Somewhere in present-day Osun State, about a hundred years ago, an oba ordered a manhunt for a troublesome strongman in his domain. The man, Kátákatà, was captured one night, killed and beheaded. His severed head was placed in a pot and brought to the oba. The palace erupted in celebration. At last, the nuisance was gone forever.
But at the height of the rejoicing, another celebration broke out outside the palace. It was Kátákatà himself, arriving with his drummers.
A stunned oba confronted him.
‘But they brought your head to me this morning. It is in that room.’
‘Kabiyesi,’ Kátákatà replied, ‘that was not my head. It was your heir’s head they brought.’
How? The oba wondered as his visitor danced away.
Before noon that same day, Àrèmo (the heir to the throne) was brought home dead.
We heard the story many years ago from our fathers who insisted it was true. They pointed to a living old man who was Kátákatà’s ‘apprentice.’
There is another story, far more contemporary, that carries much the same moral.
Journalists often stumble on stories richer than the one they set out to find. The latest controversy in town is that the man we called maximum ruler, General Sani Abacha, died on top of a lady who was his girlfriend’s sister.
I read that Abacha report and felt like I heard or worked on something like that 28 years ago.
So, I went to the library of the Nigerian Tribune in search of the story.
A newspaper archive is a strange place. It lies in ambush and catches you, no matter how alert you are. You go looking for one story, and another (often the better one), walks out to meet you. I was looking for General Abacha’s prized paramours when I found something else: an editor’s prison report more compelling than the tale of a dictator dying in the arms of his girlfriend’s sister.
Mr Femi Adeoti was the editor of the Sunday Tribune during the years of General Sani Abacha’s war against his enemies – the media and the political class. The editor published a story in May 1998 against Abacha and was arrested and detained at Agodi Prisons, Ibadan. There, he lived among, and interacted with, some of the most hardened inmates. He remained in custody until Abacha expired in June 1998.
Because every good editor is first a reporter, Adeoti spent his days in prison harvesting stories. When he regained his freedom, he told story after story about the inmates and the circumstances that brought them to jail.
The man published the first of his prison reports in the Sunday Tribune sometime in July 1998. I stumbled upon it last Friday while digging through the archives for our old reports on what killed Abacha. Then I felt an irresistible urge to reproduce it here because I see it as a metaphor for what I feel about Nigeria and the leaders it is blessed with.
My teacher taught me long ago never to abandon one story for another. I had planned to continue my celebration of Abuja and its budget of bandits but as the Yoruba say, bí ?m?de bá rí oyin, á s? àkàrà nù-when a child finds honey, he throws away his bean cake. I am resisting that temptation. Every story deserves to be told. Tell both, or at your creative best, use one as a metaphor for the other. Metaphor. Yes. I do that here.
The prison story:
‘In Agodi Prisons, Ibadan, I interacted with different characters. The moment they knew me as a journalist, I gained instant recognition and popularity. I kept receiving notes from the inmates-convicts and Awaiting Trial Males (ATMs). The characters were queer. Their stories were pathetic and interesting. The first person whose confession we will take today is a corpse robber.’
The voice above is the editor’s. What follows is the prisoner himself telling his story, raw:
‘My name is…, but the inmates call me Orieku. I was born in 1972. I abandoned school in Primary Two. I just felt like leaving, so I left. I also left home in 1981. Since then, I have slept outside, mostly at Bode and under the Molete Bridge (Ibadan).
‘One night under the bridge at Molete, an elderly man walked up to me and woke me. He was surprised to find me under the bridge at that odd hour, sleeping alone.
‘He asked me to follow him to his house. He lived at Bode near Molete. It was at his house that I discovered he was a Babalawo (herbalist). I wanted to run away, but he calmed me down.
‘I told him how I ran away from home and that my father died in 1973. My mother abandoned me and married another man. I did not want to follow her to her new matrimonial home. The Babalawo said he had a good job for me if I would do it.
‘He told me he (Babalawo) specialized in using human parts for rituals and that he would like to recruit me to look for these human parts. He said I would look for where a dead had just been buried and go there in the night to exhume the body. That’s how I came into the business and became a corpse robber.
‘This Babalawo was the only customer I knew. He would tell me what part(s) of the body he needed. And I would go for it.
‘I had a very reliable informant. He knew almost every village around Ibadan. He would go into these villages to locate where they had just buried somebody. He would come back and give me a ‘perfect’ description of the place. Unfortunately, this informant is dead now. I would go to the location in the dead of the night to perform the ‘operation’. I would dig the grave, bring the corpse out and cut whatever part I needed. I would then re-bury it.
‘I never cared to find out whatever happened after I might have exhumed the corpse. That was not my headache. Once I got what I wanted, my business with the corpse was over.
‘I did not spare even my relations in my business. I went for their body parts and made good use of them.
‘Christian corpses are very difficult to exhume. They are buried more deeply, unlike Muslim corpses.
‘I was in business as a corpse robber between 1981 and 1986. Prices for these human parts were very cheap. Maybe that Babalawo was cheating me. He would pay N500 for head, N100 for fingers, N1000 for the two eyes and N500 for tongue.
‘Throughout my career as a corpse robber, I sold only to that Babalawo. He would not allow me to sell to any other customer. He would always threaten me with charms.
‘Then I left the business. Why I left was a long story.
‘You see, my customer, that Babalawo, told me to look for the smallest toe on the left leg. And that it must be fresh. He said I must produce it within two days.
‘It was a difficult task. I got in touch with my informant. He set at work. He told me a man was buried that morning in central Ibadan. I will not tell you the exact area, because people will easily remember the man.
‘After giving the description, I prepared for my mission. I gathered my tools – digger (pick axe), cutlass and shovel. I set at work. I located the grave with ease because it is a popular area in Ibadan.
‘They buried the man in an uncompleted building. So, nobody stayed near the building. I started work at about 1.30am, the grave was not deep, so the job was easy.
‘Immediately I took the corpse out, I knew there would be trouble. The man was having beads on his neck, his two hands and legs. He was a Babalawo! I just summoned up courage and cut the toe. I put it back roughly and left the place hurriedly. I was afraid.
‘I went straight to my customer and gave him the toe. The Babalawo was very happy and told me to come back later in the morning for my money.
‘Because it was an emergency case, he said he would pay me N1000 for the toe. I was happy and went home to sleep.
‘But when I woke up in the morning, the unusual happened. My wife suddenly woke me up and shouted: ‘What is wrong with your leg? Why the blood?’ I checked my leg and discovered that the smallest toe on my left leg was gone! The very toe that I cut from the dead Babalawo that night. I was terribly afraid and could not sleep again.
‘I jumped up and went straight to my customer’s house. Immediately he sighted me, he began to rain abuses on me. He was angry and cursing me. ‘Why should you cut your own toe for me because of N1000?’ he shouted at me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me it is your own toe? I wanted the toe of a dead person, not a living human being.’ I tried to explain, but he would not listen. He just threw the toe at me and refused to pay me any money. He said the toe did not work because it was the toe of a living person. I took the toe, wrapped it in a paper and hid it from my wife. It became rotten and was carried away by a rat. The mark on my leg is this. You can see it (shows the editor his toeless leg).
‘Why people call me Orieku (rat head)? Well, not much. They had wanted to call me Orioku (ghost head), but that would be too frightening. So they chose Ori Eku.’
Orieku said he left the business in 1986 and joined a popular theatre group in Ibadan as an apprentice. Then he diversified into petty stealing and burglary. It was that new vocation that took him to Agodi Prisons where he met the editor.
I read his story several times and saw the leadership of this country in Orieku. Nigeria’s political class is that corpse robber. The man thought he was cutting someone else’s toe. He discovered he had amputated his own.
It is common in Yorubaland to hear ‘A?eni n ?e ara r?`.’ The man who thinks he is cutting another person’s flesh may well be slicing into his own body. Those who think they are harming others often end up destroying themselves. The Kátákatà story, the corpse robber’s missing toe, and today’s politicians are all versions of the same tragedy: public wrongdoing is ultimately self-harm.
In 2022, we got the famous instruction: ‘Grab it, snatch it, and run with it.’ If that season sounded brazen, the politics of 2026, as the country marches towards 2027, is even shriller. The scramble has become more desperate, the appetite less restrained. Little seems to matter anymore; not truth, not decency, not even who dies – so long as the grave robbers return with enough body parts to satisfy their dibias.
They are all stuck in the capital. Politicians who created bandit and terror groups in order to win elections; they can no longer go home to enjoy their loot. Those who dared return have found their own lives looted by the monsters they created. In destroying this republic and its democracy, they have turned their swords against the very sheath that once protected them. Every budget they poison with phantom projects and agencies, every institution they weaken with incompetent heads, every election they steal, every school abduction and terror act they condone with appeasement appears to injure someone else. But, one morning very soon they will wake up to discover that the missing toe is theirs.