Courtesy: *#HistoryVille*
If Diepreye Solomon Peter Alamieyeseigha’s story were written as a Nollywood script, the writer would be called lazy with a hazy imagination.
However, the Great Escape of DSP Alamieyeseigha, the Governor in a Dress, would make an interesting title for a Nigerian thriller.
On a chilly London morning in September 2005, Diepreye Solomon Peter Alamieyeseigha, the flamboyant governor of Bayelsa State in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta, was arrested and led away by Metropolitan Police officers at Heathrow Airport.
To his supporters, he was DSP, a political strongman and benefactor. To his critics, he was the “Governor-General of the Ijaw Nation,” a man who had grown obscenely rich while his people wallowed in poverty.
When officers searched his London home, they discovered over £1 million in cash. Investigators claimed he owned luxury properties and bank accounts scattered across Britain and beyond. To the British press, it was an open-and-shut case of money laundering. DSP was granted bail, but the conditions were stiff: no passport, daily visits to the police, and a strict ban on going near airports or seaports. It seemed the governor was cornered.
But Alamieyeseigha had other plans.
Two months later, on November 21, 2005, Nigerians woke up to extraordinary headlines: the governor who was meant to be standing trial in London had reappeared in Yenagoa, smiling broadly as he waved to cheering crowds. He had slipped out of Britain, across borders and seas, and somehow found his way back to the creeks of the Niger Delta.
How did he do it?
The story that spread like wildfire was that DSP had staged one of the most audacious getaways in modern history. According to British and Nigerian reports at the time, he had disguised himself as a woman, complete with flowing attire, and walked past unsuspecting officers.
One rumour had him boarding a Eurostar train to Paris before flying to Cameroon and sailing home in a speedboat. Another insisted he had used forged papers to board a plane out of Heathrow. Alamieyeseigha himself only smiled at the speculation, declaring his return “a mystery.”
Yet, the image of a Nigerian governor sneaking out of Britain in a wig and a dress was too delicious for the public to resist. It was soon etched into political folklore.
Back in Nigeria, his troubles deepened. The National Assembly erupted in anger, and on December 9, 2005 the Bayelsa State House of Assembly impeached him. British authorities denounced the escape as an insult to justice, while global watchdogs pointed to the case as a symbol of how power and corruption intertwined in Africa’s oil states.
But in Yenagoa, many hailed him as a hero who had outwitted the West. Crowds thronged the streets, some dancing and chanting his name. To them, it was not about stolen millions but about pride: one of their own had humbled Britain.
The triumph was short-lived.
DSP died on October 10, 2015, still a larger-than-life figure in the Niger Delta. He was 62.
Yet for all his politics, wealth, and power, one story overshadows the rest: the day a Nigerian governor, pursued by British law, supposedly outwitted the world dressed as a woman.
He was later pardoned on March 12, 2013, by President Goodluck Jonathan, his former deputy who had succeeded him as governor on December 12, 2005.
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