By Suyi Ayodele

The yuletide is a season of merriment. Traditionally, a season of merriment and joy. It is a period of hope because it is the month that the Saviour was born. In Old English, Yuletide, as depicted by Norsemen, celebrates warmth, merriment and fellowship. Why is it now a period of blood and tears in Nigeria? What is our sin? We will employ a folktale to explain our present predicament.

Ikú (Death) once challenged Òrúnmìlà to a duel. Whoever won would eliminate the other alongside his household. Orunmila, the wise one, knew that no one could kill Ikú. Baba Àgbonnìrègún knew he had a big problem to solve. But there is always a solution to every problem.

Òrúnmìlà devised a means. He asked one of his wives, Òsúnlèyò, to befriend Àrùn (Disease), the wife of Iku. At that time, Àrùn had a contagious disease that made everyone avoid her. Therefore, it was a welcoming development that Òsúnlèyò, would want to be her friend.

After many days of interaction, Òsúnlèyò, broached the idea of the contest between Ikú and Òrúnmìlà, and Arun asked her to relax. “I know my husband, Ikú. He is a trickster. He will bring three strange objects concealed in three different pots. If your husband cannot name the objects, Iku will kill your husband and his entire household. But I will help you”, Àrùn assured Òsúnlèyò, She further instructed Òrúnmìlà’s wife that on the day of the contest, Òrúnmìlà should nominate his wife, Osunleyo, to solve the riddle of the mystery pots.

On the D-day, Ikú came with his pots. Òrúnmìlà and other deities gathered with bated breath. When the time was due, Ikú with his club raised, asked Òrúnmìlà to name the items in the pots. Majestically, Òrúnmìlà adjusted his divination bag and boasted that he, being an Òmòràn tíí mo aboyún ìgbín (the one who knows all things including a pregnant snail), would not condescend to name objects that an apprentice initiate could easily decipher. Rather, Òrúnmìlà said he would ask his wife, Osunleyo, to name the objects.

Pronto, Òsúnlèyò, stepped forward and named the objects in the three pots of Ikú to be the legs of a lame man, the head of a madman and the corpse of a hunchback. Ikú was dazed. He accepted defeat. But he added a caveat. Since his assignment from the Creator is to cut short people’s lives, he would not deviate from that. But rather than being brazen about it, he would ensure that humanity would, through their follies, look for death.

Like Ikú (death), President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came on May 29, 2023, with three mysterious pots. Each pot contains a strange item that Nigerians must decipher correctly if they are to live to tell the story of the untold hardship the new government will unleash on them.

In one of the pots, Tinubu deposited the legs of a lame man. Inside the second, he had the head of a madman and the third pot was the corpse of a hunchback. These three strange items have grave significance: spiritually and otherwise.

This is not an esoteric exercise; so, we will not categorically say what each item represents. But we will adopt the Yoruba philosophy Ààbò òrò (half word). During our discourse, the Ààbò òrò will turn to “Odindi” (full word). This, however, will be on the understanding that those who will rise to defend President Tinubu in the present calamities that have befallen the entire country will imbibe the ethos of Omolúàbí and have the wisdom to turn Ààbò òrò to Odindi.

This is exactly what happened to Nigerians in 2023. Ikú was standing by the wayside. Nigerians willingly invited him to their abodes. It began in 2015. Through the error of judgments, Nigerians voluntarily invited Ikú (Death) to their closets. Not even the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has records of how many Nigerians have died sheepishly and cheaply since the current locust of leaders took over the administration of this country in 2015.

For the eight ruinous years General Muhammadu Buhari spent picking his teeth while the nation drifted to the bottomless pit. Nigerians died in their thousands in the hands of killer herdsmen, Boko Haram insurgents, kidnappers and other felons who visited “sorrow, tears and blood” upon the people.

In the current administration of President Tinubu, the contents of the strange pots the Jagaban Borgu came along with at his inauguration have continued to hunt and hurt us. The wicked and rudderless economic policies of the administration, which like the legs of a lame and the head of a madman, have led many Nigerians to their untimely death. The pain of directionless economic permutations is like the one associated with hunchback; there is no folding it, there is no bending it! The NBS released damning statistics, which the Bureau was forced to recant as a product of a hacked platform, last week. But are we all deceived? If the government pretends not to know its own lies, don’t we, as a people know the truth?

The Yuletide brings good tidings in sane climes. In the Nigeria of the locust leaders, the Yuletide is a bloody season! We are different from others in many ways. Nothing works for us; nothing works in our favour, and we question nothing. We are too unfortunate not to have Àrùn, who could tell us about the secrets in Tinubu’s strange pots. This is why when one ugly event occurs, all we do is mourn. The next minute, we behave like nothing had happened. We resign to fate and ‘faith’ so easily. Nigerians are a pummelled people, always at the mercy of callous leadership!

Here, life is cheap. But death is much cheaper in our clime. For a measure of rice, a pack of noodles and fingertips-counted seeds of beans, Nigerians die in their scores because an unfeeling leadership has imposed on the nation a strangulating economic policy that leads to nowhere but the shallow graves of the victims!

From Ibadan, Oyo State, to Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, and Okija in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State, and to the next unknown destination, death hovers over us like the proverbial sword of Damocles. We can only count the number of known victims. Many more are there unaccounted for, just as many are lurking in the corners, waiting to take their spots in the shallow graves where we bury our victims.

And we are all victims, though we are not all dead yet. We don’t even have to have relations among the dead. As long as we read about their news and feel sorrowful about it, we are all victims. Victims of inept leadership; victims of wickedness that those we entrust our future daily dish out from their cosy offices and homes.

It started in Ibadan on Wednesday, December 18. A ‘philanthropist’, that is the narrative they want us to project, and former queen of Oba Enitan Ogunwusi, the Ooni of Ife, Prophetess Naomi Silekunola, in conjunction with a popular radio presenter, Oriyomi Hamzat, promoted a freebies programme that would give N5,000 to 5,000 children from the age of 18 downwards. That was what Ikú in the Tinubu administration needed to strike. A freebie that targeted children in the cast has its spiritual implications. But we shall not dwell on that here.

For a programme slated for 10 am, Nigerians in their thousands thronged to the Islamic High School, Bashorun, Ibadan, playfield, the venue of the proposed programme as early as 5 a.m. Many were said to have slept overnight at the venue to be among the “first 5,000”. Parents threw toddlers over the fence while they scaled the high fence to get a common N5,000. Ikú waited. Like it promised Òrúnmìlà, he would not strike brazenly again but would allow human beings to seek him through their follies.

The ensuing stampede led to the death of 35 children. Many of the children were not up to two years old. Hamzat, in one of the reactions to the incident, said while the rescue operation was ongoing, he encountered women who came with their babies for gifts. A woman was said to be looking for her four-month-old baby among the over 10,000 people who had gathered for the freebies. Pray, why would a nursing mother venture out of her house with a four-month-old baby strapped to her back? Poverty!

Poverty is what this government sells in abundance. The tragedy spares no one. Everything that gives hope has disappeared. When there is hunger, wisdom is always in short supply. That is what Ibadan experienced last Wednesday, the flight of wisdom in the face of acute hunger! What will N5,000 buy in the Nigeria of Tinubu? But it would not matter. Nigerians have gotten to that level that if another freebies programme is organised at Bashorun High School, people would travel all the way from Alakia to partake. That is what deliberate poverty does. The government knows this; those in power know that it is a veritable instrument to keep the masses subjugated.

I have read comments about the faults of Prophetess Silekunola and the Agidigbo FM, organisers of the Ibadan programme of death. I agree that the organisers should have been more thorough and put measures in place to avoid the disaster. Their failure to do that makes them liable.

But beyond that, can we ask why Nigerians would sleep in an open field overnight just to collect N5,000 at daybreak? This is where those exonerating President Tinubu and his economic policies of death are getting it wrong. If there is any culprit for this disaster, it is President Tinubu! It is not enough that the President cancelled the Lagos boat regatta to honour the dead. The greatest honour President Tinubu can give to the dead and those who will still be victims is for him to begin to think outside the box.

President Tinubu must know or must be told that none of his economic policies has worked, is working or likely going to work. The President must be told that his government, like the immediate Buhari government, has eliminated the middle class. He must be told in clear terms that Nigerians are hungry. When a man experiences the pang of hunger the way Nigerians are now, wisdom and discretion become irrelevant. There is no deity like hunger; it kills faster than death itself.

Olóbòbòtiribò in Yoruba cosmology, is the god of the throat and stomach. It is a deity that requires daily sacrifice. The sacrificial items are the same edibles that this administration has taken away from the people. Before these present gangs took over in 2015, Nigerians could get a bag of rice for as cheap as N3,500. That was why nobody had time to organise rice palliative distribution in Abuja or Okija. Nigerians had no reason to die while scrambling for bags of rice at an unorganised distribution centre because a bag of 50kg of foreign rice was sold at N7,500 in 2015.

Just 19 months ago when President Tinubu came into the saddle, a bag of rice was still sold for N35,000. Today, that same quantity and less quality of rice goes for N120,000. This is why despite the much publicity the Ibadan tragedy attracted, Nigerians still gathered in Abuja and Okija to receive their slots of death! This is sad! But more sadly, it will happen again!

The people in Orunmila’s time were lucky. They had Àrùn, the compassionate wife of Ikú, to save them by leaking the secrets of the mystery pots to them. Who is that compassionate Àrùn in the Tinubu government, in Tinubu’s household, and among his kitchen cabinet? Who is that man or woman with the milk of kindness?

Hours after the Ibadan tragedy, the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, was all over Abuja, canvassing for how the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) would help him ‘capture’ Oyo State in 2027! That is how unfeeling our leaders are. Ikú said he would not kill unless the people, through their follies, invited him. This is a lesson for us all. We are at liberty to invite Ikú again in 2027!

Most of the calamities of the last 19 months are self-inflicted because we refused to scrutinise the gifts of the legs of a lame, the head of a madman and the corpse of hunchback Tinubu gave to us at his inauguration. President Tinubu must know that the ancient greeting for the Yuletide is: “Compliments of the Season.” History will not be kind to him if this should turn into “Bloodiness of the Season! This is sad enough!

By V. C. Mba, Esq.

Professors Kperogi and Eghagha are some of the most engaging essayists one may ever encounter; both writers would immediately arrest you with their opening paragraphs and hold you spellbound until the last sentence — grandmasters of the art of writing and excellent polemicists.

Characteristically, their pieces on Ms Kemi Badenoch’s put-down of the Vice President of Nigeria, the country of her birth, did not disappoint, except that none of the excellent essayists and polemicists either has made any attempt to deny the veracity of Ms Kemi Badenoch’s claims, or (where, that is if, there has been any such attempt at all) has failed in disputing any of Kemi Badenoch’s said claims. Their only complaint was that yes, we all know that Nigeria is in a deep mess, but Kemi Badenoch shouldn’t have said so in the market square or (to use Prof Eghagha’s words) should not have pointed a left finger at her roots! And I ask, but why not?

Yes, distinguished Prof Eghagha has copiously cited some undeniably egregious evil immanents in Kemi Badenoch’s newfound country, but has failed to recognize the fact that the various Commissions of Inquiries in that country at least had objectively, independently, dispassionately and empirically carried out their briefs, and had come to a verifiable conclusion on the issue of whether or not the British system was racist — concluding that ‘black and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested and imprisoned than their white counterparts’.

Respected Professors Kperogi and Eghagha, while uncharacteristically missing the point — on the incontrovertible and yet-to-be-cncontroverted veracity of Ms Kemi’s allegations against egregious institutional failures in Nigeria — have each gone on a wild-goose-chase regaling themselves with obvious non sequiturs. Example, while positing, albeit without any verifiable and plausible evidence, that the North of Nigeria is the progenitor of the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria (according to respected Professor Kperogi) and or that Ms Kemi Badenoch had pointed at her father’s homestead with the left hand (according to Prof Eghagha), both authors have annoyingly failed to say any word to contradict or discredit the veracity of Ms Badenoch’s seemingly unassailable delivery. Does this not mean that Kemi was right?

Notwithstanding Prof Eghagha’s unsuccessful attempt to discredit the UK, it is important to assert that, at least, the institutional framework of the United Kingdom was able to conclude that ‘black and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and imprisoned than their white counterparts’, unlike their Nigerian counterparts which have consistently and unfortunately proven incapable of any such depth or objectiveness in their investigations, and this is integral to the immanent evils Kemi Badenoch riles against.

In my respectful opinion, Ms Badenoch is right on much of her claims or at least on the frightening apocalyptic insecurity in Northern Nigeria; she’s unimpeachable notwithstanding that the mob and their apologists perhaps feel that Kemi Badenoch shouldn’t have exposed in the open, the depth of decadence in Nigeria, and, again, I ask why not?

With due respect, it’s disgusting that the two distinguished Professors, Kperogi and Eghagha, like some citizens with a voice are calling for Ms Badenoch’s head on a platter, not because of what she said, but unfortunately on account of how, or the forum, she said it! As a piece of counsel to each of Prof Farooq and Prof Eghagha, the very first steps towards self-redemption is the ability to tell oneself the truth.

As bitter as it may be, Kemi Badenoch has told us the truth about ourselves. A reasonable bystander would have thought that instead of all this hypocritical righteous indignation, and our usual play-to-the-gallery, we should rather use the opportunity afforded by Ms Badenoch’s apposite reprimand, to ask ourselves some ontological questions with a view to finding lasting solutions to our problems?

V.C Mba, Esq
(23 December 2024)

The handling of the on-going defamation case between legal giant, Afe Babalola and social activist, Dele Farotimi has provided strong evidence that Nigeria has probably lost its fight against media trial. Many years back, there was the well-articulated viewpoint that because the word “trial” is associated with the process of justice, trial by the media constitutes an undue interference in the process of justice delivery. The argument has since been overtaken by the nature of social media which has made public communication exceedingly rampant, just as lawyers have themselves contributed to the development by engaging in the new wave of minute-by-minute commentary on cases already before a court of justice. Apart from publicity-seeking lawyers, some others with scanty briefs are too anxious to let the public know that they are learned.

Unfortunately, the Nigerian public has not been well served by the trend in which both parties in the case have already found one another guilty. In the process, the parties have also made it easy to identify the bias of each commentator while establishing that Nigerian law was in a state of confusion. The original point made was that Farotimi was smuggled into Ekiti from Lagos for trial because libel had been decriminalized in Lagos state. Another version said Lagos and Edo states were the only two states where libel had been downgraded to civil wrong before it was realized that Ekiti itself had done same in 2021. Those who were thus unable to comprehend why the charge was read in Ekiti were later informed that it was still a crime as a federal offence. So, how can anyone pacify the social media mob with the gossip that a federal crime was being happily prosecuted in Ekiti which had decriminalized same offence in her own territory?

Here, one can say that the irrepressible prolific writer Chidi Odinkalu may have greatly influenced some of the views of the social media activists. Odinkalu had recalled the story of Paul Anyebe a judge in Benue state who was once prosecuted on a-two count charge of attempted murder and illegal possession of firearms. On the latter, he was convicted in the lower courts but freed at the Supreme Court. What the apex court established was that the illegal possession of firearms being a federal offence could only be prosecuted by the Attorney General of the Federation. Expectedly, the public may not have understood why Dele Farotimi was being tried in Ekiti state for criminal libel which is a federal offence. In the circumstance, any person was free to believe that the trial of Farotimi in Ado Ekiti was influenced by some big personality.

The views of a few conservative intellectuals on Babalola’s side did not convince some ‘diehards.’ As one commentator on social media observed, the write-up with the title “Dele Farotimi: When activism is no licence to defame” gave an impression that the accused had already been found guilty hence the conclusion that activism was no licence to defame others. No one could have defamed anybody yet until after judgment. As a matter of fact, with a few people already volunteering to testify in favour of Farotimi, the presumption of guilt is shaken. At the same time, writers on the side of the complainant have spent ample time telling us about the great achievements of Babalola as if the man’s career and feat were in doubt. There is nothing strange about people seeking to bring down a great character because it is only those on top that can be brought down. One commentator was so incensed that he reduced the issue to how African culture expects young people to respect elders.

Those who were unable to immediately comprehend the overwhelming public interest in the matter were wrongly thinking of Babalola and Farotimi. They greatly missed the point because what attracted everyone to the subject was the common public pain of judicial corruption in the country. Nigerians are not pleased with the judiciary. The other day when Chief Justice Kekere-Ekun tried to explain the problem of conflicting judgments, one critic on radio merely reminded listeners that the ugly trend was a recent phenomenon. To be honest, too many inexplicable things have happened in Nigeria of recent; a good example being the case of a governorship election petition in which the oral judgment was the opposite of the certified true copy of the same judgment.

Again, although criminal libel is a written law that can be located and read, it still did not make sense to many people. On the other hand, it is easy to appreciate civil defamation where anyone who was defamed could sue and be compensated for whatever damage was done. It is truly hard to convince people that Farotimi’s alleged defamation against Babalola should be punished as if he defamed every other person whose names he never mentioned in his book. Consequently, social media mob can never understand how the attack on a particular person’s reputation can adversely affect the reputation of another person who was not referred to in the statement that was considered to be defamatory. For as long as it exists, criminal libel will always be perceived more as bad law.

From the above, it is obvious that decriminalizing libel in Nigeria is overdue. It is indeed one of the failings of our National Assembly that obsolete colonial laws of sedition and criminal libel are still in our law books more than half a century after the colonialists who originated them had left Nigeria. The obsolete laws are no doubt an affront on free speech provided for by Section 39 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic 1999 and Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights Act. Each time this argument is presented, it is countered by the purpose of Section 45 of our constitution which recognizes that certain laws are reasonably justifiable in a democracy. Is it justifiably reasonable to take aspects of the law of sedition and incorporate them into the Cybercrimes act to harass citizens? Is it not repugnant to criminalize libel and equate an attack on a person’s reputation to an attack on government and the entire society?

To make matters worse, the procedure attached to criminal libel can hardly meet the course of justice making it clearly undesirable. What usually happens is that when a person files a petition, accusing someone of making a false or damaging statement against him or her, the accused is usually brutalized even before the case is determined or indeed before getting to the point of saying anything. In the case of Farotimi for example, he was placed on handcuffs, denied bail and imprisoned for no less than two weeks without any opportunity to even show that he can prove the truth of his allegation. Yet, the law accepts truth as an absolute defence. Such a procedure can only be forcefully justified in a dictatorship and not a democracy.

Since we are no longer under colonial or military rule, it is important to repeal criminal libel so that a party that can win a case at the end is not first brutalized before the case starts just as the loser’s sanction comes only after conviction. Nigeria would certainly be better off if sufficient attention is paid to law reforms. One of the advantages of such is that it produces a uniform system of laws and justice delivery. The situation of a few states decriminalizing libel while the federal system remains stagnant is ill advisable. Besides, it is not in the interest of the nation to focus on yearly review of Electoral Act while obsolete colonial laws remain in our books.

We have had ample time to change the situation. As far back as 1985 when former governor Jim Nwobodo sued one writer, Arthur Nwankwo over an article he wrote criticising the governor, Hon Justice Olatawura JCA made the following profound statements: “we are no longer the illiterates or the mob society our colonial masters had in mind when certain laws were promulgated. Let us not diminish from the freedom gained from our colonial masters by resorting to laws enacted by them to suit their purpose.” Instead, let us enjoy the freedom of democracy that at the same time abhors reckless statements that can hurt the reputation that some citizens have built over the years.

By Lasisi Olagunju

I died one bright day in 1969 — yes, died; crushed by a motorcyclist. It happened on Ileya Day (Eid el Kabir) in my hometown. I did not know, and still do not know, how it happened. All I know is that I was following my father to the Eid praying ground in the morning, then I followed a crowd of other children to cross the road to the other side,…then I woke up in the afternoon, medics all over me, stitching and cleaning. Where I was turned out to be the Baptist Welfare Centre in neighbouring Iree town.

A day that was supposed to be a day of feast almost turned grim in our home. For parents of the children who died last Wednesday in Ibadan, and families who lost loved ones on Saturday in Abuja and Okija, Anambra State, this Christmas and the New Year are certain days of mourning. May God comfort them.

The dead got eaten while looking for what to eat. I pray that the bereaved be healed of their mortal wounds. They do not have my parents’ luck: I came back from the dead, head heavily sutured. The children who went to Basorun in Ibadan on Wednesday last week didn’t come back; they won’t be back, forever. Every Eid el Kabir reminds me of my own aborted (abortive) death. For the Ibadan, Abuja and Okija families, every year end henceforth will come with spectral, ghostly memories. What happened is an evergreen tragedy, monumental in all ways.

When a similar crowd crush killed 183 children in a hall in Sunderland, United Kingdom, on 16 June, 1883, one of the survivors contrasted the mood in his family with the atmosphere in unfortunate homes in that city: “In our house there was joy and thanksgiving, and one old neighbour laid his hand on my head and told me that my death had not yet been decreed. But in many homes, there was misery and desolation, many a heart was stricken with woe, and many a mother as she bent in sorrow over a loved one so strangely still (said that) indeed, the ways of God are not as our ways.” William Codling, who managed to escape the horrid incident with his sister, wrote the above in December 1894 (eleven years after the tragedy).

Death existed to kill the aged, but today, it is murdering the young, north, east and west. Why? Fuji music philosopher, Saheed Osupa, asks the same question in a song: “Ikú np’àgbà/ èwo ni t’omodé?/ Ilé ayé mà wá di rúdurùdu.” The world is spoilt. In his ‘Yoruba Responses to The Fear of Death’ (1960), Peter Morton-Williams describes death of the young among the Yoruba as “horrifying, an unnatural calamity.” It is true that what we call àìgboràn- headstrong foolhardiness – sometimes kills, but it is also true that the will of the enemy kills more. The enemy in the context of this death discourse is the Nigerian state. Mass misery was the enemy that processed the disasters of last week.

Hunger is a very jealous tenant; it habours no neighbour – not the fear of death, not of death itself. If the hungry feared death, they would know that an uncontrolled crowd is a barrel bomb that kills without borders. Hunger was the devil in the fatal gatherings of Ibadan, Abuja and Okija. I blame the lords of the land. On their watch, everyone begs, or rummages the trash can or joins deadly food rallies for IDP rations. Those are the options. The other available option is suicide – and many pursue life today in ways that suggest they do not mind dying as an escape route.

In 1883, what was promised the kids of Sunderland were toys and “the greatest treat for children ever given.” In Ibadan last Wednesday, what the children were promised was N5,000 for the first 5,000 of them that showed up. Some mothers heard that and put one plus one together: Two kids meant N10,000; three kids, N15,000. They did the maths and thought it was right to gather and rush their entire kids into that ground of death in search of hope. Many got there as early as 5 am – five hours before the event was due to start; some mothers reportedly even slept overnight there with their kids to beat the queue. Some more desperate ones threw their kids across the fence into the already choked and charged school compound, the event venue. It was like feeding their future to the demon of misery. Mr. Oriyomi Hamzat, whose Agidigbo FM radio station partnered with the organizers, says in a trending audio clip: “I saw how people were falling on one another. As I was rescuing those that fell, more people were rushing and stepping on those that were on the ground because of small gifts. I pity that woman, and I pity myself. I will never do this again.”

In Okija, Anambra State, the promise was rice; in Abuja, it was imprecise ‘palliative.’ The Ibadan, Abuja and Okija gesture of magnanimity unfortunately turned to foods of death; a pledged gift of chickens took whole bulls from many families. In ‘The Gift, and Death, of Blackness,’ Joseph Winters of Duke University, North Carolina, United States, writes about what he calls “the gift of death.” Some gifts become poisonous when wrongly given; they kill. We have become so depraved that we volubly advertise philanthropy. Gordon B. Hancock, in a June 1926 Social Forces article, writes on “the evils which inhere in excessive advertising.” He asks one troubling question: “Is the unlimited sway of advertising compatible with society’s highest good?” Whoever is probing last week’s serial disasters should seek an answer to that question. An effusive promise of gifts on a popular radio station roused several thousands of hungry children and adults to the Ibadan funfair of death. Similarly hyped promises of gifts poured over two thousand school children into Victoria Hall in Sunderland in 1883 – 141 years ago. William Codling, who was quoted above, narrated how the Sunderland disaster happened: “It began something in this wise: A man delivered a handful of bills outside the school doors on the Friday night setting forth the entertainment in glowing terms and we were all wild to go.” And they went. As it turned out, no one left that venue, and all the Nigerian venues of last week, with what was promised. Instead, death, which was not promised, was the harvest. In the UK experience, a whole class of 30 Sunday School children were among those picked up dead from the stampede. In Ibadan, some mothers reportedly lost all they had to the tragedy.

Hunger, or even fear of hunger, push people to plunge into deadly irrationality. On Thursday, 24 October, 1918, eleven women, four children and a police officer died in a stampede at a market in Cairo, Egypt, simply because they feared they wouldn’t get enough cereals to buy. They were not looking for freebies; they died because they scrambled to buy what was scarce.

“In the aftermath of tragedies,” writes Ellen Walker in a November, 2022 article, “it’s easy to focus on the assignation of blame. But how well do we understand the causes of crushing crowds?” The piece is on ‘Death by Crowding.’ All probes and available literature on crowd accidents abroad blame the same issues: poor and “inadequate planning, excited crowd, lack of crowd management and a flaw or hazard in a facility” (J. F. Dickie, 1995: 318). We have those factors here compounded viciously by unremitting hunger courtesy of bumbling governance, and a colada of existential concerns.

Grim and tragic as last week was, will it be the last? We pray it is so, but it may not be unless we check the causes and yank off the throttle, drivers of such tragedies. In ‘The Life of Reason’, Spanish American philosopher, George Santayana, warns that: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

A passage in J. F. Dickie’s ‘Major Crowd Catastrophes’ published in 1995 suggests exactly that. Dickie writes about the Sunderland disaster of 1883 with 183 fatalities, the London crowd crush of 1943 with 173 fatalities; Bolton of 1946 with 33 fatalities; Glasgow of 1971 with 66 fatalities and Sheffield of 1989 with 96 fatalities. He then sculptures those crowd-crushing disasters into a dizzying revolving door of calamities. Because man does not learn from his bad experiences, they come in repeated times like Wole Soyinka’s Abiku. Dickie notes that “the Ibrox stand incident of 1902 in Glasgow reoccurred at Bastia in 1992 where the potential for an enormous tragedy existed. The crushing accident at Bolton in 1946 has a striking similarity with the Hillsborough disaster. The Sunderland catastrophe of 1883 is similar to the Bethnal Green incident of 1943 which repeated itself on a smaller scale in New York in 1992.”

We have them in Nigeria here too. I quote a BBC report of the Ibadan stampede and its predecessors: “Nigeria is grappling with its worst economic crisis in a generation, which explains why more than 10,000 people reportedly turned up for the event. There have been several similar incidents this year. In March, two female students were crushed to death at the Nasarawa State University, Keffi, near the capital Abuja, when a rice distribution programme by the state governor caused a crowd surge. At least 23 people were injured. Three days later in the northern state of Bauchi, at least seven people died in another crush when a philanthropist and businessman was giving handouts of 5,000 naira. Earlier in February, five people were reported killed in Lagos when the Nigerian Customs Service auctioned seized bags of rice. A crowd surge for bags of rice being auctioned for about $7:00 led to the trampling to death of five people with dozens more injured.” The BBC did that recap on Wednesday, four days before the twin tragedies in Abuja in the north and Okija in the east – a perfect completion of the usual pan-Nigerian triangle of evil.

I spend some of my valuable time watching power and its drama. This past week, I bit my lips watching the indiscretion of the president’s men organizing a voluptuous boat regatta for him in Lagos in spite of the Ibadan disaster. I shook my head at the politics of a last-minute cancellation of that boat regatta not because of Ibadan but because of similar disasters in the north and in the east. The president and his Lagos men were almost echoing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “What touches us ourselves shall be last served.”

The president has been busy with statements after statements mourning the dead. He needs to do more than issuing condolence messages. PR stunts of cancellation of a boat regatta won’t turn back hungry crowds from journeys of death. The president should convince himself that his policies are not life-friendly; they kill the poor and impoverish the rich. I hope he knows this and believes this and makes amends.

Defenders of power would point at pre-May 2023 crowd-crush disasters in this country. They would say they happened before this regime; they would cite the several deadly stampedes outside Nigeria across decades and centuries. The Muslim among them would cite Quran 63:11: “Never will Allah delay a soul when its time has come.” The Christian among them would quote the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:9: “There is no new thing under the sun.” Yes, a stampede in a Chicago theatre in 1903 killed 602; another in a Moscow stadium in 1982 killed 340. A stampede in Mecca in 1990 killed 1,425; many more follow-up crowd crush disasters in Saudi Arabia claimed hundreds of lives. Further down history in 1863, a Church stampede in Santiago, Chile, killed 2,000 persons. Regime backers here will use these figures to scent the arse of their palace. They won’t think of one distinguishing fact: in all those places, the disasters were not because the people were starving and dying. Even the Egypt food scarcity that birthed the disaster of 1918 was not because government was unfeeling; it was because a world war was ongoing. Here, there is no war, yet people are dying in droves as if there is a war here.

Kings and presidents should pause their greed, rethink their policies and create some space for the people. They can remain big without being “superfluous and lust-dieted.” They can let “distribution undo excess” so that “each man (will) have enough.” The words in quote here are from Shakespeare’s King Lear. And, ‘enough’ in every culture here means life’s basics: food, shelter, clothing and hope of advancement. It is only when the “houseless heads and unfed sides”, when the “poor naked wretches” are weaned of their want that the country can have peace and stop crying over spilt milk of fatal stampedes. In whatever remedial steps we may take, I see a need for urgency. We need to act fast, otherwise – and this is my conclusion here – the next stampede may not spare the elite.