June 4 Assassination: How close aide betrayed Kudirat Abiola

Although he may have been acquitted and be walking freely after years in jail, life can never be the same for Lateef Shofolahan, the insider conspirator who was initially convicted and sentenced to death for paving way for the murder of Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, wife of the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Chief Moshood Abiola.

Shofolahan was another betrayal in the mold of the Biblical Judas. Only Judas could beat him in the game. He was a protocol officer to Kudirat Abiola before she was brutally shot dead with her driver in Lagos on June 4, 1996 by assailants hired by the tyrannical military regime of the late Gen. Sani Abacha. As Kudirat’s protocol officer, Shofolahan, like Judas, gave the deadly kiss that condemned his master to death.

Although the eldest wife, Simbiat, who the businessman married in 1960, was never in support of his involvement in politics, her death in 1992 made the more politically outspoken Kudirat, whom he married in 1973, to become senior wife and one of the most famous and active among Abiola’s wives.

The arrest of Abiola in 1994 for declaring himself President gave rise to several pro-democracy groups and advocates who pressured the government to release him declare him winner of the 1993 presidential election. Kudirat was actively involved in the several protests demanding her husband’s release. Her rising profile as the rallying point for pro-democracy movements following Abiola’s incarceration soon became a torn in the flesh of the military dictator and they sought to silence her. It was a case of striking the shepherd to scatter the sheep.

After hatching their assassination plan, it could not be executed without the support of an insider who would give them access to her and provide the ‘kiss’ of death that will allow them assassinate the outspoken advocate. They sought the service of Shofolahan, Kudirat’s trusted aide, as the protocol officer who managed her itinerary. The position of a protocol officer is reserved for trusted ally, but just like the popular Yoruba adage “Bi ikú ilé ò pani, tòde ò lè pani” (If the death at home does not kill, the death outside will not). On June 9 when Kudirat was heading out around 9:40am as they approached the 7-Up end of Oregun Industrial Estate to link the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, she was gruesomely murdered with her driver, while her protocol officer, Lateef Shofolahan ‘miraculously’ escaped unscathed.

There was outrage and grief across the land, the pain was mostly felt by pro-democracy campaigners, the woman they saw as a rallying point had been taken away, the sheep will be scattered just as planned by the killer. That particular death hit hard and was a terrible blow to the civil society organisation. All fingers pointed towards same direction, no one else could have done it other than the common enemy – Abacha and his men, but there was an enemy within who provided details of Kudirat’s movement.

After the government of Abacha came to an end in 1998, Shofolahan was arrested along with Major Hamzat Al-Mustapha, Abacha’s former Chief Security Officer (CSO), a son of Abacha, Mohammed; and former head of Mobile Police Force Unit, Aso Rock, Rabo Lawal. They were charged with conspiracy and murder in the assassination of Kudirat.

In the court, Mohammed Abacha’s driver, Mohammed Abdul (aka Katako), a prosecution witness narrated how Kudirat’s close aide Shofolahan gave his boss away to the killers. The star prosecution witness, Sergeant Barnabas Jabila (aka Sgt. Rogers), in his oral testimonies before the High Court, and later before the panel on Human Rights Abuses (Oputa Panel) headed by Justice Chukwudifu Oputa, gave an account of how he collected two Uzi guns from Al-Mustapha, on whose orders he said he assassinated Kudirat.

Sgt. Rogers, who was an infamous member of Abacha’s Strike Force, told the court that Shofolahan had given information on the movements of Kudirat and that Abacha’s son, Mohammed, lent his Mercedes Benz car and allowed his driver, Katako, to drive the killer squad to the scene of the crime. Despite their presence at the Oputa Panel proceedings, the indicted individuals could not challenge the witness nor fault his testimonies.

Mohammed was discharged and acquitted in July 2002, and there were claims that the administration of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo deliberately gave Mohammed a soft landing as part of a deal struck with his family to return funds looted by his father while charges against him are quashed. A Federal High Court in Lagos on Monday January 30, 2012, sentenced Al-Mustapha and Shofolahan to death over the killing of Kudirat. They judgement was, however, upturned by the Court of Appeal which acquitted them and ordered their release.