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OPINION: Bisi Akande, Poverty And Ige’s Death

Published

10 months ago

February 11, 2025

Festus Adedayo

In her biography of Ayo Rosiji, one of the key politicians of Nigeria’s first republic, entitled Man With Vision, Australia-born historian, Nina Mba, citing a Holmes, called biographers “People who knead people.” In other words, biographers knead their subjects from raw flour into edible form. You then wonder what the late lecturer in the History department of the University of Lagos would have called autobiographers. Self-conjurers, perhaps. For, in the process of piecing together bits about themselves, those who write their life histories have been accused of selfishly adding together a mish-mash of two unrelated traditional soup recipes, (lúrú and sápá) falsifying realities and mis-painting the picture of truth. Last week, sidekick of the Nigerian president and former Chairman of the All Progressives Party, (APC) Chief Bisi Akande, chose to conjure the spirit of a dead dog. In a podcast interview with popular broadcaster, Edmund Obilo, which centered around his autobiography, My Paticipations, the 86-year old came under heavy shellacking on allegations of historical revisionism. The specifics were that he kneaded a wrong dough of history and made a wrong portrayal of himself. In that interview, Akande coasted home with a self portraiture as a man who sat by the edge of a smelly sewage but chose not to smell the rank odour of rot.

By the way, I passed Akande’s country-home, Ila-Orangun, Osun State, by about a week ago. I was on my way to the burial of the mother of Oba Adedokun Omoniyi Abolarin, the Orangun of Oke-Ila. You cannot fail to notice Akande’s house. Its arrogance and domineering spirit in the midst of abject poverty are worn on the mansion’s lapel. Architectured to sit imperially among natives’ poor houses, the mansion fittingly tells the story of a countryside-born boy made good. Don’t bother yourself with the architectural gaffe of such a mansion being surrounded with lock-up shops. It still doesn’t diminish the majesty you see in Akande’s home. Its outward finishing struck me as a repeat of same architecture of his house in Oluyole, Ibadan. Both bear similarities with the State Secretariat’s roofing and burnt brick finishing at Abere which I also saw. His government constructed the secretariat. So, when, in the Obilo interview, Akande kept referencing his retirement to his Ila country-home, planting pepper at his backyard and deliberately choosing not to live the posh life of a president’s consort in Abuja, do not be fooled to believe that the old man lives in less splendour.

Sorry, I digressed. Akande made two weighty assertions in his controversy-baiting interview. One is that the presidency under Olusegun Obasanjo allegedly killed Chief Bola Ige. The second was that the pan-Yoruba sociocultural group, Afenifere died with the assassination of the Attorney General of the Federation. As the Yoruba say of words in convoluted circumstances as this, they need to be surgically placed in their contexts (élá l’ọrọ ). In doing this, let me begin from Akande’s assertion on Afenifere’s purported death. There is no denying the fact that Chief Ige was the darling of Southwest Nigeria. At his death, the Yoruba lost its most valuable political leader who was famously referred to as Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s heir apparent. At campaign grounds, the evocative song sang to usher Ige into such arena was “Ige has arrived! Ige has arrived! Awolowo’s heir apparent has arrived!” (Ìgè dé, Ìgè dé o, Aróle Awolowo, Ìgè dé o!).

Ige was proud of his Yoruba heritage. He wasn’t one who prostrated on all fours to a cow for the sake of eating its protein. He never suffered fools gladly and belonged to the school of thought which says that every impulse a man strives to strangle broods in his mind and poisons him. So, he spoke his mind without caring whose ox was gored. A lawyer friend once told me of how Ige beckoned onto him and his friend at a public event and, in his usual lacerating words, tongue-lashed them for putting on other tribe’s cap, rather than the Yoruba’s. Though he spoke Hausa very fluently, having schooled in Kaduna, Ige took great pleasure in his mother tongue.

The truth however remains that the January 1999 D’Rovans hotel presidential primary election of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) which took place in Ibadan marked the beginning of the cracks in the wall of the AD and Afenifere. It has been alleged that Ige sponsored the creation of alternate sociocultural groups to get back at the so-called “Ijebu Mafia” who allegedly worked against his presidential aspiration. To that extent, Akande may be right that Ige saw the fractionalization of the original Afenifere. To however say that Afenifere died with Ige will be excessive hyperbole.

Again, after the death of Ige, there doesn’t seem to exist any group, apart from the two factions of the sociocultural group – either Chief Reuben Fasoranti or Ayo Adebanjo’s – who can surpass the duo in how they deify or factor in Yoruba’s recent ancestor, Chief Awolowo, in all they do. I am sure the man Chief Akande is his sidekick, Tinubu, in his closet or among his coterie of Yoruba hangers-on, gloats, like Obasanjo did in his autobiography, that the presidency which Awolowo couldn’t attain in his lifetime, was handed him on a platter. Since Tinubu became president, unless I missed it, I am yet to hear him pay tribute to Awolowo’s fabled sagacity in governance. I do not know if Bisi Akande, who is now mouthing Afenifere’s Catholicism, more than the Pope, has ever spoken to the president about this historical memory loss. It was good Obilo asked Akande if the Fasoranti who Tinubu visited in Akure as president wasn’t head of the same Afenifere he claimed was dead or if the members of the group Tinubu hosted in Aso Rock belonged to Ohanaeze Ndigbo. Such selective memory is said to be Akande’s stock-in-trade. When he engages in this kind of revisionism, his opponents remind us of his self-confession he made that he was never an Awoist until Chief SM Afolabi invited him to be a member of Awo’s Committee of Friends.

On the assassination of Ige in 2001, there is also no doubting the fact that the failure of the federal government to find the killers of this highly respected Nigerian is a blot on the Obasanjo government. On the list of assassins who possessed the raison d’être to kill Ige, the fact that the presidency ranks top is an unassailable fact. If you knew the awe with which Ige was held in Yorubaland, his resignation from the Obasanjo government would indeed have dented the Ota farmer’s second term presidential bid. However, with Ige’s obsession for his Yorubaness and the disdain and awe with which the north held an obsessive Yoruba in power at that time, Ige’s presidential aspiration could not have stopped Obasanjo’s second term bid. After all, even when the southwest refused to vote for him in the first term, Obasanjo still became president. If Akande was desirous of Ige’s killers being apprehended, why didn’t he factor in more theories on the assassination? For instance, could some persons, who nursed ambition to be Nigeria’s president someday, have stopped him, knowing that an Ige presidency in 2003 could put paid to their ambition? Yes, the theory of armed robbery has been eliminated due to the clinical planning of the assassination, but, is there any possibility that we cast our nets too narrowly?

It is of great importance for us to drill down further into Bisi Akande’s claim that the government headed by Senator Rashidi Ladoja, as Oyo State governor, demanded and got a nolle prosequi in the trial of alleged Ige murderers. Was it a deliberate attempt to play politics, attempt to even political score or share political banditry? Not only did Ladoja denounce this claim with facts, he went ahead to accuse Akande of a penchant for lying while threatening to drag Akande to court for defamation.

It should also be said that while Akande was enamoured of unraveling the killers of his mentor, Chief Ige, under his leadership and direction as governor of Osun State, his ‘boys’ supervised the impeachment of his deputy governor, Iyiola Omisore, allegedly so that the Ile-Ife-born politician could lose his immunity and be ready to face trial for the same murder. If I were Akande’s interviewer, I would have raised further question for his answer on what his government did to unravel the assassination, a few days before Ige’s murder, of an Osun State legislator, Odunayo Olagbaju. So, what moral right does he have to ask Obasanjo to find Ige’s killers when his own government equally looked the other way when Olagbaju was felled? In the interview, Akande made many other assertions on Ige’s death which should make the police ask him, instead of Ladoja, to come forward for interrogation so that the spirit of Bola Ige could get justice finally. He appeared to know more than he was telling the world, even by his own admission.

Let me go to another issue of importance in the Akande interview. Of recent, the power apparatchik that surrounds the Nigerian president must have discovered that the narrative that all his life, Bola Tinubu had wanted to become president, was flawed. At a meeting with some political operatives immediately after attending a Chatham House engagement in December, 2022, Tinubu was seen on video telling them that “Political power is not going to be served in a restaurant. They don’t serve it a la carte. At all cost, fight for it, grab it and run with it”. The vehemence with which then presidential aspirant Tinubu told these operatives of the cold-bloodedness of power had same cadence and grits with the vehemence with which a leopard pursues an impala. Tinubu sliced the words with his teeth with same clinical finish and precision with which the leopard slices the impala’s throat. So, when, a few weeks ago, some misguided fellows, without the president’s consent, impeached Mudashiru Obasa, erstwhile Lagos House Speaker who the Lagos Landlord installed by himself, they courted the wrath of a man who though shoulders the behemoth hunk of flesh of an elephant, is yet interested in the flesh of a grasshopper. Since 1999, Tinubu has held Lagos as a fief, his incisors tightened round the neck of the politics and economy of the state.

No political juggernaut in the Tinubu political clan had enough cognate sidekick ‘followership’ around the president to dissolve the above narrative in the minds of the world like Bisi Akande. Since they both left office as governors of Osun and Lagos in 2007, Akande has maintained his political ‘follow-follow’ role around Tinubu. He was the most qualified for the task. So, in the Obilo interview, Akande attempted to push a counter-narrative. Tinubu didn’t want to be president, he emphasized. There was a bedlam in the Tinubu camp when he told all the scroungers around him that he would not be contesting for the presidency, Akande said further. Pius Akinyelure attempted to convince him, yet he would not bulge. Akande then had to be enlisted to do the convincing. He then told Tinubu that his being Nigeria’s president was a clarion call which he must yield to. In other words, Tinubu was persuaded against his earlier wish to be Nigeria’s president.

But, as James Hadley Chase volunteered in one of his classics, a liar must have a very good memory. The interviewer then momentarily badged in. But, that same Tinubu told Nigerians it was his lifelong ambition to be Nigeria’s president? Obilo asked. In fact, at the famous but controversial Abeokuta campaign in June 2022 where it was believed he dared Muhammadu Buhari to do his worse, Tinubu actually told the world that he, the godfather, had come to take over a throne that rightly belonged to him. With that Emilokan pronouncement, Tinubu literally said he was tired of playing the second fiddle. When the interviewer confronted Akande with Tinubu’s claim of entitlement to the presidency, the Tinubu sidekick went into an incoherent waffle. With that Abeokuta speech whose summary was akin to “my feet are tired,” many of Tinubu’s followers have compared his audacity and self-entitlement mentality to the seat of Nigeria’s president to that of African-American rights activist, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on the American Montgomery City Lines on December 1, 1955.

As it is with politicians who play the ostrich with verifiable facts, in the interview, Akande also attempted to muffle the facts of Buhari’s opposition to Tinubu’s presidency. In the Abeokuta declaration, it was obvious that the “they” Tinubu knocked for putting barriers before his ambition were Buhari, Godwin Emefiele and their accomplices. So, why was Akande attempting to potato a glaring fact that is negative to his party, the APC?

The final issue of concern in the Akande interview is his claim that only lazy Nigerians are hungry. While the interviewer squared up with him admirably over this claim, Akande’s fabled gambit of playing the ostrich sprang up here. He couldn’t see hunger in the land, he claimed. To be fair to the ex-APC chairman, he may not see hunger if his impoverished kinsmen in Ila-Orangun have found him too insulated from their existential plights, so much that going to him for help is a waste. None of his children, it is obvious, with his role as consort of the Villa, would feel the hunger in the land. So, how could he see hunger? Even when confronted with palpable cases of hunger under the government of a man he claimed was next good news after the so-called discovery of River Niger by Mungo Park in 1795, he still defiantly claimed that the pepper he allegedly planted at his backyard was the antidote to the impoverishment sown by the Tinubu government. If I may ask, why did Chief Akande ask the president to put his daughter in charge of dollar-denominated National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) and not ask that she heads Ogun Osun River Basin Authority so that she would plant “one grain of corn and reap a thousand cobs”?

All the above put together remind me that, in their daily fight for dominance and conquest, a fleeting nature of power and dominance exists among Nigerian politicians. It is the type of desperation found among the lion and a warthog. In Nigerian politics, there is an unending, constant and relentless struggle between preys and predators, with each seeking dominance and conquest. In doing this, politicians deploy worldly cunning to foist false narratives on the populace. Bisi Akande’s interview and a huge chunk of his autobiography are a further reinforcement of this frightening fight in the political wild.

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OPINION: Nigeria’s ‘Sheikh Of The Slaughters’

Published

2 hours ago

November 25, 2025

Editor

By Suyi Ayodele

The festive period is here, yet one wonders how the sound of fireworks will affect us, given our recent experiences in the hands of terrorists and bandits. I also wonder how the elderly women we saw in the video of the attack and abduction at Eruku town in Kwara State will react to the sound of knockouts this season. This is not the best of times for us. We have never had it this bad. Why does terrorism thrive here, and the government remains flat-footed? Emma Sky provides an answer.

The British adviser to the US military in Iraq states: “Corrupt regimes and terrorists keep each other in business. It’s a symbiotic relationship.” He made this remark while speaking about the connection between terrorists and those in government.

Chapter two of the 270-page book, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, written by the American journalist, author and news commentator, Michael Weiss and the columnist for UAE-based English daily, The National, Hassan Hassan, (Pg.20, 2015), opened with the above quote ascribed to Sky. The authors took that route to underscore the claims in many quarters that terrorism is not just a mere game but a transactional enterprise between those in power and the agents of death, the terrorists. The sub-title of that chapter, ‘Sheik of the Slaughters’, tells the story more. It is our today’s headline

The cliche: “to win the battle and lose the war”, often used in military circles, is defined as: “to achieve a minor success or victory, but lose or fail to achieve a larger, more important, or overall goal, especially when the larger failure is at least partly due to the smaller victory.” (Collins COBUILD Idioms dictionary, 3rd edition, 2012)

Nigeria, at the moment, presents a stark reversal of the old saying. Here, we have lost the battle and are dangerously close to losing the war. We sure need Deus ex Machina – the Greek plot device – to serve as denouement and rescue the nation. The bitter truth is that despite extensive propaganda about “technically defeating” terrorism, the terrorists are now firmly among us! Unfortunately, our response so far reflects the same predictable, panic-driven approach of previous years!

Our governments – federal, state and local – do not only negotiate with terrorists. Officials at various levels openly associate with them, attend their social functions and take photographs with individuals responsible for widespread loss of life. Not long ago, there was a report that the government paid a particular terrorist group a substantial sum of money to recover a lethal weapon the blood-sucking demons seized from our military. It was at that time that, if left in the hands of the terrorists, the weapon could be used to shoot down our president’s aircraft!

Most states in the North pay terrorists and bandits in order to maintain a semblance of peace. Farmers and other residents in the region also pay these violent groups simply to plant and harvest their crops. When individuals are kidnapped, ransom is paid, depending on the number, the circumstances and their identities, or governments ‘negotiate’ their release. In some instances, we are told that our security agencies “rescued” victims after “exchange of fire with the abductors.”

Nigeria is in ruins! Pardon the sharpness of that expression, but a milder word seems inadequate! We live in fear, perpetually at the mercy of terrorists and bandits. In the past, we slept with both eyes closed. Over time, we learnt to sleep with one eye closed. Today, we hardly sleep at all – and it is not because we suffer from insomnia, but because those more powerful than the State appear to exert control across the nation from the North to South and East to West! The government is battered, those in authority are overwhelmed!

This is not the time to play politics in Nigeria. The nation is in bad shape. Non-state actors are in control of our affairs. Those we entrust our lives to are practically absent. The leaders are in panic mode just as the governed are marooned on the island of insecurity. The iconoclast rapper, Eedris Abdulkareem, did not see anything when he sang Nigeria jaga jaga. Now is the time the protest song is most relevant!

The humanity in us dictates we should pity President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The old fox must have realised the wisdom in the caution of our wise ones that no one should sell gravel as goods. The exchange currency is usually in pebbles, our forebears posit. Today’s power wielders in Nigeria know where what is hitting them comes from. They sold sand as goods to Nigerians and Nigeria in 2014, when they politicised the mass ‘abduction’ of school children. Today, they are being paid in the same coins of pebbles (àwon tó ta ojà iyèpè ti ńgb’owó òkúta). This is sad because we are all victims!

The Yoruba indigenous religion, Ifa, in Oyeku Meji, warns that when the enemies gather to wage war against the all-female-inhabited town, no wise man should join the venture (tí wón bá sí’gun Ìlúbìrin, má bã won lo). I once asked an elder to interpret the caution in that Ifa Corpus. His response is very instructive here. The all-female-inhabited town, Ìlúbìrin the elders said, is always calm like the duck in hibernation (Ìlúbìrin máa ńdáke róró bíi pépéye tó sàba). He explained further that the gentle bird does not fight on its own because it is a bird of the women’s cult. It has an unseen army fighting its battles.

That unseen army is what the elders of my place call èsan (vengeance). The Holy writ, the Bible, says: “vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord” (Deuteronomy:32:35). The gods and humans fight on behalf of the duck (àti ebora àti ènìyàn níí ja ìjà pépéye), the elder concluded. We are tempted to ask the leaders of today if they have ever broken the eggs of a duck in hibernation. If they answered in the affirmative, we would ask them to seek help. They need it!

The event of the last one week have further confirmed that Nigeria has moved from the stage of a failed nation. The country feels non-existent! How do those in power today even sleep at night? What comes to mind when they reflect on the roles they played, directly or indirectly, during the orchestrated Chibok schoolgirls’ ‘abduction’ happened on April 14, 2014? What runs through their minds?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Pastor Adeboye, Tinubu, Trump And Truth

When the Chibok incident occurred 11 years ago, some of us believed it was a ruse. We argued that shepherding 276 girls from a school would require more than a mere illusion. We reasoned that the ‘abductors’ must have been extraordinarily well-resourced to feed the children while they were supposedly in captivity. We also noted that securing a location to keep them would not have been a simple undertaking. Furthermore, providing medical care in the so-called Sambisa Forest, where we were told they were taken, would have been an even more daunting challenge.

But we were asked to remain silent! When we insisted that the act would eventually return to haunt the perpetrators, harm the entire nation and injure the innocent – who had no part in the dangerous politicking that led to Chibok, we were told to blame the “clueless” President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. Ironically today, those who once silenced us for suggesting that Chibok was a scam, are now the same set of people claiming that the recent series of schoolchildren kidnapping are political weapons aimed at undermining President Tinubu.

The calamity sweeping across the country today is like the proverbial rain – it spares no one. As the elders say, “A thing that is not sufficient is not allowed to go to waste” (ohun tí ò tó, kìí s’òfò). The North of Nigeria is widely regarded as an educationally disadvantaged. Yet, in that same region, 46 unity schools, all owned by the Federal Government, are now completely shut because terrorists are attacking schools across the 19 northern states! Just when it seemed that the problem was confined to the North, a school in Ekiti State – the Federal Technical College (FTC), Usi Ekiti – was also closed! The question now is: where is safe in Nigeria?

The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, Safe School Data, (September 2023), reports stated that 723 schools were closed in the North because of insecurity. A few of the schools, the report added, were shut down because non-state actors (terrorists) and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) occupied the schools’ premises. It listed states such as Adamawa, Benue, Borno, Katsina, Sokoto Yobe and Zamfara as mostly affected.

Yet we expect students in these schools to compete favourably with their counterparts down South. The campaign to bridge the educational gap between the North and the South has been ongoing for generations, championed by Nigerians of goodwill. Sadly, those for whom others undertake great sacrifices are busy enjoying comfort and abundance!

My concern is that ultimately, the misfortune of the North will be spread in equal measure across the Federation. The daily migration of northern young men and woman, from childhood to adulthood, to the South demonstrates that when the North suffers, it invariably drags the South along.

This is why nobody should adopt the attitude of “it is their problem over there.” The North is eating the bad insect today; the attendant whooping cough of that bad habit will give all of us sleepless nights. This is why we must all set politics aside and join hands in the fight against this menace. If a school could be shut down in Ekiti State because of threat of terrorism, no school in the South-West is truly safe. As the saying goes, when a fellow hunter shouts, “it is coming”, our elders advise that we set our nets in readiness for a catch (ó hún bo, ó hún bò, àwòn làá de dèé).

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: US And FFK’s Drum Of War

The last week has been that of great calamity for Nigerians. It was a week the nation lost a two-star General, Brigadier-General Musa Uba and three other officers, killed by terrorists who ‘captured’ them after they survived an earlier ambush. Ask those who know the art of war, and you will be told that for an officer of the rank of a Brigadier-General to die on the battlefield, not a few other officers and other ranks would have gone! But it happened here, and we shoved it aside, facing other calamities.

Within the same week, almost 400 students were ‘kidnapped’ in Niger and Yobe States by terrorists. The same ‘sheik of the slaughters’ also killed no fewer than 68 Nigerians across some states of the North. In Eruku, 38 worshippers in a church were kidnapped and three others killed! While the government of Kwara State announced on Sunday that the 38 victims had been ‘rescued’, a blog in the locality claimed that the government paid close to N200 million before the victims were released. Whom do we believe, whom do we trust?

On the farm or on the way to the stream and in the comfort of our bedrooms, we all live in the fear of terrorists. If we are not the victims today, we assist our kidnapped neighbours and relations in raising the ransom for their release. Those of them who were unfortunate and died in captivity, we organised their funerals. In most extreme cases, we don’t get their corpses to be buried! Whichever way one views it, we are all victims, helpless victims for that matter! The only question on our lips is: how did we get here?

Just as we are grappling with the closure of those 47 unity schools, the governments of Yobe, Adamawa and Taraba States, ordered that all schools – private or public – operating boarding facilities in the states must close them due to the threat of terrorist attacks! What, then, is the fate of the students of these closed boarding schools? Will the West African sub-regional examination body wait for them when it is time to sit for the regional sub-examination? How can we treat our future this shabbily and still expect Nigeria to develop?

From all indications, and I hope President Tinubu gets this: Nigeria has lost the battle. And by the way things are going, we are on the verge of losing the war. When terrorism and banditry started as a battle pre-2014, and the government of President Jonathan wanted to confront it headlong, many of the actors of today’s power frustrated the efforts for political reasons. Notable leaders from the North said fighting Boko Haram was like fighting the North. We accepted their narratives and looked on while the felons overran Nigeria!

Those who travelled as far as the United States to ask for ‘help’ all in the bid to get rid of Jonathan, are now crying because the same US has noticed that Nigeria is not just a “disgraced” country, but a nation in dire need of help! Many of us still don’t understand why the issue of Nigeria’s sovereignty should be paramount now when 11 years ago, the present handlers of our affairs threw that same principle to the wild dogs! The US assisted them into power. Today, the same American Government has indicated that it would, on its own volition, intervene and put an end to the killings in Nigeria.

What is the reaction of the government? A powerful delegation was sent to the US to go and explain that nothing like genocide is happening here! We die in our hundreds, they say it is not genocide! Do we have to wait till there will be nobody to bury the dead before the realisation will dawn on us? Growing up, we were told that the man with a thorn in his foot limps to meet the man holding the blade. The reverse is the case today in Nigeria.

When our swollen pus-infected foot is visible to the world, our leaders say all is well. However, the truth starring us all in the face is that whether America comes or not, the present government here has lost the battle. If it remains lethargic, it will lose the war in a matter of time. When that happens, our leaders will not merely limp, looking for the man with the razor, they will take a dash in their wobbling tracks seeking help. May it not be too late!

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10 Countries With The Strongest Global Reputation In 2025

Published

2 hours ago

November 25, 2025

Editor

In today’s world, countries’ reputation is more than prestige: they shape investment, trade, tourism, and diplomatic influence.

CEOWORLD Magazine’s Global Nations Reputation Index 2026 evaluates 197 economies using 50 key attributes across governance, ethics, innovation, sustainability, and social cohesion. The result is a comprehensive measure of global trust and respect.

Leading the ranking is Singapore, recognized for its stability, innovation, and effective governance, surpassing long-established reputations of Switzerland, Ireland, and Germany.

Here’s a look at the top 10 countries with the strongest global reputation:

1. Singapore (97.83) – Asia

Renowned for policy consistency, transparent governance, and advanced infrastructure. Singapore is a hub of innovation, multicultural inclusion, and neutral diplomacy.

2. Switzerland (97.81) – Europe

Admired for neutrality, financial integrity, high quality of life, and robust institutions. Switzerland is a global standard for stability and innovation.

3. Ireland (97.22) – Europe

Known for economic openness, skilled workforce, and cultural diplomacy. Ireland combines modern business competitiveness with strong social cohesion.

4. Netherlands (96.77) – Europe

Celebrated for progressive policies, sustainability, and global trade leadership. The Netherlands excels in human capital development and innovation.

5. Germany (95.49) – Europe

A powerhouse of industrial and technological innovation, governance, and global influence. Germany maintains a strong reputation for efficiency and reliability.

6. Norway (93.55) – Europe

Respected for social welfare, environmental stewardship, and transparent governance. Norway blends prosperity with high citizen trust and global responsibility.

7. Denmark (93.46) – Europe

Known for quality of life, ethical governance, and sustainability. Denmark consistently ranks high in innovation, education, and societal cohesion.

8. Luxembourg (93.34) – Europe

Small but influential, Luxembourg is admired for economic stability, governance, and financial integrity. It maintains a strong reputation as a safe and prosperous nation.

9. Sweden (92.93) – Europe

Celebrated for social equality, innovation, and environmental leadership. Sweden balances economic competitiveness with progressive policies and human capital development.

10. Liechtenstein (92.79) – Europe

Highly respected for governance, economic stability, and quality of life. Liechtenstein combines a strong financial sector with a reputation for discretion and reliability.

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Edo: Stakeholders Rally To Address Children Trafficking Through Education

Published

2 hours ago

November 25, 2025

Editor

Stakeholders in migration and education gathered in Benin on Tuesday to discuss Mainstreamed TIP Content in the revised National Curriculum, and how best to utilise the new curriculum addressing irregular migration and children trafficking in particular.

The stakeholders, comprising the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD); the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), and Edo State Government held a two-day two-day training of subjects teachers on Mainstreamed TIP Content in the revised National Curriculum code named School Anti-Trafficking Education and Advocacy Project (STEAP).

In her speech, ICMPD Head of Office, Nigeria, Isabelle Wolfsgruber, revealed that over 75% of trafficking victims in West Africa are children, and that Nigeria shares a high percentage, stressing the urgent need for preventive efforts, particularly “within our schools.”

The ICMPD Head of Office, Nigeria, said the rising statistic underscores the urgent need to “leverage education as a powerful tool to prevent trafficking.”

Her speech, which was read by Favour Simeon, ICMPD, Wolfsgruber expressed optimism that at the end of the training, the teachers would have been equipped, and by extension, the “larger school community with knowledge about the risks of trafficking, how to recognize warning signs, and strategies to stay safe.”

The Head, Nigeria Office, ICMPD, who disclosed that 150 teachers drawn from 50 schools across the state were captured for the training, added: “That is why we have organized this two -day training workshop for subject teachers from selected schools in Edo State. Through this training, teachers will gain practical skills to apply the curriculum
effectively while fostering safe and supportive classrooms that protect children from harm.

“The training aims to equip teachers with a thorough understanding of human trafficking, practical skills to deliver the national approved curriculum effectively, and the capacity to act as child protection advocates, fostering safe, supportive, and collaborative school environments.”

On her part, Director-General NAPTIP, Binta Bello, who said trafficking in Persons remains “one of the gravest human rights violations confronting Nigeria today,” emphasised the need for collective effort to “safeguard the future of our children and strengthen the national response to human trafficking through education.”

The DG, who was represented by Hassan Tahri, added: “The statistics are deeply troubling-children account for more than 55 percent of identified victims.”

In his speech, Edo State Commissioner for Education, Dr. Paddy Iyamu, while lamenting that “Edo State has, in the past, been significantly affected by the devastating consequences of human trafficking,” however, noted that “tremendous progress has been made in recent years, we must continue to consolidate our gains by strengthening education-driven prevention mechanisms.”

Iyamu, while stating that “education remains the most powerful tool for shaping values, informing decision-making, and protecting the next generation from exploitation,”
promised that his ministry will continue to “reinforce our State’s preventive strategies and expand the impact of our anti-trafficking interventions in schools.”

“This training is not just another workshop—it is a strategic investment in the human infrastructure that supports our fight against Trafficking in Persons (TIP),” he said.