Nollywood filmmaker Lancelot Imasuen has revealed that the Bakassi Boys arrested his distributor and accosted actor Sam Dede after the release of the original "Issakaba" in 2001. He shared the account in a new interview with Channels Television, as the sequel "Issakaba: The Return" approaches its November 13 cinema release.
Imasuen said the vigilante group felt the film exposed too much about them. He said the distributor handling the film in Aba was arrested by the group. He added that Sam Dede, who played the lead character Ebube, was accosted in Aba while travelling to Port Harcourt.
He said the group confronted the filmmakers over how they had come to know so much about their activities. "They were asking, how did we know about them?" Imasuen said. He explained that the film's portrayal of the group was drawn from real events, not invention. "They were not fallacy, they were true," he said. "We followed the story tenaciously as it was played in real time."
Imasuen said the fear around the film was genuine at the time. "Our fears then were real," he said. "We had that fear that, are you sure these guys would not come to us?" He said the success of the film made it impossible to pull back, and that the motivation behind it went beyond money. "The success was not about, 'Oh, there was money to be made,'" he said. "It was about the reality that was with us."
He also recalled that several other films on the same subject came out around the same period, among them "Great Vigilante," "Bakassi Boys" and "Ashes to Ashes."
The original "Issakaba" remains one of the most referenced films in Nollywood's history, built on the real activity of the Bakassi Boys vigilante group in the South East in the late 1990s. Imasuen is now revisiting that story with "Issakaba: The Return," a sequel he wrote, directed and produced, bringing Sam Dede back as Ebube alongside Chidi Mokeme, Iyabo Ojo, Regina Daniels, Phyna, Nosa Rex, Alex Usifo, Charles Okafor, Itele the Icon, Mark Angel and Chiwetalu Agu. The film opens in cinemas nationwide on November 13, 2026, through Blue Pictures.
