By Damian UGWU
The morning sun filtered through the windows of my office on Gana Street, Maitama, Abuja, casting familiar shadows across stacks of case files and witness testimonies.
Another day of meticulously documenting the invisible wounds of a nation, another morning of transforming human suffering into evidence that could speak for those who had been silenced.
Working for AI and other international human rights organisations had taught me to read the signs—the subtle patterns that preceded explosions of violence, the institutional failures that created spaces for abuse, the political tensions that could ignite into human catastrophe.
My colleagues often marvelled at my ability to predict where the next crisis would emerge, but there was no mystery to it. When you spend years documenting systematic violations, you begin to recognise the architecture of atrocity before it fully reveals itself. For instance, when visiting UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions Philip Alston visited Nigeria in 2005, he asked me how I was able to predict the events I documented in CLO’s report “ I can Kill You and Nothing will Happen” especially the extra judicial killing of 6 young undergraduates of UNN after they were paraded for armed robbery by the police.
I simply told him that 90% of all suspected armed robbers paraded by the police at that time were usually executed a few days later, allegedly while trying to escape from lawful custody. The parade appears to be the last “rite” before the execution.
The morning passed in routine documentation—reviewing reports from field research, cross-referencing testimonies, and building cases with the methodical precision that human rights research demands. Every fact checked, every source verified, every claim substantiated.
In this work, the difference between credible evidence and rumour could mean the difference between justice and impunity.
Then noon struck like a judge’s gavel.
My phone vibrated with urgent purpose. A message from Aster, my colleague stationed in London, whose morning ritual involved scanning Nigerian media with the intensity of a forensic investigator. In this line of work, distance meant nothing—human rights violations in Lagos felt as immediate in London as they did in Abuja.
“What is happening in Anambra?” Her message carried the weight of someone who had just spotted the early indicators of a human rights crisis.
I paused, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. Over ten years of collaboration with Aster had taught me to trust her instincts implicitly. She had cultivated something invaluable from across the Atlantic—a network of sources that spanned every level of Nigerian society.
Human rights defenders in remote villages, government officials wrestling with their consciences, police officers witnessing abuses they couldn’t prevent, prisoners whose testimonies could expose systematic torture, clergy members who had become reluctant chroniclers of violence, and yes, even militants whose stories revealed the complex roots of conflict.
Before I could respond, my phone erupted in a cascade of alerts. Colleagues from across the human rights community, contacts from civil society organisations, sources who had learned to trust me with their most dangerous testimonies—all asking variations of the same urgent question. “What’s happening in Onitsha?” “Are you seeing the reports from the Southeast?” “Can you confirm the violence?”
Then the digital evidence began flooding social media platforms. Twitter and Facebook transformed into repositories of potential evidence—photographs and video clips from Onitsha, Aba, and Asaba. Raw, unfiltered documentation of what appeared to be systematic violence.
A massacre of unarmed pro-Biafra protesters was unfolding. The kind of material that makes a human rights researcher’s pulse quicken with both professional recognition and human horror.
My phone buzzed again. Aster, more insistent now: “You must get back to the East. This is getting out of hand. You need to get going. You are the only person who can do this work.”
The compliment carried a weight I understood intimately. In human rights work, being “the only one who can do this work” often meant being the only one with the right combination of local knowledge, established trust networks, and institutional backing to document atrocities while they were still unfolding.
It meant being willing to collect testimonies while the trauma was still fresh, to gather evidence while the perpetrators still felt confident in their impunity.
I stared at my screen, watching fragments of what could become a major human rights documentation project scatter across social media like pieces of a puzzle demanding assembly.
Somewhere in the Southeast, events were unfolding that would require more than remote monitoring—they would demand field investigation, witness interviews, and the kind of meticulous evidence-gathering that could eventually support accountability processes.
“Ok,” I typed back to Aster, my hands steady with the resolve that comes from years of walking toward rather than away from human suffering. “I’m going tomorrow.”
But even as I sent those words, I knew that by tomorrow, crucial evidence might be lost, witnesses might be intimidated into silence, and the opportunity to document violations in real-time might have passed. In human rights work, timing isn’t just important—it’s often the difference between evidence and memory, between accountability and impunity.
As I sat in my Abuja office, surrounded by notes and testimonies I have careful documentation during my last trip to the south east in April, I felt the familiar weight of responsibility settling on my shoulders.
The interview notes on my desk were bad enough, but nothing compared to what I am about to hear and witness in the coming days and weeks. Somewhere to the south-east, people were experiencing violations that would leave invisible scars for generations. My job was to make those violations visible, to transform suffering into evidence, to ensure that when the world moved on to other crises, the record would remain.
The real work was about to begin.
(Extract from my upcoming memoir)
May 30th, 2006, Reminiscence
