Boko Haram (26 page)

The rally began shortly after we finished speaking, civil society activists, students, Chibok elders and sympathisers dressed in red, some bearing slogans such as ‘We are all from Chibok' and ‘Bring Back Our Girls'. They chanted Ezekwesili's call-and-response and listened as others addressed them on the latest news regarding the kidnappings. All remained peaceful, but there was an ominous sign later. The counter-protesters eventually moved toward the rally, trotting in a line, clapping and chanting. They circled the Bring Back Our Girls demonstrators, clearly attempting to provoke them, but no one took the bait. The counter-protesters gave up and returned to their spot on the other side of the Unity Fountain, but it was easy to see how the situation could degenerate if they were allowed to continue to gather there.

They were allowed to continue, of course, and what played out the next day was inane and brutal – simple thuggery designed to end a peaceful protest of dozens of people who were only asking what any citizen should expect of their government. According to journalists and others present at the time, young men who were
among the counter-protest rushed over, sought to grab cameras journalists were holding and smash them, broke plastic chairs being used by the rally and hit some of the demonstrators with sticks and bars. Then they were allowed to walk away. Some of those present at the time told me that the police briefly detained a couple of the youths, but later let them go. When I arrived at the rally after the madness had subsided, the pile of broken chairs was still there and the Bring Back Our Girls leaders were shaken. They had earlier warned the police that they were concerned about their safety given the thugs assembling near them and had delivered a letter to the authorities saying so. They explained this to a police officer at the scene and showed him a copy of the letter, but he seemed uninterested. He misunderstood and said he would deliver the letter for them, and they told him again that it had already been delivered. Rumours began to spread that more thugs were on their way, and Bring Back Our Girls demonstrators began warning that everyone should leave. I did not see Tabai, Sani and Abduljalal – the three government supporters I spoke with a day earlier – and cannot say if they were there when the violence broke out.

The same officer who misunderstood the protest leaders was later standing next to a police truck along with several of his colleagues. I walked over and asked him why they had not arrested those who attacked the demonstrators. He told me he did not know who was responsible. I suggested he could talk to witnesses to find out. ‘I didn't ask them', he said. It was clear that he had no plans to do so, that he was helpless. There would be no benefit for this man dressed in the uniform of a Nigerian police officer to protect his fellow citizens from harm.

It was drizzling rain on a Thursday in September 2013 as I landed in Warri, a hub for the oil industry in Nigeria's Delta state in the south, where gas-burning petroleum flares spew into the thick, tropical air. Along the bustling banks of the River Warri, flat-bottomed boats with outboard engines load passengers, food and supplies before winding their way deep into the creeks, past soot-covered makeshift oil refineries fed with stolen crude, where fuel is illegally produced for sale or survival. During a previous trip a couple years before, I had taken a boat and visited the village of Gbekebor, where I sat in a tiny community hall with a chief. He told me proudly that the plastic chairs there stamped with the words ‘Donated by Niger Delta Freedom Fighters', along with goats and rice, were given to them by a prominent ex-gang leader who had participated in the oil militancy of the 2000s. A company believed to be controlled by that same ex-gang leader was later reported to be earning massive amounts of money through a government contract worth more than $100 million, ostensibly to provide security for waterways.
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It was another reminder that the sleazy dealings with money belonging to the Nigerian people seemed to know no bounds.

I thought of that trip after I boarded a taxi at the airport and rode past an overgrown expanse of green brush and vines, dishevelled palm trees extending skyward like upside-down mops. Ramshackle hotels and storefronts stretched down the roadside along with shipping containers transformed into market kiosks. As we pushed our way through traffic, a billboard came into view wishing the former state governor, James Ibori, a happy fifty-fifth birthday. It called him ‘The Living Legend of Resource Control', a phrase meaning he fought for Delta state to keep more of the revenue earned from crude oil pumped there. In fact, he has been accused of pocketing much of the money – or more precisely, using it to pay for an opulent mansion and luxury cars, among other properties – according to prosecutors.
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He is currently serving time in Britain for money laundering and fraud, having been tried there after a Nigerian court acquitted him of 170 different charges.
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I was not in Warri this time to explore the creeks or look into illicit profits being raked in by corrupt overlords, however. I was there to see Wellington Asiayei, the police officer shot and paralysed outside his barracks room during the Kano attacks in January 2012. It would be the first time we would meet since the days after he was shot, when he spoke to me from his hospital bed, still overcome by what had occurred. I had been given a rough set of directions by his brother, and my taxi driver pushed on through the sopping-wet streets, a tassel dangling from his rear-view mirror with an emblem reading ‘Doctor Jesus' and music on the radio declaring, ‘up, up Jesus'. I eventually arrived at a dirt road off a larger paved street in Wellington's neighbourhood and walked with his brother to the front door. We entered the flat inside a fading yellow and white building, and I was led to a room at the back, where I found Wellington, lying on a mattress on the floor, unable to stand.

I knew before my trip that he had not been in good condition, having spoken by phone to his doctor and his wife, as well as Wellington himself. Still, it was jarring to see him there that way,
an assistant police superintendent helpless on the floor of his aunt's spartan home, appearing much weaker and withered than when we had met some 19 months earlier. I knew he had agreed to speak with me because he hoped I would get the word out about his condition since his repeated pleas to the government and the police force for further assistance had gone unanswered. I didn't blame him, though neither did I have much hope. When I telephoned a police spokesman several weeks before with the aim of tracking him down, the spokesman told me they had been trying to contact him as well so they could figure out when he could come back to work.

I took a seat in a chair next to his mattress, and Wellington, slowly but deliberately, took me through the odyssey he had endured since our last discussion, from road journeys across Nigeria to stem-cell treatments in India, followed by a desperate resort to herbal remedies back in Warri. ‘They should not allow me to die in this condition', he said.

He had remained in Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, where I first met him, for six months, when his doctors advised him that he should seek treatment abroad since they had done all they could there. At one point during his stay at Aminu Kano, the national police chief, Mohammed Abubakar, visited those wounded in the attacks. According to Wellington, he promised the force would urgently look into his case. He did not hear back from the police force, but he was also not completely without help. The country's National Emergency Management Agency had covered the bills for his stay at Aminu Kano, and the Kano state government would later contribute 2 million naira, or about $12,000, to his expenses for seeking treatment abroad. He would also continue to receive his salary from the police force. It would not be enough, though, as further complications arose.

I should say clearly that the Nigerian police have a terrible reputation. Poorly paid, low-level cops find themselves reduced to shaking down drivers for bribes, while pay-offs are often required
for investigations to move ahead. There have also been more serious allegations against police involving torture or rape. I could never know all the details of Wellington's life and his career; I do not know if he would have been considered a good cop or bad cop or something in between. But his path from his birthplace in a village in the creeks near Warri to his promotion through the ranks of the police, followed by his struggle to find adequate medical help, seemed to me typical of many in a country where the odds of succeeding are long.

He was born on 2 May 1964 in his grandfather's village of Asiayei Gbene. According to Wellington, his father had many wives and he does not know how many brothers and sisters he has. His father, an Ijaw by ethnicity, was in the army and moved regularly, so Wellington attended primary and secondary school in Ogun state in south-western Nigeria, where he was stationed at the time, many miles away from their home in the creeks of the Niger Delta. He said his father fought on the Nigerian side in the 1967–70 civil war, though Wellington did not seem to remember much from that period. When his father retired from the army in 1977, Wellington returned to the Niger Delta and finished his secondary education in the town of Ayakoromo, also located within the creeks near Warri. In 1982, while living with his uncle in nearby Rivers state, he heard an announcement on the radio that the police were recruiting, so he went to headquarters and signed up. After passing a test to join, he was sent for training at Oji River, slightly further north, and became a recruit constable on 1 September 1983, when he was 19 years old.

‘I have this respect for uniformed personnel because they command respect', he said when I asked him why he wanted to become a policeman. ‘Wherever uniformed men – police, army, air force, navy – wherever they go, people respect them a lot.'

Later in the conversation, I asked him if that would have come from his father.

‘Yes, yes.'

After some time on the force, Wellington began to realise he needed to do more if he wanted to continue to advance through the ranks. He decided to go back to school, and in 1999 he was admitted into Ambrose Alli University in Edo state to study public administration. He said he continued to work as a policeman during that time and was placed on night duty to allow him to attend classes. He graduated in 2004, and five years later he was accepted into the police staff college. After completing the course, he was posted to Kano. He had mainly been in the investigations department throughout his career, and he remained there in his new posting. Before his injury, he said he had never been shot at and the toughest situation he had dealt with involved armed robbers.

At around 6 p.m. on 20 January 2012, Wellington finished for the day at state police headquarters in Kano and took the walk back to the barracks. He had only a one-room flat since his wife was not there with him. She had remained in Kaduna, where he had been posted before attending officers' college. Back in the barracks that evening, he intended to prepare food for his dinner, but was interrupted by yelling and the sound of gunfire and explosions. When he walked out, he saw a man dressed in the green beret, black shirt and green trousers worn by the mobile police branch of the service, estimating he was between 15 and 30 metres away. He was thinking that both of them could run back to headquarters, or if that was not possible, to a church located inside the barracks to take cover.

‘With the gunshots going everywhere, I just came out, and I wanted to lock my door, and as I turned to lock my door, I saw somebody in a mobile uniform from head to toe', said Wellington, still lying on his back on the mattress on the floor. ‘I was thinking it was my colleague – the mobile men that are being posted to man the barracks gate and the armoury in the barracks. And I was trying to beckon on him so that we could all run to safety, and before I
could say Jack Robinson, I didn't know myself again. I was already on the ground.'

‘He is the one who shot?' I asked.

‘He is the one that shot.'

‘You thought he was police, but he was one of the —'

‘One of the Boko Haram members. I thought he was my colleague, and if he was my colleague, we would have run to safety. And maybe he would've shielded me while we were running. But I never knew he was an enemy. They have invaded the barracks. They have taken over the whole barracks [...] The one I saw was carrying [an] AK-47, because I saw him very vividly, very clearly, before he shot at me. I never knew that he was going to shoot at me. In fact, I didn't even think in that direction. I did not.'

Later, as I asked him further questions on the details of what happened that day, he pleaded for me not to go on. ‘I don't want to recall this incident, honestly speaking', he said, his voice sorrowful. ‘I don't want to recall this incident [...] In this condition today, it's very traumatic, very, very traumatic. I know what I'm passing through. I know what I'm passing through. I know what I've suffered.'

After his six months at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, he decided to return to Warri and begin looking into how he could travel to receive treatment. He had bought a wheelchair for himself, and he chartered a vehicle to drive south from Kano, reclining the front seat so he could lie back for the 11-hour journey, enduring the rough ride over Nigeria's poor roads. Once back home, his brother went on the Internet to research Fortis Hospital in India, which his doctors had recommended. He exchanged emails with doctors there who told him the cost of his treatment would be in the area of $10,000. With that in mind, Wellington calculated that he would have to come up with about $16,000. Including the money donated by Kano's state government, he was about $4,000 short. He said his family went to work trying to pull together that
amount and was eventually able to do so, and he began planning the specifics of his trip to India.

In November 2012, he took an Etihad flight from Lagos, and was able to sit in business class so he could be in a reclining seat. After a stop in Abu Dhabi, he and his wife landed in New Delhi, some 15 hours after leaving Nigeria. The hospital sent a van to pick him up at the airport, and once at the hospital, his consultant began a series of tests. The results were not good.

‘So finally, he now came out with this report and said that I have only one option now, that I did not come to Fortis in good time', Wellington said. The spinal injury had apparently worsened, and the doctors informed him that the only option was stem-cell therapy, an experimental procedure. Plastic surgery was also needed to repair a worsening bedsore. The stem-cell procedure came first, lasting about three hours, though Wellington said he felt no pain, thanks to the anaesthesia. Several days later, he underwent plastic surgery for the bedsore. He said doctors told him that if he did not begin to feel sensation in his lower limbs in six months or less, he should return for another round of treatments. After a period of recovery, Wellington flew out of India on 31 January 2013, hopeful that he would eventually be back on his feet.

There was more trouble just after he landed back in Nigeria. His wife, while tending to him at his brother-in-law's house in Lagos, noticed that the plastic surgery for the bedsore had ruptured. He had also begun to develop new sores since he had been lying in different positions to allow the surgery to heal. They returned to Warri, again by road, and he decided to enter a health clinic in hopes that they could deal with the sores. He remained there for six months, receiving antibiotic injections and with nurses cleaning and dressing the wounds, before leaving in July. He paid a bill of 650,000 naira, or about $4,000, but the sores had not healed.

‘The wounds were infected, so they were giving me antibiotics, but the truth of the whole thing is that the doctor said that I need to get to a specialist hospital where they can handle the matter. They
cannot handle it', Wellington said after having a relative assist him in showing me the worst of the bedsores as he lay on his mattress. ‘I was spending money and I was not getting anything. I was spending my salary on treatment and drugs, and a few individuals, my friends, assisted me with money.'

He had also not regained any sensation in his legs and decided he should try to return to India, but to do so, he would have to raise thousands more dollars. While he was still in the clinic, a delegation from the ministry of health visited on a routine tour of private hospitals and were taken to meet Wellington. After hearing his story, they introduced him to newspaper journalists, who wrote stories on his plight. Features appeared in June 2013, including in two of Nigeria's largest newspapers, along with his contact information in hopes of donations. They ran pictures of him lying in his hospital bed alongside an older photo of him dressed sharply and standing proudly in his ceremonial uniform, taken at the police college in Jos in 2009. A headline in Nigeria's
Guardian
paper bluntly declared ‘Boko Haram victim, ASP Wellington, dying gradually', while another in
ThisDay
newspaper said he was ‘Dying to save Nigeria'. According to Wellington, police officials again looked into his case after the stories appeared, contacting him by phone and paying him a visit, but he did not see any results. He was still receiving his monthly police salary, but he told me he was unable to access any insurance money.