Addiction to cocaine, heroin, Indian hemp, ecstasy, cigarette and alcohol – sometimes in reckless combination – comes with devastating consequences that shatter lives, sunder families, cause impoverishment and at times trigger suicides. As it often turns out, as drug patrons continue to live in denial under the grinding bondage of substance dependence, their once blossoming minds and bodies also slowly wither into smithereens till addicts break ranks or die. However, for the fortunate few, who have refused to perish in the unconsciousness of their addictions, it is good news galore after walking the rugged paths of rehabilitation to achieve sobriety and become productive, reports Assistant Editor ADEKUNLE YUSUF
•Continued from Saturday, December 19
Until the harsh realities of life dawned on her, ostentatious lifestyle was a way of life for Ola, as the Delta State-born chubby woman of an average height wantedto be identified. As at 1987, when she left England for Nigeria, where she was introduced to drugs by her lovebird, Ola, who admitted that her fifteen years as an addict was akin to a fall from zenith to zero, had not plunged into a journey of unlikely return – despite being a big girl from London. Ola, who clocked 50 in March, was a night crawler, whose weekends were not complete without attending night clubs. Although, she knew her boyfriend was a cocaine and heroin user and courier, she did not bother – since “he never let me see it.” She also noticed that whenever they returned from night clubs, he would never make love to her until he went into the toilet to “fix his cigarette.” She also did not raise an eyebrow. “He usually came out from the toilet with a cigarette that he would smoke in my presence. But, his cigarette always had a different smell from the normal cigarette I was smoking, though I did not bother.”
But, things went out of control one day in 1987. After returning from a night club in the early hours of the fateful day, her man interacted with her before entering the toilet. “After making love, I found out that I was having a terrible stomach pain. When he came out of the toilet, he asked what was wrong and I told him about my stomach pains because it was becoming so unbearable that I was screaming and rolling on the bed. He now said he was sorry that he forgot. I asked what he was sorry for and why was he sorry. He gave me his cigarette and I had some puffs. Instantly I was okay.
“He told me he should not have made love to me when he was jouncing (without having taken his drugs). He was withdrawing at the time; that what he had taken was out of him. So, all the pain he was suffering from during the withdrawal time was passed onto me when he made love to me. That was why he gave me his cigarette and I was instantly fine. From that time on, anytime I had a headache, I would go for it. If I felt feverish, I went for it. Apart from cocaine and heroin, I was also soaked in alcohol, being the normal way of life in Delta State where I come from.”
‘I sold my house, cars and jewelries to get drugs’
Now firmly ensnared in the suffocating hole of hard drugs, Ola began a life of waywardness that was to compromise her future, including all her savings and personal effects. Having become addicted without knowing it, she started puffing drugs recklessly. “He was also addicted but because he was a courier who was taking it abroad, he always had it with him. Because we were staying together and he was always having it in the house, I always went for it anytime I needed it. After sometime, he left me and moved on with other girls; he knew when to stop. So, I had to start buying it. Before I knew it, I sold all my jewelries. I sold my cars. I sold my house for N200, 000 and started living on the streets.”
With all her finances down the drain, she resorted to chinese begging (accosting a stranger, greeting him in an unusually respectful manner and asking for financial assistance), which was complemented by “stealing and robbing anybody.” Although other girls in the joint added prostitution to their ways of getting money to feed their drug life, Ola said she did not venture into it. “Sometimes, you get as much as N10, 000 or more and sometimes less, depending on how your luck shines. You may even see someone who will give you N20, 000. That is why we will go out begging in the whole day so as to get enough money. Some of the girls have boyfriends who give them money; guys also go out in the night.”
But, her turning point came the day she tricked a congregation in a church and got about N75, 000; telling them a lot of lies. With the cash in her hands, she returned to the joint and smoked overnight, exhausting the money (which she said was one of the least). “So, I entered the joint and enjoyed a VIP treatment with the money made from the church. When I woke up in the morning and told the drug seller that I am hungry and he should borrow me N500 to buy food and have my bath so that I could go out again to hustle, he was very rude to me. He said, ‘Look at this Londoner woman. Who cursed you? Was I the one that ruined your life?’ Even from the way he looked at me, I had to look at myself from head to toes to see if there were excreta on my body. Everything I smoked just cleared from my eyes. I looked at the guy and he was not even up to the guardsman in my (former) house. I said that I must stop this thing because I was angry that somebody in whose joint I spent N75, 000 cannot lend me N500; instead he was raining abuses and hauling insults at me.”
Despite her resolve to stop using drugs, she was lost regarding how to go about it. That was in 2002. While still smarting from the insult, she went out to hustle, as usual. Hardly had she stepped out of the drug house when she bumped into some 419 friends, who advised her to quit drugs and join them to “chop better money.” They however gave her $300 out of their loot. On her way to the same joint, when she noticed a crowd milling around something by the roadside, near the drug joint in Ikeja. Out of curiosity, she pushed her way into the crowd, jettisoning her urge for drugs. Alas, it was the remains of one of the ladies with whom she spent the night smoking. She died at the joint. Because nobody wanted to be held responsible for her death, she was wrapped in a sack and thrown into the dust bin. “They broke her bones and wrapped her corpse in a Ghana-must-go bag and dropped her by the bus stop. And dogs and pigs were feasting on her intestines. That was in Ikeja in 2002. I became frightened and took to my heels, running as if something was pursuing me. I said I did not want to die like a chicken because the lady that died was the only child of her parents. She was from the Eastern part of the country. Her parents and family members did not even see her corpse. These were some of the thoughts that raced through my head. I did not go back to the joint till today; I left all the drugs and money. I was so scared that I was just running till I was hit by a police van pursuing some armed robbers and fell into the drainage. People brought me out later. I regained consciousness immediately, and I started running again. I am sure the people would be wondering what went wrong with me, probably thinking it was the shock of the accident that affected me. I had run from Ikeja to Maryland before I realised that I had nowhere in mind. I just stopped running before it dawned on me that it was CADAM that I wanted to go to. That’s how I came here. I was there crying and rolling on the floor that if they did not take me, I would die. I told them this is my last bus stop. I told them my parents were late, but there were sisters and brothers. I was not sure they were going to take me back, having done a lot of nasty things such as selling things in the house. I sold the house for N200, 000; not to talk of the cars and everything. I was at CADAM for more than a year until they were able to talk to my family, who doubted if I was telling the truth because of what I had done at home in the past. They were not ready to come because they felt they had their own lives to live as well. But, they came and saw for themselves. They were shocked. I was lean because of the effect of years of drugs, but they met a normal person with bulky frame. I told them I would not follow them; that I would stay in the church and help in getting others to come out of drugs. This is what I have been doing in the last thirteen years.
Drugs made me to attempt suicide thrice
From his radiance spewed with a youthful look, it is difficult to hazard a guess that Chudy Maduegbuna has enjoyed even a day’s dalliance with cigarette. Yet, the 56-year-old former addict has racked in lots of hard drugs – cocaine, heroin and cannabis – into his brittle system. As a young footballer with a rising profile in the 1970s, he was fondly called Addidas by his mates who daily thronged the Nnamdi Azikiwe Stadium, Enugu, to watch epic encounters between the earswhil ICC (now Shooting Stars Sports’ Club), Rangers and top-flight local football clubs. Chudy acquired a nickname carelessly and fell for the allure of drugs because of the myth that narcotics would augment his soccer exploits. He started with Indian hempwhich he supplemented with cigarette, banking on the assumption that this would enhance his prospects, he had erroneously thought. Suddenly, his fate in his secondary school football team in Enugu became the first casualty, as drugs adversely affected his career, before his academic performance also nosedived. Evidence for the latter came by the time he sat for WAEC in 1977 in the form of poor result.
Because of the prevailing idea of wanting to get rich quick, Chudy went straight into business, trading in children materials: tricycles, baby walkers, plastic beds. His education stood him out among illiterates that dominated his chosen business at the time in a popular Onitsha market, Anambra State. And with a loaded importer boss, he rose fast on the business and established a thriving outfit, traveling regularly to Brazil to bring in wares. But, his hot romance with Indian hemp, which started in his secondary school days, had never waned, since nothing seemed to have suggested to him that his marriage to cannabis would be his undoing. One day, while puffing his drug of choice at a joint, he noticed that what less important boys who did not even own shops like him were smoking “looked bigger and better.”
He inquired to know, but got no satisfactory answer. Later, as fate would have it, it was the same friends that tutored him about how to invest in a more lucrative line of business: cocaine and heroin trafficking. He tried it and got a triple-fold as returns. That was how he unwittingly embarked on a journey of no return, leaving Onitsha for Lagos where he coordinated his foot soldiers in drug business. Pronto, his subsequent travels abroad were no longer for importing children stuffs, but to seal deals in importing destructive drugs into his fatherland. Brazil, India and Pakistan became his regular destinations, where he was “investing but not trafficking per se” in cocaine and heroin, earning juicy profits in the process.
However, things suddenly changed in 1983/84, when a crackdown on the thriving illicit drugs market by the no-nonsense military regime of Muhammadu Buhari/Tunde Idiagbon altered the tenor of the illegal but money-spinning business. Yet, in all his years of investment in drugs business, he only smoked Indian hemp and cigarette. “This made moving drugs in and out of Nigeria difficult. So, my money was tied down. I had to start going to Indian hemp joints to show them the drugs. I tasted it in the process and became addicted instantly. Right from the first day, it was a fall to ground zero. I lost everything except my life,” he recalled ruefully. For years, besides deliberately cutting himself off from his “family members, who were trying to pry into my secrets,” his drug habit also forced him to dispose of all household items, including personal belongings, till his apartment was emptied. And from a man brimming with bright prospects in a legitimate business, Chudy derailed into drugs trafficking because of greed, only for addiction to complete an ill-fated journey that landed him in financial ruin. Because he had started living on the streets of Lagos, he was cut off from those who could help him reconnect with reality.
Encounter with Prof Adeoye Lambo
By the time his family members realised the magnitude of his addiction after years of isolation, he was promptly taken to the late Prof Adeoye Lambo, a renowned psychiatrist, who recommended him for treatment in 1987. But, when the late psychiatrist realised that Chudy was still indulging in drugs, he asked that “I should be quarantined.” Thanks to his loving brothers who refused to ditch him in his hour of need, his addiction problems also took him to Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital in Abeokuta, spending months in rehabilitation that cost a fortune. After few months, he was back on his feet, clean and sober, before he secured a job with the defunct Financial Post as an office assistant, only to relapse when he fortuitously ran into some old guards who had ransacked everywhere looking for outlets to dispense a consignment of 4.5 kilograms of cocaine that just arrived from Brazil. That was how he went back to drugs in 1994, almost in the way that he was lured into cocaine and heroin by some of his former boys who had become drug merchants under his tutelage.
To the delight of his business partners, he had coordinated the drug deals in Balogun market in the dark corners of Lagos Island without any hitches, but it was the final end of the transaction that plunged them into crisis, as arguments ensued that the cocaine had been tampered with by the people that helped in warehousing the parcels in Ladipo Market, Mushin. And in an attempt to ascertain the claim, he tasted the drugs and got hooked, again. “The boys in Ladipo had taken from market (cocaine) and mixed it. The argument was that they had doctored the cocaine. They had taken away from it, mixed it and sealed it. So, we decided to cook it with soda in order to know. I tasted it and discovered that the cocaine had been tampered with,” Chudy said. The cost of that action was treatment dates in the House of Hope, Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, both in Abeokuta and Yaba, suffering multiples relapses between 1994 and 1998 before he ended up in CADAM, which he had shunned during addiction years because “it is free and meant for the downtrodden.” At this time, the realisation dawned on him after reading a letter that his younger brother, who schooled with him in Enugu, had been called to the bar in New York, United States (U.S.). And in the interregnum, Chudy, whose bungalow around Adeniran Ogunsanya area of Surulere used to be “a transit camp for almost every Onitsha boy that was in Lagos for the national youth service or business or job mission,” admitted that he decided to take his own life.
“People knew I had done well for myself. I used to live in a two-bedroom bungalow with two-bedroom boys’ quarters and a thriving business in Onitsha. To lose all that led me to begin to think about suicide three times. So, each time I went to Lagos Island to smoke, I walk through Idumota through Idumagbo. The next thing is that I would find myself on a flyover or Third Mainland Bridge. All the fishermen would be looking at me. In my mind, something would be telling me that if I jumped, I would not die but be maimed. Something would be telling me to jump and another thing would be telling me not to jump,” he reminisced, adding he is happy that “I got my life back in CADAM at the end of the day.” More than thirty years after he completed his secondary school education, Chudy, a happily married man, who is now a pastor of one of the RCCG parishes in Lekki, sat for WAEC again in 1999 and passed, which he used to enter the Bible College, University of Lagos Computer School, and NIIT where he finished his training in Microsoft certification. “It is in CADAM that I found hope that my life can be better than it was under drugs. I have no regrets about my past because everything happens in life for a purpose. I am now facing the future with confidence. Because God saved me to save others, I am using my second chance in life to lift others from the destruction of drugs.”
From Abia Poly to Lagos drug joints
The fall of Onyi Peters, 30, from his path of greatness is a pathetic story that can induce all lovers of education to shed tears. By the time he was introduced into the world of drugs, the handsome youngster, who hails from Imo State, was already a student in Abia State Polytechnic in 2000. But, because the last born from a family of five saw a lucrative opportunity in dealing in drugs for the teeming campus population, he quickly fell for the bait. That was how a young Nigerian, who secured admission into the school by the dint of hard work, started hawking cocaine, heroin, Indian hemp and other hard substances on campus, using the proceeds to sustain himself. Initially, the regular flow of cash was more than enough to savour, which later earned him the envy of rival cult groups, who courted him to join them. And to cap the sweetness of life, Onyi was merely profiting from drugs; he tasted his products.
Suddenly, all that changed when a friend, who was also a drug dealer, lectured him that he was probably shortchanging himself and clients by not having a taste of what he was selling. His friend told him that the best way to distinguish an adulterated drug from the original product is by having a taste. Although he initially shrugged off the idea, he capitulated when students started avoiding him and his products like a plague. “I saw that my friend’s market was moving very well. I know that he was selective; unlike me, he would not just buy from any dealer. Whenever he was to buy his products, he would taste it and buy the one that gave him the biggest high. His products were selling like hot cake, while mine was suffering low patronage,” he explained why he heeded the bad counsel, and got hooked on drugs in the process.
Eventually, Onyi dropped out of the polytechnic. Also, his savings and source of cash dried off afterward, as he fell deeper into drugs. Sadly, he graduated in no time, not in his studies, but in drugs consumption, upping his game from merely snuffing or smoking to injecting cocaine, heroin and other substances. From the buoyant status of unrestricted access to drugs, which his dealership afforded him, he became a drug addict, constantly buying from his trader colleagues. “Later, I was not getting any money again because I used more of the drugs than selling. I backed out of the business and started patronising those selling it. I started injecting drugs. I had to abandon my course and out of shame, I relocated to Lagos.”
As he left Abia, not just in penury, his ambition to ascend the ladder of greatness was also torn into shreds; and his future enveloped in uncertainties. However, his plan to start a new lease of life in Lagos was also not to be. Within a short stay in Lagos, he was connected again into drug business by an old drug merchant, who was in dire need of an experienced person to run around for him. Onyi became the ideal candidate. With bounteous proceeds from the first trip to India, the former undergraduate started “living large” as usual, having secured a two-bedroom apartment in Lagos. But, as it is often the case, he frittered the money on his cravings “because the thing has become resistant in my body.” He stumbled further on a fast lane, leaving a life of comfort for a “one-room apartment in a face-me-I-face-you building.” And when his life plummeted further, Onyi abandoned the woman he had just settled down with, including the newly-arrived twins, relocating to a drug hideout beside NNPC depot in Ikotun, a Lagos suburb. “My wife would come and see me at the joint. She would cry and cry, but there was nothing she could really do because she knew that addiction is not something anyone can just quit within the twinkle of an eye. While we were together, she had seen people come to me with their property to get drugs. She would just cry and pray, but the thing continued for years.”
NDLEA providing the turning-point
Even when the mother of his twins died in 2012, he was still ensnared in the unconsciousness of his addiction, unable to quit the harmful practice. However, providence smiled on him on May 4 this year, in a disguised manner though. On that fateful day, operatives from the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) swooped on the notorious joint beside NNPC depot, apprehending many drug patrons to their NAHCO Office, also in Lagos. But, without anyone coming forward to bail Onyi after one week in NDLEA cell, he was set free. That was his turning-point, as he was angry about “indignities” he suffered in NDLEA detention. “I was asked if I was a seller, but they realised that I was not from the way I looked. All the people that had money among us bailed themselves immediately. I told them that I was living in a bunk; no sister, no brother or families. Officials of the agency would stay with us to see if we could invite the dealer or anybody to bail us. Sometimes, the officials would give us some drugs, which some people collected, so that we could name our dealers. At a point, after a week, they looked at us that we were like a liability to them because they were giving us food. Yet, nobody had come to ask for our bail. They just opened their gate and asked us to carry our wahala go.”
Although Onyi had made up his mind to quit, he did not know how to go about it. He, however, returned to the drug den, since there was nowhere to go. His story changed instantly, when some good Samaritans from the Centre for the Right to Health (CRH), a not-for-profit NGO empowering the vulnerable segments of the population in areas of healthy living, visited the drug joint. While his other partners mounted a fight to rebuff the visiting CRH officials, thinking that they were NDLEA informants, Onyi saw them differently. “They were even begging us to quit. That is why I embraced them. Due to my desire to quit, I had to trek all the way from the NNPC joint to CRH office at Ilupeju, lasting for more than two hours, to participate in the programme. They linked me up with detoxification centre.” Now clean and sober, Onyi, who still goes to the bunks to counsel drug addicts about the dangers inherent in drugs, is a counselor/tester with Society for Family Health (SFH) as well as a volunteer for CRH.
Addict dropped out of three varsities
Although Ibrahim Ladan Kotangora, 28, is happy to be himself now, he still rues his incursion into drugs, which has “denied me the joy of having a university degree, eleven years after I left secondary school.” His road to regret began in 1999/2000, when he was in JSS III. At that time, the son of one illustrious journalists was fond of joining his peers at KNG to chat about football and all sorts of things during the break time. Trouble began when one of his seniors in the school introduced cigarette to the group, which all the members willingly and gleefully embraced “because it was kind of freaking and interesting the way he drags it and brings out the smoke.”
From that day, all the students in the group seemed to have eaten the forbidden fruit, and there was no going back, for “we all started doing it every day without knowing it would be to our detriment.” This, however, did not inhibit Ibrahim’s journey in life until many years later. Three months after completing his secondary school education in 2004, he secured admission into Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, to study Crime Management – a rare feat in a country where millions waste years at home in search of placements into universities that have far less carrying capacity than the number of eligible applicants. It was a moment of parental accomplishment for his late father, who relished the joy of having his brilliant son taking after him. But, barely a year and a half in ABU, he dropped out due to poor academic performance caused by his addiction to marijuana, codeine, alcohol and retinol, which had taken a toll on him.
A tale of multiple relapses
That was not the end of the travails Ibrahim foisted on the family. Subsequently, as an idle hand, he was on a visit to Lagos, where friends lured him into cocaine at Liverpool, a busy drug hideout around the rail track under Marine Bridge, Apapa. Distraught that a child with a promising future was gradually turning a demon under their roof, his family took up the gauntlets, enrolling him at a private rehab facility (Damisa Hospital) in Kaduna. After three months in rehab, he was clean and sober, hoping to start life all over to achieve his dream. But, his resolve was weak and fragile, for he had barely maintained sobriety for one month when he relapsed again. Before his fourth month at the rehabilitation centre, he got a letter offering him admission into University of Abuja to study Political Science in 2006. He accepted the offer with both hands and began his studies in earnest.
Again, just after a year at the institution, Ibrahim relapsed into drugs, forcing him to abandone the programme without fulfilling the dreams his educated parents had for him. Determined to get a university degree, he made another attempt and he was successful. In 2007, Ibrahim was offered a slot into the remedial programme in Social Development at the Kaduna State Polytechnic. As usual, his exemplarily supportive parents provided the wherewithal for the umpteenth time, and he enrolled for the course. After a year, his drug cravings also compelled him to abandon the course mid-way, leaving his family heart-broken. Instead of returning to Damisa Hospital, his parents chose a rehabilitation centre in Minna, Niger State. Their efforts were also to no avail. Certainly not the type that would give up easily, in 2012, his distraught parents took their son to the new Kano Reformatory Centre (KRC), a public rehabilitation home established by the administration of former Governor Rabiu Kwakwanso. Ibrahim was to enjoy the historical privilege of being part of the first set of addicts admitted into the centre, where “I spent seven months and three weeks without any positive impact.”
Less than three months after leaving KRC, Ibrahim returned to cocaine, heroin and other hard substances, which forced him on what promised to be his final recovery journey to Nigass Rehabilitation Centre, a popular home in Kaduna, where addicts are given a new lease of life through faith-based healing approach. He spent two and a half years at the rehab before graduating on August 15 this year to the joy of his long-suffering families. “It is at Nigass that I got myself composed. Unlike the previous centers, I pray five times daily as a Muslim and recited the Quran at Nigass. I was able to get myself back physically, emotionally and spiritually. There is a lot of guidance and counseling and other things.”
Ibrahim said he wants the world to know that “drug addiction is the single biggest impediment to youth development today, especially in the northern Nigeria.” His latest dream is to venture into agriculture and “go back to school to get a degree in law.” While expressing gratitude for the “wonderful support of my entire family members who stood by me,” he reminisced, with a tinge of regret in his voice, that all the huge sums of money spent in the various rehabs could have been “channeled towards other development things, even sending me abroad for my studies.”
Leaving Navy for drugs
Bolaji Loko, now in his late 50s, is a man of illustrious birth. Being a scion of a well-to-do parents, Bolaji, only son of the two children of his parents, was rascally and naughty. His father was then the third highest ranking man at Mobil Nigeria Ltd as employees’ relations manager, and his mother was a top banker working with the Federal Building Society (now Federal Mortgage Bank). Born on Lagos Island but brought up in Surulere, he was over-pampered. He was “seriously into night clubbing.”
He was either taking Indian hemp with illicit gin and lime, or stout with Indian hemp anytime he was at the club . He grew up in life with “my father and I not on speaking terms,” despite having devout Christians as parents. His journey in life was on the fast lane when he was admitted into Yaba College of Technology (YCT). He however left YCT with OND, unable to complete the NHD “because of my rascality” before joining the Nigerian Navy in 1979. As a seaman, he became a computerised weapon operator. Deployed to Naval College as a junior instructor, doing fine until curiosity to try something new led him astray. Few years after enlisting in the Navy, his addiction problems started.
Living at drugs joints with naval uniform
Having watched some American films about addiction and its consequences, Bolaji was running away from drugs until he joined some naval colleagues to sniff cocaine. That was in 1984. When he first tasted cocaine, he said the feelings were massive because “it made me to mellow down and trip far into the horizon.” He fell for the allure. “What they have now is adulterated. Then, if you take a shot of cocaine, you won’t be able to talk because the tongue will remain numb for sometimes and you will doze off. A loud humming sound will fill the two ears so much that you won’t be able to hear anything. The feeling was what got me carried away,” he admitted.
Things went from bad to worse, as he stumbled deeper into drugs, sleeping at the drug joint under CMS bridge with “my Navy uniform, my action ring and sometimes with my liberty ring.” The same dark corners at CMS also served as his operating base. “Sometimes, I would buy drugs in bulk and give to others to sell for me while I use my uniform to give them protection. I would also be smoking. Some colleagues in the navy would come and meet me under the bridge to take drugs. If policemen came, I would collect the drugs from my boys and put it on my body, since policemen cannot arrest me.” Because the Navy frowns at hard drugs, he almost lost his job, until he threw in the towel in 2000. “I was more committed to drugs than to my naval office duties; sometimes I may not report for duty for two weeks. They would lock me up, sometimes for up to ninety days with serious hard labour. Sometimes they would charge me. They knew quite all right that I was a serious Indian hemp smoker, but they could not prove any link to other drugs.”
To feed his cravings, he was hustling for money in front of the Cathedral church at CMS bus-stop. “I would say prayers, but if I see that the denomination you are bringing out for me is small, I would turn it to another thing for you. I will threaten that my boys will gun them down if they refuse to play ball. I would scare the hell out of them because the way I would talk to them. Yet ordinary pin no dey my body. Some will even drop their entire wallet and beg not to be killed.”
In December 2004, he was caught off guard, when he a ghastly “motor accident that almost took my left leg away from me.” As he flagged down one unsuspecting motorist on the same spot at CMS, an oncoming motorist, who apparently, had fallen victim of his pranks targeted his and knocked him down as a way of avenging. A leg was totally fractured; unable to walk (he removed his trousers to show me the scars). When he was taken to the General Hospital on Lagos Island, they wanted amputate it. “I did not want to return home as a one-legged man, since I didn’t desert the house as a one-legged man.” That was how he returned home, having “exhausted all I had on the treatment of my leg.”
He had to spend the whole of 2005 in a private hospital in Isolo, owned by one of his uncles, where two major operations were carried out on his leg before he could walk again. Even during his time in the hospital, Bolaji was still on drugs, as friends were still sneaking in marijuana for him during visiting hours. “Every day, between 12am-1am, I would walk downstairs on crutches to smoke Indian hemp in the hospital. I was doing this for about three to four months. One day, one small girl just walked up to me and asked, ‘don’t you know that it is God that is dealing with you?’” He wondered how a ‘small girl’ can be that good in preaching the word of God, which suddenly reminded him that “after all I am also from a Christian home.” He said he just slept over the issue, ending up with a change of heart which saw him reconciling with his parents.
After completing his rehab at Wellsprings, Bolaji, he also went through the RCCG discipleship programme. He has worked in Lagos State University Teaching Hospital as a security man, now a guardsman in an annex of his uncle’s hospital. “Drugs let people derail, but patrons will be thinking that what they are doing is the best. We used to see ourselves as the best, the wisest and the most enlightened, not knowing that we are the worst and the most ignorant and foolish,” he lamented.
Editor’s note: All the persons and their experiences in the story are real. Full consent was sought and received before using their names and other identities.
Concluded.
