*Baba has gone leaving us behind, Wife tells The DEFENDER Saturday
By BASHIR ADEFAKA
Sun has set in the midnight for former Quartermaster General, Lagos Garrison Command, Col. Gabriel Ajayi, who died night of Sunday August 19, 2018 at his home Lagos home at 71.
The retired colonel was ill, taken to the hospital and was well, even preparing for the burial of his late mother, when he succumbed to death.
Still deeply touched by the death of her hubby of many years, wife of the fallen military officer who never pretended about his grouses over former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s failure to address the injustice of fathomed coup in which he was also involved before he was pardoned, cleared and made President in 1999, told The DEFENDER in Lagos on Saturday that the man had gone “leaving us behind”.
It will be recalled that former President Olusegun Obasanjo was involved in a fathomed coup to overthrow the then military Head of State, General Sani Abacha, in 1995. Col. Ajayi, Obasanjo’s former deputy, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, Col. Lawan Musa Gwadabe were among officers involved in the same problem with him.
Col. Gabriel Ajayi was always pained that Obasanjo, despite the favour of God over him, could not look into the plight of others as well as that of another fathomed coup of 1997 which saw Lt. Gen. Oladipo Diya, General AbdulKarim Adisa, Gen. Tajudeen Olanrewaju and others in the jaws of death before they were freed following the death of Abacha in July 1998.
Ajayi, an Ijesha Osun State-born, started out in life following completion of his secondary education in 1969. He worked briefly at the Nigerian Tribune after which he joined the Nigerian Army in 1971.
A brave solider, Col. Gabriel Ajayi, as Quartermaster General, Lagos Garrison Command, was second-in-command to the then General Officer Commanding, GOC, Major Gen. Ishaya Bamaiyi, who was said to have been roped into the 1995 fathomed coup with Obasanjo on a day, according to the interview he granted a Vanguard journalist that, he was arrested in the night by Bamaiyi to whom he was second-in-command after taking Holy communion in the Garrison’s church with him in the morning.
Ajayi was sentenced to death on 14 July 1995 by the Brigadier General Patrick Aziza’s Special Military Tribunal (SMT) before it was commuted to 25 years jail term. He spent four years in Minna prison before he was released and compulsorily retired by General Abdulsalami Abubakar regime in 1999 just as his co-convict Obasanjo was being prepared to become President.
