I FIRST heard of Aderemi Adeoye, the so-called billionaire police commissioner through a close family member a couple of years ago. He recently retired from the Police Force as Commissioner in charge of the Awka, Anambra State, Police Command. Based on the description I received of his activities, he was a cross between a human rights activist and a social media influencer as we have come to know those among Nigerians that are described as such. Until his interview on Arise TV some days ago, all I knew about him came from what I had learned from the said relation of mine. Mr. Aderemi Adeoye, following that account, was very active on Facebook and had many enthusiastic followers, including my informant. 

He made regular posts of his human rights and influencer activities. Among other things, he helped people who had been defrauded to get justice; employed his police network to arrest miscreants or criminals and set straight erring police officers. His family activities were sometimes not left out of his posts. He was by every description of his online activities quite an infectious and very energetic man. He was certainly an unusual police man and as someone raised by a police officer father and with an awareness of the relative anonymity or secrecy that surrounded the task of law enforcement, I thought his Facebook engagements were way out of line. I could not share my relation’s obvious admiration of and enthusiasm about his activities. 

When this relation of mine started talking about the man setting up a cooperative or some kind of online investment, I got a bit concerned. It reignited my suspicion of such schemes, especially when they are carried out online. I don’t quite remember if I was given a name for the online “business” but Adeoye’s invitation to his Facebook followers to invest in it brought to my mind prior words of caution to my relation against having a hand in any such investment. 

Not that I had any evidence of something shady but my ‘’analogue’’ mind just couldn’t absorb the very idea of people who had probably never met face to face before going into a commercial endeavour. It ran against the grain of what many of us have come to take for granted as common sense, especially where online transactions are involved. It smacked of fraud- 419! It all looked not a little reckless but I think over time, I forgot all about Aderemi Adeoye, who in conversations with my relation was often simply referred to as ‘the police man’. ‘’Do you remember that police man I told you about…? He has posted again,’’ was a typical conversation starter. 

A few days before his appearance on Arise TV’s ‘The Morning Show’, I think I read about his retirement from the Police in the media. I saw reports about the Commissioner of Police in Anambra State being pulled out of the Force but I didn’t connect these to Adeoye until his interview on Arise TV. Hours after the interview was aired, my relation suddenly exclaimed with a tone of regret that she had missed the interview of ‘’the police officer’’ on Arise TV. He had informed his followers via a Facebook post a day before that he would be on ‘The Morning Show’. 

I would come upon the recorded version of the interview that had been posted on YouTube not long after that. My relation was able to confirm to me that Mr. Adeoye was ‘’the Police man’’. Later that night, though, I saw a post by someone on Facebook asking to know if he was wrong to think that the Arise TV ‘The Morning Show’ crew was breaching basic rules of journalism by the easy way the anchors bully and disrespect guests on their show in the name of some firebrand kind of adversarial journalism. That was my first hint that something must have gone wrong during the interview. The post on Facebook was requesting an answer to a question that many have in the past asked but found no satisfactory answer to in the charged atmosphere of the pre- and post-election drama of 2023. 

Such questions drew more heat than light, leaving those involved where they were and most times more convinced of the wisdom of their prior position than the contrary position being purveyed by their interlocutors. While the jury may still be out on the desirability or not of ‘The Morning Show’ crew’s interview style, a style for which they have been both excoriated and celebrated, what is not in doubt by the vast majority of those who watched their interview with Mr. Adeoye is that Mr. Adeoye acquitted himself in a grand way. He put his interviewers in their place by his total mastery of the subject at issue, which was why and how a police officer like him ended up running a business and amassing wealth to the level of a billionaire while still in the full employ of the police. 

Early signs that the Arise TV crew of three, especially Reuben Abati and Rufai Oseni, was out on a limb came from Adeoye’s response to their first question, fired by Abati. He misattributed a quote to Adeoye about him proclaiming himself a billionaire whose wealth portfolio would rival that of Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, in ten years’ time. He responded by denying he ever made any such statement and challenged the Arise team or anyone else who had any contrary evidence to produce it. It was a clear case of fact-checking the fact checker and none of Abati, Oseni or Ayo Mario Ese had a word in response. It was dead silence. 

Adeoye quickly gave a run-through of his achievements as a highly-trained, diligent, disciplined and celebrated police officer; the holder of two chieftaincies from Anambra with a street that runs by the Governor’s Lodge named after him. Everything he had to say cohered with the opening montage of tributes by a cross section of people in Awka who praised the retired commissioner. It served as a background to all he would build his defence on. Yes, defence, for he knew he was at Arise TV to defend his integrity despite the failed denial of this claim by these self-proclaimed generals of journalism. 

Rather than follow where the fact leads as unbiased professionals, Abati and Oseni came to the interview apparently with preconceived ideas and the determination to roast their guest. They got served in return by a ‘’mere’’ police man with facts, figures and superior knowledge of the points at issue. Barring any untoward discovery, here is a man, Aderemi Adeoye, to be celebrated beyond retirement. Abati’s closing remark is a climbdown, an attempt at damage control. It, however, betters Oseni’s disgruntled comportment.