Oriire 44 and our Double Standard -By Festus Adedayo

Long ago, Ìjàpá, the Tortoise, the famed trickster lord of the animal world, grew deeply jealous of the popularity of Ẹkùn,  Leopard, as the forest circumciser. He devised a con plan to de-escalate Ẹkùn’s admirable place in the hearts of the forest inhabitants. To ruin his rival’s popularity, Ìjàpá secretly hid a stolen calabash (igbá) containing undiluted palm wine inside the den of the fearsome but likeable leopard.

Having perfected this gambit, Ìjàpá called a town meeting of all animals. Feigning a broken heart and weeping profusely, he announced that a theft had occurred which, if not drilled deeply down into, stood the risk of destroying the very ligaments of the community’s relations. He then led the entire animal population straight to the evidence of Ẹkùn’s guilt that he himself had planted.

On seeing the palm wine kept secretly in the leopard’s lair, the animals gasped in utter disbelief. They unanimously chorused that Ẹkùn had betrayed the kingdom and stood guilty of being a greedy thief. But as the community prepared to send the leopard into exile and disgrace him, long-necked Ògòǹgò — the world’s largest and heaviest living bird, considered the king of the feathered — furtively climbed down from the Irokò tree where she had been hiding.

Cloning Bob Marley’s classical Small Axe track, she reminded the animal crowd that he who diggeth a pit for another will surely fall into it: “Ẹni tí ó gbe koto, òun ló maa já si.” Ògòǹgò then revealed how she had secretly watched Ìjàpá plant the evidence to implicate the leopard. As affirmation, she asked the gathered animals to look closely at the edge of Ìjàpá’s shell, revealing it was stained with the very same palm wine, while the trickster’s greedy fingers still reeked of the damp smell of the wine.

In deep annoyance, the animals felt let down by the staged “discovery.” They promptly banished the wily tortoise from their kingdom and exonerated Ẹkùn. The moral of the fable is reflected in the saying: when you dig a pit for your enemy, don’t dig it too deep, for you may someday fall into it yourself. More fundamentally, those who attempt to destroy others often expose their own malicious nature.

For the last 56 grueling days in Oyo State and across Nigeria, it was as if the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was right there with us. Nigeria was wrapped in a shawl of collective sorrow. In the abduction of the 39 pupils and six teachers in Oriire Local Government, Nigerians momentarily forgot the bitter issues that divided them.

In his 1961 work, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Levinas — the French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry — observed that suffering and sorrow uniquely unite a people. They allow a collective to see how vulnerable they are through the plight of others. As he wrote, collective mourning allows people to recognize their shared, fundamental fragility, shifting society’s focus from individual interests to interpersonal connection.

For 56 harrowing days, the streams of Nigerian tears gathered inside one single bowl. They agonized collectively and lamented with a single cadence of sorrow, confirming the views of Matthew Ratcliffe, a professor at the University of York, UK. Writing with an authoritative lens on grief, Ratcliffe noted that losses, even in remote parts of humanity, radically alter our shared world, giving us entirely new ways of connecting with one another.

Whether we like it or not, since 2014, weaponizing the abduction of school children as a political tool has become an inescapable factor in Nigerian politics. Only God knows whose child will be the next sacrificial lamb. Either as fact, fiction, or faction, abduction of school children has come to stay as a permanent conspiracy theory. It has become exactly like what my people say of the uncountable teeth of Adipele, a woman of abundance of molars: how many of those teeth can one truly count? Is it the horde of molars and incisors buried deep down into ridges of flesh, or the canines and premolars sitting on top of a mountainous mouth debris?

On April 14 of that year, Boko Haram terrorists abducted 276 schoolgirls from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. While over 190 escaped or were rescued, approximately 80 to 90 remain missing in captivity till tomorrow. Aware that abduction was a novel weapon designed to typecast his government as effete, President Goodluck Jonathan was reported to have initially doubted its authenticity.

The suspicion that the Chibok abduction was a political tool was fueled by a strange calculus: it took place in an area that possessed an extensive security umbrella. The lingering question was how men riding motorcycles could abduct such a massive number of students in a high-security zone without being intercepted by the Army, Air Force, Police, or DSS.

When these abductions were taking place, the then-opposition — in whose vanguard today’s Nigerian president stood — took Jonathan to the cleaners. Possessing an effectively lethal media machinery, they succeeded in reducing the president to the value of used tissue paper. The opposition, led heavily by Tinubu, demanded Jonathan to “bring back our girls,” effectively internationalizing the campaign and even recruiting Barack Obama and his wife to their drive.

The Tinubu-led opposition challenged Jonathan precisely because he was the Commander-in-Chief, while completely leaving Governor Kashim Shettima alone because he wasn’t the C-in-C. I agreed with that logic then; it was perfect. But in the 2026 Oriire case, yesterday’s opposition now in government, are changing the roles and rules, shifting the blame from the Commander-in-Chief to a governor who is sitting in Shettima’s exact shoes. What greater duplicitous politics could there be?

Throughout the entire Chibok period, no reference was made to Governor Shettima’s responsibility to rescue girls picked like hens from his government’s backyard. He received no strictures.

Yesterday’s opposition characters have completely inverted their thesis today. Now, state governors (who are not in their party) — who cannot give a single binding directive to the Police, DSS, or Military without federal approval — are the ones blamed for local abductions. Their security votes, which were never an issue during the Shettima era, are suddenly the core of the debate. The hypocrisy and Janus-faced hypothesis sicken.

The logic of this new thinking is scary, and even examples within the ruling party’s own states belie it. On April 28, 2026, 15 church members were abducted in Eda Oniyo, within the Ilejemeje Local Government Area of Ekiti State. They spent two grueling months in captivity until their release on July 4, with one victim tragically losing his life during the ordeal. From an initial ₦1 billion demand, the abductors reportedly collected unnamed fees from the poverty of the villagers before releasing their victims. Yet, Governor Biodun Oyebanji of Ekiti State was neither harassed nor did his second-term ambition allowed him to lead the push for the rescue. When the abducted were finally freed, the governor was at their hospital beds for a photo-op that graced the front pages of Nigerian newspapers.

Unbiased logic must convict anyone who harangued Jonathan in 2014 over Chibok but now claims Tinubu is entirely guiltless while children spent 56 days in a dense forest of a million demons.

Going further with the comparison, Jonathan swallowed the welter of orchestrated criticisms and, in May 2014, invited Governor Shettima to the Presidential Villa to discuss rescue efforts.

Tinubu, by contrast, seemed too locked up in the prison of his own grouses. He is too imprisoned to invite the Oyo governor. It took Peter Obi to let the world know that the president was all this while drinking pap with his Iya Alakara’s akara in Aso Rock and never even called the Oyo State governor to discuss the way out of the tragedy. Sources claim that when the governor reached out to discuss operational details with the C-in-C, he met impenetrable walls. Instead, while Tinubu was in Lagos for the merriment of Sallah, he merely sent his isomogbe — political surrogates whom Nigerians never voted for — to insolently fly choppers over the mourning people of Oyo State.

However, as the wisdom in the metaphysical operations of the Yoruba goes, the Babalawo, high priest and diviner of the Ifá oracle, divines every five days on purpose. His consistent interrogation of celestial operations is not done because of today’s realities, but because the realities of tomorrow may refuse to align with today’s. It is expressed as: “Bí oní ti rí, ọ̀la ò rí bẹ, l’ón mú babaláwo dí’fá oroorún.” It speaks to the absolute need for constant daily recalibration.

If we want to end this ugly weaponization of abductions as a political tool — whether real or imagined — we cannot simply celebrate the freedom of the Oriire abductees and declare it “QED” like mathematicians do. We must conduct a rigorous post-mortem into it and ask critical questions, just as the Babaláwo divines for the sake of tomorrow.

By the way, if you look carefully at the pictures and videos of the rescued children that began circulating Friday evening, they looked remarkably well-fed. Except for Mrs. Alamu, who looked genuinely harangued and lean, only the bushy hair of the children suggested they had been in captivity for so long. Their clothes looked not too roughened for people trapped inside a forest for 56 days.

The questions begging for answers are heavy: Did the rescuers change their clothes after their abduction? How were they fed during the ‘detention’, and how were those provisions procured? Where is the body of the neutralized abductors? Can the eight other arrested suspects be paraded publicly before the world? How true is the military’s claim that they were released without a ransom payment?

More than an aside, I congratulate gallant Nigerian security officials for this rescue, as well as President Tinubu and Governor Seyi Makinde. I also pray for the souls of the slain teachers and of the gallant officers who were martyred for this rescue. A reminder, though: Hundreds of others are still held in the forests of Nigeria. But, to effectively stem this Sòbìà, we need the Olúgànbe leaf. What leaf is that? Ask the native doctor nearest to your bunker.

Gbaja gets a reprieve

A few weeks before his assassination on February 13, 1976, one Obarogie Ohanbamu, who was a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Lagos and who also doubled at that time as Editor-in-Chief and publisher of African Spark, a monthly news magazine, published a damning story against the Head of State, General Murtala Mohammed.

A damaging rumour about the integrity of the Head of State was then in circulation. The publication and the rumour said Murtala possessed a row of houses in Kano which he could not have legitimately owned. Ohanbamu’s magazine also editorialized this information, asking how the Commander-in-Chief, as a public servant, could have mobilized such huge capital for the acquisition.

Upon the publication, Ohanbamu was promptly arrested and detained incommunicado. However, a few days after Murtala was assassinated by Buka Suka Dimka, the Attorney-General of the Federation produced Ohanbamu in an open Lagos court. He was accused of slandering the late Head of State. Curiously, the AGF asked the court to caution and discharge the accused, submitting that Ohanbamu had since acknowledged his accusation as an error.

The error, said the Attorney-General, was that Ohanbamu did not know Murtala had declared his assets to him (the AG) on his accession to office. Subsequently, said the AGF, Murtala also deposed in an affidavit that he had given back all the said Kano properties to the state. However, questions trailed the AGF’s submission. No one corroborated his claim, nor did anybody claim to have seen the document with which this deed of transfer was consummated. Even if they did, the fact of the properties’ initial acquisition by Murtala had not been trumped, thus validating Ohanbamu’s original claim. If you look at this story with a thorough eye, substitute Adeniyi for Ohanbamu and Murtala for the Villa and you might not be far from being correct.

That story looks so much like the Gbajabiamila/Adeniyi scandal.

With the huge achievement of the Bola Tinubu government in getting the Oriire victims freed, will the scandal of the disowned Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council cum Presidential Economic Advisory Council now go away?

If you ask me, the greatest beneficiary of the exhilarating news of the release of the abducted pupils and teachers of Oriire in Oyo State is the president’s Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila. Or, and the Nigerian presidency. In my piece of last week, I wagered a guess that the presidency would soon reach for its scabbard and bring out a dagger to perforate and deconstruct the embarrassing scandal. An alleged impostor penetrating the walls of the Nigerian presidency, revealing the rump of corruption on the presidency’s back, is an issue to ponder on. Aso Rock Villa promptly looked westward. The abducted pupils and teachers of Oriire council of Oyo State might be the answer. In communication studies strategy, it is taught that when a problematic issue like the Gbajabiamila crisis rears its ugly head, strategists should canvass doing one of three things. Or even all three. The reeking fart can be dissolved, deconstructed, or re-contextualized.

The truth is, from colonial times, it is a notorious fact that corruption had acquired a recurring character. It is a variant of a social virus.

The Gbajabiamila/Adeniyi issue reminds me of Swahili, the Bantu language of East and Central Africa. It is a major lingua franca across nations like Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Like all languages in Africa, Swahili explains the world in very vivid imagery. Spoken by over 200 million people, it has a saying that seems to explain the roiling Femi Gbajabiamila/Adeniyi-gate.

On the day a monkey is destined to die, a classical, powerful Swahili saying goes, all trees become slippery. The dramatis personae in Nigeria’s most horrifying drama involving the president’s Chief of Staff are obviously banking on Nigerians’ infamous short memory and short-span emotions — assuming that Nigerians would yell, yell, and eventually keep quiet. To their chagrin, however, cells of the scandal, like cancer cells, seem to be multiplying. Spins upon spins have failed to explain away the lies. Even the man behind the look-alike House of Horror scandal, speaking on a Very Dark Man podcast last week, said the whole episode sounded confusing to him, too.

A replica of the Gbajabiamila/Adeniyi-gate also happened under the Yakubu Gowon government. It was found in the sensational public charges of corruption that were made in sworn affidavits against a Federal Commissioner for Communication, J. S. Tarka, by Godwin Daboh. A school teacher, Aper Aku, similarly made an allegation against Joseph Gomwalk, Gowon’s Benue-Plateau State Military Governor.

On this matter of a phony federal agency, President Tinubu has acted fittingly like an Ìjàkùmò. In Yoruba zoology, Ìjàkùmò is a fierce, elusive, and wild nocturnal animal. While many say the Ìjàkùmò is a civet, some others call it the wolverine, or a type of phantom wild cat. The commune that gave Ìjàkùmò the taxonomy of a wolverine may, however, not be correct because its nativity isn’t Africa. Wolverines hail from remote, cold climates and high alpine environments across the Northern Hemisphere in North America, Europe, and Asia. The Ìjàkùmò is, however, notorious as an animal that is forever restlessly on the move. It never settles in a particular place for long, nor is it ever seen in the daytime. It is also a very smart animal, though never clever.

As spinners in Nigerian federal clothing attempt to dig holes wherein they could hide, the land gives their naked frame up. Their spins mirror the classical Fela Anikulapo-Kuti bedlam: “You be thief, I no be thief; you be armed robber, I no be armed robber; argument, arguments argue…” To some of the spinners, the “ghost agency,” the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), is a completely fictitious body whose self-named DG is a conman, simpliciter. To some others, PFIPC is a doppelgänger — a clone out of ancient German mythology which believes that every living creature has an invisible, identical spirit double. So, PFIPC is a double of an original. But the notorious questions have not been answered: how did a conman infiltrate the presidency, Nigeria’s civil service, and the legislature, succeeding in running a sophisticated fraud operation for over a year without an insider?

Last week, spirited attempts were made to exonerate Gbajabiamila. Pages of advertorials placed in a newspaper heralded the scare, which to some shallow minds, approximated exoneration. A 2023 video of the president exonerating his family pitcher-breaker (afo’keemu) — the recidivist, who the Yoruba say is always a subject of village discourse — resurfaced with the aim of misleading the people.

Then, the Ìjàkùmò himself dug in. No, he didn’t dig in like in the case of Betta Edu, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation in the Tinubu cabinet. Immediately accusations against this minister surfaced, Tinubu showed her the door. She’s not been back ever since. But, not to worry, the Yoruba say it is someone else’s child you send on a nocturnal assignment — Iwofa ns’ojojo, won ni alakori gbe ise re de, o nse omo olowo, won ni ko r’oju fi ata s’enu (the pawn develops catarrh; they sneer, “the fool has come with his usual trouble.” But when the rich man’s child falls ill, everyone prescribes pepper soup and showers him with concern).

To be sure of the claim that Adeniyi Adeyemi was indeed a doppelgänger and had nothing to do with Tinubu’s Chief of Staff, the whole world suggested that an independent investigative panel consisting of trustworthy Nigerians should investigate the maggots’ paradise scandal. Rather than this, from his pouch of smartness, the Ìjàkùmò ordered the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to wade in. And the furtive guile of this animal came out for all to see. This animal, the Yoruba claim, in its spin pseudo-wisdom, reverses the norm. While every animal cleans their bum-bum after excreting, Ìjàkùmò cleans its bum-bum before it excretes. In a mockery of the Ìjàkùmò’s smartness, which the animal believed was cleverness, the Yoruba mock anyone who swims in reverse wisdom like Ìjàkùmò.

Ancient wisdom tells us that even if we do not know anything else, we cannot be as daft as not to know that three persons cannot stand in twos. On the matter of the former governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, and the ICPC — dragged to court by the latter on charges of alleged conversion and possession of proceeds of corruption, as well as money laundering — the commission hasn’t acted like the impartial arbiter that it should be.

The belief out there is that the trio of the Villa, the judiciary, and the ICPC have collaborated to lock up the Villa’s nemesis, El-Rufai, in detention until after next year’s presidential election. Mrs. El-Rufai said as much in her viral plea last week. Begging the president not to just free her husband, but to uphold the principles of fairness that go with judicial trial, Mrs. El-Rufai was forced to dig up the emotive contributions of her family to the presidential victory the “Lagos Boy” currently savours. If you drill deep down into why El-Rufai must be continuously kept in detention, you may encounter the metaphysics of marabout prophecy in it. It is said that marabouts have predicted that El-Rufai will someday become Nigeria’s president, and the Lagos Boy is scared silly of this star from the north upstaging him from his birthright. So, how does the Ìjàkùmò expect the world to believe that, in this matter of perceived collaboration between a Villa boy and a scammer to scam the Nigerian establishment, deploying the ICPC as an arbiter would bring about justice?

Moreover, this selfsame presidency, a few days after the scandal broke, had cleared Gbajabiamila of complicity in the said crime. Calling Adeyemi a “con artist”, Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, accused him of peddling falsehood. He also stated that he had earlier been investigated by security agencies and the court awaited the commencement of his trial. In the release, the presidency established Gbajabiamila’s innocence while accusing Adeyemi of an attempt to drag “the Presidency to disrepute before the public and international community”. Indeed, said the presidency, the police had, on November 27, 2025, filed an eight-count charge against Adeyemi and two of his accomplices at the Federal High Court in Abuja, and they were due to appear in court on July 27. So, how do you first convict a man and then ask him to be probed? This Ijakumo sure cleans its bum-bum before excreting!

On Tinubu mandating the ICPC to look into the scandal, I recall that the Murtala-Obasanjo government did the same. It appointed a judicial commission of enquiry to investigate the circumstances that caused the infamy of the Cement Armada under General Gowon. Nigeria had lost millions of Naira to a cement ships armada which choked off the free passage of vessels at the Apapa port, costing the government huge losses and strangulating her external trade via massive demurrage fees. The panel was headed by Justice Belgore.

After the report of the commission was made available to the duo of Murtala and Obasanjo, the public never saw its content. The government merely issued a white paper which cleared Obasanjo of any complicity in the allegations. Obasanjo was then the Director of the Army Engineering Corps and later the Federal Commissioner for Works throughout the period of the cement scandal. He supervised a country-wide military barracks building project that Gowon was in a near obsession with.

All the above no longer matter anyway. All is now quiet on the home front. No thanks to the Oriire abductees’ freedom. Praise the Lord, somebody!