In Ondo today, truth is not merely contested; it is deliberately inverted. A lawful landowner can wake up to discover that the full machinery of the state has been deployed to rebrand him a criminal, not because he broke the law, but because he refused to surrender his inheritance to the powerful. That is the grim subtext of what has happened to Ojo Ajisafe.
After an unsuccessful attempt to forcefully wrest his family’s land from him, and following an even more sinister bid to snuff the life out of this peasant bricklayer for the simple offence of standing on lawful inheritance coveted by a coalition of interests that includes powerful politicians and their proxies, a new strategy was activated. When violence failed, character assassination was deployed.
Ojo Ajisafe was first labelled a master forger. His crime, according to his adversaries, was that the several subsisting court judgements in his favour were allegedly fake. Never mind that these judgements were issued by competent courts over time, after due process. A petition was hurriedly assembled, adorned with the signatures of over two dozen politicians, and propelled by influence rather than evidence. The outcome was predictable.
In the early hours of one morning, Ojo’s home was encircled by no fewer than eighteen heavily armed policemen. He was seized, manacled like a common criminal, and hauled away in a display designed not to investigate crime, but to humiliate and intimidate. At the Force Headquarters in Akure, he was chained to the ground of his cell, a treatment that belonged more to a military dictatorship than a constitutional democracy. This spectacle was enabled, facilitated, and legitimised by the then Commissioner of Police, Mr Wilfred Afolabi, whose complicity in that shameful episode remains an indelible stain.
For one week, Ojo languished in detention. His ordeal unfolded under the watch of local government officials and self-styled lawmakers who ought to have defended the weak but chose instead to supervise injustice. Silence, in that moment, was not neutrality; it was endorsement.
Then something unexpected happened.
A new Commissioner of Police, Wale Lawal, arrived. A hard-nosed professional with a reputation for blunt honesty, he brought with him a disposition unfamiliar to Ondo’s power brokers: an allergy to elite pressure. He studied the case file, asked the inconvenient questions, and refused to be placated. Almost immediately, Ojo was released. More damaging still to the architects of the frame-up, the so-called “fake judgements” were transmitted back to the courts that issued them. The response was devastating. Every single judgement was confirmed authentic. The forgery narrative collapsed under the weight of facts.
One would expect that to end the matter. It did not.
On 14 February 2025, Ojo Ajisafe was again attacked, this time in a near-fatal assault allegedly carried out by the same adversarial forces bent on dispossessing him of his family’s inheritance. When brute force failed and forgery allegations imploded, desperation took centre stage.
Shamelessly, and with a desperation that defies decency, Ojo Ajisafe’s adversaries began to peddle yet another grotesque falsehood. They swore that the grievous injuries sustained by this voiceless peasant bricklayer were not the result of a violent attack, but merely animal blood, tortoise blood or monkey blood, used to smear his head. It was the same tired script they had deployed earlier when they claimed that his subsisting court judgements were forgeries, a lie that only collapsed when a senior police officer with conscience went the extra mile to uncover the truth.
Ojo spent three agonising days at the Trauma Centre of the Ondo State Specialist Hospital. The injuries to his head, caused by a brutal machete attack, were severe and life threatening. Yet there was no remorse, no hesitation, no retreat by those who sought his end. Their singular interest remained unchanged, his family’s inheritance. To them, his continued existence was an inconvenience. He was meant to die. No more, no less.
Though his wounds were stabilised, his condition deteriorated in the early hours of the morning. At about 3 am, he was hurriedly transferred in a government ambulance to Union Diagnostic Centre in Akure when his situation became critical. Even then, those invested in his destruction reportedly prayed for the worst, eager for death to rescue their collapsing narrative. Had he died, they were prepared to swear without blinking that it was a snake bite, a cult attack, or the handiwork of unknown herdsmen, as though they had stood at the scene themselves.
But Ojo survived. And in surviving, he disrupted yet another carefully rehearsed lie. Against calculation, against influence, and against expectation, he lived. And that survival, more than any allegation, is what has unsettled the powerful.
For Ojo Ajisafe had a faithful God.
Today, the matter sits with the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, now under the shadowy influence of a pathetically compromised officer who effectively directs the affairs of the ministry. His stewardship has just been confirmed; his retirement looms. Yet, rather than wind down quietly, he appears determined to leave behind a legacy of infamy. Verifiable documents exist. Trails are intact. And when the reckoning comes, his entire career may collapse under the weight of his own excesses.
But the most grotesque twist came when all previous schemes failed.
An arm of government, acting with the active connivance of a thoroughly discredited former Honourable desperately seeking relevance, conspired with his co-travellers to rebrand Ojo Ajisafe a “land grabber.” The irony would be amusing if it were not cruel. A poor bricklayer, armed with multiple court judgements affirming his family’s ownership, suddenly recast as a criminal syndicate leader, simply because he refused to be bullied off his land.
This was not law enforcement. It was intimidation. It was an attempt to exhaust, shame, and silence a man whose only crime is refusing to surrender what the law has repeatedly affirmed is his.
What we are witnessing is not a dispute over land. It is a test of whether justice in Ondo State still recognises the poor as human beings. When the powerful fail at negotiation, they deploy force. When force fails, they deploy lies. When lies collapse, they deploy the state itself.
And when the state becomes the weapon, silence becomes complicity.
This case unfortunately, is not dying anytime soon because holistic private investigation is at this time being processed and shall be unleashed at the fullness of time for the world to decipher.
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