Joseph Omoniyi
One of Baba Sala’s children, Emmanuel Adejumo has explained that, his Father whose career was said to have wrecked by the piracy of his movie, ORUN MOORU in 1980 forgave the pirates long time before his death.
Emmanuel Adejumo in an Interview revealed that his father even paid for the release of his offenders from the prison.
He said, “My daddy forgave them a long time ago. When the police locked them up and they were in detention; as hard as things were then, he was still the one paying for their feeding in detention. He gave them food and asked them to confess but they did not confess.
I believe that because of his kindness, one day, one of them confessed that they did it.
He said they offended this man and he kept feeding them and kept asking the police not to torture them. So they confessed.
They willingly confessed and narrated how it all happened. The man that pirated the film; they looked for him but could not find him. He was a member of a cult group.
I heard that the lawyers and the judge also belonged to the same cult he belonged to.
A case was instituted and it was a clear case but the case only dragged on for a long time. When the final verdict was to be given, the man trafficked cocaine to the United States to make money but he was nabbed and jailed for 15 years. My father bailed the operator and the driver from police custody.
The operator and the driver were members of his staff. There is a Yoruba adage that says that people can only assist someone to secure a job but they would never do the work for them. One of them was brought by one of his (my father’s) wives but they were not related.
She just assisted the person to get employed by my daddy but she was not related to him. My daddy provided the money that was used to bail two of those responsible for the piracy – the driver and the operator.
The owner of the cinema was not there when the final verdict was to be given. Remember I said he trafficked cocaine to the US to get more money and he was arrested and jailed for 15 years. He returned after the jail term but he didn’t even last up to six months after his return before he died”.
Emmanuel Adejumo who said he was in form five when the incident happened explained further how the pirates were able to successfully carry out their agenda, “What happened was that the troupe had a show at a cinema in Lagos.
The owner of the cinema cajoled the operator into allowing him to show the film to his wives at home because they were in purdah and forbidden from going to cinemas to see movies.
He promised to bring the film back in the morning and gave them N500 for that. The operator’s salary at the time was N40. After the operator collected N500 from the man, he felt that he could not execute the deal alone, so he co-opted the driver of the group to do the deal with him.
So, when they were packing the film and other equipment, they only carried empty boxes, which were supposed to contain the celluloid. They pretended that the contents were there.
The following morning, they went to the man’s house but he was nowhere to be found. And there was no mobile phone at the time. Later, they realised that the film was missing and that the man had stolen it and taken it away to be pirated. We heard that they were showing the film in Kano or Kaduna and that it was on VHS; that was the beginning of the whole crisis”.
“The loan was not up to N1m, but I can’t remember the exact amount; probably N250,000. He took the loan from the then National Bank. He used two of his houses as collateral for the loan and somebody put up two other houses, which he also used as part of the collateral for the loan”.