An Oblong Media Global Intelligence Historical Perspective.
On 14 January 1997, in the suffocating political atmosphere of General Sani Abacha’s Nigeria, armed men trailed one of the country’s most prominent pro democracy figures through Lagos.
Their target was Chief Abraham Adesanya.
Adesanya was already an elderly man, but retirement from political struggle was apparently not part of his vocabulary. A lawyer, former senator and leading figure in the National Democratic Coalition, NADECO, he had become one of the most recognisable voices resisting military dictatorship and demanding the restoration of democratic government following the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election.
Many opposition figures had fled Nigeria.
Adesanya stayed.
That decision almost cost him his life.
As his vehicle travelled through Lagos that January day, gunmen opened fire.
The car was riddled with bullets.
The windscreen was shattered.
Yet Adesanya survived.
So did his driver.
Contemporary reporting leaves little doubt that the attack occurred. Human Rights Watch subsequently recorded that gunmen attacked Adesanya on 14 January 1997, shattering the glass of his vehicle. Contemporary international reporting similarly described his car as having been sprayed with bullets.
But the extraordinary survival of Abraham Adesanya would eventually become only one part of a much darker story.
YEARS LATER, SERGEANT ROGERS TALKED
After military rule ended, President Olusegun Obasanjo established the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, the Oputa Panel, to investigate abuses committed during previous governments.
Before the commission appeared Sergeant Barnabas Jabila, better known by his operational name, Sergeant Rogers.
His testimony opened a disturbing window into the security apparatus of the Abacha era.
Rogers identified himself as a member of the Strike Force and testified about operations against perceived enemies of the regime. Among the assassination assignments he discussed were attacks involving Alex Ibru, Kudirat Abiola and Abraham Adesanya.
The Adesanya attack was no longer simply an unsolved episode of political violence.
Rogers admitted firing at him.
The matter subsequently entered Nigeria’s judicial record. In Aminu Mohammed v. The State, the Court of Appeal judgment recorded that Jabila admitted shooting at Senator Adesanya on 14 January 1997 with the intention of killing him and testified that the operation had been ordered through Major Hamza Al Mustapha. Those allegations were contested by the accused, making it important to distinguish Rogers’ testimony from an uncontested judicial finding against everyone he implicated.
Rogers’ account nevertheless provided chilling detail.
According to his testimony, Adesanya was among several political figures identified as targets. The team located him around his Lagos office, followed his vehicle and opened fire.
The bullets failed to kill him.
And this is where documented political history collides with something altogether different:
African spirituality, personal faith and folklore.
“MY FATHER WAS A NATIVE DOCTOR”
Only days after surviving the attack, Adesanya reportedly sat down with Weekend Concord.
Naturally, one question hovered over the interview.
How had this man survived?
According to the reproduced interview, Adesanya resisted attempts to turn his survival into a straightforward story about supernatural protection.
Instead, he attributed his survival fundamentally to God.
But then he revealed something intriguing.
His father, he said, had been what Nigerians commonly called a native doctor.
Adesanya nevertheless portrayed his father’s traditional practice and belief in God as compatible rather than contradictory. Asked whether his father had bestowed some form of traditional protection upon him, Adesanya reportedly laughed and said he did not know.
That answer ensured that the mystery would survive alongside the man.
Because January 1997 was apparently not Adesanya’s first encounter with violent death.
THE MAN WHO HAD ESCAPED BEFORE
In the same interview, Adesanya recalled earlier political confrontations in which his life had allegedly been threatened.
During First Republic political struggles, he said, men once approached him with machetes during a campaign. Yet instead of attacking him, something bizarre happened: according to his recollection, the attackers began fighting among themselves while he watched.
There was another episode during the Second Republic.
Adesanya recalled returning home late after Senate duties. He had dismissed his driver and was driving himself. When he arrived home, he got out to open his gate.
Vehicles reportedly boxed him in.
An assailant came at him with a machete.
Adesanya reacted.
A struggle followed.
He managed to wrest the weapon away before, according to his account, someone smashed a bottle against his head. Dazed but alive, he watched the attackers escape.
Then came 1997.
This time there were no machetes.
There were guns.
And behind the gunfire, later testimony would point toward a specialised security apparatus operating during one of the darkest periods of Nigeria’s military history.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT MATTERS
It is tempting to reduce the story to the mystery of how Abraham Adesanya survived.
But doing so risks missing the more consequential history.
Nigeria under Abacha had become an extremely dangerous environment for political opposition.
M.K.O. Abiola was imprisoned.
His wife, Kudirat Abiola, was assassinated in Lagos on 4 June 1996.
Publisher and businessman Alex Ibru survived an assassination attempt.
Political activists were detained, harassed or forced abroad.
Journalists were imprisoned.
NADECO became one of the principal centres of resistance to continued military government.
Adesanya was one of its senior figures and remained inside Nigeria when several leading opponents had gone into exile. His resistance to military rule consequently made him an important symbol of domestic opposition.
The attempt to kill him therefore belongs to a much larger historical picture.
This was not merely the story of bullets and an extraordinarily fortunate elderly politician.
It was part of the struggle over who would control Nigeria’s political future.
FORTY BULLETS, OR THE MAKING OF A LEGEND?
Later accounts frequently state that more than 40 rounds were fired at Adesanya’s Mercedes Benz.
That number has become embedded in popular retellings of the episode, although contemporary reporting is less precise about the exact number. What is securely established is that his vehicle came under sustained gunfire and that Adesanya survived.
And naturally, Nigerians began asking questions.
Was the Mercedes armoured?
Was it simply extraordinary luck?
Did the attackers fire inaccurately?
Was divine providence responsible?
Or, as inevitably happens when an apparently impossible survival intersects with African cultural traditions, was there something his father had left behind for him?
History can establish the attack.
History can identify testimony about those who participated.
History can document the damaged vehicle and the survival of its occupants.
But history cannot scientifically establish supernatural protection.
Adesanya himself provided perhaps the wisest answer.
Whatever people suspected about his father’s traditional practices, he credited God with preserving his life.
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The enduring importance of the Abraham Adesanya assassination attempt lies not in proving whether charms, providence, an armoured automobile or sheer probability defeated the gunmen.
It lies in understanding what the bullets represented.
They represented an era in which political disagreement could become a matter of life and death.
The Abacha period demonstrated what happens when institutions weaken sufficiently for coercive state power, clandestine operations and political survival to become dangerously intertwined.
And there is an extraordinary irony in the Adesanya story.
The gunmen apparently intended to silence him.
Instead, their failure helped immortalise him.
Every bullet hole became evidence of the political climate through which Nigeria was passing.
Every shattered piece of glass became part of the historical memory of resistance to dictatorship.
And when Sergeant Rogers eventually appeared before the Oputa Panel, what had once appeared to many Nigerians as speculation about politically motivated assassinations acquired a dramatically different dimension through testimony from inside the security machinery itself.
Adesanya survived Abacha.
Abacha died suddenly on 8 June 1998.
Nigeria’s military government subsequently began its final transition.
On 29 May 1999, civilian government returned.
Abraham Adesanya lived until 2008.
The elderly politician whom gunmen attempted to remove from Nigeria’s political equation therefore lived long enough to witness the democratic restoration for which he and many others had struggled.
That may ultimately be the most remarkable ending to the story.
Not that a Yoruba political titan had a father associated with traditional medicine.
Not even that an extraordinary fusillade failed to kill him.
But that a government possessed the guns, soldiers and coercive machinery of the state, and an old man armed principally with political conviction refused to be frightened into silence.
The bullets eventually became museum pieces of history.
The dictatorship became history.
And the intended victim lived to tell the story.
That is the deeper mystery of Abraham Adesanya.
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Historical Intelligence | Nigeria’s Untold Political History
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