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.
Their naivete is deceptive – not to be toyed with. Collectively, their fates resonate a tragedy so intense it manifests as a protracted wail. Before many of them fell in love with fast money, bullets, and guns, they probably had dreams, like any normal child their age. In Zamfara, 17-year-old Aliyu, told me that he dreamt of being “a very big rice farmer.”
But he embraced banditry and strife, and his life transformed into a constant blur of anti-bullet charms, AK-47s, mindless rape, and bloody raids on defenseless villages.
Lest we forget the teen gangs of Lagos, including the One Million Boys, Fadeyi Boys, Ereko Boys, Akala Boys, Awala Boys, Shitta Boys, No Salary Boys, No Mercy Boys, Aguda Boys, Black Scorpion, Red Scorpion, Akamo Boys, Omo Kasari Confraternity, Japa Boys, Koko Boys, and the much dreaded Awawa Boys.
What started innocently as groups of minors begging people for money eventually metamorphosed into gangs of fearsome teenage cultists, rapists, and armed robbers terrorising Agege, Iyana-Ipaja, Sakamori, Ibari, Ashade, Dopemu, Ogba, Ifako-Ijaiye, Abule-Egba, Ifako-Ijaye, Agege, Isale Oja, Ibari, Akerele, Papa Ogba Ashade, Aluminium Village, Ibeju Lekki, Ajah and other parts of Lagos Island.
They rob with guns, machetes, daggers, and weaponised cutlery, forks in particular. They also rape young girls and women. Most of the gangs nurse a morbid fascination for raping women old enough to be their mothers and young girls.
Rape is a crucial part of their initiation rites. It helps to groom fearlessness in even the youngest member. Prospective initiates are ordered to rape a certain number of girls or a particular woman they intend to shame.
Several women have been raped on their way to and from work by those boys in parts of Pen Cinema in Agege, but victims have learnt to keep quiet, hiding their pain for fear of being stigmatised by their communities and loved ones.
Though predominantly a cult of boys, females including prepubescent girls are recruited into these gangs too. They move in pretty large squads and pride themselves in their numbers. Often times they operate as a flash mob of close between 100 and 150 but for smaller missions, they move in squads of between 20 and 50 boys and girls. Sometimes, they operate in rag-tag squads of four, five, seven, 10 to 15 boys bearing deadly arms including baseball bats, clubs, meat cleavers, daggers, crude metal bars, ‘two by two’ (wooden planks with nails), and forks.
Members of the cult are drug dependent. They binge on psychotropic substances including omi gota (gutter juice), colorado, pamilerin, codeine, cannabis, rohypnol, and tramadol.
Just recently rival gangs terrorised Agege in a protracted turf war that lasted almost one week. After establishing their dominance in any neighbourhood, they engage in a peculiar brand of hustle by which they perpetrate scams, bullying, political violence, and armed robberies.
Several gangs are linked to criminal operations across Lagos. They commit house burglaries and armed robberies and the stolen valuables are often sold at ridiculous prices.
These gangs are composed of mainly young males, aged seven to 25 years. Despite their dangerous proclivities, they provide young people with a sense of belonging and social identity, and as they operate in shadow economies, they make up for the lack of educational and job opportunities afflicting young boys.
Within gangs, young boys have found camaraderie and a way to make a living. Many of them commit serious crimes such as robbery and burglary with the intention of exchanging stolen goods for cash. The money earned from such crimes is invested in hard drugs, commercial sex workers, gambling, and other guilty pleasures.
In Lagos, many gang members and area boys act as violent brokers in parallel structures, having created an income for themselves via forced extortion and narcotics peddling, playing guard of individual property, or public space in situations of inadequate or ineffective police presence.
Over time, they have become an accepted part of the urban landscape even as they become mercenaries for various forms of political, ethnic, and religious criminal contracts in the process.
A more worrisome reality, however, is the increasing fascination among gang members with the ‘money ritual.’