Leader of the Senate, Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, has narrated how he was smuggled out of Abuja by his wife, Yemisi Bamidele, in an ambulance belonging to Garki General Hospital, where she was working as a pharmacist.
Bamidele said that his narrow escape from the onslaught of the agents of the General Sani Abacha junta eventually culminated in his political asylum in the United States due to the perennial threat to his life and that of his immediate family members.
He made this disclosure in Abuja yesterday while narrating his experience as part of the activists to commemorate the 2025 National Democracy Day following the annulment of the June 12 presidential election won by the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Moshood Abiola, now of blessed memory.
Bamidele added that he was in a court session in Wuse II, Federal Capital Territory, to defend 11 student union leaders who were expelled by the University of Abuja when he received information that security operatives had invaded his law office looking for arms and weapons.
He stated that immediately he was informed about the development, he told his colleague to take over the matter, after which his wife made arrangements for his eventual miraculous escape from Abuja. He said: “There was no GSM then. We only relied on landlines. One of the lawyers in my office had called my wife from the NUJ Secretariat because they had my wife’s office line at Garki General Hospital, where she was working as a registered pharmacist. “He called my wife’s office line just to let me know that when he went to buy something around my office, he saw that security officers had taken over the entire place.
“As one of the people who managed to come out of the street, he heard that the security agencies said they were looking for arms and ammunition in that office. It was that bad to come and look for arms and ammunition in a law office,” Bamidele said in retrospect.
He further narrated how his wife quickly called one of the assistant registrars she knew in the court, requesting her to inform him about the invasion of his law office by the agents of the military junta.
According to him, my case had not been called because there were other senior lawyers in court whose matters would be mentioned before coming to junior counsel. So, the assistant registrar came to whisper what had happened in my law office to me. I managed to inform one of my colleagues to stand by and represent me. “What I did was to walk across to the law office of another colleague. I stayed there until I was able to reach my wife through her office line. My wife brought an ambulance from Garki General Hospital to convey me to another location. It was the ambulance we used to go to a place where a friend could convey me in his car. We then drove out for almost three days before we got to a safer place.”
THE GUARDIAN
