There is an apocalyptic drift to the scourge of minors – mainly boys – who have laid siege to Nigeria’s suburbs and rural areas. They are not only looking to make a quick buck, many of them are seeking to become filthy rich, in the blink of an eye.
The viral video of three teenagers looking to learn internet fraud aka ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ in Edo State is the latest in a slew of horrors haunting the Nigerian landscape.
In the two-minute video, the boys, between ages 14 and 15, appeared stranded as they told an interrogator in pidgin: “We wan come hustle.” Their preferred hustle, they revealed, is the “Yahoo hustle…”
At further probe, they reaffirmed their initial claim, stressing, “…but not Yahoo plus.”
It’s only a matter of time before they prowled the bloodied boulevard of “Yahoo Plus,” like the quartet: Wariz Oladehinde, 17, Majekodunmi Soliu, 18, Abdul Gafar Lukman 19, and Mustakeem Balogun 20, who were arrested in the early hours of Saturday, January 29 by men of Ogun State Police Command for allegedly killing a girlfriend of their friend for money-making ritual. The boys were arrested following a report at the Adatan divisional headquarters by a security guard, that the suspects were seen burning something suspected to be a human head in a clay pot.
On interrogation, the arrested suspects confessed that what they were burning in the clay pot is the severed head of the girlfriend of their accomplice.
Few days earlier, the Bayelsa trio: Emomotimi,15, Perebi, 15, and Eke, 15. The boys and natives of Sagbama in Bayelsa, allegedly accosted one 13-year-old, “hypnotized” her, and led her to Emomotimi’s apartment. There, they reportedly cut her finger and sprinkled her blood on a mirror for money-making ritual. But for vigilant village youths, Comfort would have been history, perhaps.
Charms were recovered from the teenagers, who confessed to the crime, according to the spokesman of the Bayelsa State Police Command, Superintendent Asinim Butswat.
The pagan dialectic of the teenagers’ ritual misadventure is sweepingly comprehensive and accurate about Nigerian mind and nature. The boys are the products of a culture and value system fostered by materialism, and lacking in compassion and model filial ties.
Nigeria’s intelligentsia, civil societies, and political class, however, perceive them as fractions of the country’s disposable human trash. They believe that there are more pressing political and economic problems to address. This is a mistake. A grievous one.
These boy ritualists, like the boy bandits and insurgents prowling Nigeria’s northeast and northwest, constitute our reality check; the frightful glimpse into our infernal core.
They are products of Nigeria’s dysfunctional system. Inured to mayhem, they are forbiddingly dangerous. Their personalities, shaved of compassion are sculpted to project strife by innate lust and their maleficent benefactors.
Brainwashed, they become puppet personae, stunted in growth, and unquestioning of their puppeteers’ malicious intent.
Amid their benefactors’ toxic patronage, they manifest like soulless dummies, casual workers in a Nigerian carnage factory.
s victims and villains, they are exposed and enclosed, behind their coarse faces and masks.
Each boy is naked yet armoured, premature yet ritually experient. They are impervious to morals because they have become soulless; their defiled innocence screams for urgent help and yet remains closed to redemption.
