What is the value of a human life? Depends on who you ask. If you asked the Nigerian government in 2006, led by President Olusegun Obasanjo, a human life taken without regard; beaten, shot, and mutilated and hastily buried costs $20,000, or N2,600,000. You have to understand that this rarely ever happens in Nigeria; compensating for a life cut prematurely, but the circumstances around the #Apo6 extra-judicial killings were so unprecedented that the events it triggered had never happened before it, and has not happened since. In a country where the wrongfully killed is quickly glossed over and forgotten Augustina Arebu, Anthony Arebu, Ekene Isaac Mgbe, Ifeanyi Uzor, Paulinus Ogbonna and Chinedu Meniru continue to resurface, eliciting curiosity, outrage and cyclical demand for a reform of the Nigerian police. Has anything really changed?

On Thursday, November 23, 2017, the  Federal Capital Territory High Court under the direction of Justice Ishaq Bello upheld the judgement passed in the criminal case against Mr. Ezekiel Acheneje and Mr. Baba Emmanuel on March 8, 2017, sentencing them to death for their role in the Apo 6 murders. Acheneje and Emmanuel had confessed to have murdered Anthony Nwokike and Augustina Arebu on the 8th of June 2005. Nwokike had been shot and Arebu strangled before they were hastily buried alongside four others at a cemetery in Apo.

But the November 23rd hearing was actually about Danjuma Ibrahim, Nicholas Zakaria and Sadiq Salami, whose cases had caused the trial to lag for 12 years. Bello pronounced them innocent, citing that his inquiry had found that the contradictory witness reports against Ibrahim, who witnesses had described opened fire on the victims with an AK-47, had exculpated him of wrongdoing and hamstrung the court’s power to convict him of a crime. Bello is reported to have suggested that because the charges brought against Ibrahim hinged on witness reports rather than irrefutable physical evidence, like a fingerprint on the AK-47 filed as evidence, he would have been convicted. Since then, the Nigerian Police has reinstated Ibrahim and his cohorts, two of whom were on medical bail for the entirety of the criminal case and living free and ordered that Ibrahim be paid back all the salaries and benefits that he should have accrued in the intervening years.

The acquittal of Danjuma Ibrahim and his reinstatement to his position as a Deputy Commissioner of Police in the Apo Area in Abuja is a decision that while legally accurate, shakes the very foundations of our continued hope that Nigeria will change for the better. It reaffirms the degree to which people with power can manipulate the system to their favour. It reminds us that rape culture and the misogyny that fuels it, worms its way insidiously into all aspects of our lives, and manifests unexpectedly in places where order and the rule of law should have prevented it.

Feminist theory explains in detail that while women are always the victims of misogyny and rape culture, the consequences of the violence that accompany manifestations of rape culture can and does infrequently affect men. The five men who died in the Apo 6 murders were victims of an event that had nothing to do with them; a singular interaction between Augustina Arebu and Deputy Commissioner Danjuma Ibrahim, common enough that they probably saw it happen and brushed it aside. Arebu, her brother and his friends had gone to a nightclub in the Apo area. Ibrahim had seen Arebu, solicited her. He most likely threw his weight around, name-dropping his rank and influence as is common for public officials in Nigeria. Arebu remained unswayed, after all she was out with her brother and his friends, leaving with Ibrahim would have caused her more trouble than it was worth. Ibrahim like many Nigerian men, saw her rejection as a personal affront.

There were many other factors that probably exacerbated his anger; she was from the South and Christian, he was from the North and Muslim, he was well known in those parts, he was significantly older and unused to being rejected. Whatever they were, Ibrahim was angered enough that he did what many Nigerians men do when they are faced with perceived humiliation from women; he used his influence to exact swift, violent revenge. Ibrahim couldn’t punish her immediately, she had five young men at her side, one of them was her brother so even if anyone else was intimidated by Ibrahim’s position, he would stay and protect her. So Ibrahim did the next thing available to him, he found his way to the nearest checkpoint and lied to the policemen there that Augustina Arebu and her posse were armed robbers. Reports say when they arrived at the checkpoint, the other policemen wouldn’t shoot so Ibrahim took the gun himself, an AK-47 and opened fire on the car. Four of the six passengers died immediately, but Augustina and Anthony Nwokike survived the initial attack. The surviving two were dragged to a police station where Arebu was forced to call her family and demand a N5,000 ransom. They couldn’t raise the sum in the time they were given, so Nwokike and Arebu were posed beside the bodies of their dead friends and family and photographed with planted guns and ammunition. After they were driven to a cemetery where the two police officers convicted of murder strangled Arebu and the other fatally shot Nwokike.

The pictures from the murders were so gruesome they were never published online. But the outrage that surrounded their murders started a riot where two more people were killed and struck a nerve so deep in the Abuja division of the Nigerian Police force that policemen publicly rebelled against Ibrahim, some testifying against him and others sabotaging his criminal case by stealing information from Ibrahim’s defense team and feeding it to the prosecution.

Augustina Arebu was more than just a murder victim. She was a young woman in her 20s who thought she was in charge of her life, who thought her life had value. On the night she was murdered, she thought she was safe, surrounded by 5 of her friends. Safe enough that when this strange man tried to talk to her, she didn’t immediately begin to micromanage his emotions the way all Nigerian women learn to do in their childhoods. She didn’t stall for time, she didn’t try to circle around him by asking to meet at a later date, she didn’t pretend to be ‘shy but interested’. She simply said no and returned to her friends and their evening and she was strangled for it, framed as an armed robber and hastily buried in a shoddy cover-up.

The Federal Capital Territory High Court that oversaw Danjuma Ibrahim’s case didn’t absolve him of wrongdoing, it merely reminded us that the system can fail us. At no point was Ibrahim’s influence ever questioned, neither was his involvement in the actions that killed Augustina Arebu. Neither was his involvement in the plot to frame them as armed robbers and justify their murders. One of the six accused police officers Othman Abdulsalami went ‘missing’ after he was allowed to perform his daily prayers unsupervised during a Juma’a prayer. Another informant Anthony Edem died a day to his testimony in what was confirmed by autopsy as a poisoning, neither occurrence investigated. It reminds us that even high profile cases where the evidence is practically in our palm, the criminal can still go scot-free provided they are rich and influential and male enough.

Augustina Arebu is only one of hundreds of thousands of Nigerian women who suffer violence because of the entitlement that rape culture and misogyny breeds in men. She is also a part of a select few for whom justice was actively sought. The vast majority of women who are sexually assaulted, raped and murdered because of the deep-seated misogyny that influences our culture remain undocumented, their attackers unpunished. We can scarcely name any other woman whose wrongful death has resulted in a twelve-year-long criminal court case. We cannot help but ask; would anyone have cared if the #Apo6 was the #Apo1? If Augustina had gone to that club alone, had rejected Danjuma Ibrahim even though she knew there was no army of siblings and friends to come to her aid if need be, would we have even found out about her death?

Would her life be the subject of an op-ed today?

Editor