Barely three months after the Minister of Interior wielded the gavel of sanction against officers of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in Ekiti State for a brazen act of armed extortion, a chillingly similar incident has emerged, casting a long and dark shadow over the command and revealing what appears to be a deeply entrenched culture of impunity.
In a distressing echo of the past, a team of officers, operating under the leadership of the Ekiti State Commandant, Mathew Toma, has once again been accused of terrorizing a citizen at gunpoint, not to uphold the law, but to blatantly violate it for personal gain.
The victim, Sakiru Haminu Mide, a student of the Federal Polytechnic in Ado Ekiti, recounts an ordeal that began on a Monday evening with an unlawful arrest on the street and escalated into a nightmare of psychological manipulation and financial rape.
According to his detailed testimony, the officers—identified as Akinola Ayoola, Falodun Temitope, Adeosun Abiodun Emmannuel, Solo, and Stephen—forcibly took him to his own residence, where they proceeded to ransack his home before detaining him. The price for his freedom was set at an astronomical and utterly arbitrary sum of five million naira.
Faced with the terrifying prospect of a fabricated court case and the disruption of his academic life, and after being secretly advised by one of his captors that he would be falsely implicated, Mide’s resolve crumbled. He negotiated his liberty down to a still-crippling N500,000.
In a stark illustration of the operation’s brazenness, the officers, allegedly on the orders of Commandant Toma who “does not collect transfers,” produced a Point-of-Sale (POS) operator on the spot. Mide transferred the funds digitally, which were then given as cash to the officers, completing a transaction that laid bare the criminal enterprise operating under the guise of state authority.
This incident has ignited furious conversations among local observers and residents who have long noted the notoriety of the NSCDC in Ekiti. Close watchers of the agency’s activities now assert a tragic inversion of its mandate: an institution originally conceived to defend the vulnerable and protect public safety has, under the current leadership of Commandant Toma, allegedly been transformed into a tool for systematic harassment and extortion.
The fact that this latest scandal occurred despite the recent sanctioning of the very same unit’s leadership suggests a profound failure of internal discipline and accountability, raising urgent questions about who guards the guards themselves. The officers have been ordered to report to Abuja, but for the people of Ekiti, this feels like a familiar script—one where a change of characters does little to halt a devastatingly recurring plot of abuse.
