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.

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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.

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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.

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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