Nigeria’s former ambassador to Namibia and Jamaica, Lilian Onoh, has put up a fierce defence against a libel suit lodged against her by Geoffrey Onyeama.
Onyeama is Nigeria’s immediate-past Minister of Foreign Affairs, where he served for nearly eight years under ex-President Muhammadu Buhari.
In an explosive testimony on Thursday in the ongoing defamation case brought by Mr Onyeama, Ambassador Onoh testified that she had informed former President Buhari about the “hereditary insanity” of former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Geoffrey Onyeama and his “long familiar history with the Federal Psychiatric Hospital in Enugu”.
The former envoy took the stand yet again for cross examination by Mr. Onyeama’s counsel Mr. Agada Elachi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN).
In a fiery four hours of cross-examination before Justice Keziah Ogbonnaya at the FCT High Court Zuba on Thursday, Mr. Onyeama’s legal team chose not to challenge her testimony about the former Minister’s psychiatric problems or her testimony that Mr. Onyeama did not know that the $2.8million embezzlement of Red Cross Funds by Nigerian Diplomats in Jamaica was not a bilateral issue with Jamaica as claimed by Mr. Onyeama or that Mr. Onyeama lied when he claimed that he forwarded the matter to the EFCC for investigation.
Instead, the legal counsel chose the route of trying to focus on the career of the former Envoy which elicited a heated exchange between the Ambassador, her lawyer and Mr. Onyeama’s lawyer about the relevance to the case, which was supposed to be about defamation.
The judge, Justice Keziah Ogbonnaya, overruled their objection and permitted Mr. Agada Elache to focus his entire line of questioning on the Ambassador’s career.
The questions ranged from the date in which she joined the Ministry to how many foreign Missions the Ambassador had served in, which often caused the Ambassador to question the relevance of the questions to the case at hand.
When Agada (SAN) read out a dismissal letter submitted in evidence by the former Minister, Ambassador Onoh immediately stated that the letter submitted and read out by the SAN was “a fake”.
She repeated that the letter was “Fake” several times and informed the stunned judge that her lawyer had written to the Federal Civil Service Commission and that their response differed from what Mr. Onyeama’s counsel had read in court. The Ambassador warned Agada Elache SAN that it was a criminal offence to submit fake documents in court.
When Mr. Elachi raised the question of a panel investigating her, she directed him to the testimony of Mr. Onyeama who had testified under oath that he did not set up any such panel and that Mr. Gabriel Aduda, the Permanent Secretary never set foot in Namibia and thus any documentation to that effect would equally be fake. Mr. Agada Elache did not produce the document.
As damaging as the testimony that the former Minister and his lawyer had submitted a fake document to the court was, the Ambassador also testified that Mr. Onyeama had also lied about forwarding her reports of massive corruption in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the EFCC, stating that all reports were supposed to be forwarded to the Foreign Service Inspectorate (FSI) for internal investigations and only after such were complete and internal sanctions imposed could any criminal element be forwarded to the EFCC or other relevant security agencies.
When Mr Elachi tried to dismiss her reports of corruption by Nigerian diplomats as mere speculation because nobody had been sanctioned, she sharply corrected him and told him that Nigeria’s “culture of impunity” did not negate the fact that the Namibians had taken action against their own nationals involved in the VAT fraud and had presented notarised evidence from both Mercedes Benz and Toyota Worldwide to prove that Nigerian diplomats had used forged documents to claim VAT refunds from the Namibian Government for cars they had never bought; and that the diplomats had even used a TAC volunteer to commit fraud, which caused Namibia not to receive TAC Volunteers and denied dozens of Nigerians the opportunity to be TAC Volunteers in Namibia. TAC is the Technical Aid Corps.
Mr. Elache then read out excerpts of Letters written by the Ambassador about Mr. Onyeama’s visit to Namibia, which conversely had been complimentary about the former Minister, something that caused other lawyers in court to comment that it was counterproductive to proving defamation.
In a final question in which Mr Elachi asked Ambassador Onoh if her memos to former President Buhari were not the result of “generational hatred”, the Ambassador responded that he was “hallucinating”.
When pressed by Mr. Elachi, the Ambassador repeated that he was “hallucinating, delusional…” to which the Mr Onyeama’s lawyer objected, prompting the Ambassador to remind him that she had previously warned him about asking irrelevant questions.
She ended by asking “So where is the defamation?”
The cross-examination was volatile, with the Judge having to intervene at a point when the two opposing counsels got into a heated argument.
Throughout the cross-examination, the counsel for Mr. Onyeama did not reference a single news article or memo that they had called “defamatory” and did not challenge the dozens of newspaper articles about corruption in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the over twenty letters submitted in evidence by Ambassador Onoh.
Even though the case was ostensibly against Ambassador Onoh and Information Nigeria, Akelicious News and Newswire, none of the other defendants were present and no mention was made of them by Mr. Onyeama’s counsel.
The Judge cautioned all journalists present and online to report the proceedings accurately after forcing journalists to identify themselves and sending out anybody who had nothing to do with the case from her court.
She also forced those on the Zoom platform to identify themselves. Ambassador Onoh testified via zoom from her base in the United States where she has equally sued Geoffrey Onyeama, Omoyele Sowore, Sahara Reporters and Gabriel Aduda for defamation.
Justice Ogbonnaya adjourned the suit for final arguments for April 15, 2024.
