We already know the life of DCP Abba Kyari is a movie. What we don’t know for certain is just how many parts of it we’re going to have to watch. Is it even just a movie at this point? Because it’s running for long enough to qualify as a mini-series with the potential for an unplanned second season.
The last time we talked about Kyari, he was a fresh boy in the custody of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA). But before we talk about what’s new, it’s useful to do a quick recap of his life over the past eight months.
From grace to grass
Abba Kyari was a celebrated “supercop” until the nosy Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from faraway United States of America stumbled across a huge skeleton in his closet.
It wasn’t any one of his many awards of excellence.
What the FBI found was that Kyari’s team had arrested one Kelly Chibuzo Vincent on January 20th, 2020 and detained him till February 25th, 2020. What’s controversial about Nigerian policemen arresting anyone and keeping them for longer than the law allows without charging them to court? Well, Vincent’s one-month imprisonment was arranged from Dubai by Ramon Abbas, aka Ray Hushpuppi. You may remember him as the now-convicted international fraudster with the glossy Instagram page.
The FBI discovered that Kyari’s arrest of Vincent helped Hushpuppi to succeed in scamming a Qatari businessperson of $1.1 million.
He was immediately suspended and investigated by Police authorities to determine if to send him to America to answer for his crimes. But the investigation was taking too long, and we assume Kyari was bored of being idle, which is (probably) why he went and got new skeletons to stuff in his closet.
On January 21st, 2022, Kyari called an NDLEA officer in Abuja to tell him his team had arrested suspects who were smuggling 25 kg of cocaine. We’ve told this story before and you can read all about it here
But some haters at the NDLEA didn’t like his audacity, so they declared him wanted on February 14th, 2022. It was the day of love but the NDLEA said:
So, what’s new with Abba Kyari?
Many Nigerians have been debating the Federal Government’s willingness to extradite a high-ranking police officer to answer for crimes in America. The longer the investigation took, the more conspiracy theories were created.
But on March 3rd 2022, the Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, gave the green light for Kyari to relocate to the land of the free and home of the brave. Very likely in chains.
There was just one problem — Abba Kyari was already sitting in a cell courtesy of the NDLEA. And when the agency heard about the extradition case going green, it quickly announced that it had already filed charges against him in court. The agency then quickly clarified that the charges had been filed a week before the announcement.
The clarification was in reaction to Twitter detectives that were speculating that Kyari’s drug case is an elaborate scam to keep him in Nigeria. Dealing with a local case, which is already in court, is sure to complicate extradition. Charity begins at home, after all. Section 3 of Nigeria’s Extradition Act provides for an extradition to be rejected if the suspect has a pending criminal case in Nigeria. It makes you wonder if Kyari got himself entangled in another criminal case just to delay or abort that trip to America. Because doing drug deals while suspended from police work sounds like a crazy thing to do. But it appears like another Friday in the life of Supercop Kyari.
During his first court appearance on March 7th, 2022, Abba Kyari pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. His lawyers then begged the judge to allow him to remain in NDLEA custody pending his bail application hearing on March 14th, 2022.
So it’s clear that he doesn’t want to go to Kuje Prison, where we imagine he’d get an uncomfortable reunion party with people he put there in his past life as a supercop. But we bet he doesn’t want to go to America either because of what looks like a clear case against him there.
It’s uncertain to say where the supercop’s case ends, and the suspense of it all is why everyone keeps watching The Abba Kyari Show.
