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.
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.)
