say is that Umaru and I had a historical problem in that from day one, he
considered me a competitor. I still do not think he ever forgot or forgave Nuhu’s initial reaction to his
presidential candidacy, and then to top it off, he was misled into thinking that Obasanjo’s short list of
successors consisted of two people: him and me. Yar’Adua, with his deep feelings of insecurity,
came into the job feeling that I was a potential problem – I was not only a past competitor, but could
be a future competitor. Yet he kept trying to bring me in close, and when I told him I was not
interested in working for him, I think that persuaded him that I was up to no good, I was retreating to
re-arm. Even when I thought it was better to leave town, that did not work either, because he thought I
was going abroad to get this big arsenal of American, British and other ‘imperialist’ friends that I am
supposed to have. Quite honestly, I really did not care and I never had, about this sort of thing.
Secondly, there was the Obasanjo factor. I had no doubt in my mind, and I had a variety of indications
of this, that Obasanjo told Yar’Adua the truth - I was difficult to control. I also think that when I
outlined my plans to be studying abroad for at least the first two years of his tenure, he felt snubbed
and it would be typical of Yar’Adua to take my retreat additionally as a sign that I had no regard for
him. Putting all these things together with Nuhu’s attitude and investigations, he likely considered us
two dangerous northerners that he could not trust and who needed to be taken care of. It was a simple
matter of making sure he covered all his angles. Southerners would be waiting until 2015 regardless,
so there was no need to worry about any of them. Northerners posing a potential threat had to be
eliminated.
I know that he had plans to at least do his two terms, but I do not think he factored in his health. Had
he known he was going to die before his first term was over, I do not think he would have bothered
with it all, but this is all just supposition. I am now quite certain that he knew he was not going to do
much work, so he would have plenty of time to devote to knocking out everyone else. I had the
reputation of getting things done, his doing nothing evoked memories of our accomplishments,
particularly in Abuja. Everyone in Nigeria was concerned about electricity and everyone, even my
own enemies, was writing opinions suggesting that I was one of the few that had proven capability to
fix it. That kind of thing would certainly worry a president who had given up on delivering.
More than just an inconvenience
There is, of course, a difference between suspecting a smear campaign is being waged against you
and knowing that you are in danger. While I was studying to complete my LL.B. in London in May
2008, I was also arranging to return to Nigeria in June to retrieve my student visa so that I could go to
Harvard that summer to begin a master’s degree programme. Nuhu had asked me not to come back to
Nigeria in June 2008 out of concern because of certain things he was noticing already underway. He
was not in the EFCC and thought that if I came back to Nigeria I would be in some danger. Jendayi
Frazer, who at the time was the US Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, was aware of the
danger of going home and told me I could collect my visa from the American embassy in London if I
wanted, but I insisted on going back. Once I was there, the EFCC came to my house to ask me
questions about particular land allocations, which I had already answered during the public hearings,
so I gave them a pre-written 118-page explanatory document and we all left it at that. When I went to
the airport to return to London for my LL.B. exams, something was definitely not right. I had checked
in, my baggage was already on the plane and when I handed over my passport for my exit stamp,
internal security informed me that they had been told not to allow me to fly out that day.
“Ok. Am I under arrest?”
“No.”
“Well I have to travel. I have the right to travel. If you are not arresting me for an offence,
then I have a right to travel.” The SSS does not have the power of arrest.
“Well I am sorry sir, I am following orders.”
I called my lawyer, Abdul-Hakeem Mustapha, and informed him that I was being illegally detained at
the airport and was going to miss my flight, so he should get ready to sue the federal government for
violating my civil rights. I then called the head of the internal security service in Nigeria - the
Director General of the SSS, Gadzama, who was my senior at Barewa College.
“I have been detained by your people, what is going on?”
He knew nothing. Five minutes later I still had not heard from him, so I called the chief of staff to the
president, who was the chief of staff when we were in government. I told him what was happening
and he became very upset. He too knew nothing but promised to check on it and get back to me. After
about 15 minutes, I was permitted to board and was still able to catch my flight. I did not know when
I would come back to Nigeria again, but I knew this incident at the airport was not a mistake.
As the plane took off from Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport that morning and turned northwards,
I knew I would not be able to return to Nigeria for quite a while. It turned out to be 23 months of
exile.
Chapter Sixteen
Exile
“To me, there is something very powerful about being totally alone
and far from home. It gives you a perspective about life you could
never have any other way. It is a rush, partly because you have no
identity or connections to where you are. You could be anyone,
anything. You could be nothing.”
– Owen P. Grover
When I left the country, thoughts of exile or asylum did not cross my mind as I was embarking on a
12- month course of study. Exile is what happens when circumstances have forced you to keep away
from your country, but on a temporary basis. Asylum, on the other hand, is permanent, but like exile,
also involuntary. You accept that your life, limb or property is in danger in your country and you are
driven to live in another country so you request for political asylum and intend to never return unless
circumstances change. Being a
refugee I think is voluntary, either as a political imperative or because
economic circumstances force you to leave your country willingly and move to another. So exile and
asylum are involuntary, while being a refugee is to some extent voluntary, broadly speaking.
This is why I considered myself an exile. I was now an exile, but would not seek asylum. The
Yar’Adua government, of course, wanted me to apply for asylum, and the attorney general even
alluded to the fact that I was attacking Yar’Adua because I wanted to justify my application for
political asylum in another country. [131] I did not hesitate to respond that I would never seek asylum,
I would come back, because I would not live permanently anywhere else.
I do not know why, but when Nigerians leave Nigeria for more than a few days, we really begin to
miss our country. This I noticed my first time in England as a married man, in 1985. Nigerians I knew
abroad or at home, were and still are fond of complaining all the time about our country, and yet we
miss it. A friend of mine recently told me a story that I thought captured this quite well. She used to
work for me in the BPE and has dual Nigerian-British citizenship. She had her first daughter when she
was in her early twenties, the daughter was born and raised in the UK, and grew to be 28 or 29
without ever having visited Nigeria as an adult. A couple of years ago, the daughter visited Nigeria
for the first time since she was a young child. When the daughter came back to the UK, she packed her
bags, sold her house and moved to Nigeria.
“That is very strange,” I told my friend. “I would like to ask your daughter why she made such
a drastic decision.”
My friend said, “Well I asked her the same question and she said it was very simple – she
just loved the lack of order. She loved the anarchy, the fact that you do not have to pay your
bills, the fact that if you drive too fast or beat a traffic light, you can negotiate it. She said in
England, if you beat a traffic light, you are sure to get a ticket or you pay a fine at the end of
the month, and if you do not pay that fine, you will get dragged to court and could go to jail.
But in Nigeria, everything is negotiable. She loves that about the country.”
I am a law and order type of person, so I do not think I can say that I miss the same chaos about
Nigeria. But I did miss home terribly-- the networks of friends and family, the food, especially my
favourite jollof rice, the climate, the sight and sound and smell, the contentious jostle, the hustle and
flow, the sense that you belonged to your own corner of earth.
Prior to my exile, the longest I had ever been away from Nigeria at a stretch was about three months,
so the idea of exile of indefinite duration I found really tough to handle. I had great difficulty
accepting that anyone could say that my country was not mine to live in – it was an affront to my sense
of citizenship. The thought that President Umaru Yar’Adua would attempt to deprive me of my
citizenship and residency rights enraged me. I had to face him and we had to sort it out one way or the
other, even if it meant one of us dying, more likely me. [132] If I was not at Harvard attending the
Mason Fellows Programme, and was instead just living idly in the US, I would have returned
immediately to Nigeria the moment the persecution started. But I was certain that if I had returned to
Nigeria, I would not be allowed to go back to the US to complete my degree programme and I was
determined to do that because I had been waiting ten years to do so. So I thought, first things first, I
will first complete my academic programme, not be distracted, and put it behind me - then face
Yar'Adua full time and end it - one way or the other.
A Lonely Year on the Charles River
Among the things that made my exile easier was that first, one of my sons, Mohammed Bello, was
studying for his undergraduate degree in the Boston area and my wife Hadiza, eventually joined me. I
had an austere two-bedroom apartment in Peabody Terrace, one of Harvard’s many graduate
apartment blocks in Cambridge, but my wife did not like Boston very much, so she would frequently
visit Washington where her sister lives, as well as family friends like Dr. Angela Onwuanibe, Stella
Ojukwu, Oby, Ngozi and many acquaintances working at the embassy and at the World Bank. In the
end, she moved to live in Bowie, Maryland as she increasingly found DC to be more liveable. She at
least had family and a community of friends there. From my end, I really spent most of the time
reading. My graduate programme required the reading of some 300 pages of course material every
day, which gave the sense that Harvard really overworked its students to make them feel like they had
come to the greatest school in the world. I do not think they believed that everyone would read it all,
but I did end up reading almost all of it, which left me little time for anything else, Yar’Adua and his
goons included. I was and remain very grateful to God and Harvard for the lonely experience of exile,
as painful as it was, because the programme kept me very busy and left no room for me to be unhappy
about what was going on in Nigeria. My summer programme of seminars went quickly and the
master’s programme required me to take eight classes, which equated to eight credits over twelve
months, two semesters. The school recommended very strongly that each student takes three or four
classes per semester. I decided to take five credits in the Fall Semester which included the winter and
my logic was simple: I hate winter, I hate the cold, and I knew that I was going to be unhappy and be
mostly in my room, so I thought I would take five classes and just stay focused on the readings. I
figured that if I passed the five classes, I could then take three classes in the spring when the weather
would be much better, and I would be able to go out and enjoy it and go to Washington for the
weekends.
In addition to taking five classes, I was also a teaching assistant, which effectively meant taking six
classes. I had to attend the sixth class, prepare for it and also set aside what was called in Kennedy
School lingo, ‘office hours’. This meant I sat with my classmates on Sunday and assisted them with
their homework because the assignments were due on Mondays, and the professor knew from
experience that most people waited until Sundays to do homework. This meant I could not go to
Washington for weekends in my first semester. When spring came, instead of taking three classes, the
minimum I needed, I ended up taking four and did not enjoy the weather as much as I had thought.
The Politics and Ethics of Statecraft
It was only as a result of this intense studying, coupled with my physical withdrawal from the street-
level manoeuvrings in Nigeria, that I was able to learn many lessons and come to certain conclusions
about the past number of years. One of the most revealing came in the form of a class entitled, ‘The
Politics and Ethics of Statecraft.’ The course was taught by a Catholic priest named Brian Hehir. I
became curious about it during the ‘shopping’ period, in which all professors spend a week teaching
a sample class for 45 minutes so students could get some feel for each professor’s style. Since I had
never in my life actually studied politics or political science in a classroom, I thought I should take a
class on politics – after
all, this was the Kennedy School of Government. Joe Nye had a politics class
but it was Americo-centric, the whole soft power thing. I had read enough about the US and I needed
something more, something different in political science. On a lark, I attended Professor Hehir’s class
during the shopping period and he totally swept me off my feet.
The syllabus focused on the characteristics of a handful of great leaders in history: Otto von
Bismarck, Charles De Gaulle, Henry Kissinger, JFK, Woodrow Wilson, Tony Blair and Jimmy
Carter amongst others. What was most compelling about this class is that it helped me understand that
leaders in general possessed huge components of both good and evil in their character and leadership
styles. Of that group, there was no one leader that did not have a significant blemish. Some had a little
bit more evil than others – Bismarck was amazing, and De Gaulle was a huge egomaniac. That was
when I began to understand Obasanjo a little more. I always had difficulty understanding how
Obasanjo could sit with us and preach about sacrifice and transparency one moment and then the next,
sit with Gaius Obaseki, the GMD of NNPC, about how to get some payments to the PDP from some
oil or LNG deals. I never understood how a person could do this and sleep well. How can one have
Obasanjo’s complex personality and sleep well at night? Studying Bismarck, De Gaulle and the rest
helped me make sense of this duality in leaders.
The class also had one advantage: no end –of-term written examinations. Instead, each of us was
required to write a final essay about a leader, dead or alive, that we had studied on our own. I wrote
on Obasanjo and I received an A, one of only two in the class. I was also the only student who had
actually worked for the leader he or she wrote about and since it was first-hand, I had an added
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