By Aiyepola Abayomi
There was a street brother I had back then. The year I got admitted into UNAAB, he pulled me aside and told me something that has stayed with me since.
“Aburo, make sure you join student politics. You have the knack for it. Build yourself up until people seek your support, until they respect your dexterity. But however alluring it looks, however fashionable it seems, never join a fraternity. Don’t join the cults. Because if you do, and a life is lost along the way, no matter how far you think you’ve run from justice, no matter how much you repent, karma will find you. The Lord might forgive you. Karma won’t. It always takes its pound of flesh.”
My colleagues that I came into UNAAB with resident on this street know exactly which part of that advice that I followed. Lol.
I’m writing this in reasoning with the death of Toba Ajiboye, popularly known as Toba Ijaya, the Organising Secretary of the NURTW, Lagos State chapter. He was killed two or three days ago, and since then, the reactions online have been sharply mixed.
That divide comes from the two phases of his life: before wealth, and after wealth. Two men, one grave.
Those who knew him from the earlier years tell a different story from the one people are celebrating now, stories of turf wars, of rival street factions, of a brutal fight for control that they say cost lives on multiple sides.
Others only know the man who came after: the philanthropist, the “magnanimous” benefactor, the man who gave back.
So his death lands two ways at once; just like the shrodinger’s cat scenario in quantum mechanics in Physics. For some, it feels like a full circle closing on a past they haven’t forgotten. For others, it’s simply the loss of a man who was good to them. Depends which Toba you met.
In The Godfather Part III, Michael Corleone spends the whole film trying to launder his soul the same way he laundered his money.
He wants out.
He wants to be legitimate, respectable, clean.
He’s old, sick, tired of the blood on his name.
And just when he thinks he’s finally free of it, betrayal drags him right back to the center of the war he thought he’d retired from. In his own words: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
That line isn’t just cinema. It’s testimony. It’s what every man who ever tried to buy his way out of the streets with charity eventually learns.
You don’t get to negotiate an exit with karma. You don’t get to donate your way out of a debt written in blood.
The past doesn’t do refunds, it does interest.
If you’ve watched Tade Ogidan’s Owo Blow released in 1996, you’ll remember our beloved character Wole Owo blow (played by a younger Femi Adebayo and later by Taiwo Hassan Ogogo), driven into crime not by greed but by desperation, by the disappearance of the middle class and the slow suffocation of a family trying to survive a harsh economy.
Everyone who saw the movie rooting for him wanted the same thing; for him to make his money, walk away clean, and become respectable.
He tried. God knows he tried.
But karma had already opened a file on him, and every time he attempted to step back into decency, the streets reached in and pulled him back to settle what he owed.
Tade Ogidan, ever the realist, refused to give us the fairy tale ending we begged for. He gave us the truth instead; some doors don’t let you walk back out the way you walked in.
That’s the lesson. Not “crime doesn’t pay.” Crime pays plenty, sometimes generously. The lesson is that it pays on its own schedule, and it always collects.
This isn’t about speaking ill of the dead. It’s a clarion call.
No matter how much redemption you chase after taking a life, or after destroying a family’s livelihood, the reckoning still comes. It might not come from a courtroom. It might not come from the police. But it comes. The streets don’t have a statute of limitations.
Even if you repent, even if God forgives you, that doesn’t cancel karma.
Karma doesn’t check your church attendance. It doesn’t care about the foundation you started or the school fees you paid for other people’s children. It takes what it came for.
Forgiveness settles heaven’s account. It doesn’t settle earth’s, in fact on the streets of crime and violence, it’s a dog eat dog scenario , forgiveness is a sin.
You want to rule the streets?
Think of Michael Corleone.
Think of Toye Sugar.
Think of Toba Ijaya.
And the ones who’ll come after them, because there always will be. The throne is rented, not owned.
If you like swim in jars and pots of juju, when karma comes, it will take you like a snail out of its shell. Slow, sure, and with nowhere left to hide.
As the Yoruba say: “Ogun lo ni ọjọ́ kan ìpọ́njú, Orí ẹni lo ni ọjọ́ gbogbo. JuJu owns just one bad day. Your own head, your destiny, owns every day after it. You can survive the bad day. It’s the account your destiny keeps that you can’t dodge.
As someone once put it, and I know it sounds harsh; may his soul get the justice it deserves. It’s an uncomfortable thing to say about the newly dead.
But these days, “don’t speak ill of the dead” doesn’t really hold with the youth anymore. We’re watching too many of these stories end the same way to keep pretending otherwise.
The maxim died before he did.
What will people say about your death?
Think about it. Because somebody’s already writing your eulogy in their head.
