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OPINION: Pastor Adeboye, Owners Of Nigeria And 2025 [Monday Lines]

Published

5 months ago

December 30, 2024

By Lasisi Olagunju

If the elites of the North will not ‘give’ President Bola Tinubu a second term, who told them that the South will give power back to them in 2027? Leper losing his needle presents peculiar problems. It is not two years since power changed hands in Nigeria but the jungle is already rumbling.

Mordant cries about French bases, about federal appointments lacking symmetry, about dirty gutters and stinking swamps are all familiar tricks of snatching the forest from the current champion. The roars of ‘fairness’ are not about ‘justice’ and the people and the challenges they face. They are not about terror and error bombs; not about cheap deaths, hunger and joblessness. The goal is power with all the privileges it gives the privileged.

But we are what Cecil Helman’s ‘Parables’ says we are: fragments under the feet of fate. Nobody, and no body, neither north nor south, owns this land. The one who created power possesses it – and that is the Creator. But, some think Nigeria and all of us can be knitted into anything that suits their fingers –all because of greed of unearned grandeur. They should look keenly at coconut: it rests on its side despite having a bottom. Why?

Those who think power is their own exclusive possession and think life cannot be lived well outside power should listen to the following parables and the story that follow them:

Long, long ago, at the beginning of time in Ile Ife, there was a very poor man who had only one he-goat as his only means of living. He-goat is called itú in Yoruba. This poor man got his daily meal through the she-goats his itú mated with. One day, he discovered to his sorrow that the goat was missing. It was stolen.

The man searched and searched for his goat without success. The more he searched, the sadder he became because he suspected that his pricey goat may have become food in some thieving tummies. He kept searching. Then, one day, he met an old man who asked what his problem was. He told him.

The old man gave the poor man a warning that he must stop the search. Itú (he – goat) rẹ̀ sọnù, ṣùgbọ́n wọ́n kìí nílọ̀ pé kò gbọ́dọ̀ wá a. “So what do I do? I will die of hunger without that goat!” The distraught told the old man who simply gave him a metal gong – agogo ọ̀ràn – (gong of trouble) is what the old man called it.

The poor man was told to beat that gong in front of the houses of all principal kings of Yorubaland. The man set out. He went to ilé Alárá, he went to Ajerò; he was at the palace of Òràngún; he was at the Ààfin in Oyo. He went to all the 16 principal kings, the Ọlọ́jà mẹ́rẹ̀ẹ̀rindínlógún. But they all prevented him from beating the gong in front of their houses. They pleaded with him to go away with his Agogo ọ̀ràn. They offered him money, much money, and more money. The man became rich, very rich like any of the principal men of power. His status changed. He is not king but he was big enough to dine with kings. He thanked his Eleda (his Maker) for sending a worthy angel to him in the image of the old man. He also thanked his orí (his inner self) for not making of him a man who would ignore the wisdom of elders.

Now, the men of power could ignore the poor man or get him arrested. They could even kill him for his audacity. If they killed him, who would query them? But they understood the man to be a victim of state failure; they clothed him with remedial gestures.

The poor man too could ignore the old man and his counsel and remain searching for what is lost – forever. God closed his goaty door of poverty, he did not insist on opening it. Nobody owns anything; not goat; not power. The one who does not say the elder parades a smelly mouth is the one who conquers life and its difficulties. The next parable tells more of power and its powerlessness.

Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye is a very deep, wise man. Recently, he gave the Soun of Ogbomoso an invaluable gift in folktale wrappers. The audio is online, viral. I did the transcription and translation:

Several years ago. There was an incident in a town called Ejigbo. It was noticed that the kings there died as soon as they ascended the throne. Then, it was the turn of a young man to be king.

His case was a very precarious one. If he became king, he would die. If he refused to be king, it would be the end of his royal lineage in that town because he was the very last prince there alive.

One day, the young prince was going to the farm in great sorrow. Then, he bumped into an old man because he was troubled. He begged the old man for forgiveness.

“Omo aládé, kí ló dé? (Prince, what is the problem?” The old man asked him.

He told the old man his problem.

“It is my turn to be king, but I don’t want to die.”

The old man listened to him; then told him it was a simple thing. On the day of your enthronement, tell your drummers not to repeat the beat they beat for your predecessors. They should change it. The old man told the prince what his beat should say. Between them, it was a secret.

The D-Day came. He became king. It was time for celebrations. The king came out to dance round the town. The witches of the town, devourers of the earlier kings, assembled as usual under their tree, waiting for the drumbeat.

The old beat was:

Eléjìgbò l’ó l’Èjìgbò;

Èmi nÌkan ni mo l’Èjìgbò.

(Eléjìgbò, the king, owns Ejigbo

I alone own Èjìgbò).

But by the time the drummers of the new king started beating the drum for him, they came with a new beat:

Eléjìgbò l’ó l’Èjìgbò;

T’èmi tì’e l’a l’Èjìgbò.

Eléjìgbò l’ó l’Èjìgbò;

Gbogbo wa l’a l’Èjìgbò.

(Eléjìgbò owns Èjìgbò;

You and I own Èjìgbò.

Eléjìgbò owns Èjìgbò;

We all own Èjìgbò).

The witches exchanged glances. “This is strange! Who gave this young man this wisdom?” That was how the young king danced round the town. He was king and he was on the throne for a very long time. Q.E.D.

Great words of counsel are like rains; when they are released; they fall on more than one roof. Those nuggets from Pastor Adeboye should benefit more than the oba to whom they were directed. I take them as a sermon for all who think or take themselves to be owners of Nigeria. The words are for regions and religions; kings, principalities and presidents, and all conceited people who think the throne is for their whims to give and withdraw. I hope they know that half words are enough said to the well-bred.

Two days to the new year, I have one more word from our elders. It is a story of power and its implications.

The sermon is from Hubert Ogunde’s 1945 play ‘Strike and Hunger’, a drama about resistance, justice, moderation and empathy in leadership. Truth, in whatever form it is couched, is bitter. Nigeria happened to Ogunde for daring to write and stage that play. He told the story several times, and each time you heard or read him, you knew that the rain of Nigeria did not start beating fairness yesterday – it started a long time ago. Ogunde recalled that experience: “After the general strike of 1945, I staged a play ‘Strike and Hunger’ which became a hit with the indigenous population while the colonial masters thought the play was inciting the people to riot. When I took the play to the Northern Region in 1946, I was arrested and prosecuted in Jos. The £200 fine imposed on me was paid by the Yoruba community in Jos, but my troupe was banned from performing in the North.” That story told by Ogunde to a news magazine in 1973 was reproduced by Bernth Lindfors, then of the University of Texas, Austin, in his ‘Ogunde on Ogunde’, published in May 1976.

Between 1944 and 1989, Hubert Ogunde wrote and staged 56 plays. I counted them and clicked those with links on ogunde museum.org. ‘Strike and Hunger’ is number nine on the list there. I transcribed and translated the lyrics and present a summary of the plot here:

‘Strike and Hunger’ starts with the king of this town, Oba Yejide, in full bloom. He receives his people’s acclamation: “Elephant who owns the forest; Buffalo that owns the savannah.” He is Oba Yejide, the king whose possessions are the sea and its rising and falling tides.

The king replies his people’s love with lines of arrogance: “I, Yejide, great king. I snatch others’ houses and make them mine; I take others’ homes and become fat by them.” Despite all these, the king still does good; he commands respect and loyalty in all circles of the town. His people need jobs, he gives them government work to do. They sing, they dance and “rejoice in their one kobo per day job.”

Then change happens to them and the town. Inflation hits the roof; their kobo per day loses its vaiue. The people approach the Oba for help. Oba Yejide’s response to the food inflation is to establish a food market in the palace. The people are happy again. They think the market will offer goods for buyers, food for the hungry. They declare that their king owns the world; they say everyone must obey him; they sing his praise. They warn dog not to dare their leopard so that it will not wear gowns of blood.

Things soon get bad again. Hunger seizes the land. The king’s food market gets a new name. Thoroughly disappointed townspeople call it “Ojà ebi” (hunger market). The people work harder but their salaries remain the same while prices at the hunger market keep rising daily. Buyers who complain of the daily rise in the price of food items receive lashes, some get wounded. Complaint is disloyalty. Anyone who says the king is failing is made to eat his pounded yam as yam. The people turn their hunger into bursts of oxymoron: “hunger is satiation/ the world is changing.”

Workers are downcast; Oba Yejide’s minimum wage is maximum cage. The people are trapped in his fiefdom and they complain. They are hungry; they shout the needs you shout today. Ogunde says the people sing in sorrow: “Ebi ńpa wá o, ará mi (We are hungry, my people).” Workers down tools. They continue their song of depression: “Kí l’a ó fi kóbò ojúmó se (what shall we do with a daily wage of one kobo?)”

The king ignores them; he says the people should go and manage. The people are sad and angry; they won’t stop singing songs of defiance and lamentation, and subversion: “Workers do not have money to feed/ We have no cloth, we have no dress/ we move about stark naked like monkeys/ Yet, Oba Yejide feeds well; Yejide drinks/ He forgets the day of reckoning…(Àwa òsìsé kò r’ówó jeun/Béè l’aò l’áso, béè l’aò l’éwù/ Ìhòhò l’awá ńrìn bí òbo/Oba Yéjídé ńje; Yéjídé ńmu/ Kò rántí p’ójó èsan ńbò…). .”

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: ‘We Collected Money, And We Voted’

They sing frustration and helplessness. They say “a worker who wakes up into hunger and wears rags lives a hollow life/ The dead are better than such a person (lásánlásán l’óńbe l’áyé/ eni t’ókú sàn jùú lo).” Oba Yejide’s reign suffers strikes and protests. He is called “Oba elébi” (king of hunger). But he does not care.

The song on the street is:

The king’s men eat and drink to satiation,

The king’s chiefs eat and are happy,

They are happy and they dance.

Workers are dying the death of hunger,

Husband and wife feed on miserable grains.

God, Almighty,

Please come and deliver us from those who hate us but commiserate with us…

(Asojú oba ńje, wón ńje,

Wón ńje, wón mu;

Ìjòyè oba ńyó wón ńyò,

Wón ńyò sèsè;

Àwon òsìsé ńkú ikú ebi,

T’okot’aya ńje jéró;

Èdùmàrè yé o, ó d’owó Re,

A-wí-má-ye-hùn,

K’ó gbà wá l’ówó àwon

Abínú eni tí ńbá ni dárò…).

Still, the oba won’t lift their burden. He won’t bend and the people won’t stoop. Face-off is what the white man calls it. The town doubles down and sings to Oba Yejide who thinks the world is his property:

Oba tó s’abúlé di’gbó,

Oba tó s’abúlé d’ilè,

Aráíyé kò ní gbàgbé rè

Oba elébi…

(The Oba who turns the village to bush,

The king who turns the village to rubble,

The world will not forget you,

King of hunger…).

That is my 2024 review of Ogunde’s ‘Strike and Hunger’. It ends with the oba eventually dropping his arrogance and making amends. The palace moves the minimum wage from one kobo to ten shillings per day; the king orders the hunger market closed. Old markets reopen. There is enough for every buyer to buy; enough for all mouths to feed. Everyone is happy, the town becomes peaceful once again and the song transits to that of praise and freedom.

Those are my stories. The lesson from all the elders is that the world is the sea and the people in it the lagoon; no master-swimmer swims them successfully. Let all powers and power blocs do good and take things easy. Nigeria is not a possession of any region or religion; president or potentate. It belongs not to the angry elites of the North plotting day and night against Tinubu and the South; and it is certainly not the property of Tinubu, today’s viceroy.

We pray for peace and joy and victory in 2025. May God say amen to our positive prayers.

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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.

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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.

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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.