Major Seun Fadipe (retd), a former Chief Security
Officer (CSO) to the late Lt-Gen Oladipo Diya, has recounted how the late
ex-military Head of State, General Sani Abacha, escaped a planned abduction in
Enugu State in 1997.
Fadipe was the CSO to Diya who was the Chief of
General Staff, the then de facto vice president of Nigeria under the military
administration of Abacha. Fadipe was a guest on the Friday edition of Inside
Sources with Laolu Akande, a socio-political programme aired on Channels
Television.
Fadipe recalled how Diya and his co-travellers planned
to abduct Abacha and force him to resign in Enugu but the then head of state
caught wind of the development and aborted the trip at the last hour.
He said, “There was a coup, whether it was now a
phantom one or it was a setup, it’s immaterial now because that’s the problem I
had with my boss until he died. I was a major, if I wanted to be involved in a
coup as a major, it would be a violent coup because there was no way I would do
a palace coup because I had a lot of seniors ahead of me. I never planned any
coup, I never intended to plan any coup but I got involved through my boss.”
“As of that time, Abacha was doing well but because he
wanted to transmit to a civilian regime, things went haywire.”
Fadipe said it would have been easy for Diya and his
co-coup plotters to take over in Abuja and control things from the nation’s
capital but “maybe it was just providence or he (Abacha) got some information
because all his advance parties had gone to the airport” yet he aborted the
trip at the last minute.
“On the 9th of December 1997, we got to the office,
and after the pleasantries with my boss, the ADC left. Once the ADC leaves, I
will give my boss the security briefing for the period and after, he said: ‘Are
you sure all is well?’ That was before the bomb attempt on the 13th of December
1997. That was the first time he told me directly that something was in the
offing.
“A day before then, the Chief of Army Training
Conference just took off in Enugu, and Abacha, being the C-in-C was supposed to
open the event. The man had left the Villa and then on his way to the airport,
all of a sudden, the man came back.
“So, after some time, my boss called me and told me
that the man aborted his trip and he was back in the villa. My boss was a bit
worried. I don’t know what was going on at that time. So I asked my boss to be
on standby maybe the guy would still go back but to my surprise, that never
happened.
“In the evening, Ishaya Bamiyi (then army chief) came
to General Diya’s office. So, we were wondering, the chief of army staff,
what’s he doing here? He was supposed to be in Enugu. So when he (Bamiyi) left,
my boss called me and asked me to call him General Adisa Adisa.
“By then, Adisa had been removed as the Minister of
Works and Housing. I called General Adisa and he came in almost immediately,
this time around he was almost in mufti. So, on his way out, the man was asking
me some questions but he discovered I was not privy to it.
“The next morning, my boss told me and a few security
people: ‘If Oga had travelled yesterday, he would have been arrested and there
would have been a change of government’. I just knew I was in trouble. He said
if he (Abacha) had gone to Enugu, he would have been abducted and forced to
resign and there would have been a change of government.”
Fadipe said he didn’t betray his former boss,
stressing that he never disclosed any of the coup plans to the authorities.
“There was no way I would have betrayed my boss. A lot
of things happened when we came out of detention; he was trying to malign me
and all of that but I just know he was a man that was struggling to survive,”
he said.
Fadipe and Diya, alongside over 200 others were
arrested for treason and detained after the failed coup plot in 1997. Diya was
tried by the military tribunal and was handed the death penalty but he was
pardoned, alongside Fadipe, and others, by Abacha’s successor, Abdusalami
Abubakar, after the sudden demise of Abacha in 1998. Diya died in March 2023 at
the age of 78. (Channels TV)
Comments:
Leave a Reply