In his new book ‘MR SPEAKER: The legislative life, service, and resilience of Femi Gbajabiamila’, Speaker Gbajabiamila has claimed that his father-in-law, the late General Iliya Bisalla, was unjustly executed by the military government led by former Head of State and later president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.
General Bisalla, who served as Nigeria’s former Minister of Defence, was one of 32 officers executed on March 11, 1976, for their alleged involvement in the abortive coup of February 13, 1976 in which then Head of State, General Murtala Mohammed, was assassinated.
Throughout his trial, Bisalla maintained his innocence before the Military Tribunal led by General Emmanuel Abisoye. However, Gbajabiamila, who is married to Bisalla’s daughter Salamatu, believes his father-in-law was wrongfully implicated.
Gbajabiamila argues that the military government at the time was “highly politicized” and that “a lot of people, both military men and civilians, were under severe pressure to incriminate people.” He notes that when the evidence against Bisalla could not be substantiated, the Obasanjo-Yar’Adua administration enacted the controversial Decree 29, which made anyone who knew of the coup planning but did not report it guilty as an “accessory to the fact.”
“It was the first time in the history of any judicial investigation that a Decree will be passed because of a single individual,” Gbajabiamila opines, adding that this same Decree was later used to arrest Obasanjo during the Abacha regime.
Gbajabiamila, who was just 8 years old when he lost his father-in-law, believes the military government under Obasanjo unjustly executed Bisalla, who he says was one of the 90% of those implicated that were of Middle-Belt extraction.
