Two soldiers got arrested after a viral clip showed them working as bodyguards at Peller and Jarvis’s wedding. Here’s what really happened.
So Peller and Jarvis’s wedding was already the talk of the internet. Now it’s trending for a completely different reason, and honestly, nobody saw this one coming.
Two Nigerian Army soldiers have landed in trouble for showing up to the wedding as private security. Yes, actual soldiers, moonlighting as bouncers at a TikToker’s wedding. The military police weren’t having it, and they were picked up on the morning of July 5.
Sahara Reporters named them as Private Onasanya Ifeoluwa and Private Ukpai Onyinyechi, both attached to a medical unit in Obalende, Lagos.
The wedding, which happened on July 31 in Lagos, was livestreamed, and clips from it flooded social media almost instantly. One clip in particular caught everyone’s eye. It showed a soldier walking content creator Ivanna into the venue, basically playing bodyguard for her.
People online didn’t find it cute at all. One user asked on X, “Ivanna carry soldier come Peller and Jarvis wedding keh? For wetin?” And that pretty much summed up how a lot of people felt. Watching a man in uniform, someone trained for actual combat, reduced to red-carpet escort duty for an influencer? It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
This isn’t a one-off thing either. Just days before this, a soldier got arrested for begging an influencer for money on TikTok, still in his military fatigues. So the army is clearly in a mood to clean house right now, cracking down hard on anything that makes the uniform look bad.
But here’s the thing people keep bringing up whenever these stories happen: why are soldiers doing this in the first place? It always circles back to welfare. Soldiers dealing with a demanding, dangerous job, and reportedly poor pay, will always find side ways to make extra money, even if it means risking their career.
The government has tried to respond. President Tinubu recently approved 24,000 new recruits and an 80% salary bump for troops. Whether that actually trickles down and stops soldiers from picking up random gigs like wedding security, we’ll have to wait and see.
For now, though, Peller and Jarvis’s big day keeps giving people something new to talk about. First it was the wedding gifts. Now it’s this. What next?
