It was all for God.
Everything I have done so far was all for God. I am a driver by profession; I am attached to one of these online stores that do deliveries in and around Lagos. So I have the opportunity of going to people’s homes, offices, places of delivery…you know that sort of thing.
I am also a man who believes I have a calling to start my own church and help people to be closer to God. Every time I dream, I see myself in front of a big congregation preaching the word of God. That’s how I know I have the calling but after many years of hearing God speak to me, I still did not have money to start my own church.
Many times, my salary is never enough to last even two weeks because I have a wife and three children. Taking care of them and my elderly parents in the village is a big burden but I always know that once I start my own church, I will have money from praying special prayers for people, offerings and tithes that people will bring. The only problem is starting the church.
That’s when I began to think maybe I should just go into robbery and get the money to start my church because it was taking such a long time for the dream of having my own church to come to reality.
One day, I attended a crusade, one of these church crusades they hold in schools; I was one of the ushers; that was where I met ‘Tablet’ and we became friends. He too is a Christian brother, he was playing the guitar in the choir. He is so talented that I told him he will head the choir when I start my church. It was through ‘Tablet’, I met the rest of the people that we formed our gang and our specialty is car snatching.
There are six of us, myself, ‘Tablet’, Matey, Austin, Sly, and Emma. What we do is, we usually watch out for certain types of cars, like Camry, in short any Toyota product is good because we get quick buyers.
The first time, we made N950,000, my cut was N450,000. The next time, was N800,000 and my cut was N400,000, that’s because I am the one who formed the gang and I am the one who bought the toy gun.
So far, we have snatched three cars at gun point and though we try not to be the type of gang that kills people, once we show them our gun, which is also a toy gun, but they won’t know, they will co-operate and we will do our business and go.
On the day we were caught, I think someone went to alert police that we were coming on the road with new cars to sell. I mean the cars we have just stolen in Abeokuta, we were taking them to Lagos to sell. We were told there were buyers at Ijora side, so we were driving to meet them, ase na police. They were not buyers, they were police people. That is how I landed here at the station and I co-operated with police.
I told the police everything that happened; we don’t kill people, we just take their cars and that’s all. I will not lie, I am a Christian and i know maybe I should not have been stealing to start my church.
But you see, Ijust wanted to start the business quickly that’s why I came into armed robbery.