All around Abule Egba area of Lagos, they call him Okuta (Stone). But his real names are Oluwasegun Kokumo Raji. The fear of Okuta in that area and in the Lagos underworld of the 80s and 90s was the beginning of wisdom. He was feared and practically revered. But today he is an evangelist. Okuta, in this interview, took KAYODE FALADE through his past of ignominy, the brutal and ruthless world of the underworld and his final battle. Excerpts:
I had been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and I found myself in the Jos prison. There I began my sentence. But after a while, I thought about it: would I spend the next 10 years of my life in this hole? There and then the seed of escape started germinating in my mind. There were about eight gangs in the Jos Prisons then. They were the firewood gang, lavatory gang, the grass cutting gang, the kitchen gang – which I belonged to and others.
You would notice that wells are usually sunk very near the fence. This was also the case in the Jos prison then too. After sometime that I had been contemplating escape, I decided to share my thoughts with a slightly elderly inmate. He was serving life for illegal mining.
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