By Professor Banji Akintoye
On Wednesday, December 18, 2024, a tragic incident occurred in Ibadan in which a charity event offering food gifts to young people turned into a deadly stampede. Large numbers of parents sent their children to receive the food, and the large crowd of children resulted in an a tragic stampede that led to the unfortunate deaths of 35 healthy children immediately, and later to the deaths of more children. We learn with great sorrow that one family lost as many as three children in the stampede. We also learn, with equally great sorrow, that, in closely similar circumstances, ten children died in Abuja and several adults died in Anambra State.
We of the Yoruba Self-determination family in all countries across the world are horrified by this terrible news. We extend our deepest and heartfelt condolences to all the families that have suffered these unimaginable tragedies. Our hearts ache with the parents as they navigate through their profound grief. The young lives that were lost in Ibadan were precious and full of promise to our Yoruba Nation, and the sudden loss of them is felt deeply by our whole nation. We say to all the affected families all over Nigeria that they are not alone in their sorrow; we stand with all of you with our love. And we wish you divine strength as you endure this heartbreaking ordeal.
From our deep understanding of the disastrous situation of Nigeria, we see the horrible tragedy in Ibadan and in other parts of Nigeria for what it is. We see it in ways that, unfortunately, many members of the Nigerian elite who are benefiting from the corruption in Nigeria are not likely to see it. It is a product of the abject poverty to which Nigeria has reduced most Nigerians. The poverty has created a vicious desperation for basic necessities of life, so that if anybody offers anything now in the nature of gifts, such as food gifts, an unexpectedly large number of people will most certainly show up for the gifts and then engage in deadly stampedes to reach the gifts.
Such stampedes are occurring almost daily now in the lives of Nigeria’s impoverished citizens. Most Nigerians certainly still remember the example of such a stampede that occurred in 2014. In March 2014, the world watched in shock as the unemployment desperation among Nigeria’s university graduates caused a scene of frantic and fatal chaos and stampede in the Nigerian capital city of Abuja. In response to an invitation to university graduates to come for an interview for a few job openings in Nigeria’s federal service, about 56,000 graduates, according to most reports, showed up in Abuja. In a rush to reach the officials who were about to conduct the interview, the mammoth crowd surged into a stampede. Seven of the university graduates were trampled to death. Dozens were wounded and treated in hospitals, and very many needed to be hospitalized. The reports had it that, that morning, similar stampedes among university graduates occurred in two other major cities of Nigeria where parts of the interview had also been planned.
These kinds of tragedy underscore the need for deeper, more responsive, more humane, more statesmanlike, and final solution to the manifest fall of Nigeria, by the leaders of Nigeria, and particularly by Nigerian political leaders. Nigeria has sunk to the lowest levels of degradation in the world and has become an ultra-barbaric country in which nothing works and nothing can work. As one of the few truly humane members of the Nigerian elite said some weeks ago, “It is madness to think that Nigeria will work”. A respected former Governor of the Nigerian Central Bank, Dr. C. Soludo, said some months ago that, by mid-2023 when a new Nigerian president was coming into office, Nigeria’s economy had collapsed – and some of the highest officials of the incoming presidency instantly agreed with him. The impact of the collapse is writ very painfully on the lives of almost all Nigerians and Nigerian families. Most families can no longer feed their children and, therefore, most are withdrawing their children from school. In Nigeria, only the horrendous culture of corruption works. Nothing else works. No other country in the world has Nigeria’s kind of story – the story of a country that has been one of the leading producers of petroleum in the world and that has somehow fallen so low as to have millions of its citizens living as beggars in the streets, or holding ‘WE ARE HUNGRY’ protests in the streets.
At the same time, inter-ethnic and religious extremism, animosities and violence are at a peak, making Nigeria the most violent and most unsafe place in the world in peace time. This December, the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics published the staggering information that, in the course of the twelve months from May 2023 to April 2024,as many as 64,935 Nigerians were killed, and 2, 235, 954 were kidnapped. It does not get worse than this in our world. All this insecurity, and the culture of public corruption, the dilapidation of all of Nigeria’s infrastructures, the collapse of electricity supply, the weird inflation at over 35%, and the collapse of Nigeria’s national currency, devastate economic enterprises by individual Nigerian citizens, destroy farming and food production, scare away foreign businesses and investments, and therefore relentlessly drag down Nigeria’s economy and the quality of life of Nigerians. There is no way forward for Nigeria. We do not need to continue to deceive ourselves; we do not have to continue to suffer in self-deception.
Obviously – very obviously – what Nigerians need now, in the interest of humanity, is to find a peaceful way to dissolve Nigeria, so that Nigeria’s many different peoples may go on and find culturally meaningful ways to develop their economies and to minister to the needs of their citizens. It is of uttermost importance that the dissolution be done peacefully, in order to ensure that the new smaller countries would be peaceful and friendly neighbors thereafter, in the interest of orderly development and prosperity for all.
One thing is certain. Nigeria will break up – whether peacefully or through a bloody implosion. The bloody implosion is looking more and more likely. Nigerian political leaders have a chance to earn eternal praise and honour now and forever (if they guide Nigeria to dissolve peacefully), or to earn eternal dishonor and worldwide curses (if they keep resisting dissolution until Nigeria breaks up in a sea of blood). Their resistance to the dissolution of Nigeria is not for any noble purpose; it is mostly to enable them to continue to scoop corrupt wealth from the Nigerian culture of public corruption, and partly out of cowardly fear of serious, though desperately necessary, change. The breaking up of a heavily troubled country like Nigeria cannot possibly be a tragedy; if it happens peacefully, it is certain to be a big blessing.
The rest of us Nigerians who are not politicians or cronies of politicians or beneficiaries from the public corruption have a duty to intensify now the demand for an orderly, peaceful and speedy dissolution of Nigeria. For one thing, that is one way by which we can send the message to the many Nigerian children and adults who died stampeding for food gifts in recent days that we are sorry for forcing on them the conditions whereby they needed to stampede for food at all – and that we are now determined to ensure that, hereafter, none of our people will ever be so poor again as to need to stampede for food gifts or for any other valuable gifts. Nigeria’s disastrous and dehumanizing fundamentals now demand courageous change – and courageous men and women to make the change happen.
