Posted by By JULIANA FRANCIS on
A man who fraudulently collected money amounting to over a million naira from nine different people with the promise to give each of them, a two-bedroom flat, located in the Sabo Onike area of Lagos, has blamed a Pastor's curse for his actions.
A man who fraudulently collected money amounting to over a million naira from nine different people with the promise to give each of them, a two-bedroom flat, located in the Sabo Onike area of Lagos, has blamed a Pastor's curse for his actions.
Fatai Oladiran, 37, claimed that a pastor that he once played a fast one on placed the curse on him.
He said: "The pastor works at the Redeemed Christian Church of God. I also attend the church, but I don't belong to his chapel. He wanted to rent a house that was under my care. I contacted the company that owns the property.
The woman handling the property for the company said I should tell the pastor that it was N250, 000 for two years, instead of N100, 000. That was what I did. The pastor later found out. I could hear him and his congregation from my office, praying and cursing me. Since then, I found myself duping people. It was his curses that reduced me to this condition."
According to Oladiran, he first got to know about the curses being rained on him by the pastor and his congregation, when one of the members of the chapel came to tell him. Then he started hearing distinctively the curses from his estate management office, not too far from the church.
As far as Oladiran was concerned, he didn't do anything wrong in his dealings with the pastor. He said he did what the woman attached to the company asked him to do and he collected his share. He explained that the deal would have gone undiscovered if only the company had fulfilled its part of the bargain and renovated the warehouse for the church as promised.
Recollecting the incident, which happened August last year, he said: "They didn't go to renovate the warehouse after collecting money. The pastor later called the company. There, he learnt that the money was not N250, 000. He came to me. I told him it was business. The woman knew the deal had blown open. She begged me not to expose her or she would be sacked. The case was later brought to Sabo police station, since then the pastor had been angry that he came to police station because of me. I heard them praying against the man who took their pastor to the police station. But it was a colonel who brought me to the station that day.
It was even the pastor that called the colonel."
Though the case was said to have been settled at the Sabo police station because the pastor didn't want to prolong the issue, Oladiran rather than going home to sin no more, had gone back to his old habit of duping people.
He denied defrauding nine people, insisting his victims were only five. He has been having a field day until he collected over N100,000 from a student of the University of Lagos for a flat which eight others had already paid for. The sharp student was said to have aided the police in his arrest.
Oladiran said it was never his intention to dupe the victims but just needed money to offset some debts, incurred from a deal gone bad in the Ajah area. He explained that he sold a land at Ajah to a client, but didn't know the land was not that of his colleague who handed it over to him. His client discovered he had been duped and asked for the return of his money.
When Oladiran was wasting time in refunding the money, the man called in members of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC). He said: "In fact, those OPC men were terrible! Aside from the pastor's curses, they were also part of the reason I am here. They tortured me too much. I promised to pay the man. I started collecting money from those people that wanted to collect the two-bedroom flat. I wanted to use the money to pay off that man because of the OPC. I was already expecting some money. About N300,000 from another deal. My plan was to make refunds those people after I've used their money to pay that man. If not that the police arrested me, I would have rallied round to pay them all!"
Daily Sun gathered that Oladiran had been into duping of unsuspecting victims for long. Once he knew the police were looking for him, he would disappear. But the game ended when the UNILAG student, assisted police in tracking him down. He was nabbed while trying to board a bus. Oladiran said he believed things would get better for him, if only the pastor could revoke the curse.