8 min readUncategorizedThe Unresolved Mystery of Nosamu Street
The sun was shining, it was a friday and officers of the notorious and now disbanded anti robbery squad, SARS officers stormed Eric Okwaji´s neighbourhood in Ajegunle, a working class area in Lagos. They were on a mission to arrest a suspect. Tragically, Okwaji, somehow ended up getting caught in the operations. It is almost 7 years to the day and Okwaji remains disappeared.
Eric Okwaji spotted a gold-painted Sienna car parked in front of his residence at Nosamu Street, Ajegunle Apapa, Lagos.
Mr. Okwaji, 34, who shared his residence with some friends, asked for the car to be moved because it was blocking movement. Though the car was eventually moved, so was the body of Mr. Okwaji – badly beaten and unconscious.
It was late morning on September 17, 2014.
Later information revealed that the car parked in front of Eric’s house was being used by men of the erstwhile Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).
The SARS operatives had been in Mr. Okwaji’s neighbourhood to make an arrest close by, at 39 Nosamu Street. They had ransacked the house at that address, which they believed was the family home of their target, known as ‘Popo’. The SARS men did not find Popo. He apparently did not even live there.
Whatever intelligence the SARS operatives had received about Popo’s location had been misleading. They were frustrated by their failed arrest, so when they heard Mr. Okwaji ask for their car to be moved, it ticked them off.
“Their next action was to vehemently descend on Eric with serious anger,” Bosah Emeka, the coordinator of Ajeromi Ifelodun, recorded in a letter sent to the Onikan office of the assistant Inspector General of Police.
The aggression the SARS operatives had reserved for the Popo arrest was poured out on poor Mr. Okwaji, who they beat to the point of unconsciousness.
Pleas by community residents for them to exercise restraint were ignored. Mr. Okwaji’s battered body was then thrown into the back of the Sienna car, which sped off.
It’s been six years since the car disappeared into the distance.
Family and friends of Mr. Okwaji, as well as residents of Ajegunle Apapa in Lagos, have since not seen or heard from the young man.
The search
One of the men who participated in the brutal violence against Mr. Okwaji, gave his name as Sergeant Samuel C.Y. He left a mobile number, asking for any enquiries about the condition and whereabouts of Mr. Okwaji to be directed to him.
But each time a family member or neighbor called, he asked for money to be paid before he could give out any information. He hardly did.
“When we called him for the release of Eric, he demanded N400, 000,” Lawrence Macaulay, Mr. Okwaji’s father, said. “We begged him but he did not listen.”
Once Mr. Macaulay, a retired civil servant, realized he could not raise the bribe demanded, he set out on his own, visiting different police stations in search of his son. The Ajeromi Ifelodun Community Movement also sent out dispatches to different police units and NGOs asking for help to find Mr. Okwaji.
In one of such letters, addressed to Amnesty International, the association revealed they had sent search parties to Abuja “to no avail”.
While insisting on his demand for the N400, 000 bribe, Sergeant Samuel evaded the family of Mr. Okwaji, preferring to connect on phone and not in person. “Anytime we wanted to meet him, he would say, ‘Come, but you will not meet me’,” Mr. Macaulay recalled. “Anytime we got to a station we’d been directed to, they would claim they did not know him; or that there was no Sergeant Samuel in that station.”
In a plan to track down the dubious sergeant, Emmanuella, Mr. Okwaji’s sister, connected with Sergeant Samuel via WhatsApp. Tall and fair, her looks seemed to have caught the attention of the sergeant, who invited her for an evening hangout at a local bar. In their WhatsApp chats, Sergeant Samuel gave his name to Emmanuella as Stephen Bayo.
Even as this scheduled meeting provided a rare opportunity to meet Sergeant Samuel in person, Mr. Macauley discouraged the idea. He said he did not want his daughter, whom he describes as “beautiful”, to come into contact with a man who had been involved in the abduction of his son.
Besides, Mr. Macauley thought Sergeant Samuel’s Whatsapp profile photo, as well as the name Stephen Bayo – which he suspected could be Sergeant Samuel’s real name – were enough leads to go on in terms of getting to the bottom of the issue. “I thought it would help our case,” Mr. Macaulay said.
But it didn’t. The sergeant continued to evade the family, keeping his identity secretive while still demanding the N400, 000 ransom.
A quick search on Truecaller, a caller identification app, showed the name attached to the number as “IPO Tayo Sars”.
Indicted for robbery
Abba Kyari, the celebrity cop who now leads the Inspector General of Police’s Intelligence Response Team (IGP-IRT), was the Officer-in-Charge of SARS when 34-year old Okwaji was arrested.
Mr. Macaulay, in the company of one Mr. Fatoki, a lawyer from the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), made a complaint to Mr. Kyari about the unlawful arrest of his son.
Mr. Kyari admitted that Mr. Okwaji was in his custody, but claimed he had been arrested for highway robbery, as against the known fact of being beaten and abducted on Nosamu Street in Lagos.
Convinced that there had been a mix-up which could be resolved with some legal backing, Mr. Macaulay and Mr. Fatoki left hoping to return on a later date to secure the release of Mr. Okwaji.
But things didn’t quite work out that way. Mr. Macaulay, whose pension earnings as a retired civil servant were irregular, could not meet the financial demands of his lawyer, Mr. Fatoki. He had assumed that given the sensitive nature of the case, Mr. Fatoki would consider helping him pro bono.
“We did not go back to Kyari because the NBA lawyer started asking for money,” Mr. Macaulay recounted. “After I had given him N20, 000, he took me to his chambers and asked that I pay more, but I did not have any money.”
.
On Thursday, November 6, 2014, The Nation newspaper published an article about two alleged armed robbers arrested by Abba Kayari’s SARS operatives. The men, identified as Olarenwaju Oladejo and Ibrahim Afolabi, both in their early 20s, confessed to armed robbery and indicted an “Eric Okowaji” and two others, who were reported “at large” at the time.
“My father died while he was working with the Ajeromi Local Government Area. I learnt panel beating but did not get enough money from it. Two of my friends, Eric (Okowaji) and Seyi, who are still at large, introduced me to the gang,” one of the suspects, Mr. Oladejo, was quoted to have said in another publication by The Punch newspaper.
The photo of Eric Okowaji in question was not attached to the publications by either The Nation or The Punch newspaper.
Could he have been the same Eric Okwaji who had been whisked away in that gold-painted Sienna car a few weeks earlier?
Mr. Macaulay insists that the Eric Okowaji referred to by armed robbers could never be his son, Eric Okwaji, who he said was a decent man.
“Eric was a footballer, and also worked at Bayelsa Motor Park Boundary before he was taken away,” Mr. Macauley said.
It has been exactly six years and one month since Mr. Okwaji was inexplicably brutalized and plucked away on the streets of Lagos.
Last month, as years of SARS-related brutality reached its peak, provoking protests nationwide and garnering global attention for Nigeria, the anguish of aggrieved families hit close to home for Mr. Macauley and his household, who continue to live in perpetual anxiety, not knowing where their beloved Eric Okwaji is, or even whether he is still alive or not.
Under the pressure of the #ENDSARS protests, the Nigerian Federal Government of President Muhammadu Buhari disbanded the controversial SARS unit, but the scars of their atrocities remain, with many questions unanswered, many mysteries unsolved.
Abba Kyari, the senior police officer who was responsible for SARS operations when Mr. Okwaji’s disappearance took place six years ago, is still being pursued for answers.
Multiple calls to Mr. Kyari’s phone number only gets his voice mail. He also has not responded to text messages sent to the same number.
Meanwhile, Mr. Macaulay has approached the Lagos State Judicial Panel on Restitution for Victims of SARS Related Abuse and Other Matters to seek answers.
This is a developing story. Expect more revelations as we try to find Eric Okwaji.