Oríire: When will Tinubu bring back our children?

From Suyi Ayodele

Eda Oníyò, Oriire. Has anyone heard any word said directly by the Commander-in-Chief since the attacks happened? ‎Mr. Peter Obi recently claimed that he was surprised to learn that Oyo State Governor, Seyi Makinde, had not received any call from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu over the Oyo incident which happened over 50 days ago. .

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‎“But, to my utmost shock, I discovered that, contrary to my assumption that they had been in regular communication over the matter, Governor Seyi Makinde had not received a single call from President Bola Tinubu,” he said. Should it be like that?

 

A ruler’s first duty is empathy. Shakespeare understood this. In King Lear (Act 33, scene 4), he admonishes those in power: “Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” A king or president who does not share the anguish of his people risks appearing distant from their suffering.

 

Something close to Eda Oníyò and Oriire incidents happened in an Ekiti community years ago. I will tell you the story of what the king of the town did. This is a true life story.

 

It was sometime in 1979. Schools were on holiday. A group of primary school pupils went to a nearby orchard to pluck oranges. The boys were between the ages of 9 and 12 years.

 

The orange trees were behind a house. Behind the house was a bush path that led to a stream, called Àjoni (jointly owned). Among the boys was an Urhobo boy, whose parents came from the then Bendel State to farm in the Ekiti community.

 

One of the boys climbed the tree and the rest were picking the oranges. It was a boisterous gang; children full of happiness. Children of that era considered it fun to go-a-plucking, even when the owners of the fruits would have given them willingly. The adventure of plucking and running away was thrilling enough!

 

Then a man showed up. The boys on the ground mistook him to be the owner of the orange. They took to their heels. The one on the tree, he was just 10 years old then, could not jump down. So, the man asked him to climb down and led him away through the bush path towards the stream. According to the boys, the man who led their mate away wore an all-black attire.

 

The other boys ran home and told their friend’s guardian that the owner of the orange had taken the boy away. The guardian also went to the mother of the boy that was caught to inform her that her son had been taken away by the owner of the orange. The mother responded that the one who took away her son would be the one to also return him. Nobody paid any further attention to the matter.

 

Then it was dusk, and the boy had not returned. An older brother, who lived in another town, happened to have arrived in the town on a visit, and was told about the development. He was the one who raised the alarm and the whole town became alive with the news of the yet-to-return boy. As of that time, he was not considered missing; very unthinkable that anyone would steal a child!

 

The other boys were contacted and asked what happened. The Urhobo boy was more forthcoming of the lot. He told the people that he knew the man who took their mate away. He added that he was a regular face at his father’s place. But before he could be asked to give a name to the man, his father spoke Urhobo Language to him and the poor boy went mute!

 

When he spoke again, what followed was a disaster. The Urhobo boy told the gathering that he did not know the man again. The case became what the elders of my place describe as: Odò gbè Ìwọ̀fà, ogun pa onígbòwó ẹni to mọ ìdó owó pin (The pawn got drowned and the guarantor became a war casualty, those who knew about the borrowed funds are no more).

 

Another woman said that she saw a man and a child on the path to the stream. The woman added that she was answering the call of nature in the bush when she saw the duo but could not put a face to them. A search party led by the older brother of the now missing boy left for the stream path and then got the shock of their lives!

 

Not far away, they discovered the boy’s trousers. Someone had pulled it off and sat on it before departing the area. Also, there were two sets of footprints; one of an adult and the other of a child that would fit into the boy’s size. The party looked around and could not find any other clue. They picked the trouser and returned home to a wailing community.

 

The elders met and sent hunters to the bushes around. Adjoining communities were also contacted. It was a coordinated search that brought out no result. The search party returned to a distraught community.

 

Of course, the family of the missing boy did not sleep. Their elders met at the usual place where curses are usually laid on the perpetrators of any heinous crime such as the kidnap that the agrarian community just witnessed. Curses were issued in their most scary ways!

 

The Oba of the town also summoned his senior chiefs over the case. One after the other, the traditional heads of the quarter that made up the town came out with their own traditional staff, and offered prayers. When they had all finished, the monarch concluded the session with his own prayers. His royal pronouncements carried the force of a command.

 

First, he said, in this deep Ekiti dialect thus: Oni p’ugún hí ha ká’gún odún (he who kills the vulture will not last another 20 years); Oni pà’kàlàmàgbò hí ha p’ógbòn osù (he who kills the ground hornbill will not last 30 months); Ajá p’odíde hí mó la (the dog which kills the parrot does not live to know the following day). Then he added: L’úlé oni gbé Túndé, ati hirá kan mò síi, kán bá ti hí gb’oku ehúré hí ho lé, naa gbé t’àgùntàn a já de (let there be multiple deaths in the homes of the one who kidnapped Tunde and those who are in the knowledge of it). The town chorused Àse!

 

The women, still not satisfied with the efforts, took to the streets. They went round the community, their breasts exposed, weeping and issuing curses. Theirs was carnivalesque, very pictorial. I could picture the train of women as they marched round the town that fateful day. The wailing was indescribable. Later, it rained. Heaven joined in the lamentation. It was a shared grief; something akin to the Biblical Rachael weeping inconsolably for her children because they were no more (Jeremiah 31:15)!

 

Did the prayers happen as wished? I answer with a resounding YES! The boy was never seen. His corpse was never discovered. But, three months later, disaster started happening. The prime suspect, the man many believed to have been the old man who took the boy away, was the first to go. He died in an accident one evening in a circumstance that no one could explain. One other man fell off from his palm tree and died.

 

In two other neighbouring communities, deaths were recorded. A party of three friends died on their farms in a very strange way. One of the people suspected to have been involved in the boy’s disappearance, and a friend to two of the ones that died earlier, ran away from his town. He forgot that he who commits a crime and runs off to Ibadan should know that Ibadan does not obliterate crime. He also died, hit, by a hit-and-run driver around Ita Ogbolu.

 

Why this story?

 

To date, the boy was the first and the last case of kidnap in the town. But more importantly, no single individual suspected of having participated in the dastardly act lived to tell the story. All those who died, both in the town, or in the other neighbouring towns, were traced and found to have had something in common in the past! This ugly incident is recorded in the derisive song used at every festival in my neighbourhood. The song serves as a reminder that the community has not forgotten the incident and those responsible for it.

 

Relations of the suspects remain pariahs in their towns and sections. While their homes are not necessarily the homes of the enemies, we are told, nevertheless, that they are homes children should not run to if it rains!

 

Our forebears had a way of settling tricky issues like kidnapping. Yours sincerely believe that the power of old is still there, residual, in our various communities. I may not be able to vouch for the ‘civilised’ cosmopolitans; but I know that in the hinterlands, there are some crimes that are dared not to be committed without repercussions. So, what is wrong with us?

 

I saw the video of the return of the Eda Oníyò Ekiti kidnapped victims. The 16 victims were kidnapped on April 28, 2026, during a church service at the Christ Apostolic Church in the agrarian community. The officiating minister at the service was killed by the assailants who invaded God’s sanctuary. The victims were ferried into the forest between Eda Oníyò Ekiti and Kwara State.

 

By the time they were released on Saturday, July 4, 2026, the victims had spent 65 days in captivity. One of them, an octogenarian woman, was said to have died in the forest! Was she buried? The remaining 15 came in their skeletons. Malnourished children, drained-up women; they were a sight to behold. Some could not walk and had to be carried.

 

A man, possibly the husband of one of the women, lifted a woman the way one lifts a bag of salt! The woman, looking sickly, with all her bones showing, could only wrap her hands round her lifter! What a pity!

 

The question has been asked: are there no ways the people in the locality could have helped those victims? What happened to the owners of Eda Oníyò Ekiti? Not just Eda Oníyò this time around, but other towns and villages where this type of incident takes place every now and then? Have the powers of our forebears gone to sleep; are they on sabbatical?

 

Like it happened in the story above, there could have been a compromise. And I want to believe so. Otherwise, how do we explain that a set of 16 people was kept in a forest for over two months without anyone discovering them? Were people not going to their farms for that period? What about palm wine tappers? What about palm fruit harvesters? No hunters and other wayfarers? How wide or large is the Eda Oníyò forest itself?

 

Then, to come to the real issue, why are our towns and villages porous nowadays? Are our gods no longer active? Eda Oníyò Ekiti is not cosmopolitan for goodness’ sake. I also don’t want to subscribe to the suggestion that everybody in the town is now a spirit-filled, born-again Christian.

 

We grew to hear tales of thieves who ended up as unsolicited farm hands on the farm they had come to plunder in the first instance. We witnessed a few cases where the people’s tradition was invoked and the result became instant! Why is Yorubaland, nay, the African society losing its traditional powers to Western civilisation? Why should those who left their homes healthy to serve God in His sanctuary, return to us in their skeletons?

 

While we appreciate the wonderful job by our security agents, who claimed to have ‘rescued’ the victims; and also acknowledge the Eda Oníyò Ekiti leaders who said that they paid millions of Naira in ransom to secure the release of the 15 victims, we ask: when will the Oriire school children and their teachers, kidnapped, 52 days ago on May 15, 2026, be returned to us even if they have been reduced to famished living cadavers?

 

Truth be told, we are all victims. We are also skeletons like the Eda Oníyò Ekiti victims. Though we are not in any forest as kidnap victims, we live daily in the ‘forest’ of the fear of being kidnapped. Even our homes are no more places of refuge just as the Sanctuaries of God are no longer sacred places

 

I am worried and I think we all should be alarmed. Until the Eda Oníyò skeletons were ‘rescued-released’, we never knew that the octogenarian woman died in captivity! Now, we may ask: how many of those Oriire school children are still alive? Who is feeding them? What rations do their captors feed them? Will they ever come back to us? If they do come back, will they ever remain the same given the agony they had suffered?

 

This is why I believe the owners of Yorubaland in particular, and other lands in general, should wake up. We must go back to our roots. My people say no one establishes their deity in another man’s compound. How foreigners take over our forests while we do nothing about it is a communal embarrassment! Let us act; let us activate the powers our forebears bequeathed to us. They are there; let us use them. Let us get the Oriire school children back in whole pieces first, using any means. We can thereafter recite Psalm 91!