Some Nigerians said it was wrong for Mr. Peter Obi to have labelled Yahoo Boys geniuses. I heard them and wondered whether ‘genius’ now has a new meaning apart from what the dictionary says it is.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (2007), on page 1091, defines genius as: “Natural ability or tendency, attributes which fit a person or particular activity. Natural aptitude, talent, or inclination for, to (something).”

Obi, the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 presidential election, in the post titled: “Our Youths Need Redirection”, that he shared on his verified X handle, after a conference he addressed in Onitsha, Anambra State, said that “some of our so-called Yahoo boys are geniuses who need redirection, not condemnation.”

He did not stop there. He posited further by saying that the “creativity and courage” of the Yahoo Boys, “if properly guided, can drive innovation and national development. Our challenge is to channel their energy from deception to productive enterprise. I also stressed that the reckless pursuit of money destroys both character and community. Leadership must lead by example, for a nation that rewards dishonesty cannot build integrity. I urged our youths to rediscover the dignity of labour and embrace hard work and innovation. Nations are built not by miracles but by men and women who think, work, and build.”

Pray, what do the Yahoo Boys display if not aptitude? How do they succeed in fleecing people of their hard-earned money if not that the Yahoo Boys are naturally gifted and their victims stupid or greedy, or a combination of both? How does a 17-year-old boy convince a 60-year-old man to part with his money on the promise that the old man would be given an oil block? Who swindles like that if not a genius? And we have these geniuses in our homes as children, wards and relations. The attention we pay to them matters.

A few weeks ago, I had lunch at an old friend’s house at Ido Ekiti. His wife, also a friend, was generous with the pounded yam she served. We were almost through when their 15-year-old daughter came in with two of her friends.

The girls greeted us and made for their section of the house when my friend called his daughter back. He complained that he was having an issue with his Android phone and asked her to check it. The girl asked what the issue was, and the father explained. What followed almost ruined our lunch.

Taking the phone from the father, the young girl said: “But I taught you how to fix this problem before, Daddy. I know you will soon call me again because of this.” It was not what she said that was the problem. The what-else-do-you-think-that-makes-you-to-forget manner she said it, was the issue. If an adult were to say those words, he would have simply called my friend an alakogbagbe (teach-and-forget soul)!

The girl simply punched some buttons and returned the phone to the father. “I have done it”, she said, giggling. The father, surprised, asked how, since he had locked his phone. The girl, laughing, simply said: “I know your password, even mummy’s and Uncle Tunji’s password.” She dropped the phone and dashed inside to join her friends.

We simply exchanged glances and continued with our lunch. But I could feel the tension. My friend’s wife was particularly embarrassed, but I felt nothing. Only God understands the ways of this generation.

While seeing me off, I decided to douse the tension, or minimise the reprimand I knew would follow once I departed. I quipped: “That’s a brilliant girl.” My friend responded: “Yes, but she can be rude. I have told her to watch how she talks.” I stopped and asked if the girl was rude or simply wondered why an adult should forget things easily. The wife joined the husband and affirmed that the girl was rude.

Then I said to the two of them: “I think I know what you people should do. Stop paying her school fees.” “Ha!” They both exclaimed, and I added: “Yes nao, sebi you said she is rude.” We all laughed at the joke, and I left.

My friend’s daughter will be 16 years old in June next year. But I was told that there is nothing she can’t design using computer applications! We have children like her in our homes; restless, brilliant, naturally impatient with perceived docility and outspoken to the point of seeming ‘rude’! What we do with them makes all the difference.

Teckworm, an online technology news and media company, on September 19, 2018, published an article: “Meet these 5 child hackers who could become top cyber security researchers.” The article, written by Maya Kamath, demonstrates how the society could guide negative prodigies into becoming useful members of the society especially in the field of Cybersecurity that is experiencing a shortfall of skilled professionals.

The first of the youngsters is Reuben Paul, a nine-year-old boy, and a third grader in Harmony School of Science, Austin, Texas, USA, who at a .B-Sides security conference, demonstrated how in a matter of minutes, hackers can easily steal all the important data from any Android smartphone including contact details, call logs and messages. The kid warned: “If a child can do it then a regular hacker can do it … so I just want everybody to be aware [and to] be more careful when you download games and stuff like that.” He went ahead to establish the Prudent Games and became the CEO at age nine!

Another kid is Betsy Davies, a seven-year-old British girl, who was able to hack the public Wi-Fi network following a short video tutorial. After 10 minutes, the article says: “Surprisingly, Betsy was able to hack the open Wi-Fi and steal the traffic of the volunteer in just 10 minutes and 54 seconds. Betsy managed this by setting up a Rogue Access Point which is normally used by hackers to carry out the “Man in the Middle” (MiTM) attack on the overly trusting web surfers to sniff web traffic.

The piece further mentions Kristoffer Von Hassel, a five-year-old kid hacker, the piece further states, “exposed the Xbox password flaw for which he has been officially added to the list of Microsoft’s recognized security researchers. We can expect a five-year-old kid to play the Microsoft Xbox Game as well as know the operating system. However, just imagine if a five-year-old kid starts finding a security vulnerability in the system. It just seems impossible; however, little Kristoffer Von Hassel discovered a back door into one of the most popular gaming systems and that is the Xbox Game.”

Another wonder kid identified only as “An Unnamed Canadian”, said to be 12 years old and a fifth grader, “launched a series of Denial-of-Service (DoS), spoofing and even defacement attacks against the Canadian government websites in support of the Quebec student protests. It seems the young protester even passed the data which was stolen from the government websites to the Anonymous group in exchange for video games. The young hacker was from Montreal and also pleaded guilty for being responsible for the shut down of a number of government sites including the Quebec Institute of Public Health and the Chilean government.”

The last of the quintet is a 10-year-old security researcher, who goes by the pseudonym ‘CyFi. According to the article, “The young Californian school girl first discovered the flaw when “she started to get bored” with the pace of farm style games. The first DefCon Kids at DefCon 19 was held in August 2011, where CyFi presented her findings on the zero-day flaw in the games on the iOS and Android devices which was confirmed to be of a new class of vulnerability by experts. While speaking to CNET, CyFi said: “It was hard to make progress in the game, because it took so long for things to grow. So, I thought, ‘Why don’t I just change the time?’”

CyFi’s, whose “real identity is being protected… was already a Girl Scout and a state ranked downhill skier. In addition, the little girl was already an artist who gave a spontaneous 10-minute speech in front of a thousand people at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.”

The Nigerian society also has more than enough shares of those young and brilliant children. What we do with them as a people is what makes the difference. While more developed societies harness the potential of such youngsters and turn them into useful members of the community, we often brand and blacklist them here, calling them derogatory names instead of seeking ways to change their orientation.

In our cities and towns, we see them everyday. Young boys in their teens and early twenties driving flashy cars. A friend, who teaches in one of the state-owned universities, once told me how young boys in his school created a massive car park for themselves. He said that the situation became embarrassing, such that the university authorities had to ban students from driving their cars within the campus. When I asked if that measure had stopped other students from buying their own cars, my friend answered in the negative. So, what is the effect of the ban?

Who are these super-rich kids behind the wheels of exotic cars that we see in our neighbourhoods? How did they get the money? What do they do for a living? On February 8, 2022, I published a piece titled: “The Yahoo in us all: Whose conscience have we not scammed.” In that piece, I submitted that “The issue of Yahoo Boys, Yahoo Plus and HK, are not social problems that just hit us all suddenly. No. The Nigerian society gradually moved into this present level of moral decadence, which has reached a bestial level, where sucklings now kill to make money.”

Regrettably, nothing in the submissions above has changed today! Rather, we have moved from a bad situation to an even worse one, and the worst may still be ahead. The moral decadence in our society today has become so pervasive that no segment of the society is spared. Ironically, the leaders we should look up to for direction are also complicit.

A community led by certificate forgers, drug barons, ex-convicts, corrupt politicians, and adults without childhood playmates cannot question the moral decadence of the youths! The Yahoo Boys of our society today are products of failed parentage. While the influence of peer groups bears some responsibility, the erosion of family values carries the greatest share of the blame.

More importantly, society’s response to the activities of these Yahoo Boys and girls will, no doubt, go a long way in transforming some of them into good citizens. This, I believe, is what Peter Obi meant when he said that “some of our so-called Yahoo boys are geniuses who need redirection, not condemnation.”

What Obi is saying is: Check these guys out, study them, understand their modus operandi and see how they can be re-oriented to channel those talents to positive ideas that will make them good and acceptable members of the society. That is exactly what a sane society does. The five kids mentioned by the Techworm are clear examples of how a negative path can be redirected.

When, for instance, Kristoffer’s parents discovered that their child could play games above his age on the Xbox Games platform, they reported their finding to Microsoft. The company investigated, discovered the flaws in the system that allowed a five-year-old to access those games and went ahead to fix the problem.

Then, Microsoft rewarded Kristoffer with $50, four games and a year subscription to Xbox Live from Microsoft! It went ahead to include “Kristoffer’s name in the list of recognised security researchers and Kristoffer now has his own Wikipedia page.” This, to me, is Obi’s message to the Nigerian society on the menace of Yahoo Boys.

This, again, I think Seye Oladejo, the Lagos State spokesman for the All Progressives Congress (APC), should see rather than his labelling Obi’s statement as “morally reprehensible”, and capable of encouraging “moral indiscipline.”

I read Oladejo’s reaction, and I wondered if he ever shared the piece with his superiors before he made it public. I don’t know how APC finds it convenient to talk about leadership that is rooted in “values, integrity, and moral responsibility”, when from top to bottom, the party flows with characters that are as despicable as the sight of maggots-infested faeces!

I would have been more at home with anyone asking Obi to always show the alternative routes anytime he comments on any public affair than anyone in the APC interrogating another man’s “moral compass”, as Oladejo did in his reaction. I begin to wonder if our politicians don’t look into the mirror to see the gory picture they depict before they go to the moral markets and spew sanctimony!

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

When Christopher Columbus met the Tanio people in today’s Bahamas in 1492, he handed them a sword, they grasped it by the blade and had their fingers cut. To Columbus, that was enough proof that the Tanios lacked the right education and knowledge and therefore could be easily conquered.

Columbus wrote of that experience: “They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…They were well built, with good bodies and handsome features…They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…They would make fine servants…With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Before Columbus came with his sword, these people quietly ruled their world across present-day Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, the Bahamas, and the Virgin Islands. A large part of what we call the Caribbean today was their turf. They were a very good people in character and carriage. Their name, ‘Taíno’ itself means ‘good and noble.’ They made their modest contributions to the world of knowledge and, especially, to language. To English Language, they donated the words ‘hammock,’ ‘canoe,’ ‘barbecue,’ ‘tobacco,’ and ‘hurricane’. There may be more.

They had their art and science. History and historians tell us that these people cultivated corn and yams, shaped fine brown pottery, spun cotton into thread, and crafted slender darts tipped with fish teeth and wood, deft weapons with which they defended their peaceful islands against their fierce, hostile neighbours, the Caribs, whose name endures in the Caribbean Sea. Robert M. Poole, a former editor of National Geographic and author of ‘Explorers House’, describes them as an “inventive people who learned to strain cyanide from life-giving yuca, developed pepper gas for warfare, devised an extensive pharmacopeia from nature, built oceangoing canoes large enough for more than 100 paddlers and played games with a ball made of rubber.” Yet, Columbus, the explorer and navigator from Europe, said they were ignorant, backward and weak and should be cheap food for the maggot of his sword. And that was because their knowledge was stale, their skills outdated.

Columbus visited on the Taíno not only the violence of the sword. His party also gave them slavery, diseases and other fatal afflictions beyond their knowledge and capacity to manage. They were so overwhelmed such that by the year 1550, just fifty-eight years after they encountered Columbus, the race was deemed extinct.

History teaches that those who fail to master the tools of their age become victims of it. What Columbus noticed and exploited was not total ignorance but tech and knowledge gaps; what he met were a good people, “inventive” but unfamiliar with iron and steel, the technology that defined power in that age of colonialism and conquest, of exploration and subjugation. Read ‘The American West: A New Interpretive History’ by Robert Hine and John Faragher. You may also read ‘Who Were the Taíno, the Original Inhabitants of Columbus’ Island Colonies?’ by Robert M. Poole in the October 2011 issue of the Smithsonian magazine. But as you read those texts and many more, think of our today and the Columbus in our lives.

The weapon of power of this era is not steel but digital technology. Those who embrace it rule the world; those who don’t are ruled by it. The lesson from history is unmistakable: innovation ecosystems are not born, they are built to dominate. United States’ richest state is California. Its tech sector in 2024 generated $542.5 billion in direct economic impact. Check the history of its Silicon Valley, the role played in its rise by Stanford University, by the US military, the government and the organised private sector. If you read Christophe Lécuyer’s ‘Making Silicon Valley’ and J. A. Estruth in ‘A New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley, 1945 to 1995’, you would find that revolutions rarely begin by accident.

Here, while the village head keeps vigil over his guards, he leaves the children of the village unguarded. Millions are out of school; millions more who are in school are under-taught and under-trained because their teachers are hungry. Millions who managed to graduate are out there wondering what next. And they are all in the 21st century with the Columbuses of this age actively swording and enslaving them.

Nigeria routinely happens to its young. What does that mean? It is a shorthand for broken optimism. In the Yoruba cultural ecosystem, it is the world (aye), in its cosmic wickedness, at work. It is to say that the country’s realities have thrown their crushing weight at youthful hope and ambition. So, how will the victim of Nigeria escape Nigeria? There is only one escape route for the afflicted: make the appropriate sacrifices. And what are the votive offerings, items of appeasement: education, skills, jobs and character.

A lawyer and public affairs commentator, Eseroghene Mudiaga-Erhueh gave an offering in an edition of The Guardian last week. In beautiful, elegant prose, she cast a long look at what Nigeria has made of its young and declared that “today’s young Nigerian has two clear career paths: work legally and stay broke, or bend the rules and cash out.” It is a deep reflection on what life is for the youth of Nigeria – even for the not-so-young. The option that pays well and is profitable is the one that wears the jersey of crime.

“So true”, I told a Nigerian senator who shared the article with me. The writer was right; we can see it. The bird that won’t cut corners in Nigeria is the flightless creature outside, in the rain, drenched and hungry. The senator, in his response to the lawyer’s lamentation, said it was “the Nigerian situation brilliantly encapsulated.” He was right.

In ‘The Problem of Poverty’ published in the November 1904 edition of the American Journal of Sociology, the author, Emil Münsterberg, German politician and jurist, tells us that it is in the nature of man to struggle against poverty and want. A man made poor by society, he says, “will either beg the means of subsistence from his fellows, or, if this fails, he will resort to fraud or force in his efforts to obtain it.” That is the dilemma of the law. Yahoo yahoo is a southern Nigerian affliction; youths who do it are, without shame, supported by their parents.

The youths of the north who are not into begging (almajiri) are divided between banditry/mass kidnapping and commercial terrorism. The law has been unable to exercise its preventive powers over these crimes and the criminals. Prosecution has not worked, penalties have failed. And you ask why? “The history of poverty furnishes numerous proofs of the fact that the instinct of self-preservation is under all circumstances stronger than the fear of penalty.” That is Emil Münsterberg again. He says steps must be taken to anticipate the poor man’s instinctive action “by voluntarily supplying (him) with the means of satisfying his natural wants.” The society will be in self-deception if it thinks punishment is enough deterrence for crimes caused by deprivation.

The bird of Nigeria sits on a tight rope. We can change service chiefs like diapers; we can employ marabouts to conjure peace and electoral victories. We can gag the bell and break the coconut of power on the head of the parrot. Nothing will work as long as poverty continues to pass seamlessly from parents to children, locking generations and generations in a continuous loop of deprivation.

Why are children born into poverty more likely to remain poor as adults? A Yoruba saying answers this sad, tragic question: Ìsé kìí mú oko l’áya k’ó má ran omo (poverty cannot afflict husband and wife and spare their children). I read a little of a 2024 book, ‘The Escape from Poverty’. The authors interrogate inter-generational perpetuation of poverty (IGPP) and its close correlation with child poverty and inequality. They conclude that “combating child poverty is key to ending inter-generational perpetuation of poverty, (and) ending inter-generational perpetuation of poverty is essential to reducing child poverty.” It is a cycle, and it is vicious.

For us to have peace, it must be broken; but what does it take to break a cycle? James Clear, author of New York Times bestseller, ‘Atomic Habits’, says it only takes five minutes to break a cycle. The Gordian knot was proving difficult for Alexander the Great to untangle; he sliced it with his sword. The authors of ‘The Escape from Poverty’ list having or not having education as a key factor in determining whether a child will grow poor or not poor. They argue that breaking poverty cycles is not only a technical question but also a political one. Breaking the cycle of poverty in Nigeria requires more than slogans of renewed or recycled hopes, or doling out temporary relief measures; it demands deliberate investment in the transformative power of education, particularly digital education and skills acquisition.

We have history to guide us. In 1955, Western Nigeria dazzled Nigeria with free primary education, the success of that leap created a super people. Other regions saw it, scrambled and copied it. In 2025, Nigeria fumbles with the matchbox; lighting the torch again has become one of the 12 impossible tasks assigned to Hercules.

Nigeria may be a bumbling behemoth but every cloud has a silver lining. I was at an Odu’a Investment Foundation’s digital education event organised for South Western Nigeria’s school children last Friday. Students from secondary schools from all parts of the South West, trained by the foundation, competed in a show of digital skills. They called it the Byte Busters club coding showcase. Restless Professor Seun Kolade of UK’s Sheffield Business School is the project director. In one short year, teenagers who once barely knew how to use a mouse displayed what the intervention empowered them to build: apps and AI tools, quiz platforms, CCTV and virtual school tours. I saw the Yoruba kitting their youths for a digital escape from the ravages of Nigeria and its suffocation. I saw problem-solving in structured, locally grounded ways. It is a quiet revolution. I saw nimble fingers ready to code their way out of the country’s frustrations. It was an eye-opener.

“We are raising a generation of tech leaders…We are defining the future. We should have our own Silicon Valley in the South West; we have the talent,” chairman of the foundation’s advisory council, Ambassador Dr. Olatokunbo Awolowo Dosumu said as she marvelled at the genius showcased by the school teens, plus the self-confidence they exuded. Her father did it in 1955; she is doing it in 2025.

Why do we need education at all? After all, people become presidents, governors and ministers without certificates. There have been so many sermons about teaching your children so that he will give you peace. So what will happen if a nation refuses to teach their children? They will become bandits and Yahoo boys and girls and their governors and senators will have no village or hometown to retire to; they will become homeless at home. Their country will tell horror stories like what our National Human Rights Commission announced four months ago: “At least 2,266 people were killed (by bandits and insurgents) in the first half of 2025, compared to 1,083 in the first half of 2024 and 2,194 for the full year last year.”

The way to peace and prosperity is to build new ladders of opportunity for those historically left behind. The right education for our time must “teach the hand to work right, the head to think well, and the heart to choose rightly.” I do not know who to credit those words to. What I know, and sure of, is that from software development to remote service provision, the global demand for technology-enabled work grows daily. It should not be too difficult for Nigeria to know that a well-trained Nigerian youth population will compete and thrive beyond traditional boundaries; they will give the country peace of mind.

It is difficult to put a full stop to this without stressing that if children must be freed from the chains of penury that bind their parents, they must have the skills that sell today. The country will fall to the sharp edges of Columbus’s sword unless our home suckles success and kills failure. If nurtured through the keyboards, curiosity, and creativity of the Nigerian young, digital education will do for Nigeria what Silicon Valley did for California, a transformation of economy, of identity, of community, and of national purpose.

At the Ibadan event, I listened to retired Methodist Bishop Ayo Ladigbolu saying it his own episcopal way. Goats are curious because they were taught curiosity by their parents, Bishop Ladigbolu told his audience. He adds that what ram taught his own children makes them competent in locking horns (“èkó tí àgbò fi kó omo rè ní í fi í nkàn”). The education and skills which kittens got from their parent are what prepared and empowered them to jump walls (“èkó tí ológìnní fi kó omo rè ní í fi nf’ògiri”). The bishop dropped those deep Yoruba ancestral nuggets and added one more counsel: “K’á wo nkan re fi kó’mo wa…” (let us nurture our kids with noble skills). If you are wise, for this era, you would make the garment fit for this era. “Aso ìgbà ni àá dá fún’gbà.” The bishop was right. What kind of home sews loincloths, or even, nakedness for harmattan? That is what Nigeria has been doing for its youths. If this country won’t flow into extinction, it must redirect the course of its waters away from the desert.

“Àbá níí d’òótó, ojo kìí jé ká le ga.” The bishop again. And what does that mean? An attempt at translation here: Proposals are what lead to results; cowardice stunts. It is already getting late. Columbus wanted trade and its profits from the spice and silk of Asia. With his blade adequately whetted, he set out for his ambition in August 1492, he had more than Asia’s spice and silk. He got America’s federal capital named after him; he also had what has come to be known as ‘the new world.’ The explorer was successful because he had the requisite education; knowledge of Geography was his ‘digital’ skill. His life is a proof that with determination and the right education, it is possible to break any vicious cycle – and conquer the world. I enjoyed what Odu’a Investment Foundation showcased in Ibadan last week. Results come from attempts, the hesitant rarely grow.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Haruna Yahaya Poloma

In a confounding display of bureaucratic cynicism, the Government has announced December 2025 as the target date to decriminalise attempted suicide in Nigeria. This is a move that represents an ultimate surrender to the catastrophic failure to protect citizens from the unimaginable suffering and misery that are confronting them.

Rather than addressing the root causes of despair that lead many to attempted suicides, such as the crushing poverty, systemic corruption, and institutional neglect that continuously push millions to the brink of unaliving themselves, this administration seeks to remove legal consequences for those who choose to escape their misery through suicide. This is not compassion; it is state-sanctioned abandonment of a population drowning in hopelessness.

Moreover, the timing of this proposed reform is particularly grotesque. With Nigeria ranking as the seventh highest country globally in suicide rates and recording approximately 15,000 suicide deaths annually, the government’s decision to focus on decriminalisation rather than intensifying poverty alleviation and mental health infrastructure development reveals a disturbing choice in priorities. When a state faces an epidemic of despair among its citizens, the moral response should be to address the sources of that despair, not to effectively make recourse to suicide more accessible by removing the legal barriers.

Across the world, progressive nations treat suicide as a public health crisis, not merely a legal issue. The World Health Organisation recognises suicide as a global health emergency, with over 720,000 lives lost annually to suicide worldwide. In high-income countries, the decriminalisation of suicide has historically been accompanied by robust mental health support systems, crisis intervention networks, and substantial public funding for suicide prevention programs. These nations came to understand that decriminalisation alone is hollow and meaningless without parallel investments in mental healthcare and social safety nets.

Nigeria’s belated approach stands in shameful contrast to this global standard. What our government is proposing is to remove punitive measures, while offering little or no substantive replacement in terms of mental health support. The existing mental healthcare infrastructure remains grossly underfunded, inaccessible to most citizens, and largely stigmatized even within the medical establishment itself. This reform, therefore, represents a hollow form of progress; a mere legalistic change without material improvement in the conditions that initially drive people to suicide.

To properly understand the unconscionable cruelty of this effort at decriminalization of suicide, one must revisit the underlying socio-economic nightmare fuelling Nigeria’s suicide crisis and the deliberate societal apathy that continuously enables this national tragedy. The levels of unemployment, food insecurity, malnutrition, violence, terrorism, banditry, kidnapping and corruption alone paint a compelling picture of a nation in profound distress.

These are not natural disasters; they are direct consequences of concomitant policy choices and governance failures. The same government that now seeks to decriminalize suicide has presided over the economic devastation that is driving citizens to despair. The bitter irony is that the state, which has failed in its fundamental duty to protect the wellbeing and welfare of citizens, now magnanimously offers them the perverse “right” or option to kill themselves without legal consequence.

The human cost of these failures by the state can be measured in acts of desperation: men drinking pesticide after losing their livelihoods, students jumping from heights after academic frustrations, mothers poisoning themselves because they cannot feed their children. These are not criminal acts to be sanctioned; they are the final, desperate protestations against unbearable conditions of existence in a nation that has abandoned its people.

We submit that this decriminalization effort must be recognized for what it truly is: a calculated diversion to distract public attention from the breath-taking failure to address the root causes of Nigeria’s suicide crisis. Instead of creating jobs, it offers the right to die without criminal penalty. Instead of ensuring food security, it offers freedom from prosecution for those who choose a terminal escape from hunger. Instead of providing healthcare, it offers legal immunity for those driven to final acts of desperation arising from unaddressed trauma and mental anguish.

The cruel hypocrisy of this approach is stunning. While Professor Muhammad Ali Pate, the Minister of Health and Social Welfare, speaks of “changing the narrative on suicide” but the government he serves is presiding over the harshest living conditions in national memory, that not only create suicide desperation but make it a viable alternative for many Nigerians. His ministry speaks of “creating hope through action”, but is offering the hopelessness of dying without legal consequence.

This is not and cannot be compassion. It is the ultimate expression of cynicism. It demonstrates a government that has not only given up on its people, but is now offering them the “freedom” to give up on themselves. The Nigerian people deserve much more than the right to die without criminal penalty. They deserve the right to live with dignity, security, and hope. They deserve a government that fights for their lives rather than merely enabling them to die without consequence. True compassion is a government that addresses the crushing poverty and suffering that are now making death seem more preferable to life for so many Nigerians.

Poloma is a Nigerian author, historian, and public affairs commentator.. His most notable work, The First Regular Combatant: Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari, stands as a landmark contribution to Nigerian military history. [email protected]

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.