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Bobrisky, VDM, Falz And Our Very Dark End (1) [OPINION]

Published

8 months ago

October 11, 2024

Tunde Odesola

I’m no Catholic but I wish to make a confession. The headline of this article should have been one of these two: “Bobrisky: The beauty and the beast” or “Bobrisky: The lion and the jewel.” I prefer the first headline to the second for the simple reason that nothing is jewelling about the ongoing Bobrisky saga, though I can’t ever get tired of reading Wole Soyinka’s fourth play written in 1959 after ‘The Invention’ (1957), ‘The Swamp Dwellers’ (1958), and ‘A Quality of Violence’ (1959). However, I ran with the headline of this article because of its encompassing nature. Only journalists will understand.

Simply put, the tripodal tango among Baroka; the Lion, Sidi; the Jewel, and Lakunle; the Semi-illiterate teacher, mirrors the interplay between tradition and modernisation just as the Bobrisky prison saga underscores the effects of corruption, misgovernance and social media on a decadent society.

Do you love to explore wildlife? Come with me, then.

Gold is the mane on his head. So are his weapons of death. Those unlucky to come across him on the day the road is famished never lived to tell the story. They carry to Alákejí, the land of the dead, telltale signs of the king’s deadly weaponry on their mutilated necks, torsos and faces.

By virtue of hailing from the lineage of fearless hunters who fought in the Kiriji War at Ìgbájo, the citadel of the brave, I understand the language of wildlife but I don’t flaunt my mystical powers over the lords of the wild, because self-preservation is the first law of the jungle.

I say to you, there’s no other beast bejewelled with gold like the lion; gold mane, gold teeth, gold claws, gold eyes and gold skin. Out of respect, I won’t engage in tangling toe-to-toe and eyeball-to-eyeball with a lion. Verily, I say unto you, the fearsome majesty and golden nature of the lion could only have been forged in the furnace of bestiality.

May it not be your portion to come face-to-face with the golden beast, whom many Africans erroneously call the king of the jungle, because its striped big brother, the tiger, is not native to our land. But wildlife experts have, time and again, proved that the tiger is stronger than the lion.

Between February and September, this year, there has been two reported cases of lion attacks on humans in Nigeria, both resulting in death. The first tragedy was at the zoo of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, where a seasoned veterinary technologist, Mr Bode Olawuyi, was mauled by a lion while the latest fatality occurred at the zoo of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta, where a zookeeper, Babaji Daule, was killed by another golden beast.

Losing two lives to lions within seven months raises eyebrows over zoo management in the country, because both attacks were the outcomes of human errors – Man forgot to cinch the dens’ locks. Potentially, more human lives could have been lost in both attacks. While I sympathise with the families of both victims and pray for the repose of their souls, it behoves regulatory institutions to have a look at wildlife handling across the country.

But it’s not only Olawuyi and Daule who are victims, the lions are victims, too. Though human life is considered worthier than lion life, the two lions that attacked Olawuyi and Daule respectively were only acting true to their God-endowed DNA. Sadly, however, they got killed for being what they were created to be. Their death is like killing a dog for barking or a cock for crowing.

Because of their genetic code, lions cannot feel guilt for killing because they’re born to kill. Domestication can’t remove the lion in lions. Stretching the argument a little further, what Man calls natural disasters – flooding, erosion, famine, wildfires etc – are essentially man-made. Man, therefore, needs to look in the mirror.

At birth, his parents christened him Olanrewaju Idris Okuneye. That was 33 years ago. When he underwent remodelling, however, he took a risk, picked a new name, Bobrisky, and bided his time before adding an alias, “Mummy of Lagos”, to the new name while a decadent society applauded.

With a steady stream of clientele, life as a retooled piece of work was good for former Mr Olanrewaju Idris Okuneye. So, he upped the scale by desiring enhanced boobs and booty but never got the guts to replace his dangler with a slit. That was why he identified as a man when he came before Justice Abimbola Awogboro of the Federal High Court, Ikoyi, during his arraignment and conviction for naira abuse on April 12, 2024.

In the eyes of the law, the self-acclaimed Mummy of Lagos is either a Daddy or a Zaddy. And because he’s physiologically and confessionally a male, the lie by prison officials about their purported confusion over which jail, male or female, to put Bobrisky into, is brainless.

As I said in an earlier article on Bobrisky, it would not be utterly wrong for Bobrisky, a man, to go into a female restroom on account of his identification as a female, because he would pose a threat to biological females. Bobrisky and his ilk are in the minority. Therefore, when using a public bathroom, his right to freely identify as a woman should be subsumed under the right of biological females who are in the majority, and who would naturally frown on a man sharing the same bathroom with them.

In Africa, particularly Nigeria, names mostly embody the ancestries, births or characters of the bearers. Names have meaningful meanings. From the get-go, the risk in Bobrisky’s name was never in doubt as Idris, like a rolling stone, has moved from one controversy to another since he identified as a female.

Freed on August 5, 2024, after serving time for naira abuse, Bobrisky landed in another hot soup in September 2024, after he claimed in a leaked phone call that he didn’t serve his six-month sentence in jail and that his anonymous godfather paid the EFCC N15 million to drop the money laundering charges against him.

Like the cases of the lion attacks in Ife and Abeokuta, which have different layers of victims, the ongoing Bobrisky saga also has different layers of victims. I shall come to that later.

In the phone call, Bobrisky, an adult male born with Adam’s apple aka gògògóngò, which the Yoruba believe to be the stopper that keeps the secrets brimming in a man’s belly from spilling out of his mouth, spewed the secrets of the clandestine favour wrought by his godfather, like a four-year-old showing off her new doll to her playmates.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: The Bile In Oshiomhole’s Heart

In the leaked phone call, which contains actionable innuendos, a voice purported to be Bobrisky’s spoke after social media influencer, Martins Otse, popularly known as Verydarkblackman, spoke. Otse, widely called VDM, said in his opening remarks, “Alright, in respect to Bobrisky, what I’m about to post now, a lot of name (sic) would be mentioned, these are people that I also respect and I believe a lot of Nigerians respect them as well. I am very, very disappointed in the agencies that are involved in this, and I believe that this call recording that I’m about to play, even Bobrisky will not expect it (chuckles). That is what is crazy.

“But all the people that would be mentioned, I don’t care, you understand, I don’t care, and from today, no longer respect for all of you, you understand, because all of una na di same, and it’s pretty obvious that in Nigeria, the law only work (sic) against the poor people, you understand. Now after this video, I would expect that the EFCC would do a deep investigation on everybody that is involved in this case, and also they would bring the whole officers that participated in this and collected and spent this money that is involved. Thank you very much.”

Narrating his prison ordeal in the phone call, the voice of Bobrisky which comes after VDM’s says, “You know, I’m a very big influencer, I have over five million followers on my Instagram. So, my Facebook, and they are paying me on my Facebook every month. So, I’m ok. So, they (EFCC) were like all those money cannot still make me buy house of N450 million house in Pinnock and where I’m staying in Chevron, blablabla…, they come with money laundering sha, they charge me to court. When they charged me to court, we had to beg them that ok, if they want to remove the money laundering, how much would they collect? They said we should go and bring N15 million, that they would remove the money laundering…”

To be continued

News

OPINION: Children’s Day And The Scam Of Tomorrow

Published

2 days ago

May 28, 2025

Editor

By Israel Adebiyi

Once upon a time in many Nigerian homes, there was a rhythm to childhood. It echoed in the laughter of children gathered under the moonlight, listening to folktales from wise grandmothers—stories of Tortoise and the hare, morality and mischief, hard work and honesty. It echoed in warm evenings of family dinners, morning treks to school in uniforms neatly ironed, and the comfort of knowing that adults were in charge—parents, teachers, and a government that at least pretended to care. That rhythm has long faded.

Today, the Nigerian child is born into chaos, grows up amid contradictions, and learns too early that promises mean nothing. Each May 27, we gather to recite that children are “the leaders of tomorrow,” but what we fail to admit is that this tomorrow is deliberately being sabotaged. It is not just lost; it is being stolen in broad daylight.

Let’s Begin with Education. Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world—an estimated 18.5 million. That number alone should spark a national emergency, yet it is spoken of with such casualness you’d think it were a weather forecast. Millions of children roam the streets hawking sachet water, fruits, or plastic wares when they should be in classrooms. In the North, Almajiri children continue to be abandoned in large numbers under a system that provides neither education nor security. In many Southern states, children are seen as economic props, pushed into trade or house help servitude.

Those who make it to school are not necessarily lucky. Public schools across the country are crumbling. From leaking roofs and broken chairs to the absence of toilets, blackboards, and learning aids, many Nigerian classrooms are not places of learning but sites of struggle. The curriculum remains outdated, irrelevant to modern realities, and poorly delivered. While the world is building coding academies for toddlers, we are still teaching children to cram colonial poetry and 1980s textbook diagrams.

Teachers, the supposed nation-builders, are grossly underpaid and in many cases, underqualified. In some schools, a single teacher manages four to six classes. Training and capacity development are either nonexistent or political rituals. How does a child receive quality education when their teacher is themselves a victim of a broken system?

Worse still, our schools are no longer safe. With rising cases of abductions—from Chibok to Kagara to Dapchi—parents are forced to weigh the risk of education against the price of safety. This is a dilemma that should never exist in a sane society. A government that cannot secure its schools has no business sermonizing about the importance of education.

In the health sector, Nigeria’s infant and child mortality rates remain among the highest globally. According to UNICEF, one in ten Nigerian children dies before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable causes. Many Nigerian children still die from diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia, and malnutrition—ailments the world conquered decades ago. Our immunization coverage is poor, especially in rural areas where vaccine hesitancy and infrastructural gaps persist.

Traditional birth attendants continue to thrive in areas where government clinics are either too far, too expensive, or simply unavailable. Expectant mothers still deliver on floors or with torchlight. Where children are born into such conditions, the cycle of vulnerability begins at birth.

Here are the unspoken scars of the Nigerian Child – Abuse and Rights Violations. The Nigerian Child Rights Act (2003) is a comprehensive legal document that affirms the rights of every Nigerian child to survival, development, protection, and participation. Yet, over 20 years later, some states have still not domesticated this law. And in states where it exists, enforcement is patchy at best.

Children suffer physical abuse, sexual exploitation, forced labour, trafficking, and emotional neglect daily. From baby factories to underage marriages to child soldiers in conflict zones, Nigeria has become a theatre of child rights violations. It is one thing to be poor. It is another to be unprotected.

When we say children are “the leaders of tomorrow,” what exactly do we mean? A child growing up amid poverty, violence, abuse, and hunger will not suddenly blossom into a competent leader because we proclaimed it. Leadership is cultivated. And cultivation requires care, systems, and consistent investment. We are not preparing children for tomorrow; we are abandoning them to survive today.

In many homes, the idea of parenting has become largely transactional. Economic hardship has eroded family bonding. Tales by moonlight have been replaced by cartoons on phones. Parents, stressed and underpaid, often have nothing left to give emotionally. We are raising children in isolation—physically present but emotionally disconnected. The result is a generation growing up without empathy, values, or vision.

Parents and communities must take back the moral responsibility of shaping children. Government cannot parent our children for us. But government must provide the basic scaffolding—schools, clinics, protection, and justice.

In the final analysis, May 27 must stop being a day of sugar-coated statements. It must become a mirror—a day of national reflection, policy accountability, and renewed investment in our children’s future.

The Nigerian child is not asking for luxuries. They are asking for classrooms with roofs, teachers who show up, clinics that work, and laws that protect. They are asking for the basic dignity of being raised in a country that sees them not as statistics, but as citizens. Until then, the phrase “leaders of tomorrow” remains a grand deception—a scam coated in celebration.

It is time to give children more than cake and fanfare. It is time to give them a future.

News

CBN Donates Motorized Fire Caddy To Federal Fire Service In Bauchi

Published

2 days ago

May 28, 2025

Editor

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Bauchi State Branch has donated a Motorised Fire Caddy to the Federal Fire Service (FFS) Headquarters, Bauchi State Command.

Speaking during the handing over of the mobile fire suppression system on Tuesday, Mr James Laburta, the CBN Bauchi Branch Controller, said the gesture was part of its corporate social responsibility.

He commended the Federal Fire Service for its dedication toward fighting fire outbreaks in the state and reaffirmed the bank’s commitment to community safety.

According to him, the gesture underscored the importance of partnerships between government agencies and corporate institutions in safeguarding lives and property.

Responding, DCF Babangida Abba, the Acting State Controller of the Federal Fire Service in the state, expressed profound gratitude toward the gesture.

He emphasised the critical role of such support in enhancing the command’s capacity to respond swiftly to fire emergencies, especially in hard-to-reach areas.

Abba noted that the donation came at a crucial time, given the recent surge in fire incidents across the state.

While encouraging the general public to remain vigilant and proactive about fire safety, he assured that the equipment would be effectively deployed for emergency response and training.

Also, speaking at the sideline of the event, ASF Umar Lawal, the Public Relations Officer of the Fire Service, said the equipment is used in areas where traditional fire hydrants or fixed systems are not readily available.

“This unit is typically portable and easy to maneuver, making it suitable for various locations.

“The motorised fire caddy is designed for skilled and unskilled Firefighters to use as a quick-response method for Firefighting in their early stages.

“As it beats response time to emergencies, it’s also used for institutional training reaching out to incident ground scene especially in hard-to-reach areas where our Fire truck can’t have access to the fire ground,” he said.

News

75-year-old Edo Pilgrim Dies During Hajj In S’Arabia

Published

2 days ago

May 27, 2025

Editor

A 75-year-old woman from Edo State, Adizatu Dazumi, died during the 2025 Hajj in Saudi Arabia.

Dazumi was from Jattu Uzairue in Etsako West Local Government Area.

According to The PUNCH, pilgrim died on Monday at King Fahad General Hospital in Makkah after a short illness.

The Chairman of the Edo State Muslim Pilgrims Welfare Board, Musah Uduimoh, confirmed her death on Tuesday.

Uduimoh said Dazumi became ill shortly after performing Tawaaf (walking around the Kaaba) and was taken to the hospital on Sunday. She passed away the next day.

“She was buried in Makkah on the same day, according to Islamic tradition, and her family in Jattu Uzairue has been informed,” Uduimoh said.

He sent his condolences to her family and assured other pilgrims that the board is committed to their health and safety.