My wife phoned me on the way to Heathrow and asked me to call her when I met Pierre San?, Amnesty International's secretary-general, who was travelling on the same plane. After my last near-fatal incident at Lagos airport, when I was picked up by a would-be throat-cutter, she wanted to know that I was in safe custody. I told her that I wasn't sure I'd recognise him among 400 Nigerian passengers on a crowded 747-it was eight months since my only encounter with him over lunch. In the event, he was hard to miss. As I walked towards the boarding gate I saw him on a bench, talking into his mobile, paper on his lap, elegant in powder blue shirt, pale yellow tie, dark jacket, immaculately polished shoes, brown leather briefcase and a rather expensive gold watch peeping from his shirt sleeve. I wondered how such appearances would hold up in the heat and dust of equatorial midsummer.
He handed me a paper on Amnesty's mission to Nigeria. The "travel precautions" section was not reassuring: "Internal airlines have a high accident rate... Armed robbery on the roads is common..."
Both of us worked most of the time on the plane. Sitting in the empty row in front of him, my head turned round as questions came into my mind. "I see from the programme you've only got an hour with Obasanjo. Is that typical with heads of government?" "An hour is about right," he replied, "otherwise the discussion wanders. I have a lot of points here," he said, tapping his sheaves of paper, "and the Nigerian section will have their own points, but we must select the main three and focus his attention on those, otherwise it's just a shopping list."
"Does Obasanjo know what you are going to bring up?" I asked. "We've written to him and the ministers we are going to call on." He showed me the letter to the foreign minister. A good letter, hard but polite.
"I'm going to focus on impunity. His commission looking at human rights abuses under Abacha [Nigeria's military president from 1993 to 1998] is stuck. They've no resources and that's maybe because Obasanjo doesn't want them to go too far. To be fair, he probably thinks this helps reconciliation."
He passes me another paper, dated 15th June-an Amnesty press release on the execution of foreigners in Saudi Arabia, especially Nigerians. Saudi Arabia, it said, "has one of the highest rates of capital punishment in the world, and 10 per cent are Nigerians. The death penalty can be used for a wide range of offences... including sodomy and witchcraft." But most of the Nigerians on Amnesty's list were executed-usually by decapitation-for drug smuggling and armed robbery. "The Nigerian press gave a lot of space to this release," Pierre said. "So you issued it just before you left on this mission to warm them up?" "Sure," he said, smiling, "it's good to have the local press in a sympathetic mood when we arrive."
Our party is made up of two others who are already there-Stephane Mikala, from Gabon, and Sarah Pennington, an American, Amnesty's Nigeria specialist. "You don't have a lawyer," I remarked. "We had planned to have one. We also wanted a press officer. But we had to cut it. No money." Pierre, who does one of these missions every month, flies tourist class.
"Do you find," I ask, "that just being in a country, chatting to the officials and the pressure groups, has a catalytic effect?" "Oh, yes, often it brings things to the surface. Or prisoners get let out. But it can work the other way. I've just been on a mission to Nepal and on the first day pro-Chinese guerrillas attacked the police, killing 15 of them, and the police retaliated. Apparently this was done as a statement to us."
We begin our descent into Lagos, flying over great expanses of fields dotted with small villages. A river meanders through. But within moments the outer reaches of Lagos begin. From the air it looks, at first, tidy and well-proportioned; solid-looking houses facing straight streets. Then the plane dips and flies low. I see the rusty zinc of the corrugated iron roofs, the crowded balconies of the apartment blocks, the traffic pouring between them, crowds outside a mosque, long queues for the yellow buses at the bus station. From here, I can't smell the garbage or touch the violence. But I know it is there, shimmering and moving between the quiet surface of the evening light. Soon we'll be on the ground, in the middle of it.
An efficient foreign ministry woman meets us off the plane. Pierre turns down her suggestion that we sit in the VIP lounge while she retrieves our luggage. It's almost tranquil in the airport compared with my last visit 16 months ago, when Obasanjo had just been elected president following Abacha's death.
It's the same outside. The waiting crowd stand well back, yet there are only a couple of police around. Two men step forward, introduce themselves as the chairman and section director of Amnesty Nigeria, then step backward to allow a group of 20 or so supporters to grab our hands, take our photographs, and bundle us into a nice red car.
3rd July
At breakfast, Sarah Pennington briefs Pierre succinctly on the state of Nigeria since Obasanjo's return to power. It's a different world. People feel free. Fear has gone. But-and it's a big but-when trouble erupts in ethnic disputes there are often reports of army and police abuses. "Did Obasanjo say 'shoot to kill'?" asks Pierre. "Yes, quite publicly," answers Sarah. (Later I discover that Obasanjo said "shoot on sight those who resist arrest"-a rather different formulation. Amnesty researchers are not infallible.)
We drive to what seems to be the other end of this town of 8m people, for an early morning interview at one of Nigeria's new private television stations. "Why on earth am I doing this at 8am?" a grumpy Pierre asks Sarah. The interviewer has done her homework; she nails Pierre on everything from the Sierra Leone diamond trade to the Angolan and Congolese wars, to Liberian killings, to the plight of children in African wars (she was just back, she said, from filming child-soldiers in Sierra Leone), to the situation at home. Pierre knows each situation back to front-and how they relate to each other. He was doing the same thing in Asia last month and Latin America the month before.
We drive away, marvelling at the television company, functioning on a shoe-string, but professional and fast. "There is this enormous energy in Nigeria," says Pierre, shaking his head. "If only they had the right institutions they could really go places."
We go down a scruffy street to an even scruffier building, home of Amnesty's Nigerian headquarters. It is surrounded by equally down-at-heel shops and offices, many of which, to my surprise, turn out to be computer stores or internet training schools.
Amnesty Nigeria was started in 1968 by missionaries living in the eastern town of Calabar. By the 1980s it was big enough to employ staff and it now has a membership of 5,700 in 32 groups around the country. Pierre chairs a formal committee meeting. An electricity generator grinds noisily in the background, giving me a headache. Their main problem is, of course, money. They're coming to the end of a special programme, after which they are meant to be self-sufficient. In a month's time, an Amnesty team from London will come out for two months to talk to them about how to stand on their own feet. "All those churches and mosques I see," Pierre asks, "where do they get the money?" "By getting people to pledge part of their income," replies Simeon Aina, the chairman. Pierre says they must try to do the same.
Two issues came up in the discussion: the arms trade-where can we get the expertise to deal with this, they ask?-and the establishment of the International Criminal Court. Simeon says the steam seems to have gone out of Amnesty since the statutes were approved in Rome a year ago. "We're pushing on ratification," says Pierre. "Only 14 countries have ratified it and it needs 60 to be up and going. We've got a new campaign starting in two weeks. You must get Nigeria to ratify the treaty as soon as possible."
In the afternoon we meet Nigeria's other human rights NGOs. They all sing the same song: tell Obasanjo, when you meet him, that although he has given us political freedom, we still live under the tyranny of the police. "I was shopping in my local market yesterday," said one official. "Suddenly young men started turning over the market tables and stealing the market ladies' money. The police arrived after the youths had run off and just arrested the first people they could lay their hands on." On and on the stories go-of the Special Anti-Robbery Force that will throw mere suspects into a special prison from which nobody comes out; of magistrates who are ignorant and biased.
The sun begins to set and the traffic begins to pile up as we head across Lagos to the nondescript neighbourhood of Ikejin. We have an appointment to visit the daughter of one of the richest men Nigeria has ever produced, the businessman and politician, Moshood Abiola, victor in Nigeria's election of 1993. Abacha confined him to a solitary room in a lonely house and there he languished, becoming sicker and sicker, without medical help or contact with his family. After Abacha's death in 1998 there was talk of Abiola's release if he renounced his claim to the presidency. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, tried to mediate a compromise with the stand-in military president, General Abubakar-but then Abiola had a final heart attack and died. His wife, Kudirat, who campaigned on his behalf, was murdered in 1996. Abacha's son Mohammed is now in prison, awaiting trial on charges that he ordered her murder.
Amnesty had fought hard for Abiola, and Pierre wanted to pay his respects to the eldest daughter, Hafsat. We wander round the family compound, its rooms furnished with imitation Louis XV furniture and heavy carpets. Hafsat is a charming, energetic woman, educated at Harvard, with a sharp brain she often used to good effect on BBC's Newsnight during the Abacha years. She shows us the family graves in a corner of the yard.
4th July
I phone Obasanjo from an airport call box as soon as we've disembarked in Abuja, the political capital. I first knew him as a friend nearly 20 years ago, just after his first period as president, and I recently renewed the connection after his election to succeed Abacha last year. He tells me to call him from the hotel and he'll send someone to pick me up. At 7.30pm I enter the plush presidential complex for the first time. Built by one of his military predecessors, it looks like the campus of one of America's richer private universities: low buildings slung around expansive lawns, broken up with shade trees. It is-as I find with an increasing number of public buildings in Nigeria these days-spotlessly clean.
I'm ushered into the dining room which has a long table set in another of the nouveau riche heavily-curtained, thick-carpeted rooms which seem to be the taste of military dictators, to find Obasanjo sitting at its head with his entourage. He is reading a five-day-old Financial Times and I ask him if this is his daily fare. "No, someone just brought it in." He looks at what I'm carrying, Prospect and the new Ondaatje novel, and raises an eyebrow, as if to say "are those for me?" Since I have brought no present, I offer them up. Obasanjo is a voracious reader-and writer. One of his three prison books, This Animal called Man, is an erudite exposition of Christian belief, and well written, too. We often talk religion-I the doubter who wishes he wasn't, and he the evangelist whose prison years made him even more fervent.
"So you're travelling with Amnesty. What do they want? I've got nothing to say to them," he says in the gruff military manner he uses to intimidate. "Is it Odi?" "I think that's on their list," I answer. (Odi is a town in the Niger delta where, Amnesty say, the military carried out extra-judicial executions in September 1999, after coming under fire while arresting armed youths who had allegedly killed 12 police officers.) He shook his head. "It seems that executions are still going on here and there," I say. "Amnesty doesn't know what really happens," he says. "So why isn't there an enquiry?" I push, wondering how far I can go before triggering his temper. I change the subject. "I think the other thing they'll bring up is this commission investigating human rights abuses under the military governments. It seems to be slow, " I say. "They should go and talk to Justice Oputa, the chairman." "They will, but you told me last year that you were going to crack the whip," I reply. "I am cracking it," he says. He turns to talk to another guest, the former governor of Lagos state under Abacha. Then he leaves the room.
I chat to the old Abacha governor, a seemingly pleasant, articulate man. He explains that he is out of politics now, and helping to run an airline. "How's it going?" "Not very well," he says. "I noticed at the airport that it is a very competitive local market." "You're right. We find it very hard going."
When Obasanjo returns I ask him what effect Amnesty had in helping to undermine Abacha. "It's hard to pinpoint," he replies. "On the surface Abacha seemed as if nothing moved him. But all those pressures from outside had an effect. There is much speculation on what caused Abacha's death at such a young age. One factor was stress from all the external pressure." He paused. "Amnesty is good. The world needs it, but they're not always right." (Obasanjo himself had been one of Amnesty's best-known prisoners for three years, after being imprisoned by Abacha in 1995.)
I warn him that San? is a tough act. "Some say he fires from the hip, I think he fires from the shoulder. Anyway, some bullets are coming your way tomorrow." He doesn't like my quip. "I'll walk out, you know, if I don't like it." His anger flashes, subsides, and the conversation drifts. He disappears and comes back in shorts. "Come and watch me play. I do this twice a day." We walk to a squash court and he plays a fast and victorious game against one of his staff. "You intimidate them," I say. "I'm good," he says, grinning.
5th July
At 11am Pierre and I enter the parliament building, with its distinctive green dome, and climb several staircases in search of the office of Senator Sodangi, chairman of the senate human rights committee. Out of breath, and bad-tempered when we eventually find it, we are then told that he has cancelled the meeting between Amnesty and his committee in favour of one with Jimmy Carter, visiting ex-president of the US. Pierre fumes, rejects the offer of a quiet chat later in Sodangi's office, and decides to write a strong letter.
At 3 pm we cross over to the presidential complex. Mahogany-panelled rooms, marble floors and staircases-I wonder how many villages could have had running water or a primary school with the money spent on this. Perhaps this crosses Obasanjo's mind too, but whom could he sell it to?
We sit in a rather formal room. Obasanjo enters, we are called to stand, and he sits himself with four advisers at the head of the table. I purposely sit apart. On the other side of the table sit Pierre and Sarah and Simeon Aina and Eke Ubiji from the Nigerian section. Simeon introduces everyone and then Pierre gives an introduction, careful to underline how open the country now feels, how the sense of fear has gone. "I realise," he says, "that democracy doesn't solve all the problems overnight: you have inherited massive human rights abuses. We are here to talk about both the abuses of the past and those which continue under a justice system that hasn't much changed." He then runs through the evidence of continuing extra-judicial executions, torture, the abuse of women in prisons, and police behaviour. Obasanjo begins: "I don't have much time, but I want to say that I have a high opinion of Amnesty. I've always commended your work." Then he picks up the ball and runs for almost an hour: he lowers his voice, raises it, tells anecdotes, firmly knocks back most of the Amnesty proposals, but says that if they have evidence of torture in prisons to pass on the information to him.
It was done with great charm, but on the essentials he was unbudgeable. On the crucial issue of the behaviour of the army, Obasanjo was, as Pierre put it, "thinking as a soldier." "You have to think about the morale of the army, yes, but you also have to think about the bad things the army does," says Pierre. "Have you ever been shot at, Pierre?" counters the president, who was shot at many times in the war in Biafra. Pierre shakes his head modestly, although I know his life has been threatened a number of times. "Unfortunately," Obasanjo adds smiling, "there's nowhere here where we can send Pierre to be shot at!" Only at the end, when Pierre raises the question of the abolition of the death penalty, does there seem to be a modest meeting of minds. "Don't push me to run, I'm crawling, sometimes walking. That's how I want it." No, he would not declare a moratorium. "The trouble with moratoriums is that they come to an end. And it's a wasted opportunity if one has to go back. I want to abolish the death penalty. I'm working towards it, but I have a lot of educating to do. Even when I was a military president I did not sign any death warrants and I won't sign any now. But this is also a decision for each governor, so I can't interfere. But you in Amnesty must work to uncover miscarriages of justice, so the people can be educated to the flaws in capital punishment."
Pierre, Sarah and Simeon have done their forceful best. No one fluffed their lines and they knew their stuff. I look across at Pierre. I see his eyelids are heavy, almost closed. This is out of character. He hasn't won a point and it shows.
But, walking down the corridor after the meeting, they want to believe that some good has come from it. "We saw him, and the door is open." said Pierre. "We can write to him and follow it up. We have built a relationship," said Sarah. "There was no hostility. "
They had fallen under the same spell as I had years ago. Obasanjo is so straightforward, so unduplicitous in argument, with a manner so authoritative, that even the critic starts to see things from his point of view. But Obasanjo, tough old soldier that he is, has a vulnerable side. At the end of it, as he walked past me, I said, "Good performance." "You thought so?" he asked, his eyes meeting mine for approval. "Yes, you always put your case well. But I can't say I agree with it all." "I know you don't, Jonathan," and he grabbed my arm, "Come with Pierre for dinner tonight. There's so much to talk about." (There was indeed. After such an intense day it was a relief to talk about private things: Pierre's urge to return to work in Africa and my own long-standing debate with Obasanjo about Christian morality and adultery.)
6th July
Today we have appointments with the ministers of the interior and of defence. Neither are there when we arrive. The former offers another time, which clashes with the supposed appointment with the minister of defence. In the event we see neither. Pierre and Sarah conclude that seeing Amnesty is not a high priority. "Perhaps we made a mistake," confides Pierre. "We shouldn't have waited so long. The air has gone out of the human rights balloon here. We should have come six months after the election, while things were still fresh. We did that in Brazil and South Korea and everyone wanted to see us, high and low. And the media followed us everywhere."
We drive north to the capital of the Muslim state of Kaduna. Nigeria has a network of good arterial roads and we cover the 180km on a dual carriageway rapidly, passing through an Africa which has scarcely changed in hundreds of years: simple mud houses, some tin-roofed, others thatched, no sign of electricity or even schools for most of the journey.
We drive to the house of the widow of Obasanjo's vice president from the time when he was military president. They were friends, and he was arrested at the same time as Obasanjo. But he died in prison, and it is suspected-there is a court case in process-that he was poisoned. Again, we are to pay our respects.
The widow tells us about the recent religious riots; (2,000 were killed last February and another 300 in renewed Christian/Muslim rioting in May). "I didn't know where these riots came from. Kaduna has been a peaceful town. Christians and Muslims have lived side by side for decades. Parts of Sharia law have long been practised in Nigeria; it has a place in the constitution. We've always had Sharia courts for Muslims-an alternative system of jurisprudence. The upset came when members of our state assembly started pushing for Sharia punishment-amputations and so on. I don't think the governor explained to the public that it won't apply to Christians."
7th July
We drive along the burnt-out streets-small workshops, mosques and churches almost side by side, gutted and charred. We climb the steps up yet another ramshackle building, this time housing the Kaduna branch of Amnesty. Outside hangs a banner with the Pepsi slogan affixed: "Kaduna Amnesty welcomes Pierre San?." An elderly lady walks me to the balcony. "You see those large patches of discoloured tar on the road? That's where they built bonfires and burnt people alive. I had to stand and watch it. I couldn't get out. I didn't dare go down to the street."
Pierre, now dressed in full flowing northern Nigerian desert garb, addresses a meeting of the local Amnesty branch and a large number of NGO representatives. The room is crowded and everyone wants a chance to speak. Amazingly, nearly everyone is brief and to the point. I notice that there's hardly anyone in the room over 40. But they aren't students, either. Politics in Nigeria, alas, seems to be for the old school, and NGO activity for the young, educated professionals.
"The purpose of this meeting is quite enormous," declares the chairman in the heavy cadences of Nigerian English. "People have been burnt out and don't have the wherewithal to rebuild their businesses or their homes." "The state should compensate them," says the first speaker. A leading local Muslim says: "We Nigerians are notoriously religious. Most of the time we respect each other. A few people have abused their freedom to stir things up." "Why doesn't the governor sweep the town of arms?" asks another. "After the Biafran war they went from house to house and confiscated every gun and every bullet." Pierre concludes the meeting by telling them: "The NGOs must continue to discuss these problems. The community won't progress until the NGOs progress."
We head for the governor's office. He's a Muslim, and perhaps a tolerant man-there has been no effort to erase the graffiti scribbled on the outside of his office wall: "Sir, sorry to say, No to Sharia." As with Obasanjo, it's all very formal. Pierre does a succinct job of summarising the NGOs' criticisms, and the governor an equally effective job of rebutting them. "I was glad to see that no nation, large or small, escaped criticism in your annual report-I saw it discussed on CNN," the governor begins. "We are introducing a form of neighbourhood watch-drawn from various groups in each neighbourhood. We want the people to be responsible not just for security, but for maintaining the environment too." He goes through Pierre's checklist: compensation-no, but assistance; arms-we are looking for them; NGOs-"they are welcome to come and see me"; Sharia-"we can't solve problems by fighting. We have to talk."
The meeting lasts half an hour and we rush to the airport to catch the only plane of the day back to Lagos. Pierre says we mustn't miss it. Tomorrow he is going to be made an honorary Yoruba chief by the Alaafin (king) of Oyo, for services to Amnesty.
8th July
The Yoruba kingdom of Oyo used to extend, in pre-British days, halfway across southern Nigeria and into Benin. Today it is a shadow of its former glory-power and wealth passed long ago to the bourgeoisie and the army. Still, the traditional leaders retain the affection of their people, especially in the remote corners of the country where we are.
We arrive at the king's house-more old corrugated iron than gold leaf-on the edge of the small town of Oyo. There is a salute by toothless old men dressed in black, firing homemade muskets. The king and Pierre walk under a parasol embellished with the logo of the Gulf Oil Company, up to the reviewing stand. A succession of elderly men and women come to prostrate themselves before the king. A child, dressed as an African carved doll, dances. Pierre himself is dressed in the red robes of a chief. He kneels before the king, who puts red beads around his neck and a walking stick in his hand. The king speaks, calling him "one of the illustrious sons of Africa." Then it is Pierre's turn. The crowd of about 2,000 press closer to hear. "Amnesty International has reached deep into the heart of Africa," Pierre says, "deep beyond the cities of Africa, deep beyond the politicians of Africa, deep into the people of Africa."
That is the amazing conclusion I've reached, too. An organisation begun 40 years ago in the mind of a Catholic, English lawyer of Jewish descent, has taken root in darkest Africa itself.
