By Suyi Ayodele

Edo State Migration Agency last Thursday paraded two female minors who were rescued in Zaria, Kaduna State, on their way to Libya. The two girls, aged 13 and 14, were lured from their Textile Mill Road residence in Benin City by a ‘trolley’, a euphemism for human trafficker, who is now at large.

One of the girls, the 13-year-old, is a sickle cell patient! A Junior Secondary School 2 student, the victim said that the ‘trolley’ promised her a “maid job” in Libya! But for the quick alarm her mother raised when, on returning from the market, she couldn’t find her daughter, the girl would have been in Libya now on sex slavery!

How many of our children have been trafficked through the desert to sex slavery in Libya and other countries of the world? If the venture had succeeded, how would that sickle cell victim have survived the ordeal of the journey through the desert to Libya?

The Agency also rescued yet another minor from Mali! Her case was most pathetic. Worms were oozing out of her body when she was brought back to Nigeria. It was a sorry and gory case!

When a man of means detests noise-making while his pounded yam is being prepared, our elders counsel that the yam should not be bought on credit (Eni tí a kò bá ní sòrò lórí iyán è, kìí ra isu àwìn). Reason is that the creditor reserves the right to pop in anytime to collect his money.

This aged wisdom applies to anyone in public office who savours only praises and worship from the masses. The antidote to acerbic critique of his outings in power, governance and government, is good policies that are humane and masses-oriented. A leader whose pastime is to inflict untold hardship on the masses should not expect to sleep peacefully anytime.

Save for the very few who have access to our patrimony because the ‘boss man’ gave them long ladles to scoop from the deep cookie jar, the rest of us who bear the brunt of the cruel plutomania of the leader and his acolytes, cannot but shout!

And our shouting is not unfounded. Ancient wisdom of our forebears says: no matter how one shouts at the woman with goitre, she will not swallow the lumps in her throat (Bó ti wù ká kígbe mó onígègè tó, kò ní gbé ti òfun è mì). This administration has given us more than a huge lump in our throats. We are in pain, we are palpitating, we are breathless and are exhibiting the last kicks of a dying horse! Keeping quiet, or joining the ruiner’s clappers club is self-immolation, a suicide without any hope of resurrection!

African wisdom dictates that it is wrong to beat a child and at the same time forbid him from crying. Our leaders are not only beating us, but they also have the Rehoboam’s Biblical scorpions with which they scourge us mercilessly daily (1Kings 12:11). Every government since independence had its own scorpion whips, but the present administration and the immediate one before it, appear to be contesting for the trophy in turpitude.

What stands out in the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration is the proclivity of the administration’s hallelujah boys to expect us to keep smiling while their master rapes us on rooftops! How they fail to realise that the profiteering propensity of their master comes with untold hardship on the struggling masses beats one’s imagination. Devil itself, I take a bet, winks at the expectation of smiles when the masses haemorrhage!

Tí omodé bá dáràn oòrùn, ó ye kí ó rí ibòji sá sí (when a child finds himself on the wrong side of the scorching, he should have the succour of shade for shelter). Again, tí òde bá sì na omo, ilé lomo ma ún wá (when the outside becomes uncomfortable for the child, he runs home). Our elders posit thus because they believe the home should be a place of comfort. But if the house is on fire, where will the child run to?

The streets of London, United Kingdom, were alive on Saturday, September 13, 2025. A set of people described as “Far-right anti-immigration protesters” were out to demand that immigrants in the UK find their ways back to their countries of origin. The leaders of the 110,000 protesters, a “Robison, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon”, the Cable Network News (CNN), reported was videoed saying: “Britain has finally awoken. We’ve been waiting decades. Patriotism is the future, borders are the future, and we want our free speech”, among others.

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I read the CNN reports of the incident and other commentaries and all I could do was to shake my head. How many Nigerian immigrants in the UK would be affected when the dust finally settles? How many of our relations, mostly university graduates, trained in specialised disciplines, have shipped themselves to the UK and other European countries because Nigeria is made hard and almost ‘uninhabitable’ by the ruiners of our today and our children’s tomorrow?

Where in the entire globe are Nigerians safe? Where are we spared the humiliation of deportation because our nationals are regarded as illegal immigrants? The United States (US), as early as January this year listed about 3,690 Nigerians to be deported from the country because the man in charge there, Donald Trump, has started a ‘crackdown’ on illegal immigrants in the US! When did the fad to migrate illegally to other countries start in Nigeria?

When a man is thrown off balance by a major issue, the less inconsequential ones make a mockery of him by climbing him (Bí ìyà ńlá bá gbé ni sánlè, kékeré a máa gorí eni). When did the UK become a country that Nigerians must run to for succour when, up to the mid-80s, we had British citizens as secondary school teachers in Nigeria?

How did we get here; who pushed our canoe to the troubled waters and collected the paddles from us? Would the old Nigerians, who sailed to the UK in the early 60s and late 70s to study and rushed back home after the completion of their academic voyages, have imagined that a day would come when “Far-right anti-immigration protesters” would hit the streets of London doing the rubbish they did last Saturday?

I know a family, a couple, to be precise. They had four children. The first two of the children were born in the UK. The third child came shortly after the couple arrived in Nigeria and the last followed a few years later.

In one of my interactions with the old wife, I asked why she and her husband rushed back home; why they did not wait to have all their children in the UK. The old woman looked at me and said: “We actually left the UK after our final examinations, before the results were out. The institutions mailed our certificates to us in Nigeria.” I asked what happened. Her response was that there was nothing for them to do in a foreign land because Nigeria was better than the UK economically then.

That was the early 70s. The fad then was for Nigerians to travel overseas for schooling and return to Nigeria on the completion of their studies. Job opportunities abounded here. The Nigerian currency was almost at par with the UK Pound, and at a time, stronger. Of course, security was top-notch; social life was at its frenzy. Life was good and jolly here. Then the locusts came in and everything turned upside down!

The current pitiable situation of Nigeria is something those in power and their lickspittles would not want us to talk about. They say we are not patriotic to our ethnicity because we have the courage to talk about the failings of our kinsmen in power. And these are supposedly well-read individuals, with training in the act and art of writing. Many of them were once vitriolic writers, holding those in power then accountable! What has changed?

As a Yoruba man, you are not expected to say anything ‘negative’ about the porous economic policies of the current administration. You are to be like the proverbial monkey which sees no evil, says no evil and hears no evil. Why? A Yoruba man is the President and as such, everyone down South-West must hail and praise the obvious ineptitude of the President. It doesn’t matter the level of suffering in the land. We are expected to be in the cold and complain of excruciating heat! They appointed gatekeepers in the media to ‘arrest’ or ‘doctor’ or water down any opinion considered ‘negative’ to their paymaster.

A senior colleague once told me how a media aide of a top politician once accosted him and boasted: “We are aware of all the negative things you write about Oga. But we have our men in your paper to help us manage them!” I asked what the senior colleague did. He said that he stopped filing scoops because of that incident. Sad! There is no aspect of the mass media you will not find them in. To them, money answers all things. But in their extended families are the wretched of the earth impoverished by the same plutomania they serve or defend!

In their quest to recruit everyone into the ungodly army of power-clappers, they query: how many Hausa criticised Buhari when he was there? Because the President is a Yoruba man, we all must join the unholy league of conspiracy of silence. That is what is known as àrí àìgbodòwí tíí mú baálé ilé yokun lémú (conspiracy of silence that births the dirty habit of the man of the house). Check those households where the man of the house is filthy, members of his household die of diseases. That is what we are going through right now in Nigeria.

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General Muhammadu Buhari spent eight years as President picking his teeth. The only strenuous job he did for those eight wasteful years was to take occasional strolls to his farm to count his non-producing herds! His kith and kin up North saw nothing bad in that. Security dipped to the lowest level under him. Mute was the response from the North. The economy nosedived, and Buhari’s kinsmen were on holiday. The Naira weakened against all currencies of the world; nothing was heard from the North.

The few voices that spoke against the lethargic administration were labelled “wailing wailers!” The opinions they expressed were tagged “hate speech!” And guess who coined those appellations: a senior journalist cum columnist! The government hired a hallelujah orchestra to shout on rooftops that Buhari was the second-best thing to happen to humanity after sliced bread. The third-party advocacy to project Buhari and his inorganic administration as the best was damning. Today, we all know better. Both the “wailing wailers” and the ‘hailing hailers’ suffered untold hardship. But the Nigerian spirit, our resilience, wedged in and we moved on.

Then came the man with the biggest entitlement mentality. The ‘Èmilókân crooner, President Tinubu, to the saddle. His Presidential campaign was about hope and renewed hope. We warned, we shouted. We said that nothing tangible would come out of the venture; that Nigeria and Nigerians would be worse off under Tinubu. Nobody listened; nobody paid any attention. For any dissenting voice, especially from Tinubu’s Yoruba enclave, the ones behind the voice were called names. They said “all Yoruba free born” must support Tinubu’s ambition irrespective of his antecedents of anti-Yoruba posturing!

The man did his magic and his permutations. He won, was declared the winner, and was sworn in as President. The very day he took over, and in a rare display of braggadocio, President Tinubu bared his fangs. In what would go down in history as the most reckless and thoughtless policy formation, he removed the oil subsidy in his infamous “subsidy is gone” haphazard declaration.

The spiral effects were worse than what one gets during a whirlwind. The economy collapsed instantly and has not recovered since because there are no corresponding measures put in place to cushion the effects of the removal of subsidy.

Today, Nigerians wallow in abject poverty. Crimes surged just as insecurity deepened. We are back to the Hobbesian State, where life is “nasty, brutish and short.” Every problem Tinubu inherited from Buhari has doubled or tripled. The government relies more on propaganda which often results in self-contradictions. In all this, they still tell us that we should be ‘patriotic’ because our man is on the throne!

How do nations fail? The slavish tendency must be high up there. As a Yoruba man, you are either in support of Tinubu or you are tagged ‘obsessed’ or worse, a ‘bastard’. Now, the campaign has gone beyond supporting the administration; everyone must queue behind the President in his bid for his second term!

The government and its henchmen treat Nigerians like conquered people. Tell them about the parlous state of things in the country, they tell you ‘Tinubu did not start it.’ Yes, they are right. Our misfortune did not start with Tinubu. The President has simply compounded it with his numerous neo-liberal and anti-people policies. His agbàlòwómérìí tax regimes have telling tales on the masses more than any government before him. This we say without forgetting the fact that the President has always been part of the rot, ab initio!

This is September. Schools have resumed for a new academic session across the nation. Many parents have relocated to other parts of the country for whatever reason. Many children have moved to new schools or higher classes. Bills are coming in their torrents. This paper, in its Monday, September 15, 2025, led with the heart-rending headline: “Parents groan as schools resume 2025/2026 academic years.” There is nothing palatable in that report!

Due to the almost total collapse of public schools, private institutions are going for the kill. School fees have doubled or tripled in some cases. There are other ancillary payments. Parents groan under the weight of the heavy school bills., and there is no respite anywhere. At bus stops and on the streets, agony is written all over the masses. But the locusts feeding fat on our vegetation would not have us talk about it.

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Nigerians have gone back to the old method of pawn. Older children now drop out of school for their younger ones to be educated. Children who wrote and cleared their school certificate examinations at one sitting and did very well in the matriculation examinations are being asked to ‘go and work’ so that their younger ones can be in school! And which jobs are we talking about here? Our young men and women, supposed leaders of our tomorrow, have been turned to hotel receptionists, supermarket attendants, fuel dispensers and other menial crafts including rummaging through piles of refuse for used bottles and iron scraps thereby exposing those young ones to all manners of abuse.

Yet the ones who captained our ship to these rudderless shores have their children in choice institutions of the world. They travel on holidays. They have the luxury of taking their paramours on tours of continents on our bills, depleting our treasury! We are doomed, condemned to perpetuate deprivation, while the caterpillars and palmerworms in power feed fat.

But, again, and sadly too, they would not have us talk about it. Virtually every nation of the world treats Nigerians as pariahs. Ghana is sending us packing, Libya enslaves our nationals. Why? Because our home is on fire here. Our fire emanated from the shrine of osanyin deity, the Yoruba god of healing and combustion. Who do we call upon to combat the inferno!

Terrible situation that we find ourselves in because the worst of humanity are in charge of our affairs! So, how does one keep quiet in a situation like this? Just because one’s kinsman is the President. If half of the population is wasted, we should bring out vuvuzelas and blow to high octanes just because our brother is in power?

Imagine if nobody is talking at all. Imagine if all of us have subordinated our humanity to the crumps from the master’s table. Just imagine our situation if all of us keep vigil waiting for when ‘Baba sope’ (the old man said) would throw the bones of his delicacy at us! Consider our situation if we all join the tiwa ntiwa, tàkísamà ni tààtàn (ours is ours; the rag belongs to the dunghill) lullaby for an absentee President who happens to be our kinsman!

By all means, I have no problem praising any leader provided he is doing the right thing. If our lives are better off today, we will celebrate the one responsible for that. If the Naira appreciates against any currency of the world, we shall roll out the drums in honour of who made it happen. If Nigerians are no longer kidnapped, farmers don’t pay bandits before they could harvest their farm produce and Nigerians can drink water and put the cups down peacefully, we shall holler the praises of such a wonderful leader who achieved that for us. His tribe would not matter. His creed would be inconsequential. His political affiliation would not be foregrounded. We would only recognise and appreciate his competence and his sense of loyalty to people above self.

That is the burden of an opinion writer. Nobody is called to the game of column writing to be a praise singer, except the self-serving individuals who rode on the train of public defenders to power defenders! Adidi Uyo our celebrated Professor of Journalism and Mass communication, said in an article: “The Art of Column Writing”, that a columnist who is keeping fidelity with the “salient guideline of SOS of Column writing”, where “SOS” means “Spectrum Of Style”, must “operate somewhere along certain stylistic continuums, simultaneously. Prominent among such continuums are the following three: Serious-Playful, Angry-Compassionate, Plain-Sarcastic (SPPACS).

The writer, Uyo further posits in what he calls The Salient Dozen, must: “… (2) Take sides. Make your viewpoint very clear. (3) Be consistent in your views…over time that is. (4) Support your position with sound arguments and /or solid facts. … (7) Worship Truth and Public Interest…” (See: Nigerian Columnists and Their Art, pgs 2-15, by Lanre Idowu). Reading the erudite scholar, one begins to wonder which school of journalism the senior editors in power today attended, where they were taught that the art and act of opinion writing is about hailing the taskmaster! Phew!

The message should be clear; as long as lice remains in the head, the fingers will always be stained with blood (bí iná ò bá tán lórí, èjè kò ní tán l’èékáná). In any case, not everyone has the slave mentality that has conditioned many not to see anything wrong with those who, on a broad day, defile our sensibilities! The elders say when a music is bad, nobody justifies it as being of the palace because the palace is not supposed to sing disjointedly (orin ò daa, a pe l’òrin ààfin; sé ààfin ló ye ká ti ma ko orin burúkú ni?).

A man who hates his kinsman being criticised should first tell his relation to act within the walls of propriety. This is what the friends of the President should ask him to do rather than projecting the ethnicity of the President as measurements of support for him.

Why not, if President Tinubu turns out to give Nigerians the best, should we not hail him? And why should we worship him like a bloated deity when his failings and incompetence stare us all in the face? When only the minority live in opulence to the detriment of the downtrodden majority, the noise in the marketplace will be loud. And one day, it may become audacious, a la Nepal!