*Reaches Level 20 Gifting Status, Places Bets and Wins N85,000
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The concrete walls of Ibara prison rise grey and absolute against the skyline of Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital. 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.
His name is Elijah Oyebode. He is on death row.
The Conviction
According to a Certified True Copy of proceedings at the Osun State High Court in Suit No. HIK/6C/2017, obtained by the reporter, Oyebode conspired on December 22, 2016, to kill Rofiat Adebisi, a final-year student of Osun State University’s Ipetu Ijesha campus.
She stood by a roadside that day waiting for a vehicle to Osogbo. Oyebode carried her in his car and took her to a place where he had her murdered for rituals.
The CTC shows he gave conflicting accounts. In one statement to investigators, he said he negotiated a sexual agreement with her for N2,000, drove her to his rented apartment, had sex with her, went to bathe, and returned to find her motionless on his bed, after which he dumped her body by the roadside.
In a separate extra-judicial statement, he said he used a charm supplied by a herbalist, who stood trial as the third accused, to hypnotise her after picking her up, drove her to the herbalist’s shrine where both men raped her, and was later called back to help remove her body, which was dumped on a lonely road under cover of darkness.
At trial he disowned both versions, denied involvement, and repudiated the statements he made to operatives of the State Security Service and the police.
The court rejected the denial. Medical evidence showed Ms Adebisi died from cardiac arrest caused by suffocation through strangulation. Justice S.O. Falola found Oyebode responsible and sentenced him to death by hanging in 2019.
Level 20 Gifting Status
While death row is designed to be the state’s ultimate expression of confinement, Oyebode has cultivated an active social media presence, amassing followers, participating in livestreams watched by thousands, receiving monetary gifts from supporters, and interacting freely with people outside prison walls.
As of Friday, he maintained at least two TikTok accounts. One, under the handle @ayola.oluwafu, remained active. Through livestreams and audience gifts, the account attained Level 20 gifting status, a milestone requiring substantial financial activity and suggesting 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,” the investigation found.
The Clone Account
The second account was identified through forensic analysis and witness testimony. It was 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,” Ms Awoyele told Saturday Tribune. After she conducted a private investigation and confronted him, he admitted 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 the secondary account on February 14 were uploaded within the same time window as content from the primary account.
“I Confirmed That He Was Indeed in Prison”
Ms Awoyele first encountered him when a friend shared his livestream, noting that he regularly appeared online claiming to be an inmate soliciting funds.
“When I joined the live, I heard someone saying he was in prison. 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,” she recalled.
Initially sceptical, she demanded proof. “At first, I did not believe him. 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 Confession and the Threats
The digital access allowed Oyebode to manipulate external actors to fight his legal battles. Ms Awoyele, acting 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 on a call that he had taken N10,000 from the herbalist and facilitated the victim’s death.
Following that admission, his appellate lawyer withdrew from the case. Ms Awoyele eventually severed contact after Oyebode began using his smuggled phone to issue threats against her from inside the prison.
“Facebook and TikTok Are Full of Prisoners”
In one of Ms Awoyele’s live sessions on April 16, 2026, lasting over an hour and monitored by Saturday Tribune, Oyebode joined and disclosed that many inmates at Ibara have phones and internet access.
“An individual may be in possession of two to three phones. 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 said.
On his earnings: “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 N85,000.”
The court’s CTC shows he sold his victim’s iPhone in 2016. He now operates multiple smartphones inside a maximum-security prison.
The Officer-Mediated Economy
The Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019 places responsibility on custodial centres for the “safe custody and reformation of offenders.” At Ibara, according to this account, that mandate has been overtaken by a parallel economy that is internally governed, officer-mediated and digitally connected to the outside world.
“The warders are not the ones selling phones to us. They only get them for us at the tarmac and smuggle them in for us,” Oyebode said.
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 is our companion, we will definitely pay for its release.”
The warder functions simultaneously as supplier and creditor, extracting money on both sides of the same transaction.
The Drug Trade
“Warders smuggle drugs in for inmates,” Oyebode said. “The inmate might buy the drugs for about N500,000, and the warder who smuggled them in might collect N100,000 from them. So, after repackaging and reselling, the inmates can make N2 million from the drugs.”
“Building Hotels Outside the Prison”
His most serious claim concerned inmates leaving the facility.
“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 said. “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, he offered a blunt assessment: “I will not deceive you; it is no longer a correctional centre. It is corrupting people more.”
What the Law Says
Under Section 29(1)(c) of the NCS Act 2019, any officer who procures or facilitates the use of communication devices commits an offence punishable by a fine of up to N3,000,000, imprisonment for up to three years, or both. Section 29(1)(a) stipulates up to 12 months imprisonment and a N1,000,000 fine for smuggling drugs into a facility.
The 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). The law permits removal of a condemned inmate only under highly regulated emergency medical or mental health circumstances under Sections 24 and 25. Escorting an inmate to private property has no legal basis and is a criminal offence under Section 29(1)(h). If such unauthorised release results in escape, Section 31(2) states the culpable officer commits a felony.
Section 32(4)(b) provides that an officer’s immediate supervising officer shall be sanctioned where unlawful action or negligence is proven, and Section 36(1) provides grounds for prosecution for neglect of public duty.
“There Will Be One or Two Bad Eggs”
Confronted with forensic evidence of livestreaming and monetisation by inmates, the National Spokesperson for the Nigerian Correctional Service, Jane Osuji, acknowledged the vulnerability of custodial walls.
“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 said. “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.”
On the national security dimension: “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. 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 framed contraband as a global challenge, noting the service has publicly destroyed recovered items before the press, said the Comptroller-General maintains zero tolerance for unauthorised gadgets and staff compromise, and disclosed that over 1,400 officers have faced disciplinary action resulting in dismissals, demotions and suspensions regardless of rank.
Special tactical teams conduct unannounced searches alongside routine inspections, and plans are underway to deploy CCTV surveillance across custodial centres.
The NCS appealed to the public to stop sending money or gifting livestreams to inmates.
“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.
Those measures do not, however, explain how a death-row inmate maintained multiple accounts, conducted livestreams, received online gifts, placed sports bets, and described an environment where phones outnumber inmates.
“Install Jammers”
Cybersecurity expert Professor Tunde Olabiyisi said the technological solution is straightforward.
“The first thing is to disable any non-approved device within the prison perimeter. 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,” he said.
Asked whether this would interfere with nearby civilian infrastructure, including the Central Bank facility adjacent to Ibara prison, he said the technology can be configured within a defined perimeter: “It is like setting a perimeter. It will not affect areas outside the premises where you want to use it. So, it is about setting the parameters.”
“A Cosmetic Reform”
Banzak Azeez, a senior lawyer specialising in criminal law, said the NCS Act 2019 was enacted solely to achieve prison reform, and that Section 14(1-8) provides a legal framework for 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 to Nigerian Correctional Service,” he said.
“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,” Azeez said.
The Platform’s Role
While Nigerian prison authorities failed to secure their physical perimeter against contraband, TikTok’s digital infrastructure efficiently processed the payments from these streams.
Through TikTok Live, viewers sent virtual gifts converted into money. The platform processed those transactions, recommended his content to new audiences, and enabled him to build a following despite serving a death sentence. By the platform’s own metrics, he was a commercially active creator.
TikTok’s transparency reports show more than 7.5 million videos removed across Sub-Saharan Africa in the third quarter of 2024, rising to over 8 million in the fourth. Between Q2 2023 and Q4 2024, the company reported a 249.81 per cent increase in content removals across the region. Yet none of those systems detected a convicted murderer broadcasting from death row under his own identity.
A content moderator at TikTok’s Kenya moderation hub told Global Voices in April 2026 that moderators were frequently required to assess videos in languages they did not understand, environments in which context, identity verification and cultural cues can easily be missed.
No Local Footprint
Nigeria remains one of TikTok’s largest markets in Africa, yet the platform operates 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 second reading in the Senate. Its sponsor, Ned Nwoko, argued that the absence of local offices creates a disconnect between platforms and Nigerian users, making complaints, regulatory concerns and moderation challenges harder to address. The legislation has yet to become law.
When the reporter presented the findings to TikTok’s Head of Communications for Sub-Saharan Africa, Keagile Makgoba, he requested the account handles and sought additional time for internal review.
The accounts had been active for months. The creator had achieved significant gifting status. Transactions had been processed. Content had been recommended. Yet it was only after forensic evidence was presented that the platform began investigating.
The Sudden Cleanup
As the investigation was being prepared for publication, TikTok initiated a sweeping, reactive cleanup of its Nigerian operations.
On June 9, while its communications team was still requesting extensions to investigate the flagged accounts, the platform released a Community Guidelines Enforcement Report through national media, claiming to have removed 4.02 million videos in Nigeria and disrupted over 86,000 LIVE sessions for breaching community guidelines. It publicly touted its automated detection technologies and rapid response systems.
The sweep pulled down millions of videos but failed to remove the core account at the centre of the security breach.
Weeks after the purge, the primary account, @ayola.oluwafu, remains live. Throughout the monitoring period, the account holder repeatedly evaded scrutiny by shifting digital identities and periodically changing profile names. It currently operates behind a private lock, with the display name updated to “lesson of God locate me,” paired with a profile picture depicting individuals in military uniform holding firearms.
Publication
This article was published under the Tech Justice and Platform Accountability Project of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), with support from Luminate, and co-published with Nigerian Tribune.
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