By Tony Eluemunor
I’ll never presume to teach any Department of State Security (DSS) agent how to conduct investigations because they are supposed to be adequately trained. I will be grateful to learn from them. So, the best I can grant from ex-DSS Assistant Director, Mr. Dennis Amachree’s bloopers (including mere lapses and terrible blunders) is not to blame his teachers, but to assume that he betrayed them, at least on his conclusion that the late Head of State, General Sani Abacha, died from
a heart attack during a tryst with a woman. The gaffes and blunders are contained in the excerpted part of his book, “DSS @40: My Journey Behind the Shield”.
In case you assumed from the title that he authored a Nigerian version of “Every Spy A Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community” published in 1990, please, hold your piece; this book is Amachree’s personal story. His take about how Abacha perished while in bed with a woman, is filled with errors any secondary school student would have easily corrected.
First example: The Vanguard newspaper of July 22, 2026 published that “Amachree recalled that a few days before his death, Abacha received Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s emissaries and later hosted Pope John Paul II, who appealed for the release of political detainees”.
Just when I thought that Vanguard must have misrepresented the author, the paper seemingly quoted him: “Indeed, the Pope was the last visitor that Gen. Sani Abacha received”. These few lines contained three errors: One, Arafat himself, not emissaries, visited. Two, the Pope was not Abacha’s last visitor; three, Arafat was and the sunset Abacha saw on his way to the Airport was the last he saw on earth
because he didn’t survive the night.
Why am I picking holes in Amachree’s tall tale? Oh, from the Vanguard of July 25 this year comes this: “Amachree said that his decision to write about the incident was informed by a desire to preserve what he believes is an accurate account. Yet, Amachree made little attempt to achieve accuracy. Pope John Paul II (now Saint John Paul II) visited Nigeria on March 23, 1998. But Arafat made a brief, high-level
stopover visit to Nigeria on June 7, 1988, meeting with military head of State, General Sani Abacha at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja. This visit is historically notable as the final public engagement and public appearance of General Abacha, who died less than 24 hours later on June 8, 1988”. I just posted “Arafat’s visit to Nigeria” on google and that quotation popped up.
So, if Amachree was not sure about such easy items and yet saw no reason to cross-check them, it is easy to understand why he was wrong about weightier matters, such as how Abacha died. For nstance, if he had been humble enough to phone the Director of National Operations at the time under reference, Barr Mike Ejiofor, to verify when the Pope visited, he would have avoided his “error”. Mr. Ejiofor who is a popular national security analyst now, was in charge of the Pope’s security and personally took the “Pope’s Mobile” back to Lagos enroute to Rome, after the visit.
Mr. Ejiofor was also in charge of the DSS security matters concerning Gen. Abacha. So, if Amachree had cross-checked the relevant timelines with his superior or such other superiors of his in the DSS, he would have understood the suspicion Nigerian security agencies attributed to Abacha’s and Arafat’s Airport rendezvous.
Terribly, without his knowing when Abacha hosted Arafat, that is if the Vanguard quoted him correctly, he totally dismissed every other version of Abacha’s death, saying: “Many accounts were published but few were based on verifiable facts. These range from fictional stories of a poisoned apple from disaffected soldiers to more sensational claims involving foreign intelligence agencies”.
Then, only the Almighty God knows what came upon Amachree when his hubris level brimmed over, and he went ballistic: “As a security professional who was in the thick of it, I feel compelled to set the record straight and provide the true narrative for posterity”. Please, someone should tell Amachree that he
couldn’t have been in “the thick it” because he was actually Assistant Director, Travel Control (overseeing Airports, Sea Ports and Land Borders) and he left the DSS in 1999. So, he handled migration and people on the watch list matters, not Abacha’s security.
Even about the single interview he conducted concerning Abacha’s death, on which his entire story about Abacha rests, he verified nothing. He wrote: “At roughly 4:05am, the pharmacist” whose sister was Abacha’s girlfriend but had left her to spend the night with the General, noticed that Abacha had died, returned to the Abuja Hilton Hotel, and she and her sister escaped to Lagos”. Then Amachree
interrogated the pharmacist in Lagos, as the DSS Director of Operations the national headquarters instructed him. “The first thing she said to me was: ‘I did not kill him, he died on top of me.'” Then
Amachree sent the lady back to Abuja immediately. Finish!
Mr. Amachree’s publication is an indictment on the DSS! Any journalist who would base his conclusion on such an unverified tale would be issued a query. What if she smothered him with a pillow or poisoned Abacha but lied that the man died while having illicit sex, or worked for a foreign secret agency?
Worse still, Amachree who sent the lady back to Abuja for further interrogation said nothing about Abuja’s findings. Showing that ignorance could actually be bliss, he rated his unverified conclusion
above those of the DSS headquarters’ final determination of what killed Abacha. That Amachree never referred to the findings of his DSS head office is his greatest self –indictment.
So, the most charitable one could be to Amachcree is to wave off his claim as that of an ill-informed ex-agent who was blissfully ignorant of the concerted efforts at the controlling heights of the DSS,
National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Military Intelligence and coordinated by the office of the National Security Adviser (NSA) over Abacha’s death. I assume Amachree had no role in the investigations
but was contacted to watch the Airports for that lady or some people being investigated. Worst of all for Amachree, he may never have knownof the conclusive findings…which I now lay bare here.
Though two women, Filipinos and not Indians, had visited Abacha that night, the informed opinion was that he died after an asthma attack. As he did not plan to stay away from home for long, he did not take his anti-asthma inhaler with him. So just when he was about to leave the girls, he was said to have slumped at the steps, fully clothed, yes he was certainly fully clothed.
It is almost certain that nothing hanky-panky happened between the late General and the Filipino damsels that fateful night as wasn’t well, and his doctor had plied him with steroids, as usual. That enabled him to leave his sick bed after some sleep, welcomed some visitors, attended to his very last
official duty – signing a cheque and giving it to former military officer and Sports Minister, Air Commodore Emeka Omerua, for our national team’s South Korea trip. Really, Abacha was very ill with
diabetes and liver sclerosis.
Signs of trouble appeared well before Abacha died; on returning from the Airport after seeing off Yasser Arafat, Abacha’s health deteriorated and his doctor gave him an injection by 6 P.M and advised
Abacha to have a bed rest. He did, but rose up by 9p.m and began to receive guests.
His last visitor, the late General Jeremiah Timbut Useni, the then Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, remained with him till about 3.35a.m. So, between that time and the 5 a.m. when Abacha’s
Chief Security Officer, Major Hamza al-Mustapha (rtd) was informed about Abacha’s health emergency, was what Amachree termed a critical unaccounted for period.
But he had no way of verifying the story he claimed that the lady told him. And this is tragic for he published the information he wasn’t in a position to verify as a fact and so fouled up Nigeria’s institutional memory. Gen. Useni said in the Sunday Vanguard of April 3, 2010, in “How Abacha Died, by Jerry Useni”, “May be around 5 A.M or so”. Abacha’s doctor said so, too, at the Oputa Panel.
Soldiers summoned Hamza al-Mustapha to see a dying Abacha, as opposed to a dead one. Al Mustapha met him alive but gasping for breath and so summoned a doctor. Amachree’s Pharmacist
told him that Abacha died by 4.05 A.M, and he published it as the truth though he verified nothing. Haba, hubris should have a limit!
There is this hole any journalist would have noticed but it escaped Amachree. Did Amachree, a trained security agent, believe that a soldier guarding Abacha for the night would have, on his own, ordered
a car to smuggle Abacha’s visitor out of Aso Rock, just because the lady said so? Of what rank would that soldier have been to order a vehicle to take Abacha’s guest out of Aso Rock without going through Abacha’s ADC, Security Officer or the like? Not even the protocol office people would do that. That would never have been possible when Nigeria had no mobile phone by then. Or, did the soldier abandon his duty post of guarding a Head of State to wake up a driver?
Then, if truly the lady fled, who informed the soldiers who in turn informed Mustapha that Abacha needed help? Or did the soldiers barge into the room to tell Abacha to get up and go home? This is the
question Amachree didn’t address. Answer: The female visitors who were with Abacha did. But they were not prostitutes. Those two Filipinos were old time visitors to the presidential villa. They grew up in Kano, a city with a large Asian population.
So, what killed Abacha? Though Abacha was lethally ill, he was pushed off the cliff and into the abyss. Abacha’s last public assignment was the airport departure formalities for the late Palestinian leader,
Yasser Arafat, in the evening. In Arafat’s entourage was a Palestinian, who Nigerian security agencies identified as a double-agent – who was collaborating with the Americans.
It was during the Airport formalities that the double-agent tapped the head of his pen repeatedly and dropped some poison on Abacha as he introduced members of Arafat’s entourage to Abacha, and he shook their hands, during airport formalities. A review of the video recording showed the double-agent undoing Abacha – and such video reviews and other security issues were carried out after Abacha’s death to determine what killed him.
The NIA took that task very seriously because that organization was at war with the global West in its attempt to thwart their numerous efforts to bump Abacha off. But the West succeeded through that man Arafat brought to Nigeria.
Tony Eluemunor covered the Presidency (Doddan Barracks, Lagos, for Newswatch and Aso Rock, Abuja, for the Guardian and later Daily Independent). Abacha’s death details came from his manuscript for a book, “AUDACITY OF HYPOCRISY: 24 Years of Nigerian Leadership from 1999 – 2023.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
