By EMMANUEL OGEBE

I received news of the passing of rogue Republican operative Doug Wead with an acute sense of intersection of the arc of Justice. It was a horrid end to a horrible man.

Wead who was a congenital crook, a pathological liar and an indicted criminal has hounded, hunted, harassed and haunted me because I refused to let him ship off the escaped Nigerian Chibok schoolgirls who I brought to the US to his business partner for the summer in exchange for a princely sum of $300,000. In three decades of human rights work against numerous third world dictators and corrupt regimes, no one has stalked me as Wead did.

Utilizing his privilege as a white, male, Republican activist, Wead sicced the US Embassy Nigeria, the Nigerian Embassy USA, the FBI and DHS on me after I made the mistake of first reporting him to the US authorities for his fraud in relation to the Nigerian schoolgirls.

Despite illegally providing them my confidential and privileged (attorney work product) communications spanning several years, and obsessively pushing them to act against me, I was never once interviewed by the US authorities on any allegations whatsoever.

In the end however, in a brazen abuse of his old boy Network including a serving senator on whose presidential campaign he served, seven of 12 Nigerian schoolgirls I brought to the US in 2014 were taken from schools I’d placed them in and handed to Wead in 2016 from where five successfully escaped from him just weeks later. Apparently his alliance with the brutal Nigerian regime against me, failed due to mutual double crossing.

In 2018, the fourth year of his obsessive stalking of me, Wead got published in the Wall Street Journal a highly defamatory piece on me that essentially accused me of all the things he had done (that article is now in litigation).

Casting himself as the white messiah who rescued the Nigerian schoolgirls from me a “human trafficker”, Wead finagled a White House meeting with the Trumps to celebrate World Anti-Trafficking day.

Meanwhile the story of his Nigerian rent-a-girls caper kept evolving. First it was Congresswoman Wilson – not me – that brought them to America then finally it became it was Trump who brought them to America (2020 election special edition!).

It seemed he had won. He was on top of the world - I was culture canceled, he had two Chibok schoolgirls for his Girls-for-hire roadshow and he even got a Twitter thumbs up from Trump for his pro-Supremacist and anti-racial Justice rhetoric.

However in September 2021, Doug Wead was criminally indicted by the very US government he had tried to use against me for financial crimes related to his fundraising.

He was hung on the gallows he built for me as Hamman was for Mordecai in the story of Queen Esther.

But the story doesn’t stop at the fitting end to an obnoxious fiend.

His credits include the five schoolgirls who had to escape from him in summer 2016 who have mostly floundered in the five years since. Other credits include the two girls whose parents he bribed and who dubiously went from 8th grade level to High School Diploma in one year, not surprisingly at a school he headed, and then just graduated this summer from a college run, again coincidentally, by Wead’s church denomination!

It is hoped his legacy of lying and exploitation in the art of the con will not ruin these young ladies’ futures.

It is pathetic that a man who blackmailed a US president for profit stooped so low as to stalk an immigrant human rights advocate for profit.

The world is a slightly happier place today because the divine justice system works.

The serpent is out of the garden but all must now toil for the future including the young ladies he beguiled and misled.

It is unfortunate that the US government did not act in 2015, when I first reported him to be a fraudster, probably on account of his race and power and my lack thereof. This would have prevented his committing fresh crimes in 2016 that he is now charged with.

A thorough examination of his actions and that of his cohorts over the Chibok girl’s fundraising and rent-a-Nigerian-schoolgirl gambit should NOW be undertaken as that scam ran concurrently with the Russian fundraising crimes.

Ironically his Nigerian collaborator in the concerted attacks on me, Nigerian Government Minister for Women Affairs, Aisha Alhassan also died this summer. She’d held a national press conference and claimed that I never even put the girls in school in America – they were just enslaved to white people in America! (Also now in defamation litigation.)

The Arc of the Universe is strong and it bends against injustice but at the end of the day, Hateful Hamman’s hangman was himself as was Wead.

In a life spent monetizing relationships and politicizing religion, Wead ended up as a common criminal fallen from the Olympian heights obtained by crass opportunism. In his final scam act, he cheated the earthly justice system by his death.

Death belongs to everyone but not everyone must belong to death. Even if I die today, I thank God that I saw my chief persecutor in America criminally charged before he died.

The folly of godfathers is that the fail to factor in the Father God. The God who wrought justice on the brutal military dictator Gen. Abacha who imprisoned, tortured and almost killed me in Africa 25 years ago, has come through again with maniac political powerhouse Doug Wead who sought to do the same in America. I know my redeemer liveth and I would see his salvation and vindication on the face of the earth.

•Emmanuel Ogebe, an international human rights lawyer, writes from Washington, DC, USA.