Dr Niran Malaolu: Jailed in Abacha’s Prisons for a story he didn’t even approve. Decades later, Nigeria calls him a hero
Like every war, Nigeria has several heroes and villains in its fight for democracy. Moshood Kashimawo Abiola, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ibrahim Babangida, Olusegun Obasanjo, Abdulsalam Abubakar, Oladipo Diya, Sani Abacha, and many more are names that easily come to mind when we think about Nigerian democracy. So many people do not know who Dr Niran Malaolu is and why he was conferred with national honours on the 12th of June 2026.
This is the story of a journalist who was arrested at gunpoint in his office, spent years in jail for a news report he did not write, suffered permanent damage to his eyesight, and was not recognised by his child when he was released.
General Sani Abacha, the penultimate military administrator of Nigeria who ruled with an iron fist, was particularly ruthless with alleged coup plotters. One of the moments that defined his administration is his treatment of the alleged 1997 coup plotters, which saw the imprisonment of his vice-president, Oladipo Diya and other people.
At the time, Niran Malaolu was a young man with a small stature and a mighty pen. He was the Daily Editor of The Diet, a newspaper he had built around a single, stubborn idea: that a newspaper could be a crusade for truth. Yet, one of the cruellest details of his ordeal is that he never ran the story for which they jailed him. When the December 1997 coup rumours reached his table, he did what a careful editor does. He assigned it to a writer, reviewed it, but he ultimately killed it. He rejected the story because he believed it was not good enough and did not use it. Unknown to him, the Sunday Editor lifted the piece and published it anyway.
“When I was at The Diet, I believed in a newspaper that could be a crusade for truth. We heard about the coup, and I called everyone together to assign duties. When they came back with the report, I read it because, as an editor, I read everything that went into my paper. I rejected the story because it was not good enough. I did not use the story. Unknown to me, the person who was the Sunday Editor of the paper took the story and used it,” Niran Malaolu said.
On the day he was arrested, the soldiers stormed into the office shouting for “Niran Malaolu, Sunday Editor.” He did not fret because he believed he had not done anything wrong until he was confronted with an AK-47 pointed at his forehead.
The metal was cold against my skin, and I peed myself. And because I wore beachwear and had a small stature, the soldier used the gun that was pointed at my forehead to push me back into the office. He saw that the office was big and he could not imagine a small boy like me occupying it, so he asked: ‘Where is the editor?’ I told him I did not know, so he searched everywhere but saw no one. He left me, Niran Malaolu told Punch in 2018.
In the chaos that followed, the soldiers arrested the night editor, two proofreaders and a young man who was a youth corps member simply because he was well-dressed. Considering his outfit and his small stature, the soldiers decided that Niran Malaolu was the editor’s messenger, and he was picked up as well, with the promise that he would be let go if he told them where the editor was.
I considered taking them to a colleague’s house – Bayo Onanuga – because at the time, he was the Managing Director of The News, and had been arrested several times. I knew that if they picked him up, he could fight his way out as he was their ‘regular customer.’ Eventually, they brought in James Ibori, the paper’s publisher, and told him they were not going to release him until he produced his editor. When he saw me, he told them that I was the editor.
The soldiers’ realisation that they had the editor in custody all along triggered the beatings he received immediately. They beat me so much that blood came out from different parts of my body. It was hell. They released the other guys and chained me up. The next morning, my wife came with my three-year-old son and our two-month-old baby. When they were coming towards me, they kicked my son. I felt very bad and started crying, he recalled.
I had never been dehumanised in my life like I was during that period. They made me go inside a gutter with its dirt that was neck high. And all that time, I did not know what I had done wrong. Then later, I was told that I was arrested for plotting a coup; I was surprised because I had never held a gun in my life. They later took me to the airport in chains, and there was a time I needed to pee, but instead of removing the chains that were used to bind me, someone held my manhood as I peed. It was so dehumanising.
From the airport, Niran Malaolu and others were transported to Jos, Plateau State, where he was remanded in prison to stand trial. “When we landed in Jos, they threw me into a Black Maria like they were throwing a sack of rice into a van, and I sustained varying degrees of injury. While the driver of the vehicle was driving recklessly, I was at the back of the van rolling all over the place, and I sustained more injuries in the process. They took me to Jos Prison, and that was the first time I was ever taken to a prison.
The tribunal, described by Niran Malaolu as a court martial, handed down the heaviest verdict it could. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Special Military Tribunal, a sentence later commuted to 15 years. At the court-martial, surrounded by soldiers who could not place where he had come from, he did not say a word at the trial before he was returned to jail.
It was in jail, chained near an open toilet, choking on the smoke of the soldiers’ bonfire, that Niran Malaolu’s faith in God became even renewed. He recalled that he had a sudden urge to cry out, and he yelled “Praise the Lord,” and a thunderous “Hallelujah” answered back — Christians, Muslims and atheists responding together. They began to pray, and hope spread through the cells.
The guards moved the man they now called “pastor” to the wing for condemned prisoners, where the walls carried the bookkeeping of death through writings on the wall. One line read, “Mohammed was killed here yesterday” — and the gallows were visible from his cell. He hallucinated. He prayed, even for the soldiers.
One morning, the soldiers came and asked who the pastor was, and the people pointed at me, so they took me away from that cell block. They took me to where they kept condemned prisoners. On the wall of the cell, there was a lot of writing, and one read, ‘Mohammed was killed here yesterday.’ From the cell, I could see the gallows, so I became depressed and began to hallucinate. Then I began to pray, and it helped me. While I was in the cell, I prayed for the soldiers as well, and God answered my prayers.
He was eventually transferred from Jos to Kano and later to Katsina, where he saw fresh hell in the Katsina Prison. Yet, he set about doing thorough evangelism work. For long stretches, his wife could not find him at all; she went to several prisons but couldn’t locate him as he was moved from place to place.
When she finally did, she told him never to practice journalism again should he survive the ordeal.
From Jos, we were taken to Kano State, and it was the following day that Abacha died, but we did not know he had died. We thought that Abacha wanted to use us to convince the opposition to accept his presidential ambition. When we got to Kano, we found the soldiers looked sad. We thought that they pitied us, but it was later that we knew that Abacha had died.
They split us and took us to different prisons in the country, and I was sent to Kastina. I saw hell in Kastina Prison, but I thank God. When I got to Kastina Prison, I began to do thorough evangelism work. I was unable to see my wife throughout this period because, before then, she had gone to several prisons but couldn’t find me as I was being transferred to different places. Eventually, she met me at the prison, and we had not spent much time together when my son said they should go. I started crying. The boy did not understand why his nation would do that to him, especially as his father had not done anything wrong.
One day, they forgot to serve me during mealtime, and they took the leftovers from Lt.Gen Oladipo Diya, Maj. Gen. Abdulkareem Adisa, Maj.Gen. Tajudeen Olarenwaju and others to feed me. I told them that I would not eat the food, and the person who brought it went to report to Sergeant Rogers (real name – Barnabas Jabila). He got angry and sent for me; he ranted, and when he was done, I still refused to eat, and that night, I prayed to God that Rogers should come and apologise to me. The third day, he came to me and apologised in Yoruba, and I praised God. To be honest, not all the military officers were bad to me; some of them were really nice.
General Abacha’s death in June 1998 cracked open the prison gates of the men he had buried alive. What Malaolu did with that news is the moral centre of his whole story. He did not gloat because he does not celebrate people’s losses; he felt pity that Abacha died, and prays to God to forgive him.
Things did not necessarily get easier when he regained his freedom, and he felt abandoned, with support from no one, though strangers quietly carried his family and helped pay his sons’ school fees while he was inside. He reconciled with his former publisher, James Ibori, who explained himself and apologised. His wife begged him never to practise journalism again, but he knew nothing else. He went to America for a Master’s and a PhD, yet the pull of journalism was so strong that he set up Rockcity FM, basically to help the oppressed and give people a voice. He went on to serve as the commissioner of information in Ogun state under the administration of Otunba Gbenga Daniels
Why his suffering mattered
Malaolu is clear-eyed about what that brutal era did to the country — and how it ended up serving democracy almost despite itself. People began to ask questions; when hostages begin to grumble, there will be an uprising. Out of that pressure, and the death of the election’s true winner, M.K.O. Abiola, came the careful handover that followed — and, as he puts it, since then Nigeria has been able to hand over power democratically.
Abacha awoke the political consciousness of Nigerians. As Abacha was trying to hold on to power, Nigerians were organising a ‘one million-man march.’ When people are suffering, something tells them to act. The march brought people who had never left their villages to Abuja.
That is the thread that runs from a blood-streaked cell wall in Jos to a presidential podium in 2025. When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced on June 12 that national honours would go to the journalists, activists, lawyers and others who endured persecution, detention and exile so that Nigeria could be free, Dr Niran Malaolu’s name belonged on that list by right. He paid in blood, in his eyesight, in prisons across a country, in the kick his toddler took from a soldier’s boot and he came out the other side not with vengeance but with a radio station built to give the voiceless a voice.
