DIARY OF A JOURNALIST DETAINED BY POLICE FOR THREE HOURS

Jonathan...these NFF people giving me headache

The Nigerian Football crises has taken a new turn. It is now a crime for one to be a diligent journalist in Nigeria doing a legitimate professional duty. At 6:15pm on the 9^th November, 2011 Messrs Christopher Green, Tunde Aderibigbe and Robinson Okosun, agents of the illegal NFF, employed the services of the Nigerian Police with a lawyer from the CITY LAW CHAMBERS to invade the offices of the national accord newspaper in Jabi-Abuja to arrest the Acting Daily Editor, Mr. Olajide Fashikun.

His offence? He had the effrontery to write FIFA’s Ethics Committee reporting Joseph Sepp Blatter and Jerome Valcke, FIFA’s President and Secretary General respectively. The Policemen stormed the quiet office of the paper to effect the arrest and had to harass the journalists on duty. This is the second invasion of a Nigerian media house by the Police given the recent invasion of TheNation newspaper.

According to the petition written by the illegal NFF, I have defamed them. It made me to laugh so heartily and made the Police to realise that they were running a bad script. The Police would listen to voice whose decibels are deafening. They were twisting all facts upside down. My unpertubed nature vexed them to high heavens. The NFF goons and their lawyer were dictating “he must be arrested and detained. His laptop must be retained until the matter is completely investigated and he must be told to stop writing his inciting articles on his blog.”

At the Inspector General of Police Monitoring Unit on the first floor of the Louis Edet House in Garki area 10, the ‘complainants’ claimed I, Olajide Fashikun, a journalist, published on my blog, www.olajidefashikun.blogspot.com falsehood and maligned their character. I blushed. People who have no juristic personality are talking of defamation!

Two, people who are standing trial for forgery used the Police to re-investigate a journalist who is doing his professional duty. The same cabals who had held Nigerian football to ransom for almost five years and frustrated the efforts of the Federal Government to reform football, are on this new scheme, to truncate the Dominic Oneya reform committee.

The Police feels the Solicitor General of the Federation offered his June 2011 legal advice which declared that the NFF is illegal and not known to Nigerian law as “personal opinion”. I referred to the fact that the illegal members who call themselves NFF even sued the Inspector General of Police (IGP) not in their capacity as NFF but as individuals. They re-frustrated the Federal Government and the IGP from carrying out the orders of Justice Abang’s court which said their election is illegal, null and void and of no effect. They petitioned the Police as individuals against me not as NFF.

I was so amazed that the Police were rationalizing that FIFA President may have signed regularly all the 18 documents I made reference to and decided to sign the 19^th document of 14^th September (ironically, my birthday) differently. That was where I started losing confidence in the Police. I had already prepared my mind to sleep in their detention centre.

Just three days back, I was joking with two of my reporter colleagues that it was a long time I had been arrested for any report I had written not realizing this was coming to pass in a matter of days after. I left the Police when Jarret Tenebe and Chikelue Iloenyosi were alerted by Harrison Jalla that the Police had arrested me. Jalla got the information from concerned persons who read same from the hungry slaves of the NFF who were celebrating the arrest of their only unrepentant media enemy on the various facebook and other networks.

How on earth can the monkeys in the Glass House whose membership consists of criminals like a dismissed magistrate who was dismissed from the Oyo State Magistracy think I will go down like that. I am blessed to be a journalist and will not cease being a journalist. This is my calling. I have a duty from heaven to achieve. No one, I repeat, no one can stop me.  

At the point when the detention form was filled, the officer in charge, ACP Ladodo, a trained journalist himself, who doubted my evidences, refused to sign the detention order. He told his men: “release him on bail”. I was then told, my laptop and back-up are detained. I was released at 9:30pm. That made my detention a three-hour ordeal.

I got 51 calls from friends and relations who had read on the twitter, facebook, BB broadcasts, etc that I had been arrested. I visited twitter and found out that the girlfriend of NFF’s Sola Ogunlowo, Ronke Ogunleye, sent in: “Jide Fashikun has been arrested by the FCID for supplying FALSE INFORMATION to them accusing NFF of forgery”

Ironically, I never wrote the Police. That was the first puncture I did to the unlearned argument of the NFF lawyer. The same trash Ronke Ogunleye sold like a dummy to her friends on twitter. Like I told her earlier, “when an old woman goes to play in the sand with young kids, they will play with her flat breasts”.

The same NFF had attempted just like the tenure of Sani Abdullahi Lulu to lure me with money to join them. My continued refusal has made me a target. They see all my reportage activities as antagonistic.