Daniel Etim-Effiong, a popular Nigerian actor, has spoken about how he lost his mother at the tender age of four while on her way to visit his father, Lt. Col. Moses Effiong, who was serving a long prison term due to forced to serve a long prison term due to false accusations during the military regime in Nigeria.
Featuring in the recent episode of Chude Jideonwo’s WithChude podcast, Etim-Effiong recounted how his father, a military personnel member, missed major parts of his growing up due to the upheaval he encountered due to an alleged engagement in a failed military coup.
Speaking about how his father was sentenced to life imprisonment, and how that affected his whole family, Daniel Etim-Effiong said:
“I was born into an army household, born into the barracks. My mom was a teacher at Command Secondary School, and my dad was an instructor at the Command and Staff College in Jaji. And it was in 1985, there was a coup in the country, and the government moved to arrest all the coup plotters, and one of the key coup plotters had mentioned my dad as one of the co-conspirators of the coup.”
He added, “So he was picked up with the rest of the coup plotters, and that just broke my family. My mom was kicked out of the barracks, and she had to go back to Benin to live with her parents. She took us, the four kids, back to Benin to live with her while my dad was facing the music in Kirikiri. He was not released; his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, so he was supposed to spend the rest of his life in prison, while the rest of the other coup plotters were killed.
“He was moved to Kano Central Prison, where he was supposed to spend the rest of his life. Every month, my mom would travel to go visit him, and then on one of those trips, a few years later, she was traveling to visit him, and then she had an accident, and she died. So my mom was taken away from us, and of course, my family just shattered again, and my dad was still in prison.”
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How Daniel’s Father Was Released
His father, former Lt. Col. Moses Effiong was granted official presidential pardon by the Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari alongside five others sentenced to life imprisonment in 1986 after the allegedly failed Vatsa Coup during the Ibrahim Babangida regime on charges of treason concealment against the regime and released in 1993 but without official proclamation and restoration of ranks and entitlements.
Daniel continued, “Eight years later, a politician was leaving government, and he granted, as a favor to my uncle, who worked with him for a while, the release of my dad, and then he was released, eight years later. So he came back and started to rebuild his family again from scratch. Right now, he is in Calabar.“
