Veteran Nollywood actor Nkem Owoh has painfully shared the emotional trauma he was made to endure when his brother, Bartholomew Owoh, was executed on April 10, 1985, under General Muhammadu Buhari’s military regime.
The thespian who shared his pain during a recent interview on Arise TV’s The Interview said that the incident remains one of the most painful moments of his life.
Nkem Owoh claims that his brother, Lawal Ojuolape, and Bernard Ogedengbe were put to death for drug-related crimes that were not originally capital punishment.
He went on to say that he was upset that the government had changed the decree’s effective date in order to include those who had committed the crime before the statute was even in place.
“I was working with Anambra Television then, and I remember walking down the corridor in tears,” he said. “What hurt me the most was how the regime shifted the effective date of the decree just to include people who committed the offense before the law even existed.”
Nkem Owoh blasted the military for backdating the order, claiming that punishing people for acts that weren’t crimes at the time was unfair and emotionally upsetting.
“Why would anyone change the law to punish people for actions that weren’t considered crimes at the time?” he questioned, still visibly affected by the memory decades later.
© Ripples Nigeria
