Army Luring Me To Abuja To Arrest Me, Says Ex Nurse

Matilda Anighoro fears arrest after an SIB call, reviving sexual harassment and detention claims against the Nigerian Army.

Atlantic Post

April 18, 2026

4–5 minutes

Abuja, Atlantic Post, Human Rights, military accountability, Nigerian Army, Sexual Harassment, Whistleblowers

Former Nigerian Army nurse Matilda Anighoro has escalated a deeply unsettling confrontation with the military, alleging that a fresh telephone invitation from the Army’s Special Investigation Bureau may be a ruse to arrest her in Abuja.

The latest complaint lands in the middle of an already explosive dispute in which she has accused senior officers of sexual harassment, torture, intimidation and unlawful detention, allegations that the Army has previously rejected.

Anighoro’s central fear is plain. She says the call asked her to travel from Lagos to Abuja for documentation, yet the process described to her was inconsistent and, in her view, suspicious.

Her warning was blunt: “I think these people are planning to arrest me.” That fear is not occurring in a vacuum.

It follows earlier claims that a senior officer, General S.O. Okoigi, told her to “sleep with him or face consequences”, a statement she says triggered a chain of reprisals inside the system.

Her first major public account, published in early April, painted a picture of a soldier who says she was punished after rejecting sexual advances, then isolated, humiliated and locked up.

In that version of events, she alleged detention in a guardroom for more than two weeks, denial of basic dignity, and attempts to alter her records after discharge.

The allegations are serious because they go beyond workplace abuse and enter the terrain of command abuse, record manipulation and possible obstruction of justice.

General Okoigi has denied wrongdoing. In the version reported by SaharaReporters and amplified elsewhere, he insisted that he had minimal interaction with her and said, “I never knew her. The only time I saw her was during an interview.”

He also claimed that any discipline against her arose from reports made by her immediate commanders, not from sexual harassment.

That denial leaves the case at the familiar crossroads of many Nigerian institutional abuse scandals, where competing narratives are rarely resolved quickly or transparently.

The new allegation of a trap-style invitation matters because it shifts the case from an internal misconduct dispute to a broader question of coercion and process.

If a complainant believes an official call is really an attempt to seize her, then confidence in the integrity of the Army’s internal investigative machinery is already badly damaged.

The Socialist Workers League has now called for an independent investigation, signalling that the matter has begun to spill beyond the barracks and into civil society scrutiny.

That public pressure is not coming from nowhere. In the earlier coverage, nurses and campaigners also demanded that the Army should not be allowed to investigate itself in a matter where a junior female service member says she was abused by a powerful superior.

This is why Anighoro’s latest complaint has found traction: it taps into a broader public distrust of closed military processes, especially when the complainant is no longer in service and says she is still fighting for entitlements.

The legal backdrop is important. Nigeria’s Constitution protects personal liberty, bans torture and degrading treatment, and guarantees fair hearing within a reasonable time.

It also provides that a person who is unlawfully arrested or detained is entitled to compensation and a public apology from the appropriate authority.

Those protections matter here because the dispute now hinges not only on what happened in the past, but on whether today’s summons can be shown to be lawful, necessary and transparent.

The Armed Forces Act also shows why the language of a “guardroom” carries such weight.

The Act defines a “service guardroom” as separate premises designated for persons serving sentences of imprisonment, and it allows certain commanders to impose imprisonment with hard labour in the unit guardroom as a summary punishment for lower ranks in specified cases.

It also places command, discipline and administration of the Armed Forces under the Forces Council.

In other words, military detention is not informal in law, but it is still vulnerable to abuse if command power is exercised without transparent safeguards.

That is where this case becomes larger than one former corporal’s grievance.

If Anighoro’s claims are accurate, the matter raises the old but still unresolved Nigerian question of whether a junior woman in uniform can safely report sexual coercion against a senior officer without being punished for speaking.

If her allegations are false, then the public deserves a clear, documented and impartial process that proves it.

Either way, a system that depends on fear, secrecy and informal pressure will keep producing the same crisis of trust.

For now, the facts that are firmly on the table are these. Anighoro says she has already cooperated with investigators, including travelling to Abuja earlier to make a statement after struggling to raise transport fare.

She now says a fresh call has made her fear arrest. The Army has not been shown, in the material reviewed for this report, to have publicly answered the newest allegation in detail. Until that happens, the case will remain a live test of military accountability, whistleblower protection and the rule of law in Nigeria.