Osun CP, Adeleke and pounded yam of 20 years

Multiple years back, as the Lagos Bureau Chief of the Tribune newspapers, I was assigned to secure security for a company event, held somewhere on Lagos Island. With the Lagos Crime editor, Mr Lekan Olabulo, we approached the state police command’s special security formation, the Rapid Response Squad (RRS). Yeah, you are guessing right; current top cop, the 23rd indigenous Inspector-General of Police, Tunji Disu, was the commandant. He made my assignment a piece of cake. The professionally impressive cop billed the company nada (Spanish word for “nothing”) and still showed up at the event as promised, meaning he practically relocated the Alausa operational base of the outfit to V.I. for the newspaper.

The organisation too responded with lavish gratitude. Disu’s men on ground received princely treatment, though the bossman would not take a sip of water or a nibble of small or big chop. Tribune’s loyalty DNA is legendary. Even years after, I’m certain the leadership, which incidentally was in charge when Commandant Disu came through, is still effusive in disposition to IGP Disu.

Since 2023 when Disu’s years-long benefactor, Asiwaju Tinubu, became the C-in-C, detractors could argue the police numero uno has had lightning-speed promotion, culminating in sitting atop the hundreds-of-thousand-strong force within three years of the Tinubu presidency. Well, don’t we all pray for destiny helpers? However, the Yoruba will say a helper can help secure a job but won’t help do it. Exodus 18: 14–26 spoke of “leaders of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens”. The Nigerian public is arguably in unanimity that Disu has a history of commendable professionalism at his various duty posts before climbing the zenith, which would make him a leader worthy of the police force, though there isn’t a nationally agreed definite headcount of the force. While the official figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) placed the force strength at 250,227, the NPF claimed a staff capacity of 371,000. That is a huge difference of 120,773 personnel! The IGP should ensure we are not looking at ghost officers here, without attempting to cast any aspersion. For probity, data reliability and planning’s sake, relevant stakeholders should form a coherent whole and sort out the discrepancy, at least before the additional 50,000 officers promised by the president in his Friday Democracy Day speech.

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From his days leading “The Good Guys” in Lagos, to his officers helping drivers of broken-down vehicles off the road, accident victims, a woman in childbirth labour to the hospital during the COVID-19 lockdown, and serving as CP in the troubled Rivers State, Disu will easily find a spot in the column of biblical leaders of thousands. He just needs to let us know the exact thousands we are talking about!

Another top cop who enjoyed wide public confidence in office was Solomon Arase, who passed away at 69 on August 31, 2025. When his death was announced, I mused to a senior colleague and publisher of Eagle Online newspaper, Pastor Dotun Oladipo, about the humaneness that would be interred with the late cop’s bones. Oga Dotun testified back that Arase was almost angelic. I won’t be able to say his deeds to me here, but it is gladdening that the whole nation practically rose to mourn his passing, about nine years after he was done with policing. That is how to build and leave a legacy.

The two officers mentioned here had excuses to be rambunctious. They served in politically charged spaces. The incumbent IGP served in volatile Rivers. Arase was the IGP now-late Muhammadu Buhari inherited from Goodluck Jonathan, whom he replaced as president in a very contentious election. He was the only holdover of the Jonathan-era service chiefs, and Buhari kept him till his retirement, serving for more than a year.

Disu has discharged himself honourably in his first 100 days in office and hopefully the 2027 poll in which his patron, the president, would be participating, God willing, won’t rupture his tendon, career-wise.

About a day or two after the IGP was announced in acting capacity, a photo circulated widely showing him with the immediate past governor of Osun State, Gboyega Oyetola. A brief commentary tied to it framed it as a gratitude tour for the new IGP. While the optics of the photo-op can be debated as both ominous and innocuous; the latter because they have always belonged to same social circle around their common boss (which however could make the jolly-jolly appearance more worrying for “outsiders”, though nothing says a top cop can’t have a life and relationships outside the Force), it would seem one of Disu’s lieutenants, Osun Commissioner of Police, Ibrahim Gotan, has been attaching too much weight to the partisan projection of the “chummy” relationship between Oyetola, who is the undisputed leader of the opposition APC in Osun State, and Disu; his boss, leading to many unprofessional postures in fraught and vexed political, governance and, sadly too, security issues in the state. The ensuing tension, particularly in the sustained rift between him and the governor, who on paper is the chief security officer of the state, is setting my state on edge and this should not be acceptable to sincere stakeholders within and outside the state, including the professional ethic-stickler IGP. Three days from today will mark Gotan’s one year in office, but the governor began levelling serious allegations of partisanship and one-sidedness against him as far back as January this year, when he allegedly ordered the arrest and prolonged detention of the governor’s aides, allegedly breaching their human rights in the process! That was barely seven months after Gotan arrived in the state capital!

Is it possible the police chief came with a mindset or an àrokò (non-verbal, symbolic message) from someone who wanted the wild dance moves of the governor tamed?

Days back, the governor, looking uncharacteristically pensive, told a sparse media audience on camera that Gotan has been very uncooperative with his administration and other security agencies in addressing the escalating political violence in the state. So far, there hasn’t been any kind of disavowal from the accused police officer. Is silence an admission?

The politics of the back-and-forth between the governor, who is the candidate of the Accord Party, and APC, led by the man he dethroned, is not really the concern here. It is the safety of the people, especially in the light of the current insecurity realities in the South-West, Osun State inclusive.

Yes, APC is desirous of returning to power in the state through its candidate in the August 15 outlier governorship election, Bola Oyebamiji, and it is the party’s legitimate aspiration in which everything legal, not necessarily moral, can be invested. It is also within Adeleke’s political right to fortify his Abere fortress as legitimately as he can, but nobody, neither the governor nor the power-seeking opposition, has any right to turn the state to Akeldama, aided by any security chief. Maybe the governor would have to expatiate on the allegation of the CP not cooperating with sister security agencies to halt the spiking bloodshed in the state, because it would be very sad and patently criminal in nature if a law enforcer is now seen as colluding with lawbreakers to visit mayhem on the people he is meant to protect, in the name of whatever agenda.

This is not exculpating the governor or inculpating the Oyetola-led opposition, considering that our politics is now rooted majorly in thuggery and violence, but the duty of the governor, as the chief security officer who will be held responsible in a situation of breakdown of law and order, and expected to account for every person in the state, cannot be seen being hindered by a police officer, regardless of status.

We all remember how scandalous the country felt in January 2022 when a Chief Superintendent of Police (CSP) publicly defied Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State because he was obeying his IGP in Abuja. Every reasonable Nigerian was riled while the voices of the negligible anarchists like now-Ondo State Attorney-General, Kayode Ajulo, SAN, who tried to defend the aberrant defiance, were swallowed up by the attendant national indignation like Moses’s rod-snake guzzling that of Pharaoh’s magicians, before the 10 plagues kicked in.

With the way states in the president’s zone are set on edge, with citizens walking through each day in crippling fear of rampaging kidnappers, any further insecurity trigger, especially political violence, must be put down with alacrity and every force required, before it combusts. When it comes to citizens’ security, which is the number one constitutional responsibility of government to the people, politics would have to count less. And whether it was Accord chairman that was shot or financial secretary of Discord Alliance, every act of violence must be condemned and stamped out; and there must be little or no room at all for a police commissioner to be playing a political party’s game.

If the raging violence in the state is a ploy to micromanage voter turnout or skew the outcome, those behind it are likely living in a fool’s paradise. The political pulse of the state is what it is. Trying to mangle a majority will may trigger a seismic wave.

Gotan should not be a harbinger of sorrow in the state. I have taken judicial notice of him and APC national chairman, Nentawe Yilwatda, being from neighbouring local governments of Kanke and Pankshin in Plateau State, and could possibly have the kind of relationship suspected between Disu and Oyetola. But you can use what isn’t yours to do paddy-paddy. The power to choose the state’s next governor belongs to the people. No Jupiter in uniform or agbada should be allowed to take it away from them. Why should my aged mother be afraid to step out of her house in Ilesa because some miscreants want to force themselves on the people?

Twenty years ago, 2006 to be precise, the annual Oroki Day went down ugly in history because some people “came”. Let those “coming” this time come in peace and those “shimmering”, carry their light in peace.