PRESS RELEASE
‘Who on earth is Toyin Akinosho?’
Epic encounter by Africa Oil + Gas publisher’s driver with suspected assassins
'I don’t know who Toyin Akinosho is; that I have never heard that name in my life before’
This is not a screenplay.
Perhaps the key
character in the narrative would have wished it was one - for a
Nollywood flick with the title Your Oga or Your Life or The Lucky Escape
or the like.
Mumuni (not real name) is the driver of the Publisher of Africa Oil and Gas Report, Toyin Akinosho.
On the morning of 20
March, before boarding a flight to Abuja, Akinosho gave Mumuni N5,000 to
buy fuel for the generator at his residence on the outskirts of Lagos.
That was what took Mumuni out of the house at about 7 O’clock that
evening.
He had not even got to the neighbourhood filling station when the drama started.
Mumuni takes over from
here: “As I came out from our street to enter the man road, I saw a
white Hilux (mini truck) following me. I wanted to branch into another
Road but because they were still following me, I decided to go straight.
But they still followed me. At 41 Road, there is a junction that you
can branch from, to Ikoyi or to the (exit) gate. It was at that spot
that they blocked me with their car and stopped me.
They came down and were
asking me ‘Where is Toyin Akinosho?’ and I told them that I don’t know
who Toyin Akinosho is; that I have never heard that name in my life
before. I also told them that (the) publisher’s car is my personal car
and that the name Toyin Akinosho does not ring a bell. It was at that
point that they returned into their vehicle and drove off.”
Mumuni recalled that the suspected assassins were five.
He continued the narration: “They
entered their car and I kept moving because I thought it would be
unwise for me to go back home right away. As they moved, they were
moving slowly and then later turned to the roundabout that leads to
Ikoyi; but I went straight to gate. But as I looked into my side mirror,
I saw that they were still following me and I thought to myself that if
I went home, they might still trace me to the house to know where we
were staying. So, I went straight and bent towards Four Points (By
Sheraton Lagos hotel) area. The car has an e-tag (pre-paid toll
identification) so I just passed the toll gate but it was like they paid
and were delayed a bit. But the traffic light stopped me; it wasn’t up
to one minute that I was at the traffic light that I saw that they were
coming but then, the light passed me so I drove off. I passed in front
of Four Points and followed Ajose Adeogun Street.
On that street, there is
a club that Oga goes to. It was there that they caught up with me and
rammed my car by the side and I ran into a culvert and the bumper was
damaged.”
What happened next?
“Then, one of them came out of the car and slapped me on my face and
said, ‘We are asking you for the last time, where is Toyin Akinosho?’ I
told him that I don’t know the person who bears that name. On hearing
that, another one said to me: ‘I can waste you o’ but I told him that if
he wanted to kill me, he should do so, but I insisted I neither knew
Akinosho nor ever heard of his name. Then they left me there and entered
their vehicle and left. People that were around there started coming
out to assist me drag the car off the culvert.”
But the saga didn’t end
there. Mumuni decided to sleep in the car where the incident happened on
Ajose Adeogun because the impact on the steering affected its
controlling mechanism. He chose the option of sleeping in the car
because “we had recently bought two new tyres and I didn’t want them to
loosen the tyres at night because that place is usually lonely and quiet
at night before day-break.” Apart from the tyres, Mumuni thought that
the battery could also be stolen.
“Whatever happened would
still be on my head,” he said, not giving a thought to the danger he
exposed himself to. “I know that it is not worth my life, but I just
can’t leave the car there,” he reasoned.
Something happened during the small hours.
The men were back.
There’s this line in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger: “Mr Bond, they have a
saying in Chicago. ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The
third time it’s enemy action.”
Yes, this time, it was “enemy action” or an action that suggested that the suspects were not friends.
“As I was sleeping in
the car, around 2am,” Mumuni continues, “they came to meet me and used
the edge (barrel) of a gun to wake me up. They then collected my phone
and the N7,000 that I had on me and left saying that since I did not
want to say the truth, they’d go with those.”
Mumuni has a theory: “It
was like they went to check the (Contacts on my phone) whether they
would see Oga’s name on my phone but I saved Oga’s number with the name
‘MAE’”
What is MAE?
“Nothing,” said Mumini,
who is from ….., explaining, “I just saved it as such because to spell
his name, Toyin Akinosho Alfred, is difficult for me.”
His theory could be
right. “Around 5 a.m, they came back and dropped the phone on my body. I
was even asleep then but I felt something drop on my chest as they
threw the phone at me.” After he was threatened with the gun, Mumuni,
somehow strangely, decided to sleep atop the booth instead of inside
the car where he had first slept. “That was where they came to give me
back the phone and told me that I was lucky,” he stated.
Soon after he was rammed
into the culvert, Mumuni had called Akinosho to narrate the incident.
The latter advised him to “be careful.”
He has been grounded since then.
Now, who were The Five working for? Lingering question.
That was a lucky escape
but the supposed assassins would read blogs and know how he tricked
them....couldnt they have kept this story details?Na wah.
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