Title: "Tears of a Brother: Nkem Owoh's Agony and the Shadows of 1985"
In the quiet corridors of Anambra Television, a young Nkem Owoh wept. His pain wasn’t for a scene or a script—it was real, raw, and irreparable. The laughter that millions would later come to love had, on that day, been silenced by heartbreak. His older brother, Bartholomew Owoh, had just been executed—branded a criminal by a retroactive decree that rewrote justice with a soldier’s pen.
It was April 10, 1985. A day that began like any other but ended with gunfire echoing through the military barracks. Alongside Lawal Ojuolape and Bernard Ogedengbe, Bartholomew stood before a firing squad—not for murder or treason, but for a drug offence that, at the time of his arrest, carried no death sentence.
What changed? A stroke of a pen. A military decree. One that reached backward in time to snatch these young men into its grip. Their crime was now punishable by death—because the government said so. No court could argue. No family could plead. The gavel of the regime had fallen.
Decades passed. The world changed. But the wound in Nkem Owoh’s heart never healed. And on April 10, 2025—exactly 40 years later—he broke his silence.
Sitting before cameras on Arise Television, Owoh’s voice trembled with the weight of memory. “I was shedding tears along the corridors,” he recalled. “They shifted the effective date of that decree... They backdated it to include people who didn’t commit the offence within their regime. I was furious. I was bitter.”
Why did the regime choose to rewrite history that way? What threat did these three young men pose that justified such a ruthless example? Was it justice—or a performance meant to strike fear into the hearts of a nation?
The story of Bartholomew Owoh is not just a personal tragedy—it is a mirror held up to a nation's past. A reminder that behind every policy is a person. Behind every law, a life. And behind every silence, a story waiting to be told.
Now, as Nkem Owoh bares his soul, Nigerians are left to wrestle with the echoes of that fateful April. The questions haunt us still: Who writes the laws when the pen is a gun? Who mourns the forgotten when history is silent? And how many more brothers weep in silence, their pain never making the headlines?
The past is never really past. Sometimes, it sits across from us on national television, eyes full of tears, voice full of grief, daring us to remember.
And now that the story is out, will you speak too?
Comment. Share. Remember.
I'm yet to recover from my elder brother's death. https://t.co/4tgZ1AAJpr pic.twitter.com/wKjfn3413y
— Nkem Owoh (@RealOsuofia) April 10, 2025
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