By Festus Adedayo

Nigeria has become the proverbial forest of the heartless, the Igbó Odájú, where mothers must take extreme care to double-strap their sucklings to their backs. Even when they do, these Odájú, the heartless, violently yank suckling infants off their mothers’ back. It is difficult to say we have a government. Or a country. Thomas Hobbes must be smiling in his grave. His famous centuries-old theoretical Hobbesian state has found practical fit in today’s Nigeria. It was Tandi we quarreled with for embarrassing us with the incongruity of his dancing steps. Tand Tandi, the new dancer, doesn’t even have legs with which to dance.

Since I did a frightened few seconds peep into a viral video of his gruesome slaughter, I have attempted a psychoanalysis of Mathematics teacher, Michael Oyedokun’s last hour on earth. What inner conversations go on when a man is about to take his last breath? Oyedo-kun was slaughtered by bandits in Oyo State, most likely on Sunday, May 17. He taught at Community High School, Ahoro-Esinele, in Ori-ire Local Government. He was one of the teachers and pupils forcibly ferried into the forest by bandits.

Another recorded video of Oyedokun pleading for his freedom, ostensibly done hours before his slaughter, opens windows into the illimitable extent of his trauma. In a melancholic voice tempered by dread and awareness that death was at an arm’s length, Oyedokun sounded subdued and aloof to life. In doing that psychoanalysis, one mind of a dying person I exhumed for a postmortem was that of Adetutu. She was one of the female slaves of Efunsetan Aniwura.

Aniwura, “One who owns gold”, was a 19th century second Iyalode of Ibadan. She was a pre-eminent slave trader who held immense economic power, owning a household full of slaves. Historical accounts claimed she had approximately 2000 of them and oral history indicates she ordered executed 41 of them in her lifetime. While some attribute this to the psychological trauma from losing her only daughter at birth in 1860, and inability to give birth afterwards, this draconian drift was demonstrated in her strict rules forbidding her slaves from being impregnated or having romantic relationships. So when a female slave, Adetutu was impregnated by Itawuyi, another slave, and was about to be beheaded, Prof Akinwumi Ishola, in his Efunsetan Aniwura (1970) dramatized Adetutu’s last gruelling moment before her beheading at the public square.

Another recalibration of the sacred moment before death I did was that of Irish poet, Oscar Wilde. In 1900, broke and bankrupt, fallen from grace and despised, having just come out of prison for engaging in homosexual relationships, Wilde lay dying of meningitis inside his cheap room in the Hotel d’Alsace. Before this meningitis death sentence, Wilde was unafraid of death. In his 1887 short story, The Canterville Ghost, he wrote to buttress this, mocking death. “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace,” he had written of death.

Hôtel d’Alsace was a cheap and shabby Paris hotel. As he lay dying inside this seedy hotel room, Wilde made his famous last-minute death bed quip: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go”. It was first reported by his friend, Claire de Pratz, an Anglo-French writer. Just moments before their passage, ominous death hanging over them, Wilde must have been in the same state of mind as Mathematics teacher Oyedokun.

But, what had his death bed reference to wallpaper got to do with him? No doubt, Wilde was passing through a social trauma almost synonymous with Oyedokun’s. He was a man of literary aesthetics. Oyedokun was a man of mathematics. Mathematics has its own aesthetics, too. It mirrors the experience of beauty, elegance, and harmony. All of these are found in mathematical concepts, proofs, and formulas.

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Similar to what obtains in art or music, mathematics evokes deep emotional responses in its abstract structures. It stands on the cusp of principles of symmetry, simplicity and a profound interconnectedness of its concepts.

Both Wilde and Oyedokun built their careers around beauty. While Oyedokun’s beauty was in Mathematics, Wilde’s was in the beauty of literature. To be confined to a gaudy, low-quality decor of a hotel room, papered with an awful, cheap wallpaper, was, to Wilde, a personal affront on his refined tastes.

The wilderness where the bandits confined him before leading him to the slaughter, to Oyedokun, must be strange to the aesthetics of mathematics. As he sermonized to the bandits in a previous video, telling them that he and them were both victims of the system, he apparently assumed they were fighting an ideological battle. Or that they were human.

Since Oyedokun’s heartless murder, viral videos of despair have emerged. Obviously pushed out by the bandits, one of the videos showed a lady who identified herself as a teacher. Her distressing cries make life look worthless. A sucking child was strapped to her back. Could she be the same woman who another viral video captured her husband begging to be replaced with his kidnapped wife and 18-month old child? The man showed a complete disinterest in living. This is certainly not the Nigeria of our forefathers’ dreams. Hunger, anger, kidnap and senseless murders have become so concerning to hopeless Nigerians. They are like the knotty calamity that makes a father breathe incessantly in his home, which also makes the wife whimper like the chirp of a hen’s chick (Oro tó mú baálé ilé tó fi mín kanlẹ ni odẹdẹ, ohun náà ló mú ìyálé ilé tó fi ké bí òròmọdiyẹ.)

The Ahoro-Esiele/Yawota tragedy is one that would provoke Yoruba elders to say, even if one was bereft of human feelings, as to be able to barbecue the ugly and meatless head of a tortoise for supper, one could not but shed tears.

After that kidnap, others have since followed in same Oyo State. Indeed, recent kidnapping activity in Ibadan, especially in the CRIN axis of Idi-Ayunre, have gone beyond an uptick. On May 16, 2026, at the Alapinnu Community/Aba Nia (Close to CRIN), a man named Adeleke Ridwan Olayemi was reportedly abducted in his home. A ransom of N15 million initially demanded was later jerked up to N20 million. Giving him the Oyedokun treatment became the threat of his abductors.

Before then, multiple abductions along that CRIN corridor have been reported, especially in late March to early May. Within then, four people were reportedly abducted. A Mazda car driver was also discovered murdered in a bush, his remains riddled with bullet holes.

Probably on same day Mathematics was slaughtered by men for whom knowledge was an anathema and Mathematics a pestilence, at least eleven people, including an unidentified pregnant woman, were brutally killed on Sunday, May 17. Suspected bandits had attacked the agrarian communities of Gidan Wawu and Gidan Sarkin Noma in Katsina State.

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This is what Nigeria has been reduced to. Nigerians must be happy with Nigeria today, aren’t they? Gradually, our country has become the proverbial Jogbo town, a famous fictional town depicted in cinematographer Tunde Kelani’s classic Nigerian political drama Saworoide. Jogbo itself is a figurative adaptation of the lemon balm leaf, otherwise known as the King of Bitters. It is an extremely bitter but medicinal leaf.

The movie satirizes Jogbo as a Nigerian allegory, exploring themes of chaos, corruption, leadership failure and the intoxication of power.

By now, Nigerians should have realized the imperative of a good country. We probably now know, as Bob Marley sang, that when the rain falls, it doesn’t fall on a single man’s roof. And when drought comes, it is a collective calamity. The chronic insecurity in Nigeria must have shown us all that we are face to face with abysmal governmental failure. Everywhere you go, wherever you turn, it is difficult to recognize this shameful space ruled by bloodletting and chaos as the Nigeria of a few years back. The home is not at peace. The country is in teeters. We are at tipping point. Our forefathers recognized the damage of a chaotic country when they said, “If the homestead is not at peace, the entire town looks strange and forlorn like a forest” (Bí oodẹ ò dùn, bí igbe nìlú ńrí).

Since I made the fatal peep into the distressing video of the Maths teacher’s slaughter, I have lived in a depressing wonder at what zenith of sadism or animalism could have propelled that killing. What would make a human being place a knife on the throat of another, in a rekindle of abattoir cow slaughtering?

Second, I have noticed that, while ordinary Nigerian citizens have wept their eyes hollow about the slaughter of Mathematics, for Nigerian politicians, it is a season of rituals of political carnival. Direct primary. Banditry-like consensus. These are more important than the blood of Nigerians. Government has also moved on, waiting for another obsequy.

The Esinele/Yawota calamity occurred, according to press reports, at approximately 9:30 am on Friday, May 15. Most likely too sucked into the vortex of its party’s primary and consensus process, the presidency issued its usual ghoulish release condemning the abduction on Monday, May 18. It came about 72 hours after the attack. The Atiku Abubakar Press Office deconstructed what we have as government by obsequies. In a release titled, “You Cannot Govern by Hiding Corpses”, Abubakar described government’s reactions as “post-tragedy press statements” and “recycled outrage”.

Methinks the Nigerian presidency has relapsed into what I call a state of emotional desensitization and compassion fatigue. As Abubakar said, it is “the same tired ritual: condemn the killings, threaten that the perpetrators will face the full wrath of the law, and then wait for the next massacre”.

Abubakar totally captured the fate of ordinary Nigerians. I agree with him absolutely. Government has seen too many deaths that it is now numb to any fresh news of mass killings and abductions. I am however not convinced that Atiku Abubakar as president would do any better. For a man who, in May 2022, in the name of political correctness, deleted his tweet condemning the killing of Deborah Samuel, lynched for allegedly blaspheming Prophet Muhammad, abetting terrorists while in power would be a fait accompli for the Turaki. Deborah was a 200-level Christian student of Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto.

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Infants, children, mothers and fathers, moulders of generations to come, languish in the thick forest. The Oyo government, where this tragedy took place, will seem to be in a mourning mood. Like the biblical Hebrews when hit by tragedy, it literally has ashes and sackcloth on its head. In same Oyo State, kilometers away from the tragedy, a replica of saturnalia, an ancient Roman pagan festival honouring the god Saturn, was taking place. It was the festive, even if inequitable APC primary banditry and consensus. It took place even in Oriire LGA, home of the Oyedokun calamity. Figures were violently abducted to favour an anointed pick of the Leviathan. It is same all over the country.

No one remembered the captives and the felled of Esinele/Yawota. In the words of Senator Femi Ojudu, they “continue jumping from one primary election to another, consumed by ambition, permutations, and calculations of power, as though nothing has happened.” Look through the window, you cannot find any genuine tears from the seat of power. It reminds me of a philosophical Yoruba saying which, loosely translated, is, “If it were someone else’s child who died, you would shed a few drops of mocking tears and move on; but when it hits home, you are struck silent.” Ayinde Barrister turned this saying into a song: “B’o ba s’omo elomi l’o ku o, wa ke yeye wa dake o”.

Veteran journalist and wordsmith, Kayode Samuel, in his itinerant Facebook quips, warned that APC’s consensus banditry and direct primary terrorism reminded him of the witty saying of his late grandmother. If a man could be as heartless as to attempt to sleep with his own sister, his step sister should pay immediate obeisance to the hare. “Bí ènìyàn bá lè dí mó omo Ìyá è, obàkan á sá fún un,” he warned.

Short as this quip is, it represents two things.

First, on upsurge of terrorism in the Southwest, if the president’s enclave is this unsafe, other Nigerian enclaves had better be wary. It speaks to an innate incapacity. It also warns Nigeria of a greater electoral calamity to come. If the party in government could conduct its own primary elections in this shoddy, disreputable and Janjaweed manner, only God knows what greater tragedy awaits Nigerians in the general elections of January and February next year. The primaries had the flavour of a Janjaweed, a Sudanese Arab nomadic militia group operating primarily in the Darfur region of western Sudan and eastern Chad. Janjaweed, literally translated, is «devils on horseback».

But I seem to think that, as a people, we are cursed into collective silence. Our attackers, as well as our leaders who don’t care when they abduct and kill us, know that conspiratorial silence is our national Achilles heel. But the Janjaweed who kidnap us, our children, wives, mothers and fathers do not ask for political party card membership when they strike. They didn’t ask Oyedokun, Mathematics, whether he was an APC, PDP or ADC member. He was simply a victim of Nigerian government’s somnambulism and elite conspiracy.

Already, Nigerians are asking why Oyo State, whose government dissents from federal politics, has recently become the waterbed of terror.

Now that Zamfara State is federal-compliant, we hardly hear terrorist attacks about it. Praise the lord! The questions being asked are, is the uptick in terrorism, the water bug dancing on the surface of the stream, being remote-controlled by an invisible drummer? The hearts of politicians could be that desperately wicked when power is at issue. Was Mathematics, Michael Oyedokun, sacrificed for politics? Isn’t it queer that the bandits are asking the state governor to negotiate with them?

Already, the FG has become so effete that I am told it keeps a department in its security office for private negotiators. These are the ones who help it haggle with bandits like they do in fish markets. The pestilence that terrorism has become, especially in a region that is the heartbeat of education, which Obafemi Awolowo fought to the hilt to have educated, is a triumph of anti-education that Boko Haram and its terrorism progeny represent. My hunch however tells me that the Nigerian suffering in the hands of their taskmasters is terminal. And, as the holy writ says, there will be weeping, wailing, mourning and gnashing of the teeth among the ranks of our tormentors.