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OPINION: The Rotten Apples At Louis Edet House

Published

10 months ago

July 13, 2025

Editor

By Festus Adedayo

Sometime in the early 2000s, at the cusp of Tafa Balogun’s glory as the Inspector General of Police, an oil magnate from a Southwest riverine area was arrested. He was travelling into the state capital from his riverine part of the country. It was at nocturne. The oil magnate, who moved like an Oba, was in a convoy of cars. Inside the car was a falange of private security persons. They were armed to the teeth with sophisticated weapons. It was obvious that this Oba-like man was into oil bunkering as well. At a checkpoint, the police stopped the convoy and subjected it to a needle-search scrutiny. Alarmed at the weaponry in transit at that unholy hour, the policemen promptly radioed the state headquarters which ordered that the oil magnate and his convoy be brought. From there, Abuja was contacted. Tafa Balogun then ordered that the oil magnate be flown to meet him at Louis Edet House. By the time the police finished wedging the fear of God into the magnate’s heart, he had turned into jelly. His face deadpan, the late IGP, who was notorious for his obsession for automobiles, made his demand. The latest BMW SUV was the atonement to set him free.

Left with no choice but to succumb to this extortionist gambit, the oil magnate promptly had the IGP’s choice car wheeled to Balogun’s secret Lagos automobile mart-looking car deposit center. Miffed by this extortion, my source told me the oil magnate immediately ordered same car for himself. Less than a year after, a state governor, who Balogun helped bury his rotten corpse, got a demand of two Mercedez Benz automobiles from the police top brass. His Secretary to the State Government got the order to take the newly purchased cars to the IGP’s vehicle assembly point. He later told his governor boss, “You would think you were in a car mart.”

I recommend to you a copy of Wale Adebanwi’s A Paradise for Maggots (2010) for details of how Tafa Balogun’s lustering police career ended in ignominy. Inside this epiphany, you will encounter how Balogun, not minding his elephant size, went on all fours to plead with rookie police officers to let him off the EFCC hook and how a low-rank police officer, Nuhu Ribadu, made a total mess of him. Balogun died almost unsung a few years after. You would imagine that successive IGPs would learn a huge lesson from Balogun’s fall and not wear such ignominious apparel in future Oro cult festivity. No, they haven’t. To underscore why man should outgrow the facts of his fall, Yoruba use the fire insect (Ìpìn) as illustration. Ìpìn singes the flesh and my people say no animal on earth should wear that same cloth it sheds (Kò s’éranko tó jé f’aso Ìpìn bo’ra.)

For almost an eternity, the rot in the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) has engaged Nigerians of diverse strata. Being the son of a policeman, I am a stakeholder and also a victim of the rotten system. Theories have been propounded to articulate the rot. Policing literature is replete with all sorts of explanations. The rotten-apple thesis seems to be the most dominant. Today, the police has this notorious acclaim of a hopelessly corrupt and abusive institution, an agent of violence that is manifestly evil. It is also said that the innumerable police roadblocks and checkpoints in Nigeria, rather than being crime clean-up centers, are more of enablers and instruments of corruption and barefaced human rights abuses. I once wrote about how, in the 1980s, at a police checkpoint in Ilesa, today’s Osun State, a police constable by the name Ifeanyi suggested to my late father that a vehicle owner, inside of whose car loads of cash were found, should be murdered. My father stylishly sidestepped Ifeanyi’s suggestion and got the man to leave urgently.

The rotten-apple theory especially has been knocked severally as explanation for and antidote to the cancer-like metastasis of rot in the Nigerian police. Extortion through arbitrary detention and in some cases, arbitrary execution of detainees are rife in the Nigeria Police Force. Truth be said, police corruption in Nigeria today is so systemic and widespread that you could hardly get one percent of its workforce free from the huge viral load. In Nigeria, this even sounds true and also, alien. To control corruption and arbitrariness in the Nigerian police, we should look at the police as an organization and not the individual. In any case, finding a honest Nigerian policeman is akin to, in the words of Bongos Ikwue, searching for a virgin in a maternity ward.

Apart from the above theories, other factors have been adduced for the rot in the Nigerian police. First is the colonial legacy of Nigerian police. The second albatross of current decadent NPF and the rot within it is what is called the military legacy. The long years of military rule are seen as responsible for the marginalization and poor funding of the force. It is said to be responsible for the coercive psychology of the police, too.

Corruption seems to be the least of the vices in the Nigerian police. The vices range from brutality, coercion, to human rights abuses. It is the conclusion of most reports on the police in Nigeria that its impoverishment is a significant factor in the general climate of popular discontent in the police and is the parent of abuses and corruption in the force. The only means of survival for many of the policemen in Nigeria is extortion. It is a common way for its lower cadres to supplement their meagre incomes.

Some weeks ago, I was at the notorious and infamous Ibadan police station called Iyaganku. I was counsel to some persons accused of electricity theft. There, I confirmed that anyone judging the policemen we see outside by their outward manifestations is the proverbial man who accuses the knock-kneed of wobbly foot-dragging. The fault is actually from the foundation. The police station is the picture of the rot. At Iyaganku, I saw dirty, crumbling police residential houses which were probably built six decades ago. On ropes tied to balustrades were hung unpleasant-looking clothes. Broken glass panes were replaced with sooth-stained woods. Its roads, which apparently once bore tars, looked like bombed streets of Mogadishu. It was a terrible neighbourhood to behold. The whole place stank like the inside of Death’s hovel. When I moved closer to one of the residential houses, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Broken sewage and gutters had a tribe of maggots brimming out of them like traders in a night market. Police children ran over one another as they playfully encircled these ponds of rot, dead to the colony of germs and diseases lurking around.

Conversely, fat-stomached officers walked about Iyaganku police station. Their rotund, overfed bellies were apparently proceeds of illicit graft earnings. The officers looked like bloated bedbugs. They seemed to be scanning every entrant into the police station as a scientist scans an object just fallen from Mars. No one needed to tell you they were scanning for the next victim to drain their blood. Then compare them to junior officers dressed in multi-layered uniforms with shoes whose only resemblance to others’ is the black colour. Some had missing uniform buttons and torn breast pockets. It suddenly occurred to me: how can anyone expect a sane police from this tribe of frustrated persons who live in this place?

A recent interview which went viral, granted by ex-Lagos Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni, eventually burst the bubble. So also did a viral video of a retired police officer, a Superintendent of Police, who after 35 years in service, was paid a pittance of N2m as retirement allowance.

“When I joined the Nigeria Police in 1984, my first posting in 1985 was Sagamu (Ogun State)” Owoseni began. According to him, in the station where he was posted, there were stationed there Land Rover vehicles and lorries belonging to the police. Any policeman being posted out would be conveyed by vehicles. There was a fuel dump, like a filling station and mechanic workshop belonging to the police. This was where all spare parts were kept. The DPO had a safe containing information money to give informants. Two pairs of uniforms and brand new shoes were given yearly to junior rank policemen while officers, though bought theirs, had them highly subsidized. They were imported from England. “It was such that soldiers befriended police officers and gave them money to purchase police shoes for them,” Owoseni said. “Policemen being posted out of their stations were given 28-days allowance money in lieu of notice. Hotels in the neighbourhood befriended DPOs so that they could let posted policemen lodge with them. There was money to feed inmates in the cells. It was the police with dignity that we met.”

Now, it is as if government is deliberately punishing the young policemen, Owoseni said. “It is from these paltry salaries that those policemen buy their own uniforms. If you gather ten policemen now, they will wear different uniforms and different standards. There is no standard again. As they are collecting their salaries, they are deducting money to buy fuel for police vehicles, if there are vehicles at all. There are no more rain-capes, nothing. How do you treat men like animals and expect those horrible behaviour associated with police to be absent? Today, if a policeman dies, his burden is left to his family. His police colleagues would gather money to bury him,” he lamented. Owoseni said a police DPO gets budgetary allocation of N30,000 for a quarter. As a retired Police Commissioner, Owoseni said his monthly retirement salary is N70,000. When you compare what Nigeria pays soldiers who also have the fortune of sitting atop the trillions of Naira budgeted for insurgency, you will weep for the Nigerian police.

It is no doubt that Kayode Egbetokun, the Inspector General of Police, is sitting on a house of rot. When you see the IGP, with his beautiful police uniform and shining shoes, know for a fact that under this facade is a tribe of maggots festooning him all over. After the retired Superintendent of Police in the viral video shook the country to its nadir with that shocking revelation, Egbetokun claimed he was not aware of the retirement payment fiasco. It was a lie from the pit of hell. He was. In fact, his volte-face revealed the underbelly of the force. It is said that the various billions of Naira voted for infrastructure upgrade of police stations and barracks get filched by an unholy trinity of federal legislators, police commission and police top brasses. Successive police IGPs have been content with corruptively enriching themselves from graft and extortion and retiring into wealth thereafter, rather than bothering about the rot inside of which the police institution is trapped. Unfortunately, any discussion of the issue of welfare by the police is considered as threat to national security.

As Yoruba say, it is how you present that is the measurement of reactions to you (Irinisi ni isonilojo). A people is appraised by the quality of their police. If the present government does not bypass the maggots-brimming police institution and carve a future, as well as a better image and look for Nigerian policemen, we should all be prepared to stand up to it. You may not queue on same political thoughts with Omoyele Sowore. You may even not like his brashness. However, Sowore’s call for protest on July 21 against Nigerian police deplorable state is protest for a good country. The El Dorado we all construct in our minds of a great Nigeria can never come to reality if we continue to be surrounded by a tribe of maggots. That is what the Nigeria Police Force is. The NPF collapse is a metaphor for Nigeria. This country cannot continue to sell sands as it does and not collect pebbles as payment.

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Xenophobic Attacks: Oshiomhole Tells FG To Retaliate Against South African Companies In Nigeria

Published

9 hours ago

May 5, 2026

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Senator Adams Oshiomhole has called on the Federal Government to retaliate against South African businesses operating in Nigeria following the recent attacks on Nigerians in South Africa.

Speaking during plenary on Tuesday, Oshiomhole said the Federal Government should consider revoking the working license of South African owned companies such as MTN and DSTV.

He argued that Nigeria must respond firmly to what he described as persistent hostility against its citizens.

“I am not going to shed tears. If you hit me, I hit you. I think it is appropriate in diplomacy. It is an economic struggle,” Oshiomhole said.

He argued that while some South Africans accuse Nigerians of taking their jobs, Nigerians should return home and take over employment opportunities created by major South African companies operating in the country, including MTN and DSTV.

“When we hit back, the President of South Africa will not only talk but will also go on his knees to recognise that Nigeria cannot be intimidated.

“We will not condone any life being lost. If a crime has been committed under the South African law they have the right to bring any such person to justice, but to kill our people as if we are helpless, we will not allow that,” Oshiomhole added.

DAILY POST reports that several Nigerians in South Africa have reportedly been attacked, and their businesses destroyed, in ongoing xenophobic attacks in the country.

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IGP Orders Officers Display Name Tag On Uniform, Gives Update On State Police

Published

9 hours ago

May 5, 2026

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The Inspector General of Police, IGP, Tunji Disu, has ordered all police personnel to always have their name tags on their uniforms for easy identification.

Disu disclosed that only police personnel who are undercover are exempted from displaying their name tags.

Speaking on Tuesday, Disu said: “All police officers should have their name tags. All of us on the high table have our names apart from the undercover among us so if you look at all the Commissioners of Police we have our name tags, so it’s not our standard.

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Court Orders SERAP To Pay DSS Operatives N100m For Defamation

Published

14 hours ago

May 5, 2026

Editor

The High Court of the Federal Capital Territory has ordered a non-governmental organization, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, SERAP, to pay N100 million as damaged to two operatives of the Department of the State Services, DSS, for unjustly defaming them in some publications.

The court also ordered SERAP to tender public apologies to the defamed officers,
Sarah John and Gabriel Ogundele, in two national newspapers, two television stations and its website.

Besides, the organization was also ordered to pay the two operatives N1 million as cost of litigation and 10 percent post-judgment interest annually on the judgment sum until it’s fully liquidated.

Justice Yusuf Halilu of the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory gave the order on Tuesday while delivering judgment in a N5.5 billion defamation suit instituted against SERAP by the DSS operatives.

The judge found SERAP liable for unjustly defaming the two DSS operatives with allegations that they unlawfully invaded its Abuja office, harassed and intimidated its staff, in September 2024.

In the offending publication on its website and Twitter handle, SERAP alleged that the two operatives unlawfully invaded and occupied its office with sinister motives.

The judge held that the publication was in bad taste especially from an organization established to promote transparency and accountability, as nothing in the publication was found to be truthful.

The DSS staff had listed SERAP as 1st defendant in the suit marked CV/4547/2024. SERAP’s Deputy Director, Kolawole Oluwadare, was listed as the 2nd defendant.

In the suit, the claimants – Sarah John and Gabriel Ogundele – accused the two defendants of making false claims that they invaded SERAP’s Abuja office on September 9, 2024..

Counsel to the DSS, Oluwagbemileke Samuel Kehinde, had while adopting his final address in the mater urged the judge to grant all the reliefs sought by his client in the interest of justice.

He admitted that although the names of the two claimants were not mentioned in the defamation materials, they had however established substantial circumstances that they are the ones referred to in the published defamation article by SERAP on its website.

The counsel submitted that all ingredients of defamation have been clearly established and the offending publication referred to the two officials of the secret police.

However, SERAP, through its counsel, Victoria Bassey from Tayo Oyetibo, SAN, law firm, asked the court to dismiss the suit on the ground that the two claimants did not establish that they were the ones referred to in the alleged defamation materials.

She said that SERAP used “DSS officials” in the alleged offending publication, adding that the two claimants must establish that they are the ones referred to before their case can succeed.

Similar arguments were canvassed by Oluwatosin Adefioye who stood for the second defendant, adding that there was no dispute in the September 9, 2024 operation of DSS in SERAP’s office.

He said that since SERAP in the publication did not name any particular person, the claimants must plead special circumstances that they were the ones referred to as the DSS officials.

Besides, he said that there is no organization by name Department of State Services in law, hence, DSS cannot claim being defamed adding that the only entity known to law is National Security Agency.

The claimants had in the suit stated that the alleged false claim by SERAP has negatively impacted on their reputation.

The DSS also stated, in the statement of claim, that, in line with the agency’s practice of engaging with officials of non-governmental organisations operating in the FCT to establish a relationship with their new leadership, it directed the two officials – John and Ogunleye – to visit SERAP’s office and invite them for a familiarization meeting.

The claimants added that in carrying out the directive, John and Ogunleye paid a friendly visit to SERAP’s office at 18 Bamako Street, Wuse Zone 1, Abuja on September 9 and met with one Ruth, who upon being informed about the purpose of the visit, claimed that none of SERAP’s management staff was in the country and advised that a formal letter of invitation be written by the DSS.

John and Ogundele, who claimed that their interactions with Ruth were recorded, said before they immediately exited SERAP’s office, Ruth promised to inform her organisation’s management about the visit and volunteered a phone number – 08160537202.

They said it was surprising that, shortly after their visit, SERAP posted on its X (Twitter) handle – @SERAPNigeria – that officers of the DSS are presently unlawfully occupying its office.

The claimant added, “On the same day, the defendants also published a statement on SERAP’s website, which was widely reported by several media outfits, falsely alleging that some officers from the DSS, described as “a tall, large, dark-skinned woman” and “a slim, dark skinned man,” invaded their Abuja office and interrogated the staff of the first defendant (SERAP).

John and Ogundele stated that “due to the false statements published by the defendants, the DSS has been ridiculed and criticised by international agencies such as the Amnesty International and prominent members of the Nigerian society, such as Femi Falana (SAN)”.

“Due to the false statements published by the defendants, members of the public and the international community formed the opinion that the Federal Government is using the DSS to harass the defendants.”

They added that the defendants’ statements caused harm to their reputation because the staff and management of the DSS have formed the opinion that the claimants did not follow orders and carried out an unsanctioned operation and are therefore, incompetent and unprofessional.

The claimants therefore prayed the court for the following reliefs: “An order directing the defendants to tender an apology to the claimants via the first defendant’s (SERAP’s) website, X (twitter) handle, two national daily newspapers (Punch and Vanguard) and two national news television stations (Arise Television and Channels Television) for falsely accusing the claimants of unlawfully invading the first defendant’s office and interrogating the first defendant’s staff.

“An order directing the defendants to pay the claimants the sum of N5 billion as damages for the libellous statements published about the claimants.

“Interest on the sum of N5b at the rate of 10 percent per annum from the date of judgment until the judgment sum is realised or liquidated.

“An order directing the defendants to pay the claimants the sum of N50 million as costs of this action.”