(THEWILL) – The story of Dennis: Sometime in 1992, a university hopeful tearfully told his father he was dropping out of his studies in Nigeria. He had set his sights on Europe just like two of his friends had done months before. A beloved and an only son, his father lent a sympathetic ear.
A cocoa dealer from an agrarian community in the northern part of what was then Bendel state, money was no problem to the father and so he made provisions for his ward’s long journey away from Africa. Of course, the lad’s starting point was Lagos where he would process the necessary documents needed to travel to Vienna, the Austrian capital where his friends had landed.
Dennis O (not his real name) had been briefed where to go in Lagos: A place called Oluwole. That was how Dennis arrived Oluwole and met his ‘helpers,’ those who would facilitate his journey to Vienna. He was more than elated.
Of course, his supposed helpers saw through him at first glance: in his new surroundings, Dennis’s rural simplicity shone like a greasy mechanic at a banker’s convention International passport? Dennis had none. Not to worry. Within a week, the helpers had procured an international passport for the chap, complete with the requisite travel documents. Dennis was over the moon.
But first, he had to go back to the village to share the good news with his father and also get his blessings. Showing off the documents in his possession, Dennis told his father he literally had one leg in Nigeria and the other in Europe.
Prouder than a parent whose son had won a scholarship to an Ivy League institution, his father quickly arranged for a ‘little celebration’ for his departing son. Friends and neighbours were invited to what was a send-off for the lucky lad. There was plenty to eat and drink as some of Dennis peers looked on with undisguised envy.
When it was time for Dennis to leave for Austria, he returned to Lagos for the second time and then proceeded to the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Ikeja for his long awaited journey. Inside the belly of a giant Austrian Airlines Airbus 320, Dennis finally relaxed and, as the Yorubas say, he could finally prop his feet up on the table, drink water and put the cup down.
Not quite. No sooner had he got to the arrivals in Vienna and encountered the country’s immigration officers than he realised that all the documents in his possession were counterfeit – passport, visa and just about anything else. The only genuine items about him were his clothes and luggage.
Needless to say a few days later, Dennis was booked on another flight and parceled back from whence he came.
Like Moses, Dennis saw the ‘promised land’ but couldn’t step into it. But unlike Moses who was denied by a divine decree, Dennis was done in by master swindlers and forgers at Oluwole, a market area in Central Lagos and operational base of dyed-in-the-wool forgers who made oodles of cash at the expense of gullible Nigerians.
Dennis had joined the number.
Oluwole was home to ersatz documents of whatever nature. If you wanted to sell your father’s house, you could come to Oluwole, get a forged certificate of death, get a fake notarization and voila! Or imagine that you wanted a glowing WAEC result even though you are a confirmed knucklehead, there was only one place to go to make it happen.
Oluwole was also the place to go, if, say, you gained access to a parsimonious parent’s cheque book and wanted a perfect imitation of his signature so you could enrich yourself at his/ her expense.
What about obtaining, say, the blue British Passport or even visa to any European country without necessarily following due process? The road led to Oluwole.
Marriage, birth and death certificates as well as affidavits of all kinds were easily procured at Oluwole not to mention letters of invitation, bank statements, cheque leaflets, even booklets and tax clearance certificates. Of course, all of them were duds, perfect imitations of the originals.
Legend has it that a certain civilian governor of a state in the south west once boasted his signature could not be duplicated to the exact cursive letters and strokes. A week later, one of his aides showed him two identical samples of his signature from the chaps at Oluwole. The governor chose the wrong one as his.
One source told THEWILL that as ordinary as it looked, counterfeiters at Oluwole bilked victim after victim of huge sums of money, raking in between $5, 000 to $10, 000 monthly. Business was good for the forgers while the expectations of those who patronized them were never met.
Hello, Hello!
But Oluwole was not only about forged documents.
Long before the advent of GSM, Nigerians of a certain generation who wanted to reach out to relatives and friends abroad hoofed it to discreet corner shops in central Lagos where operators tapped NITEL telephone lines illegally.
According to one man-about-town who claims knowledge of the early beginnings of Oluwole, hustlers in those shops often approached people on the street, Broad Street or Marina, say, and whispered “hello, hello,” a coded message implying you could make calls somewhere nearby. Once you agreed, they would lead you to inconspicuous shops where you could, for a fee, talk as long as you wanted with the receiver overseas. It goes without saying that such payments were never remitted to the rightful owners – NITEL.
Oluwole was a garden of hope from where many ended up harvesting tubers of disappointments.
Man-about-town, Joseph Okoduwa (not real names) recalls instances of hapless deportees like Dennis angrily storming Oluwole to register their displeasure sometimes accompanied by police officers. “They come back dejected,” Okoduwa told THEWILL. “First is the shock and disbelief of what has happened and then anger at the perpetrators.”
Continuing, Okoduwa insists the fraudsters/ forgers at Oluwole usually anticipated such confrontations and were more than prepared for the returnees. Questions like “here na embassy, am I an ambassador?” were often thrown at the already hapless victims, that is if they even managed to trace the forgers at all.
Those who know describe Oluwole in its halcyon days as a warren of roads and narrow alleys leading to obscure shops and poky offices smack in the middle of a market of the same name in Central Lagos. The byzantine routes and narrow paths made it possible for counterfeiters to escape easily during unexpected raids by law enforcement agents.
In a Vanguard report of August 2, 2011, for instance, Evelyn Usman wrote of a surprise raid at Oluwole on a Sunday morning headlined “Day of Reckoning for Oluwole Fraudsters as Security Agents Raid Hideout.”
Usman wrote that “activities at the notorious Oluwole market located in central area of Lagos went on as usual last Sunday when all of a sudden an unprecedented invasion of the area by some security agencies changed the course of the day.”
The surprise raid was carried out by a combined team of Nigeria Immigration Service, Nigeria Police and the State Security Service. Recovered from the forgers were fake international e-passports, fake NYSC certificates and vital government documents.
According to Usman, fraudsters “operating there usually played on the gullibility of desperate Nigerians who intend travelling out of the country at all cost…those swindled ended up visiting the area with policemen only to discover that the person they transacted with was nowhere to be found.”
After the raid, the Comptroller General of Immigration Lagos State Command at the time, Mr. Sule Abass Ahmed, was stunned beyond words. He “marveled at the sophistication with which the fraudsters operated,” insisting that they were “well informed about any change either in signature or documents of any country at their disposal…getting the original visa or passport of any given country, after which they will scan into their system and then photocopy the original for willing buyers.”
Another source confirmed to THEWILL how back in the mid to late eighties, “you could get a British Passport, a trifold card board ID or abbreviated form of passport, the old British blue book passport and the red passport to travel from Nigeria to other European countries. If the picture of the Afro or Caribbean person doesn’t look like you, counterfeiters at Oluwole could expertly take apart the passport and replace/ transplant the passport photograph to yours.”
Continuing, the source, now safely ensconced in Canada, neither confirmed nor denied if he ever patronized the forgers, but declared that, for a fee, forgers “could provide you with first grade counterfeit visa to many countries in Europe, especially Eastern European countries.”
Asked if he knew those who were the criminal masterminds behind such deceptive schemes at Oluwole, the source mentioned one Wella, a tall, huge and fair-complexioned fellow. He may or may not be dead, he went on. Wella seemed to be the number one man of the forgers then, adding that you could distinguish them from others by the very expensive jewelry they wear.
The clever rogues they were, the forgers at Oluwole “never saved their money in banks for fear it might be traced to them. They invested in costly necklaces, rings and wristwatches such as Citizen and Seiko watches. They were the Rolex of their time.”
To be sure, the counterfeiters operated with a phalanx of collaborators ranging from retired or retrenched staff from ministries, travel agents and even staff of embassies and airlines. There were also the signature experts, sign writers and printers at Shomolu/Bariga.
According to Okoduwa, it was not only individuals forgers at Oluwole ruined financially and emotionally. They destroyed businesses as well. In his telling, there was a time when luncheon vouchers were the rave in Lagos, travellers cheques, too, and even fuel coupons. But the counterfeiters at Oluwole put an end to those businesses by cleverly forging them and having the returns come to them instead of the parent companies.
911 and the decline of Oluwole
Nothing, they say, lasts forever. Oluwole entered its final decline following the September 11, 2001 twin tower attacks in America. That attack revolutionized travel, especially by plane and replaced perfunctory airport security checks with more specialized ones.
Countries also upgraded their passports, employing technology to ensure that the identities of travelers were clearly captured. It was the age of electronic passports, biometric requests at embassies and more advanced requirements for travel.
Nigeria soon followed suit as the first African country to issue e-passports which had chips containing the owner’s data embedded in it. The year was 2007 and Shehu Musa Yar ‘Adua was president.
But the story of Nigeria’s e-passport began four years earlier in 2003. Olusegun Obasanjo was president and while on a state visit to Malaysia was shown the Malaysian passport. He visited the company that makes it and immediately put in motion a process to upgrade Nigeria’s passport.
When the Mint could not deliver, the Ministry of Interior put out a bid. Five companies emerged top contenders – The Mint, Obethur, G&D, De la rue and a Nigerian company called Iris Smart Technologies Limited (ISTL)
At the end of the process, ISTL emerged best in technical and commercial and so was awarded the contract with the first passports delivered and launched by President Yar’Adua in 2007.
Oluwole was good and tried to play catch up but the technology deployed by ISTL was a lot better and with time as most documents became technologically advanced and linked to biometrics, Oluwole entered its full decline.
In fact the ISTL technology is so good that in 2015, according to a source who did not want to be named, when 54 pilgrims died in a stampede in Saudi Arabia during the hajj, the Nigerian government had to rely on ISTL to help identify the dead through their finger prints since they did not have their travel documents on them when they passed.
When THEWILL visited the place that used to be called Oluwole with Okoduwa in tow, we met a completely razed expanse of land where counterfeiters used to converge and operate. It had just rained that early October afternoon. There were puddles here and there over which traders and shoppers skipped. There were quite a number of parked yellow LT buses and private cars all of which was dwarfed by the four imposing, gold-coloured minarets atop the nearby Central Mosque.
In place of hustling counterfeiters who once held sway in the area, there were now tattooed youngsters with sagging pants and finger-length dreadlocks, most of them smoking weed, cigarette, quaffing drinks from satchet or straight from the bottle.
To many, Oluwole had been a place of last resort, a place where, after all else had failed, you were hopeful of finding someone hawking talismans of hope.
That garden of hopes is no more.
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