The leader the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), Henry Okah, has cried out over the treatment meted out to him by South African government, describing it as inhuman.
He however said despite being maltreated, his spirit would not be dampened.
Henry Okah made the complaints in a statement issued after the affirmation of his conviction by a constitutional court.
His words: “I have been seriously mistreated by the South African government which had forged virtually all the documents used in my trial. I have been assaulted, electrocuted, denied sunlight and possibly poisoned in the last four years.
“For four years, I have been fed with two slices of bread for hospital, five slices for launch, and five for dinner. Despite being seriously ill, I have been denied access to a doctor and I have been forced to live with a growth in my throat and severe abdominal pains for the last one year but such inhuman treatment will never dampen my spirit.”
South Africa’s top court had reinstated a 24-year prison sentence for Okah.
Okah was convicted over a series of attacks in Warri and Abuja in 2010.
Reacting on the reinstated conviction, however, Okah vowed to seek redress from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, Netherlands.
“The situation in the Niger Delta is a conflict as defined by International Human Law (IHL), the internationally accepted body for legislation for adjudicating conflict situations.
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“Therefore, prosecuting a party to a conflict in a foreign country under the South African anti-terrorism act, where the same statute is inapplicable to other parties to that same conflict is, in my opinion, illogical, and in fact absurd.
“The South African armed struggle against apartheid, and that undertaken by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) are not dissimilar in substance. Even more shocking is the continual imprisonment as common criminals in South African prisons of soldiers of liberation armies who had been captured by the apartheid government almost a quarter of a century after independence in South Africa,” he argued.
He accused the Nigerian government of working in concert with the South African state to deny him access to his witnesses, whilst witnesses for the state were transported to South Africa and accommodated at the expense of the Nigerian government.
He said the injustice was not limited to the Niger Delta but the entire people of the country who, he said, were in a deplorable condition.
