A few weeks before his assassination on February 13, 1976, one Obarogie Ohanbamu, who was a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Lagos and who also doubled at that time as Editor-in-Chief and publisher of African Spark, a monthly news magazine, published a damning story against the Head of State, General Murtala Mohammed.
A damaging rumour about the integrity of the Head of State was then in circulation. The publication and the rumour said Murtala possessed a row of houses in Kano which he could not have legitimately owned. Ohanbamu’s magazine also editorialized this information, asking how the Commander-in-Chief, as a public servant, could have mobilized such huge capital for the acquisition.
Upon the publication, Ohanbamu was promptly arrested and detained incommunicado. However, a few days after Murtala was assassinated by Buka Suka Dimka, the Attorney-General of the Federation produced Ohanbamu in an open Lagos court. He was accused of slandering the late Head of State. Curiously, the AGF asked the court to caution and discharge the accused, submitting that Ohanbamu had since acknowledged his accusation as an error.
The error, said the Attorney-General, was that Ohanbamu did not know Murtala had declared his assets to him (the AG) on his accession to office. Subsequently, said the AGF, Murtala also deposed in an affidavit that he had given back all the said Kano properties to the state. However, questions trailed the AGF’s submission. No one corroborated his claim, nor did anybody claim to have seen the document with which this deed of transfer was consummated. Even if they did, the fact of the properties’ initial acquisition by Murtala had not been trumped, thus validating Ohanbamu’s original claim. If you look at this story with a thorough eye, substitute Adeniyi for Ohanbamu and Murtala for the Villa and you might not be far from being correct.
That story looks so much like the Gbajabiamila/Adeniyi scandal.
With the huge achievement of the Bola Tinubu government in getting the Oriire victims freed, will the scandal of the disowned Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council cum Presidential Economic Advisory Council now go away?
If you ask me, the greatest beneficiary of the exhilarating news of the release of the abducted pupils and teachers of Oriire in Oyo State is the president’s Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila. Or, and the Nigerian presidency. In my piece of last week, I wagered a guess that the presidency would soon reach for its scabbard and bring out a dagger to perforate and deconstruct the embarrassing scandal. An alleged impostor penetrating the walls of the Nigerian presidency, revealing the rump of corruption on the presidency’s back, is an issue to ponder on. Aso Rock Villa promptly looked westward. The abducted pupils and teachers of Oriire council of Oyo State might be the answer. In communication studies strategy, it is taught that when a problematic issue like the Gbajabiamila crisis rears its ugly head, strategists should canvass doing one of three things. Or even all three. The reeking fart can be dissolved, deconstructed, or re-contextualized.
The truth is, from colonial times, it is a notorious fact that corruption had acquired a recurring character. It is a variant of a social virus.
The Gbajabiamila/Adeniyi issue reminds me of Swahili, the Bantu language of East and Central Africa. It is a major lingua franca across nations like Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Like all languages in Africa, Swahili explains the world in very vivid imagery. Spoken by over 200 million people, it has a saying that seems to explain the roiling Femi Gbajabiamila/Adeniyi-gate.
On the day a monkey is destined to die, a classical, powerful Swahili saying goes, all trees become slippery. The dramatis personae in Nigeria’s most horrifying drama involving the president’s Chief of Staff are obviously banking on Nigerians’ infamous short memory and short-span emotions — assuming that Nigerians would yell, yell, and eventually keep quiet. To their chagrin, however, cells of the scandal, like cancer cells, seem to be multiplying. Spins upon spins have failed to explain away the lies. Even the man behind the look-alike House of Horror scandal, speaking on a Very Dark Man podcast last week, said the whole episode sounded confusing to him, too.
A replica of the Gbajabiamila/Adeniyi-gate also happened under the Yakubu Gowon government. It was found in the sensational public charges of corruption that were made in sworn affidavits against a Federal Commissioner for Communication, J. S. Tarka, by Godwin Daboh. A school teacher, Aper Aku, similarly made an allegation against Joseph Gomwalk, Gowon’s Benue-Plateau State Military Governor.
On this matter of a phony federal agency, President Tinubu has acted fittingly like an Ìjàkùmò. In Yoruba zoology, Ìjàkùmò is a fierce, elusive, and wild nocturnal animal. While many say the Ìjàkùmò is a civet, some others call it the wolverine, or a type of phantom wild cat. The commune that gave Ìjàkùmò the taxonomy of a wolverine may, however, not be correct because its nativity isn’t Africa. Wolverines hail from remote, cold climates and high alpine environments across the Northern Hemisphere in North America, Europe, and Asia. The Ìjàkùmò is, however, notorious as an animal that is forever restlessly on the move. It never settles in a particular place for long, nor is it ever seen in the daytime. It is also a very smart animal, though never clever.
As spinners in Nigerian federal clothing attempt to dig holes wherein they could hide, the land gives their naked frame up. Their spins mirror the classical Fela Anikulapo-Kuti bedlam: “You be thief, I no be thief; you be armed robber, I no be armed robber; argument, arguments argue…” To some of the spinners, the “ghost agency,” the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), is a completely fictitious body whose self-named DG is a conman, simpliciter. To some others, PFIPC is a doppelgänger — a clone out of ancient German mythology which believes that every living creature has an invisible, identical spirit double. So, PFIPC is a double of an original. But the notorious questions have not been answered: how did a conman infiltrate the presidency, Nigeria’s civil service, and the legislature, succeeding in running a sophisticated fraud operation for over a year without an insider?
Last week, spirited attempts were made to exonerate Gbajabiamila. Pages of advertorials placed in a newspaper heralded the scare, which to some shallow minds, approximated exoneration. A 2023 video of the president exonerating his family pitcher-breaker (afo’keemu) — the recidivist, who the Yoruba say is always a subject of village discourse — resurfaced with the aim of misleading the people.
Then, the Ìjàkùmò himself dug in. No, he didn’t dig in like in the case of Betta Edu, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation in the Tinubu cabinet. Immediately accusations against this minister surfaced, Tinubu showed her the door. She’s not been back ever since. But, not to worry, the Yoruba say it is someone else’s child you send on a nocturnal assignment — Iwofa ns’ojojo, won ni alakori gbe ise re de, o nse omo olowo, won ni ko r’oju fi ata s’enu (the pawn develops catarrh; they sneer, “the fool has come with his usual trouble.” But when the rich man’s child falls ill, everyone prescribes pepper soup and showers him with concern).
To be sure of the claim that Adeniyi Adeyemi was indeed a doppelgänger and had nothing to do with Tinubu’s Chief of Staff, the whole world suggested that an independent investigative panel consisting of trustworthy Nigerians should investigate the maggots’ paradise scandal. Rather than this, from his pouch of smartness, the Ìjàkùmò ordered the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to wade in. And the furtive guile of this animal came out for all to see. This animal, the Yoruba claim, in its spin pseudo-wisdom, reverses the norm. While every animal cleans their bum-bum after excreting, Ìjàkùmò cleans its bum-bum before it excretes. In a mockery of the Ìjàkùmò’s smartness, which the animal believed was cleverness, the Yoruba mock anyone who swims in reverse wisdom like Ìjàkùmò.
Ancient wisdom tells us that even if we do not know anything else, we cannot be as daft as not to know that three persons cannot stand in twos. On the matter of the former governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, and the ICPC — dragged to court by the latter on charges of alleged conversion and possession of proceeds of corruption, as well as money laundering — the commission hasn’t acted like the impartial arbiter that it should be.
The belief out there is that the trio of the Villa, the judiciary, and the ICPC have collaborated to lock up the Villa’s nemesis, El-Rufai, in detention until after next year’s presidential election. Mrs. El-Rufai said as much in her viral plea last week. Begging the president not to just free her husband, but to uphold the principles of fairness that go with judicial trial, Mrs. El-Rufai was forced to dig up the emotive contributions of her family to the presidential victory the “Lagos Boy” currently savours. If you drill deep down into why El-Rufai must be continuously kept in detention, you may encounter the metaphysics of marabout prophecy in it. It is said that marabouts have predicted that El-Rufai will someday become Nigeria’s president, and the Lagos Boy is scared silly of this star from the north upstaging him from his birthright. So, how does the Ìjàkùmò expect the world to believe that, in this matter of perceived collaboration between a Villa boy and a scammer to scam the Nigerian establishment, deploying the ICPC as an arbiter would bring about justice?
Moreover, this selfsame presidency, a few days after the scandal broke, had cleared Gbajabiamila of complicity in the said crime. Calling Adeyemi a “con artist”, Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, accused him of peddling falsehood. He also stated that he had earlier been investigated by security agencies and the court awaited the commencement of his trial. In the release, the presidency established Gbajabiamila’s innocence while accusing Adeyemi of an attempt to drag “the Presidency to disrepute before the public and international community”. Indeed, said the presidency, the police had, on November 27, 2025, filed an eight-count charge against Adeyemi and two of his accomplices at the Federal High Court in Abuja, and they were due to appear in court on July 27. So, how do you first convict a man and then ask him to be probed? This Ijakumo sure cleans its bum-bum before excreting!
On Tinubu mandating the ICPC to look into the scandal, I recall that the Murtala-Obasanjo government did the same. It appointed a judicial commission of enquiry to investigate the circumstances that caused the infamy of the Cement Armada under General Gowon. Nigeria had lost millions of Naira to a cement ships armada which choked off the free passage of vessels at the Apapa port, costing the government huge losses and strangulating her external trade via massive demurrage fees. The panel was headed by Justice Belgore.
After the report of the commission was made available to the duo of Murtala and Obasanjo, the public never saw its content. The government merely issued a white paper which cleared Obasanjo of any complicity in the allegations. Obasanjo was then the Director of the Army Engineering Corps and later the Federal Commissioner for Works throughout the period of the cement scandal. He supervised a country-wide military barracks building project that Gowon was in a near obsession with.
All the above no longer matter anyway. All is now quiet on the home front. No thanks to the Oriire abductees’ freedom. Praise the Lord, somebody!
