The concrete walls of Ibara prison stand absolute against the skyline of Abeokuta, capital of Ogun State. Barbed wire crowns its perimeter fence as armed officers patrol the walkways. But on an evening in early 2026, a man serving time inside those walls opened a TikTok account, tapped a screen, and went live. A few years earlier, the same person had set up a similar TikTok account.

On December 22, 2016, according to a Certified True Copy of court proceedings at the Osun State High Court — Suit No. HIK/6C/2017, Oyebode conspired to kill Rofiat Adebisi, a final-year student of Osun State University’s Ipetu Ijesha campus. The lady had stood by a roadside on the said day waiting for a vehicle to Osogbo. Oyebode carried her in his car but, took her to a place where she had her murdered for rituals.

The court’s CTC, obtained by this reporter, shows that Oyebode gave conflicting accounts of Rofiat’s death.

In one statement to investigators, he said he negotiated a sexual agreement with the deceased for ₦2,000, drove her to his rented apartment, had sex with her, and went to bathe. On returning, he claimed he found her motionless on his bed and later dumped her body by the roadside.

In a separate extra-judicial statement, however, he claimed he used a charm supplied by a herbalist, who was also standing trial as the third accused person, to hypnotise the victim after picking her up. He said he then drove her to the herbalist’s shrine, where both men raped her. According to this account, he was later called back to help remove her body, which was dumped on a lonely road under cover of darkness.

At trial, Oyebode disowned both versions, denied involvement in the crime, and repudiated the statements he had made to operatives of the State Security Service (SSS) and the police.

The court rejected his denial during trial. In its judgment, it held that medical evidence showed Rofiat died from cardiac arrest caused by suffocation through strangulation. Justice S. O. Falola found Oyebode responsible for Rofiat’s murder and sentenced him to death by hanging in 2019.

Digital prison break

While death row is designed to be the state’s ultimate expression of confinement, Oyebode appears to have crossed the fence of the prison with remarkable ease, as he has cultivated an active presence on social media, particularly on TikTok, where he has amassed followers, participated in livestreams watched by thousands of viewers, received monetary gifts from supporters, and interacted freely with people outside prison walls.

As of yesterday (Friday), Oyebode was maintaining at least two TikTok accounts. One of them, operating under the handle @ayola.oluwafu, remained active till date. Through livestreams and audience gifts, the account attained Level 20 gifting status on the platform, a milestone that requires substantial financial activity and which suggests spending and transactions running into millions of naira.

His online presence was not hidden. He appeared on livestreams, interacted with users in real time, and attracted an audience that, in many cases, had no idea they were watching a man sentenced to death for murder.

Oyebode’s second account was identified through forensic analysis and witness testimony. The account was actively used to impersonate Omolola Awoyele, a prominent TikTok Live host and activist. “Elijah created an account using my name and uploaded my picture, which meant he could potentially use it to scam people online,” Awoyele told Saturday Tribune. After she (Awoyele) conducted a private investigation and confronted him, he admitted to operating the clone. “He apologised, removed my picture, and edited the account name,” she said. Analysis of TikTok’s Snowflake IDs showed that videos posted by this secondary account on February 14, 2026 were uploaded within the same time window as content from Oyebode’s primary account, @ayola.oluwafu.

Awoyele first encountered Oyebode when a friend shared his livestream, noting that he regularly appeared online claiming to be an inmate to solicit funds. “When I joined the live, I heard someone saying he was in prison,” Awoyele recalled. “I immediately wondered what a prisoner was doing on TikTok. He responded that social media was his only means of getting food and survival support.”

Initially skeptical of his claims, Awoyele demanded proof. “At first, I did not believe him,” she said. “I asked if he had WhatsApp because I wanted to confirm his claims through a video call. Through the video call, I confirmed that he was indeed in prison.”

The digital access allowed Oyebode to manipulate outside actors into fighting his legal battles. Awoyele, acting in her capacity as an activist, initially believed his claims of innocence and contacted lawyers to help file an appeal. It was only after she independently obtained the court’s Certified True Copy and confronted him that he confessed to her on a call that he had, in fact, taken ₦10,000 from the herbalist and facilitated the victim’s death. Following this admission, his appellate lawyer withdrew from the case. Awoyele eventually severed contact after Oyebode began using his smuggled phone to issue threats against her from inside the prison.

In one of Awoyele’s live sessions on TikTok on April 16, 2026, which lasted over an hour, Oyebode (the convict) joined and disclosed that many inmates in Ibara prison had access to mobile phones and internet connections.

“An individual may have two to three phones,” the inmate mentioned on the livestream which was monitored by Saturday Tribune. “Facebook and TikTok are full of prisoners. They will not disclose their location to anyone. If they do video calls and people see a nice background, they will not know where they are,” he explained.

On his own earnings, he said: “I get a lot of people sending money to me from the internet; only a few are my family. The bet I won last month was ₦85,000.”

While the court’s CTC seen by our reporter shows that Oyebode sold his victim’s iPhone in 2016, he now operates multiple smartphones inside a maximum-security prison.

Inside the phone business in prison

The Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019 mandates custodial centres for the “safe custody and reformation of offenders.” But at Ibara, that mandate appears to have been overtaken by a parallel economy that is internally governed, officer-mediated, and digitally connected to the outside world.

According to Oyebode, the gateway to that economy is the correctional officer. “The warders are not the ones selling phones to us,” Oyebode explained during the live session in April. “They only get them for us at the tarmac and smuggle them in for us.”

The relationship then loops into extortion.

“Even if it is the warder that brought it in for you, if another warder sees it, he will seize it and demand a certain amount from you before you get it back. Because it [phone] is our companion, we will definitely pay for its release.”

The warder functions simultaneously as supplier and creditor, extracting money on both ends of the same transaction

The same channels, Oyebode claimed, are used to move drugs into the facility. “Warders smuggle drugs in for inmates,” he said during that live session on April 16, 2026. “The inmate might buy the drugs for about ₦500,000, and the warder that smuggled it in might collect ₦100,000 from them, so after repackaging and reselling, the inmates can make ₦2 million from the drugs.”

“There are some inmates here who are building hotels outside the prison and always go there for supervision with the aid of the warders while facing the death penalty,” he claimed. “The warders take them to their various houses and hotels and bring them back. Some will meet people, especially women, on social media and settle the warders to meet with them.”

After nearly a decade inside the facility, Oyebode offered a blunt assessment of the institution.

“I will not deceive you; it is no longer a correctional centre. It is corrupting people more,” he said on the livestream.

Legal perspectives, official response, solution

Before weighing the technological failures, these activities must be measured against the law. The Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019 strictly governs the conduct of both inmates and officers. The claims of digital freedom, active phone usage, and inmates leaving the facility for building projects do not merely point to a porous perimeter—they represent severe, punishable felonies under Nigerian law.

The Act provides specific statutory penalties for correctional officers found conniving with inmates. Under Section 29(1)(c), any officer who procures or facilitates the use of communication devices—such as the smartphones Oyebode uses for his TikTok broadcasts—commits an offence punishable by a fine of up to ₦3,000,000, imprisonment for up to three years, or both. Similarly, Section 29(1)(a) stipulates up to 12 months imprisonment and a ₦1,000,000 fine for smuggling drugs into the facility.

Furthermore, Oyebode’s claim that wealthy death-row inmates are escorted out to supervise personal hotel projects directly contravenes the strict legal custody mandated by Section 12(1) of the Act. The law only permits the removal of a condemned inmate under highly regulated, emergency medical or mental health circumstances outlined in Sections 24 and 25. Escorting an inmate to private property has no legal basis and is classified as a criminal offence under Section 29(1)(h). If such an unauthorised release results in a death-row inmate escaping, Section 31(2) explicitly states that the culpable officer commits a felony.

The Act also establishes a clear chain of command accountability for facilities that devolve into unmonitored marketplaces. Under Section 32(4)(b), an officer’s immediate supervising officer shall be sanctioned if unlawful action or negligence is proven, while Section 36(1) provides grounds for legal action and prosecution for neglect of public duty.

Those measures are significant. They do not, however, explain how a death-row inmate maintained multiple social media accounts, conducted livestreams, received online gifts, placed sports bets, and described a prison environment where, according to his estimate, phones outnumber inmates.

‘Bad eggs’, disciplinary purges, and security risks

When confronted with the forensic evidence of live-streaming and monetisation by inmates, the National Spokesperson for the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS), Jane Osuji, acknowledged the vulnerability of custodial walls to compromised officers and smuggled contraband.

“I cannot sit down here and tell you that it is true or it’s not true because where there are so many individuals, there will be one or two bad eggs in them,” the spokesperson admitted. “We want a situation where we can work together so that we can have evidence of this, track it, and get both the inmates and the officers that are enabling this.”

The Service acknowledged the severe national security implications of unmonitored digital access from inside cells, noting that criminal coordination behind bars puts the public at risk.

“If they can join a live social media platform for fun or monetary value, they can as well do anything from the comfort of their cells,” Osuji cautioned. “When they are able to organise their criminal activities from behind the walls of the correctional service, then you and I are in for it.”

Osuji acknowledged the presence of contraband but framed it as a broader institutional issue. “It is important to state clearly that the smuggling of unauthorized gadgets into prisons is a challenge faced by correctional administrations globally,” she said, adding that the service has publicly destroyed recovered items in the presence of the press.

Defending the Service’s official policy, the spokesperson emphasised that the Controller-General maintains a zero-tolerance policy for unauthorised gadgets and staff compromise saying over 1,400 officers have faced disciplinary actions for various forms of misconduct, resulting in dismissals, demotions, and suspensions regardless of rank.

She added that special tactical teams conduct unannounced searches alongside routine inspections, while plans are underway to deploy CCTV surveillance systems across custodial centers.

The NCS appealed to the public and social media users to stop sending money or gifting live streams to inmates, warning that enabling unauthorized online communications undermines rehabilitation and public safety.

“If inmates continue to receive such assistance without reports being made to the authorities, they may leave correctional facilities worse than when they entered, defeating the purpose of correction and rehabilitation,” Osuji warned.

Use tech to fight tech fraud — Prof Olabiyisi

For Professor Tunde Olabiyisi, a cybersecurity expert, the technological solution is straightforward.

“The first thing is to disable any non-approved device within the prison perimeter,” he said. “I would install jammers that will block any device that is not approved. Any device approved within the prison network will be the only one that works. If you smuggle any phone that is not approved, you will not be able to use it. It will be rendered useless.”

Asked whether such measures would interfere with nearby civilian infrastructure, including the adjacent Central Bank facility, Olabiyisi said the technology can be configured to operate within a defined perimeter.

“It is like setting a perimeter,” he explained. “It will not affect areas outside the premises where you want to use it. So, it is about setting the parameters.”

According to a senior lawyer who specializes in criminal law, Banzak Azeez, the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS) Act, in 2019, was enacted with the sole purpose of achieving prison reforms in the country. The Section 14 (1-8) of the NCS Act provides a legal framework for the rehabilitation and transformation of inmates. “In fact, it is correct to state that virtually all the sections of the Act tend to promote the rehabilitation of inmates. However, the enactment seems to be a cosmetic reform. The only reform in the country’s prison system has been the change of name from the Nigeria Prisons Service (NPS) to Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS).”

He continued that “The inmates have continued to become more hardened after their release from correctional centres. It is no gainsaying that Nigeria’s correctional centres have turned to dens under the guise of correctional facilities where inmates are trained to become more dangerous to the society.”

While Nigerian prison authorities failed to secure their physical perimeter against contraband, TikTok’s digital infrastructure efficiently processed the payments from these illicit streams. Oyebode was not merely present on the platform. He was active, visible, and profitable.

Through TikTok Live, viewers sent him virtual gifts that were converted into monetary value. The platform processed those transactions, recommended his content to new audiences, and enabled him to build a following despite serving a death sentence. He was not operating below TikTok’s detection threshold. By the platform’s own metrics, he was a commercially active creator.

TikTok acts

According to TikTok’s transparency reports, more than 7.5 million videos were removed across Sub-Saharan Africa in the third quarter of 2024, rising to over 8 million in the fourth quarter. TikTok has also convened Africa Safer Internet Summits involving regulators and government officials from Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and other countries.

Between the second quarter of 2023 and the fourth quarter of 2024, the company reported a 249.81 percent increase in content removals across the region. Yet none of those systems appeared to detect a convicted murderer broadcasting from death row under his own identity.

A content moderator working for TikTok’s Kenya moderation hub told Global Voices, an international community of digital activists, in April 2026 that moderators were frequently required to assess videos in languages they did not understand. In such environments, context, identity verification, and cultural cues can easily be missed.

Nigeria remains one of TikTok’s largest markets in Africa, yet the platform continues to operate without a significant local regulatory footprint.

In March 2025, a Bill seeking to compel major social media companies to establish physical offices in Nigeria passed its second reading in the Senate. The Bill’s sponsor, Senator Ned Nwoko, argued that the absence of local offices creates a disconnect between platforms and Nigerian users, making it more difficult to address complaints, regulatory concerns, and content moderation challenges.

The legislation has yet to become law, but the concerns driving it are evident in this investigation.

When this reporter presented our findings to TikTok’s Head of Communications for Sub-Saharan Africa, Keagile Makgoba, he requested for the account handles involved and sought additional time to conduct an internal review. The request raised an obvious question.

The accounts had been active for months. The creator had achieved significant gifting status. Transactions had been processed. Content had been recommended to viewers. Yet it was only after Saturday Tribune presented forensic evidence that the platform began investigating.

Impact: A sudden cleanup

As this investigation was being prepared for publication, TikTok initiated what appears to be a sweeping, reactive cleanup of its Nigerian operations. On June 9, 2026, while its communications team was still requesting extensions to investigate the specific accounts flagged by this reporter, the platform released a Community Guidelines Enforcement Report through national media.

The numbers released by TikTok were staggering: the platform claimed to have removed 4.02 million videos in Nigeria and abruptly disrupted over 86,000 LIVE sessions for breaching community guidelines. The company publicly touted its “automated detection technologies” and rapid response systems, asserting that it was aggressively enforcing actions against creators violating LIVE monetisation policies.

TikTok’s automated tools and highly publicised sweeps managed to pull down millions of videos, but they fundamentally failed to remove the core account at the center of this security breach.

Weeks after TikTok’s massive purge, the primary account of the convict, @ayola.oluwafu, remains live on the platform. Throughout this reporter’s monitoring, the account holder has repeatedly evaded scrutiny by shifting digital identities, periodically changing profile names to avoid detection. Currently operating behind a private lock, the account has updated its display name to “lesson of God locate me,” paired with a profile picture depicting individuals in military uniform holding firearms. (Nigerian Tribune)

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