REPORTER’S DIARY: How Lagos State Task Force Made Me ‘Igbobi Landlord’ For Filming Operatives Extorting Suspected ‘Okada’ Operators In Apapa
By Obiajulu Agu
The National Orthopaedic Hospital Igbobi Lagos (NOHIL) occupies more than enough land space along the Igbobi section of the arterial Ikorodu Road that it is rightfully referred to simply as Igbobi.
Established in 1945, NOHIL’s standing as a centre of excellence near and far has also served to consolidate its recognition. With commercial motorcycles operations gaining ascendancy in Nigeria’s transportation system, there has emerged the popular coinage “Igbo landlord” in street lingo, notably in Lagos, referring to the upsurge in the admission at NOHIL of victims of road accidents involving motorcycles. In the often chaotic traffic situation of Lagos, “Igbobi landlord” is an insult routinely and mostly hurled by commercial bus drivers in consternation at the presumably reckless motorcyclists weaving in and out traffic delivering their fares to their destinations in quick time. Ironically, even motorcyclists frequently exchange the “Igbobi landlord” insult with each other, among a number of unprintable words, during altercations.
A long-time resident of Lagos, my first time encounter with NOHIL had been sometime in the early 1990s when, in the absence of the regular Health Correspondent of the National Concord, Adebimpe Afunku, I had been delegated by the News Editor to investigate hints of an industrial action at the facility. I had arrived NOHIL, did my nosing around and conducted necessary interviews regarding the subject matter and promptly departed for the News Room to do my story in good enough time for production to meet timely publication of the next day’s edition of my medium. My first encounter with NOHIL had been uncomplicated and strictly in my role as a journalist. It ended and remained on that note for many years.
My next encounter with NOHIL has been as a patient and more enduring, commencing in the last quarter of 2023. My patient’s identity card at the facility reads AGU OBIAJULU AMD 10039338, and, till date, I have remained a regular attendee of the Spine Clinic and the Physiotherapy Clinic, until onset of paraplegia foreclosed the latter, as I await corrective surgery for degenerative lumbar spine disease and post-surgery rehabilitation. The near-endless wait for the procedure resulted in complications of paraplegia.
The causative factor for my second and prolonged dealing with NOHIL occured a number of years prior to 2023. A natural psychological recourse to put the traumatic experience behind me forbade my recollecting the exact date. The matters around the personally devastating event of that date are, however, forever etched in my memory. This had been during the tenure of the Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, administration in Lagos State. Mr. Tunji Bello, was the then Lagos State Commissioner for the Environment and Water Resources, the superintending Ministry in charge of the Lagos State Taskforce (formally known as the Lagos State Environmental and Special Offences Unit). The unit is ostensibly a law enforcement agency responsible for enforcing environmental sanitation, traffic laws (a brief recently expunged by the authorities of the Lagos State Police Command), and maintaining public safety across the state. The event had been an unwarranted violent attack on my person by murderous operatives of the Lagos State Environmental and Special Offences Unit, simply referred to as Lagos State Taskforce. The monstrosity in the days of the Third Reich would readily occupy pride of place as a phalanx of that evil regime.
That fateful evening, I had, as usual on most weekdays, departed the Atlantic House facility of the International Maritime Press Centre adjacent to the Lagos Port Complex (LPC), Apapa, Lagos State, South-West Nigeria. Stepping onto Wharf Road, as far as I could see, I discovered that traffic had snarled right from the gates of the port, stretching up to the sprawling Eleganza Plaza end of Aerodrome Road. In the face of consistent Lagos ports access roads gridlock, I had resorted to parking my car in Surulere and hopping on a commercial motorcycle into Apapa and exiting the port city by that same mode to pick my car at Surulere in the evening for onward journey home.
I walked to the traffic holdup start-off point to discover that a choke point-cum- checkpoint formed by a detachment of the Lagos State Taskforce with an operational truck parked by the median and and aligning with a puddle covering the rest of that portion of the road. On the other lane, the port inwards lane of the Wharf Road, close to Eleganza Plaza gates, a big truck, the ‘Black Maria’ mobile jail of the Task Force was parked facing against traffic.
It was obvious that the traffic holdup was the handiwork of the Taskforce, and the spot around the checkpoint had attracted a sizeable number of the ubiquitous Lagos crowd ever ready to converge to observe even the most innocuous of the various events that consistently unfolds in the metropolis. A number of the onlookers were already antsy and subtly protesting the situation of the Taskforce merely mounting the checkpoint to extort money from motorcyclists unfortunate to stumble on its trap. The unusual makes the news. This was a newsy situation, if ever there was one. I needed no further prompting as a responsible newsperson. I whipped out my mobile phone, promptly deploying it in recording a video of the scene. Engrossed in my task, I was oblivious to all else; not until I felt a painful blow on the hand with which I was holding the phone. The phone flew from my hand, landing on the ground. A non-commissioned policeman had struck my hand with a piece of hard plastic tube routinely favoured as weapon by law enforcement agents in Lagos, and the coverings peeled from the underground service cables of telecommunications providers. The policeman snatched my phone from the ground, briefed the superior about what I had been caught doing and handed it to the leader of the team, a Superintendent Ajayi, who collected the device and held on to it. This was a mere preamble of what was to come against me from the Taskforce.
Suddenly, without warning, a flurry of blows rained on me from fists, rifle butts, the hard plastic pipes, and whatever other cudgels the bloodthirsty lot could muster against any part of my body as target. No part of my body was spared. Even as the various cudgels thudded against me, the jackboots stumped voraciously on my sandals-clad feet, as hungry talons sought out other parts of my body, twisting and pinching sadistically. Seemingly particularly riled by the backpack strapped to my back impeding their onslaught, the Taskforce had made my back a special target of relentlessly cruel blows. So much of the blows struck the backpack as a buffer for my back. Inevitably, the laptop the backpack housed during the attack was irreparably damaged.
The attack on me by the feral policemen had occurred at the junction of Wharf and Commercial roads, Apapa, lasting for about ten minutes. Superintendent Ajayi had only ordered that the mauling cease and I be escorted and secured in the parked ‘Black Maria’, when his men were clearly worn out by their exertions of clobbering me. Left to my devices in my steamy filthy jail, I discreetly placed a call on a second phone to the Lagos State Commissioner for the Environment and Water Resources to narrate my harrowing ordeal. I had known Bello at the Concord Press of Nigeria Limited, and he expressed righteous indignation at my plight. Bello’s opening words in response to my complaint were: “Bayo … Bayo … ” in reference to the Task Force’s Chairman, then Superintendent Bayo Sulaiman, in tones indicative of the fact of my complaint being a part of the legion against the outfit under the leadership of Sulaiman. Bello had assured me that, apart from interceding in my situation, he would also see to my damaged laptop and whatever other injuries done me. I was also able to reach other persons, who turned out to be great intercessors on my behalf. I only went into the details of Bello’s role in the episode to affirm the veracity of my tale, knowing that the incumbent Executive Chairman/Vice Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) would surely be disinclined to deny that he featured prominently in seeking to remedy the tragic event.
As dusk settled, the Taskforce was ready to depart Apapa for its Headquarters at the Lagos State Government Secretariat in Alausa, Ikeja, the state capital. Brazenly breaking one of the Taskforce’s then cardinal briefs to nail drivers going against traffic, the ‘Black Maria’ was driven against traffic to join the other operational vehicles and form a small convoy. The team made its first stop across the road from Apapa Divisional Headquarters of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) to discharge and handover a number of the other prisoners who had been in the truck with me. After this, the convoy made its second and final brief stop at Ijora to conduct whatever business I could not deduce in the pervasive darkness. Thence, we raced all the way to Alausa.
At the Taskforce Headquarters, alighting from the ‘Black Maria’, alongside the other detainees, I saw the Chairman in the midst of other officials, similarly clad in mufti like he was. Obviously, my calls had had had great effect because Sulaiman, without preamble, enquired who was the journalist among us, and I promptly responded that I was. Then he went into a long lecture on how he expected me to execute my brief as a journalist, particularly as it relates to the coverage of security operatives. Initially, I was overwhelmed by his drawn-out monologue, bearing all with equanimity. However, after a while, I was bored stiff and had responded that I was a well-trained journalist with years of active practical experience, whose academic project, fortuitously, had been on public relations in the Nigeria Police. I further explained that the earliest beats assigned me in my journalism practice had been covering the Police, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), and Defence, which left me with pleasant memories of the services personnel I encountered years after. With his ready and constant smiles, thereafter, Sulaiman and I had a healthy debate the short time I spent at the Taskforce Headquarters before being set free. I had put it to Sulaiman that the men of the Taskforce who attacked me were a sadistic lot very far removed from the uniformed lot that my profession had brought me in contact with in the past. With the stout defence, the Taskforce Chairman put up for his men, I couldn’t help but wonder that sadism was a common feature of the lot; a toothpaste smile eerily merely masking that of the leadership.
Ajayi had held on to my phone, and, when Sulaiman gave the instruction for my release, I raised the matter of having the handset returned to me. After consultations among themselves, the Taskforce top brass decided that copies of the recordings needed to be made for their files. I readily obliged them. Unknown to me, however, they were men bereft of integrity and honour. I later discovered that under the guise of duplicating the recordings that captured the operatives in compromising positions in Apapa, the Taskforce leadership had had all the audio and video recordings, as well as photographs on my phone wilfully wiped off.
I must note that, Sulaiman had insisted that I exchanged phone numbers with him and Ajayi, as gestures of reconciliation and good faith going on. Ajayi’s number is 0803 427 7806, and Sulaiman’s 0803 318 3477. I daresay state that I have had no cause to speak to either of them; not when the one who was on ground at the scene failed woefully to call his men to order, while the overall boss could barely conceal his glee at the plight of the innocent victim of his men.
Despite my angst about the security and safety of leaving my car parked overnight in the streets of Surulere, I was too worn out by the drudgery the Taskforce had put me through to bother going to pick the vehicle that night. I simply managed to convey my battered body straight home. I wasted little time getting to bed soon after my dinner and swallowing painkillers. I slept fitfully, interspersed by nightmares. I downed more analgesics after my breakfast before heading out to where my car was parked. Thankfully, I met the car intact. I went on to kickstart my day.
I did not take up the offer of Tunji Bello to see him over my case with the Taskforce that day. And not till date. Back then, I had felt little inclination to further bother Bello with my entanglement with a body whose second name has for long been infamy; a veritable killer squad. I simply counted my losses, including my wrecked laptop and deleted phone files, as I perceived them then. I felt compelled to swallow my physical and psychological pains as well.
There was, however, a life-changing loss that soon began to manifest. The beating from the Lagos State Taskforce had terribly damaged and compromised my spine, reducing me to perennial back pain and near-endless consumption of painkillers and application of embrocations, following the incident. As the years went by, my condition became exacerbated, until I was referred to NOHIL, where series of X-rays, CT scans and MRIs have helped in diagnosing me as being afflicted by degenerative lumbar spine disease with paraplegia. I have been on the NOHIL waiting list for corrective surgery since 2025. We are in May 2026, and I was fervently praying to be given a definitive date for the procedure at my next Spine Clinic appointment on May 11, 2026. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep the appointment due to logistics issues. I have been given a July 6, 2026, fresh date. I pray that the surgery is effected successfully effected soon enough, so that I’m rescued from my bedridden and wheelchair-bound state. May each and all of the persons whose actions and inactions put me in this insufferable condition all be served their comeuppance.
In a landmark March 2026 ruling (Suit FHC/WR/CS/87/2025), the Federal High Court in Warri, Delta State, South-South Nigeria, affirmed that recording police in public is a constitutional right. Going ahead to amplify the court ruling in April 2026, the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Tijani Fatai, has explicitly stated that members of the public are permitted to film or record police officers while they are on duty. Alas, my debilitating health condition makes it already too late for me to celebrate these recent orders.
Obiajulu Agu is a journalist and the Administrator of ‘MARITIME MATTERS
