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JUNE 12: The Stolen Victory and Mysterious Death of Moshood Abiola
was MKO’s death really natural?

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Abiola's death: an unresolved controversy

Zino gbemi Ruger wizkid toolz nairaland okpa mimiko king Kai #ikorodu

In 1993, Abiola ran for the presidency of Nigeria and appeared to win the popular vote in what was considered a free and fair election.  The vote was annulled by Nigeria’s military leader on the basis that the election was corrupt. When Abiola rallied support to claim the

presidency, he was arrested for treason by the military regime led by General Sani Abacha and sent to prison for four years

In June 1998, General Abacha was found dead under mysterious circumstances.  One month later, on the day that Abiola was to be released from prison,

he met with a U.S. delegation in Nigeria which included Assistant Secretary Susan Rice and Under Secretary Thomas Pickering to discuss the country’s planned transition to democratic rule. During the July 7 meeting Abiola suddenly became ill, collapsed and later died

in a hospital. Some claimed he had been poisoned by members of the U.S. delegation after drinking tea during the meeting.

Others said he had been beaten. Autopsy results showed he had died of massive heart failure.

According to Festus Adedayo

Analysis:

Susan Rice’s memoir entitled Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, which gave an account of what led to Abiola’s death, though plausible, is not entirely believable. Rice had served Abiola the infamous cup of tea, which

happened to be his last sip alive. She said she offered to give him the tea when Abiola suddenly lapsed into a coughing fit.

“About five minutes into the conversation, Abiola started to cough, at first mildly and intermittently, and then rackingly with consistency…

Noticing a tea service on the table between us, I offered Abiola, ‘Would you like some tea to help calm your cough?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, with appreciation, and I poured him a cup. He sipped it, but continued coughing,” said Rice. Glib, suasive and evocative, isn’t it? She further

wrote in the memoir that even upon taking the tea, Abiola’s persistent cough revved up and when the team called a doctor to attend to him, he later pronounced his death, after an hour, as due to a heart attack.

The fact that, although MKO was a Muslim, a religion that forbids

autopsy notwithstanding, an autopsy was said to have been conducted on his remains, which turned out negative. However, discarding the theory that the June 12 election winner could have been poisoned would be naïve. Research has shown that there are ten deadly poisons known to

mankind and their powers vary. The poisons are: Arsenic, hemlock, dimethylmercury, polonium 210, mercury, tetrodotoxin, cyanide, atropa belladonna and aconitine. While arsenic is renowned for being the most potent of the lot, harvesting in its sack the hugest

cadavers in its fury, it has been in existence since ancient times. It is preferred in targeted killings because it presents without colour, smell or taste. Upon its administration, the victim lapses into vomiting, severe abdominal cramps and ultimately, death. While the list of

its preys is endless, Napoleon Bonaparte, George III of England and Simon Bolivar are some of its famous victims.

Hemlock was popularised in tales of the Greek philosopher, Socrates’ execution. It has two variants: poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) and water hemlock

(Cicuta species and Oenanthe crocata L). When administered, it presents with such numbing paralysis that, though the individual’s mind is continuously working, his/her physical movements grind to a halt by stealth and gradually leads to death. It is the same for dimethylmercury,

known to be an extremely poisonous material known also to be a slow killer. Its victim is only aware of a problem when they have begun to sing the nunc dimittis. Even dosages as low as 0.1ml are renowned to be very lethal. This was the case in 1996 when a Dartmouth College,

New Hampshire Chemistry teacher had a drop of it trickle down her gloved hand. It went through the glove’s latex and an autopsy on her body ten months later indicated that the dimethylmercury led to her death.

It is same for the rest of the poisons. While mercury could be

sprayed in the air for victims to sniff to their death, tetrodotoxin is an uncommon poison found inside marine animals like Puffer fish and Octopus. Atropa belladonna poison is found in plants. Aconitine, like Atropa, resides in plants and gained notoriety in history as the

poison with which the fourth Roman emperor, Claudius, also known as Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, was killed by his wife, Agrippina The Younger. Murdered at the age of 63, the empress merely mixed aconite with the mushroom meal she gave Claudius, a man who had

been afflicted with a limp and slight deafness in the aftermath of sickness at a young age. Traditional Yoruba medicine also believes that the sun dried bile of a leopard ranks as one of the deadliest poisons on earth. Some of these poisons can never be captured by any autopsy

and even if they do, they manifest as organ failure.

This is however not to conclude that the tea offered MKO by Rice contained the poison that killed him. He indeed could have died a natural death. The strongest motive for anyone to murder Abiola and Abacha however lay in that,

taking them out would ensure a clean slate in the political equation of the Nigerian polity, with both the Nigerian and American political and governmental elites posed to reap bountiful dividends therefrom. Abiola’s trial by an ordeal in detention, in the hands of Abacha,

could as well have been the gradual poison that killed him. Indeed, knowing how maniacal Abacha was, the General could have caused any of the above poisons to be administered on him, in the hope that his expiration would come gradually. While America will look too sophisticated

to allow its topmost officials to be amateurishly present at a proposed murder scene, especially with a not too salutary global renown in targeted killings, sometimes, confidence has been held to lead to slips and errors.
Suspicions of Nigerian and international complicity in

MKO’s death were further reinforced by the not too dissimilar pattern of his and Abacha’s expiration. While Abacha gradually bloated in his latter days on earth, with a noticeable podgy face, as seen in his far-between TV appearances, his corpse had allegedly distended

significantly at burial point. General Abubakar, while attempting to disclaim government’s hand in his death, would seem to be saying that the sudden sickness that took Abiola’s life was the result of a heart disease. But heart diseases don’t come about suddenly. The

fact that a government doctor allegedly attached to treat him in detention didn’t identify hitherto that his heart was tensioned signifies a suspected lax or nil medical attention from government to him.

Like Naipaul’s Half of Life, in the fullness of time the world may – if

indeed they were killed – someday get a full disclosure of what or who actually killed MKO and Abacha

During the burial of MKO, the military Tried taking over the burial

Watch Video of Omoyele Sowore and other Nigerian youths protest

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Source:
Festus adebayo
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