Do you know that the average Nigerian is, in some strange and deeply uncomfortable way, mentally preparing to commit a crime against you?

I know that sounds dramatic. Somebody is already getting ready to quote me out of context and say, “Baron says Nigerians are criminals.” But before the pitchforks come out, just think about the culture of suspicion we have built around ourselves.

We have entire expressions for surviving one another: “shine your eye,” “no loose guard,” “make dem no use your head,” “check your change,” “confirm the alert,” “count your money,” “street smart,” “no trust anybody.” These are not just phrases anymore. They are Nigerian cybersecurity protocols.

Meeting a fellow Nigerian for the first time can feel like applying for security clearance. You verify identity, inspect intentions, cross-check the story, dig into reputation, calculate the odds of being cheated… and even after all that you still keep one eye open because the person might have discovered a seventh method of using your head.

The strangest part is not even that people can be dishonest. It is how society responds when they are.

If somebody steals from you, we do not first ask why the person stole. We ask why you allowed yourself to be stolen from.

“You no shine your eye?” “You Don fuck up” “You no wise”

That is the Nigerian justice system in practice: the criminal commits the crime while the victim receives a performance review. You get robbed and somehow the interrogation starts with you.

“How much did you lose?”

“₦500,000.”

“Ahhh… why did you trust him?”

Not “Why did he steal?” Just why did you trust him.

You have been dealing with someone for five years and they finally cheat you; people will still ask why you did not verify the transaction properly. You meet someone for the first time and get cheated: “You should have known better.” You get cheated by someone you have known for ten years: “You should have known people are like that.”

At some point the burden of morality has been transferred entirely onto the victim.

Look around and you will see it.

Start with the private sector. I once went to a fuel station and drama broke out because some attendants know how to manipulate the dispensing process so that what you pay for and what enters your tank are not the same thing. Our response to this has become almost ridiculous: people now carry their own gallons to the petrol station.

Think about that. You are going to a business whose entire purpose is to sell you fuel using a machine specifically designed to measure the quantity, yet you may still need to bring your own container because you do not completely trust the person operating the machine. And nobody finds this strange enough anymore. It has just become part of the ecosystem. The average Nigerian has evolved from simply buying petrol to conducting an independent audit of every litre. You watch the meter, the attendant, the nozzle, the pump… sometimes even the shadow of the person standing beside the pump. Everybody is a suspect.

Then the restaurants and supermarkets. You eat, ask for the bill, and the receipt looks perfectly normal. If you are careless enough to just glance at the total and pay, you may later discover you ordered two bottles of water, three extra sides, a dessert you never saw, and somehow a chicken that was spiritually consumed on your behalf. You call them and they say, “Oh, sorry sir, it was a mistake.” Interesting how the mistake always appears on the side of the person holding the money.

Same thing happens in supermarkets. You buy five items and the receipt shows seven. You stand there wondering where the extra two came from. Maybe they followed you home. Maybe the cashier thinks your shopping list is only a suggestion.

The moment you stop shining your eye, somebody may decide your money has become a public resource.

A few months ago I had a business owner I had patronised for years. Not one random transaction, years. You would think repeated dealings would create some trust. No. This person stole from me and blocked me everywhere. Just like that. Years of patronage apparently did not count as evidence of anything. The moment money entered the equation, our entire history became a footnote. That is when it hits you: sometimes familiarity does not remove the possibility of being cheated. It just gives the other person better information on how to do it.

Instagram and whatsapp vendors are another chapter. “I want to buy from this person because they have 100,000 followers.” I laugh. Followers are not evidence. Comments are not evidence. Reviews are not evidence. Three years of selling is not evidence. A physical location is better, but still; shine your eye. Because the moment the money leaves your account, the vendor can suddenly enter another dimension. Messages delivered but unanswered. Phone rings but nobody picks up. Stories updated every fifteen minutes while your message stays unread. Then family emergency. Network problems. Dispatch rider unavailable. Product delayed. Account manager resigned. Grandmother’s village declared war. Eventually you realise you did not buy a product. You bought a lesson.

Payment after delivery has become valuable for a reason. Once the money leaves your account, negotiation turns spiritual.

What do you expect from a society where people steal food meant for kindergarten children? I mean actual Toddlers!! There are too many stories of parents packing lunch only for somebody at the school to develop an appetite for the child’s rice, chicken and juice. And we make skits about it. We watch and laugh until tears come. Because everybody recognises the behaviour. That is the disturbing part. We have become so familiar with certain forms of dishonesty that we can turn them into entertainment without really questioning the moral failure underneath the joke.

Then the mechanic. This one requires a full military operation. You cannot just walk in and say “Please check my car.” You call three different people, create imaginary lower quotes, negotiate, then stand beside the mechanic the whole time because if you leave, your car may develop diseases it did not have when you arrived. You came because the brake was making a small sound. By the time the diagnosis is finished, the engine, transmission, suspension, alternator, grandmother and family lineage all apparently need urgent attention. And the more innocent you look, the more expensive it becomes. If you admit you do not really understand cars, congratulations! you just announced that you are financially vulnerable.

Even the mechanic you have used for years can eventually try to use your head. Trust, in this environment, is sometimes interpreted as reduced surveillance. And reduced surveillance is an invitation.

I remember when iShowSpeed came to Lagos. Somebody reportedly sold him moissainite jewellery for over a thousand dollars, and questions later arose about the actual value and authenticity. What fascinated me was the audacity. This was not a secret deal in a dark alley at 2 a.m. Cameras were rolling. Thousands of people were watching. The whole world was practically in the room. And somebody still looked at the opportunity and thought, “Yes. Today is the day.”

That is the kind of behaviour we sometimes celebrate as being a “sharp guy.” We have developed a language where questionable morality gets repackaged as intelligence. You did not deceive someone, you “used your sense.” You did not exploit ignorance, you “played smart.” You did not overcharge, you “made your money.” You did not steal, “na business.” You did not lie, “you gats dey wise for this country.”

Perhaps that is the real problem. We have started confusing survival skills with moral virtue.

Even religion has not been completely spared. Handkerchiefs of ₦200 sold for ₦20,000. Sand and stones sold to members for thousands of naira. Actual sand. Scooped from the ground, put inside nylon, given a spiritual price tag. And people buy it. At this point ordinary soil can become an investment opportunity if you wrap enough prophecy around it.

Nightclubs too. You order Hennessy. The bottle looks right, the packaging looks right. One sip and something is off; the taste, the colour, the smell has the personality of industrial alcohol. Do you complain? Usually not. “Na normal thing.” You keep drinking. By morning your stomach is sucking every inch of life from you, your liver has become okrika, and your urine looks like somebody poured Fanta into the toilet. You knew it was suspicious. You drank it anyway because complaining would mean admitting you had not shined your eye hard enough.

And then politics; the biggest stage of all. Do you really think a political class operating inside this mentality would be afraid to tell Nigerians extraordinary stories? Snake swallowed money. Monkey carried millions. Funds disappeared. Contracts inflated. Projects existed only on paper. And somehow we continue. The audacity comes from familiarity. Everybody knows the system is crooked. Everybody expects somebody to take something. The politician is not walking into a room of innocents. He is walking into a room where most people already understand the rules.

The most disturbing version of this mentality is not even on the streets. It is inside our homes. A child tells struggling parents that a textbook costs ₦10,000 when it actually costs ₦1,000. The parents, already fighting rent, school fees, fuel and electricity, somehow find the money. The child collects it with a straight face. No guilt. No hesitation. Just profit. That child did not invent the behaviour. He learnt it by watching adults negotiate dishonestly, inflate prices when they think the customer is ignorant, and celebrate the person who successfully cheated someone else. Eventually the lesson sinks in: be sharp. Be smarter than the next person. Do not let anybody use your head. And if the opportunity comes to use somebody else’s first, why not?

This is why the phrase “shine your eye” fascinates me. It is good advice. Nobody wants to be careless where deception exists. But what happens when “shine your eye” becomes more important than “do not steal”? What happens when we teach children how to identify scammers without teaching them not to become scammers? What happens when the victim is blamed more aggressively than the criminal? When honesty starts looking like a disadvantage and dishonesty looks like evidence of intelligence?

That is when you no longer have a society built on trust. You have a society built on suspicion. Everybody is watching everybody. Customer watching vendor. Vendor watching customer. Passenger watching driver. Parent watching school. Church member watching pastor. Citizen watching politician. Nobody wants to be the fool. Everybody wants to be the sharp guy.

And perhaps that is the tragedy. We have become so obsessed with making sure nobody uses our head that we have stopped asking ourselves whether we are using somebody else’s.

So yes; shine your eye. Count your money. Check the receipt. Confirm the alert. Verify the vendor. Watch the fuel meter. Ask the mechanic questions. Inspect the bottle. Read the contract. Do all of it.

But we should also teach the other half of the equation: do not become the person everybody else has to shine their eye around.

A country cannot build trust when everyone is permanently preparing to outsmart everyone else. At some point somebody has to decide that being honest is not foolishness. That returning excess change is not stupidity. That refusing to inflate a bill is not weakness. That giving someone exactly what they paid for is not charity. That doing business without trying to exploit the other side is not bad business.

Otherwise we will keep living in this strange national theatre where everybody is simultaneously the victim and the potential criminal.

The thief says, “I had to survive.”

The victim says, “I should have shined my eye.”

The spectator laughs.

The internet turns it into a skit.

The politician watches from somewhere.

And the cycle continues.

“Kikiki.”

Because deep down we all understand the joke.

The problem is that the joke is us.

And if you are curious as to what got me ranting this afternoon, the answer is i crossed path with an individual who was criminally a Nigerian.

Before you wander into the labyrinth of words that follows, indulge me in a small confession. The song pinned above was written, composed, played, and recorded by yours truly. The voice and strings, however, received a generous diplomatic intervention from artificial intelligence, because nature and I never quite reached an agreement on vocal excellence.

So, if it sounds suspiciously magnificent, direct your compliments to both silicon and stubbornness.

Consider it my little gift to you. No invoice. No subscription. Just something to accompany you (and probably set the mood) through this read. Enjoy!

I am writing again. Not permanently, so everyone can lower their expectations. Think of this as a brief parole from silence rather than a triumphant return.

This morning, while working far later than any reasonable human being should, Memories by Maroon 5 (which eventually motivated me to write my own song) wandered into my Spotify playlist with the casual confidence of an old friend who still remembers where you keep your spare key. It is astonishing what music does to the human mind. It is less an arrangement of melodies than an elaborate time machine disguised as entertainment. It ignores chronology, laughs in the face of distance, and escorts you through corridors of memory you had long since boarded shut. One moment you are replying to emails, pretending to be a functioning adult, and the next you are standing in a forgotten afternoon from fifteen years ago, smelling the rain, hearing voices that have long since fallen silent, and remembering people whose faces have become clearer in memory than they ever were in life.

As Adam Levine sang, "Cheers to the one that we got. Toast to the ones that we lost on the way," I realised those lyrics were not merely words but a quiet obituary for youth itself. We spend so much of our childhood believing that life stretches infinitely before us that we mistake permanence for a law of nature. We assume there will always be another summer, another football match, another birthday, another afternoon beneath the same familiar sky with the same familiar people. Children possess an extraordinary arrogance, though not the malicious variety. It is the innocent arrogance of believing tomorrow is guaranteed simply because yesterday arrived without incident.

Adulthood exists largely to correct that misconception.

There must have been a day, though I cannot remember it, when I laughed with my childhood friends for the final time. We probably exchanged some utterly forgettable joke, shook hands, promised to meet again, and wandered off without the faintest suspicion that we had unknowingly performed the closing scene of an entire chapter of our lives. There was no poignant farewell, no swelling orchestra, no dramatic declaration that destiny was carrying us in different directions.

Life, possessing its peculiar sense of humour, rarely grants us such theatrical endings. Instead, it disguises its conclusions as ordinary Tuesdays. It lets you believe there will always be another conversation until one day you realise there never was.

That, I think, is one of existence's cruellest practical jokes. We exhaust ourselves constructing relationships brick by brick, investing years of affection, loyalty, patience, forgiveness, laughter, disappointment, and hope, only for life to quietly remove the foundation without notifying the occupants. No announcement. No curtain call. Merely silence. Somewhere along the way, an ordinary moment becomes the final one, and nobody in attendance has the courtesy to recognise it.

The older I become, the more everything appears temporary. Places once thought eternal vanish beneath new buildings. Traditions quietly retire. Familiar streets become unrecognisable. People who once occupied entire chapters of your life slowly reduce themselves to occasional thoughts triggered by an old photograph or an unexpected song. Even happiness seems to have adopted a subscription model, expiring the moment you become comfortable with it.

I often think about the countless ordinary moments I accepted without gratitude because I lacked the wisdom to recognise they were extraordinary. Childhood possessed an astonishing talent for disguising miracles as routine. The games played until dusk, the ridiculous arguments settled within minutes, birthday parties that required nothing more elaborate than balloons and badly wrapped presents, family gatherings where the loudest laughter echoed through overcrowded rooms, and long journeys undertaken simply because seeing relatives seemed more important than convenience. None of it appeared remarkable at the time because abundance has a curious habit of making itself invisible.

I remember those long pilgrimages to visit family, journeys that seemed impossibly endless yet somehow never felt burdensome. Upon arrival, cousins who had not spoken for months instantly resumed conversations as though they had merely paused them the previous evening. We ran through fields without destination, invented adventures without budgets, and occupied ourselves with absolutely nothing, a luxury modern civilisation has almost completely abolished. My grandmother would disappear into the kitchen and emerge carrying something warm enough to heal inconveniences that had not yet occurred. My grandfather retained the sort of effortless vitality that children mistake for immortality. Watching him ride away and return with food felt as inevitable as sunrise. It never occurred to me that one day I would speak of him in the past tense.

Rest peacefully, Grandma.

Rest peacefully, Grandpa.

The remarkable thing about childhood is not merely that life seemed larger; it is that we ourselves were wonderfully small. The world towered above us with infinite possibility. Every road promised discovery. Every year felt impossibly long. Every Christmas took centuries to arrive. Time itself appeared generous.

Then, somewhere between ambition and responsibility, the proportions reversed.

Life became astonishingly small, while we somehow became too large to fit comfortably inside it. Calendars replaced curiosity. Deadlines replaced adventures. Conversations became appointments. Friendship required scheduling. Joy demanded availability. Even rest evolved into another task requiring strategic planning. Society congratulates this transformation with remarkable enthusiasm, presenting exhaustion as evidence of importance and perpetual busyness as though it were an admirable personality trait rather than an epidemic.

Then there is parenthood, perhaps life's most exquisite act of theft. Imagine carrying a child in your arms, watching tiny fingers wrap themselves around yours as though they have signed a lifelong contract never to let go. You witness their first smile, celebrate their first word, cheer their first hesitant steps, and before you've even finished convincing yourself that there is still plenty of time, you are fastening a school bag onto shoulders that somehow no longer fit beneath your chin. One ordinary morning, you wave goodbye as they disappear through the school gates, expecting them to return later that afternoon. Instead, life performs one of its oldest tricks. It returns them years later as an adult carrying deadlines instead of toys, responsibilities instead of dreams, and exhaustion instead of innocence. Somewhere between that first day of school and their first mortgage, your baby quietly vanished, not because you stopped loving them, but because time gently pried them from your embrace and taught them to belong to the world. If fortune is particularly unkind, one day even that grown child must say goodbye, because life has an insatiable appetite for separating people who would have preferred just one more ordinary afternoon together.

From the child's perspective, the tragedy is no less cruel. You spend your youth chasing achievements, convinced that making your parents proud is the noblest use of your time. You work harder, stay busier, postpone visits, shorten phone calls, and keep promising yourself that next month will be different. Deep within you, however, lives a quieter longing. A longing to be someone's child again, if only for an evening. To sit beside your parents without checking the time. To hear them ask whether you've eaten. To be fussed over, scolded for nothing, and loved with the reckless generosity only parents seem capable of. Yet life, possessing an almost theatrical sense of irony, keeps insisting there will always be another weekend, another holiday, another opportunity. So you continue postponing presence in pursuit of provision, until one phone call arrives carrying the only deadline that truly matters. Suddenly, all the time you thought you were saving has expired, and you discover the most expensive thing you ever spent was not money, but moments.

And then, of course, there are the romances. Ah, yes. The museum of magnificent catastrophes. One cannot honestly discuss memory without acknowledging that failed relationships occupy some of its most elaborately decorated galleries. They remain there, stubbornly preserved by songs, perfumes, cities, seasons, and insignificant details that unexpectedly acquire the emotional weight of sacred relics. If you doubt this, play the song that once belonged to you and someone you loved. Observe how effortlessly a melody dismantles years of carefully constructed emotional architecture. Memory, unlike reason, has absolutely no interest in moving on.

Capitalism, that endlessly inventive illusionist, deserves particular applause for perhaps its greatest performance. It convinced an entire civilisation that sacrificing today is the necessary price of enjoying tomorrow, then quietly ensured tomorrow never actually arrives. It steals your mornings in exchange for promotions, your evenings in exchange for productivity, your weekends in exchange for ambition, and eventually your relationships in exchange for the comforting promise that everything will make sense once success has been achieved. Then one morning you discover that you possess more possessions than memories, more obligations than conversations, and more contacts than friends.

Perhaps that is why building memories feels so much harder today than it once did. We inhabit a civilisation that worships convenience while quietly dismantling commitment. Social media has perfected the art of convincing us that permanence is a character flaw. Why repair a relationship when another is only a swipe away? Why endure discomfort when algorithms can endlessly entertain you? We are encouraged to remain perpetually available yet emotionally unavailable, endlessly connected yet profoundly detached. We are told to protect our peace, owe nobody anything, avoid inconvenience, and keep every exit unlocked. It sounds wonderfully liberating until one day you look around and realise freedom, when stripped of devotion, bears an uncanny resemblance to loneliness. I only hope that, in our pursuit of endless independence, we do not wake one day to discover that we outsourced our capacity to belong, and that while we were busy collecting followers, we quietly ran out of people who would have carried our memories long after we were gone.

That probably explains why so many faces today appear quietly exhausted. We inhabit an age obsessed with optimisation yet strangely incapable of enjoying itself. We photograph sunsets instead of watching them. We document dinners instead of tasting them. We curate happiness with extraordinary precision while privately negotiating loneliness of astonishing proportions. We have become remarkably efficient at preserving evidence that we were alive while becoming increasingly incompetent at actually living.

I sometimes wonder whether we are anything more than the memories we accumulate. Strip away occupations, salaries, achievements, titles, and carefully constructed identities, and what remains? Stories. Conversations. Shared laughter. Grief survived together. Embarrassing moments that somehow became treasured anecdotes. The people who altered us without ever realising they had done so. In the end, memory may be the only estate any of us truly owns, and even that gradually slips through our fingers with the quiet persistence of sand.

I miss friends I may never see again. Not because affection disappeared, but because geography, obligation, mortality, and the relentless machinery of adulthood quietly conspired against continuity. Some reunions were postponed because there seemed to be plenty of time. Some phone calls were ignored because tomorrow appeared reliable. Some embraces were delayed until next month. Then next month arrived carrying condolences instead of opportunities. Life has an extraordinary talent for teaching urgency immediately after removing the possibility of action.

Sometimes I find myself asking a question that is embarrassingly human. Do people miss me? Do I occasionally interrupt their thoughts the way they interrupt mine? Have I become someone's favourite story, someone's unexpected smile, someone's melancholy on a quiet evening? I hope so, because I know with absolute certainty that I left fragments of myself in every meaningful relationship I have ever known. Every friendship, every conversation, every shared triumph, every disagreement, every impossible dream pursued together extracted something from me and left something behind. We do not simply remember people; we continue carrying versions of them within ourselves, often without noticing.

If, by some improbable coincidence, you are reading this and life once granted us the privilege of creating memories together, know this: I remain profoundly grateful that our paths crossed, however briefly. Thank you for the laughter I no longer remember in detail but still somehow feel. Thank you for the conversations whose exact words have faded while their warmth stubbornly remains. Thank you for occupying chapters of my life that time can close but never erase.

We spend our youth believing that memories are things we make. Only much later do we discover the uncomfortable truth. Memories, in the end, are the things that quietly make us. So, when my memories wanders like this, of course I'll sing you my favourite song…

I pick up this pen with a heart heavier than wet cement and ask the oldest question humanity has been dodging since Adam first tasted grief: what exactly is life, and what are we all doing here?

Because the older I get, the more life begins to look like a market where everybody is shopping without a list, and death is the tax collector who never misses a stall.

My thoughts are scrambled eggs this morning. I cannot tell what is and what isn't anymore. One minute you're laughing with someone, the next minute you're standing over their photograph, speaking about them in the past tense.

You lose a loved one, you cry until your eyes surrender, then you fold your grief neatly and place it beside your bed because the world does not pause. And after the mourning, after the prayers, after the condolences and casseroles, all that remains is waiting for the clock to tick one final time in your own direction.

This pen in my hand is indeed mightier than the sword because no sword could possibly feel this heavy.

No blade has ever carried this much sorrow.

Tell me, why is the happiness of a mother cut so brutally short? Why does a woman spend months carrying a child beneath her heart, endure pain that would humble a warrior, finally hear the cry of her baby and smile through her tears… only for death to take a leisurely stroll into the room two days later?

As though he were an uninvited guest.

As though joy itself offended him.

Death glanced at a happy family and said, "No, this laughter is too loud. Let me remind them that I exist."

Why though?

To what end?

Do you feel accomplished when you steal joy from the arms of a nursing mother?

Do you smile beneath that hood?

What kind of sick humour is that?

I had a friend who wrestled life with his bare hands. Every day was a battle. He knew hunger by its first name. He knew rejection so intimately they could have shared a surname.

Then one day, breakthrough finally knocked on his door.

The kind of breakthrough that makes neighbours suddenly remember your phone number.

The kind that makes old friends call you "brother."

The kind that makes your mother finally sleep with peace in her heart.

Then, just as he stretched out his hands to embrace the life he had prayed for, the hooded man appeared, sharpened his scythe, and escorted him out of this earthly realm.

I was confused for days.

Dark humour is funny.

But is this even humour?

And if it is...

Who exactly is laughing?

A mother toils for years, denying herself every comfort so her children can stand taller than she ever did. She sends them abroad. Pays fees she can barely afford. Sacrifices her youth and her health on the altar of their future.

At the very point where she should have rested beneath the shade of the tree she planted...

At the very moment she should have tasted the sweetness of her labour...

The obnoxious hooded raider swings his scythe.

Again.

She vanishes.

No goodbye.

No extension.

No appeal.

Just silence.

Then there is the family already drowning in grief. They travel to bury their mother, carrying one coffin and broken hearts.

As though grief itself was not enough.

As though sorrow had not already taken its pound of flesh.

The hooded sadist waits on the road, disguises himself as an accident and claims the lives of the husband and son too.

What in the useless odds are those?

How much tragedy can one family carry before their backs finally break?

Walk with me a little further.

A husband and wife spend years praying for a child. Years of hospital visits, midnight tears, and uncomfortable questions from relatives who have appointed themselves chairmen of other people's wombs.

Then, finally, heaven answers.

A child is conceived.

The family rejoices.

The room fills with names, dreams and tiny clothes.

And just when the cry of the newborn should mark the beginning of a new chapter, the scythe-wielding man pulls a cruel trick.

He claims the life of the mother.

And because cruelty apparently has a sense of theatre, he sometimes forces a choice upon the family:

"Save the mother or save the child."

What kind of decision is that?

Who designed such a cruel crossroads?

A father walks into the hospital with two heartbeats and leaves holding one.

A child enters the world and, on the same day, becomes a memorial.

How does one celebrate and mourn in the same breath?

How do you thank God for life while questioning Him about death?

Perhaps that is what frightens me most.

I pick this pen to comfort mourning parents who did everything right, yet still went home with empty arms.

Parents who picked out tiny clothes, folded baby blankets, argued lovingly over names, painted nurseries and counted down the days with trembling excitement—only for heaven to pick their babies from them.

What cruel arithmetic is that?

To prepare a crib and receive a coffin of memories instead.

To hear a heartbeat and then be left with silence.

To become a mother and a mourner in the same breath.

To become a father and a pallbearer for dreams that never had the chance to learn how to walk.

There is a special kind of grief reserved for parents who have outlived their children, and an even lonelier one for those whose children never truly got the opportunity to live at all.

No dictionary has invented a word large enough for that pain.

No language has found the vocabulary for parents who carried a lifetime of love only to have their future taken from their arms.

So, I pick this pen for them too.

For the mothers whose bodies still remember the child their arms can no longer hold.

For the fathers who pretend to be strong because somebody has to.

For the parents who return home to unopened packs of diapers, neatly arranged baby clothes, and dreams that now hang in wardrobes with nowhere to go.

I pick this pen today not as a writer, but as a witness.

A witness to empty chairs at dinner tables.

To phone numbers that will never ring again.

To wardrobes filled with clothes whose owners have quietly vacated the premises of the earth.

I pick this pen to pay tribute to those we've lost and to those left behind to do the hardest job known to man: learning how to continue living after a piece of them has died.

This is for futures that were carefully planned but never materialized.

For weddings whose invitations were never printed.

For graduations attended only in imagination.

For businesses that remained in notebooks.

For retirement plans interrupted by a hospital bed.

For "next year" and "when I get there" and "we still have time."

Time.

That arrogant thing we all spend as though we invented it.

I pick this pen to share in a grief I know all too well. A grief that has become an unwanted roommate, occasionally quiet, occasionally loud, but never entirely gone.

The thing about grief is that it doesn't leave.

It simply changes clothes.

One day it is tears.

Another day it is silence.

Then it becomes a song you can no longer listen to, a perfume that suddenly makes your chest tight, or a memory that ambushes you in the middle of a supermarket aisle.

And somehow, society expects us to recover from it.

Recover?

As though love can be amputated and we simply learn to walk again.

No.

Grief is love that has lost its address.

Perhaps the unanswered questions remain unanswered because the answers are frightening.

Perhaps the heavens keep certain secrets because human hearts were never built to carry them.

Perhaps if we knew why a child dies before learning to speak, why a mother departs before seeing her children succeed, or why good people sometimes leave before wicked ones, our minds would crack under the weight of the knowledge.

So maybe ignorance is mercy.

Or maybe it isn't.

What do I know?

I am as clueless as you.

I too have stared at the ceiling at ungodly hours and negotiated with silence.

I too have asked questions that received no replies.

I too have wondered why the hooded man possesses such a twisted sense of humour.

Why he arrives at birthday parties.

Why he sits quietly in hospital corridors.

Why he waits until a man finally catches his big break before escorting him away.

Why he allows us to build dreams brick by brick only to bulldoze the entire structure overnight.

What kind of game is this?

Who writes these scripts?

And why do the best characters sometimes leave in the middle of the story?

Perhaps what seems missing here continues elsewhere.

Perhaps those we love do not disappear but merely change addresses.

Perhaps eternity is simply another room that we cannot yet enter.

Perhaps the people we bury do not entirely leave us.

Perhaps they continue to exist in our laughter, our mannerisms, our memories and our habits.

A mother's advice lives on in the daughter who now sounds exactly like her.

A father's discipline survives in the son who unknowingly walks just like him.

A friend's jokes remain alive in the stories we continue to tell.

Perhaps elsewhere is not some distant, unreachable place.

Perhaps elsewhere is here.

In our hearts.

In our memories.

In the little things.

Because the dead have an interesting way of remaining present.

They become songs.

They become recipes.

They become traditions.

They become lessons.

They become tears.

They become strength.

They become that sudden smile that appears when we remember something ridiculous they once did.

And maybe that is their final act of love.

To leave enough of themselves behind so that we never truly walk alone.

Still, I will admit this:

I am afraid of the truth.

Afraid that one day I might understand why the hooded man comes when he does.

Afraid that the answers to our questions may be far heavier than the questions themselves.

So, for now, I choose to remain among the confused.

Among the mourners.

Among those who still look at old photographs and whisper, "You left too soon."

Among those who still save a dead person's number because deleting it feels like losing them all over again.

Among those who still turn during moments of joy, instinctively looking for someone who is no longer there.

I pick this pen not because I have answers.

I don't.

I pick this pen because grief, when left alone, becomes unbearably loud.

I pick this pen because remembrance is a form of love.

I pick this pen because the dead deserve to be spoken of and the living deserve to know they are not alone in their sorrow.

And if there is one thing I have learned, it is this:

The hooded man may steal our people, but he can never steal the love they left behind.

That remains.

Stubbornly.

Beautifully.

Eternally.

So Ycee said something that sent Nigerian social media into a cardiac arrest. He called it an ‘Olodo Uprising’

Predictably, Nigerians responded the only way Nigerians know how whenever an uncomfortable truth escapes into the wild. They became offended.

X transformed into a rehabilitation centre for wounded egos. TikTok became a symposium of synchronized shouting. Facebook graduates suddenly acquired honorary PhDs in "Why Ycee Is Wrong." Everybody became a professor overnight, except, of course, in the subject that mattered: critical thinking.

But beneath all the outrage lies one stubborn question.

Did he lie?

No.

One of Nigeria's greatest exports is not crude oil. It is confidence without competence.

We have somehow engineered a society where intellectual bankruptcy has become a profitable business model. The frightening part is not that foolish people exist. Every country has them. The frightening part is that ours have discovered algorithms, ring lights, monetisation, and brand endorsements.

The internet did not create the problem.

It merely gave it unlimited data, fibre optics, and a monthly content calendar.

There is simply no way a grown adult wakes up, ties a wrapper around his head or wears a dress, dances like a village masquerade that escaped psychiatric observation, says absolutely nothing of value, and walks away with five million views, endorsement deals, celebrity status, and an army of disciples unless society has collectively decided that nonsense deserves venture capital.

Demand created the supply.

Someone records themselves behaving as though common sense has been outlawed by the National Assembly.

Millions applaud.

Someone opens TikTok Live and spends six uninterrupted hours discussing absolutely nothing. Gifts begin raining like Santa Claus did a summer giveaway on a livestream.

Another posts a tweet with the intellectual density of boiled cassava water, and suddenly Nigeria organises a seven-day constitutional conference beneath the replies.

The content is empty.

The comments are emptier.

Yet everybody leaves spiritually fulfilled.

We literally paid money to watch two certified Olodos fight each other.

Not heavyweight champions.

Not Olympic athletes.

Not decorated martial artists.

Just two people whose greatest accomplishments involve spitting into phone cameras and manufacturing internet controversies.

For weeks, blogs, podcasts, influencers, and entire WhatsApp groups analysed the event as though it were the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Then another internet celebrity threatened self-destruction during his relationship drama on a livestream, and once again, the nation abandoned inflation, insecurity, healthcare, education, electricity, and governance to become full-time relationship consultants.

A leaked breast appears online.

Suddenly, Nigeria produces ten thousand digital forensic experts.

People begin zooming images, analysing pixels, measuring angles, debating authenticity, comparing screenshots, opening Spaces, writing essays, and conducting investigations the FBI would politely decline out of embarrassment.

Ask those same people to explain inflation.

Silence.

Ask them how taxation works.

Silence.

Ask them to distinguish between correlation and causation.

Network problem.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find young Nigerians capable of sustaining an intelligent conversation for five uninterrupted minutes without drifting into celebrity gossip, internet scandals, recycled talking points, tribal arguments, or slogans borrowed from influencers who borrowed them from somebody equally confused.

And if you think the Olodo Uprising stopped at TikTok dances, livestreams, and Twitter Spaces, you have not been paying attention.

Its headquarters has expanded.

Politics has become one of its fastest-growing franchises.

Every morning, before you have even finished brushing your teeth, one self-appointed political analyst has already logged into X to perform their daily gymnastics routine.

Olympic-level deflection.

A report comes out about inflation; Someone replies, "But what happened in 1983?"

Fuel prices increase.

Another responds with a seventeen-post thread explaining why your tribe is somehow responsible.

400 kids are kidnapped, we spend 2 minutes mourning about it, till one Olodo dumbs down the conversation and suddenly we are debating who invented jollof rice or what tribes own Egusi.

Every single day, there is one professionally unserious individual standing between Nigerians and an intelligent conversation.

It is almost a full-time occupation.

Facts are treated like unwanted guests.

Propaganda is welcomed with a red carpet, chilled malt, and a standing ovation.

The modern political influencer no longer needs evidence; Evidence is stressful.

All that is required is confidence, dramatic background music, aggressive captions, a ring light, and followers who mistake volume for intelligence.

A one-hundred-page policy document containing actual reforms?

Nobody reads it.

A sixty-second video screaming, "They don't want you to know this!"

Ten million views before lunch.

Nor is entertainment and politics the only place where anti-intellectualism has become fashionable.

Even parts of the religious content ecosystem have not escaped the epidemic.

Faith itself is not the problem.

The problem begins when spectacle replaces substance.

Some creators have discovered that thoughtful teaching struggles to trend, but outrage, sensational prophecies, staged miracles, endless conspiracy theories, and clickbait declarations travel at the speed of light.

Every thumbnail must promise the end of poverty.

Every sermon must expose a hidden enemy.

Every disagreement becomes spiritual warfare.

Every ordinary event suddenly has twenty-seven secret meanings.

Before long, wisdom is competing against algorithms, and algorithms almost always choose drama.

It is as though every product now passes through an invisible quality-control department where someone asks, "Can we reduce the thinking and increase the shouting? Let’s Olodofy it"

Because apparently, nothing sells in Nigeria until it has been lightly seasoned with Olodoism.

Reading is boring.

Thinking is stressful.

Nuance is suspicious.

Complexity is offensive.

Everything must be compressed into fifteen-second clips, thirty-second opinions, loud certainty, recycled outrage, and one-sentence conclusions.

Ironically, science is beginning to explain why.

Study after study has found that excessive passive social media consumption is associated with poorer attention, weaker working memory, reduced executive functioning, shorter concentration spans, and diminished self-control.

None of these studies suggest that human intelligence magically disappears.

What they consistently show is something perhaps more worrying.

Your brain adapts to the environment you repeatedly feed it.

Train it on endless scrolling, and it begins to expect novelty every few seconds.

Train it on Olodoism, and calm reasoning starts to feel boring.

Train it on headlines without substance, and deep reading begins to feel like punishment.

That is why a ten-page article now feels like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to someone who has spent eight hours consuming fifteen-second videos.

It is not because intelligence vanished overnight.

It is because attention has been conditioned like a puppy expecting a biscuit every fifteen seconds.

Algorithms understand this perfectly.

Platforms do not reward wisdom.

They reward retention.

They are not asking whether society became wiser after consuming your content; they are asking whether you stayed long enough to watch another advertisement.

The more outrageous the content becomes...

The more emotional it becomes...

The more shallow it becomes...

The more profitable it often becomes.

So perhaps Ycee was not insulting Nigerians.

Perhaps he was diagnosing a society where stupidity has become entertainment, entertainment has become influence, influence has become wealth, and anyone who insists on complete sentences, evidence, and critical thinking is treated like the problem.

That is not merely an Olodo Uprising.

That is an economy.

And business, unfortunately, is booming.

Today, the curtains rise again. Not just in cinemas, but in memory, in muscle, in that involuntary twitch your legs do when a certain bassline enters the room like it owns the mortgage. The Michael movie is out, and suddenly the world remembers again that once upon a time, a man existed who made gravity look like a suggestion.

And I can’t help it. I’m thrown back into that soft, golden chaos called childhood, where Michael Jackson wasn’t just an artist. He was a ritual. A compulsory subject. A national anthem of growing up. Every millennial child, whether in Lagos, London, or some forgotten village where network bars come to die, has attempted the moonwalk at least once or a hundred reckless times on floors that did not consent.

Michael wasn’t just big. Big is what you call buildings and egos. Michael was scale-less. To me, as a child, he wasn’t even human in the ordinary sense. He was what humanity could look like if it stopped playing and decided to perfect itself. The peak. The prototype. The final draft God forgot to watermark.

He would appear on screen, and my brain, still under construction, would simply freeze. Not process. Not analyse. Just witness. Like stumbling into something sacred without permission. And the funny thing is growing older didn’t shrink that feeling. It sharpened it. Rewatching his work wasn’t nostalgia. It was revelation. If anything, younger me was underqualified for what he was seeing.

And Thriller. Let’s not lie to ourselves. That wasn’t just a music video. That was a cultural initiation. A rite of passage. The first time you watched it, something inside you rearranged itself permanently. It remains the best selling album of all time, casually sitting at the top like it signed a lifetime lease there and locked the door.

Michael was everything. Not in the exaggerated stan sense. Literally everything. Singer. Dancer. Writer. Producer. Performer. Philanthropist. Visionary. The man stacked his own vocals like he didn’t trust oxygen to carry them properly. Built choirs out of himself. Artists like Brandy later refined that technique, but Michael was the original factory.

Now let’s talk about the clothes, because even fabric behaved differently on this man. The single white glove was not just an accessory, it was a declaration. The red leather jacket from Thriller turned into a global uniform overnight. Military-style jackets, gold accents, armbands, loafers with white socks, fedora tilted like it knew secrets. Michael didn’t follow fashion. Fashion followed him like a loyal disciple. You could walk into any country on earth and find a version of that aesthetic stitched into somebody’s identity. From street dancers in Festac to pop stars in Seoul, the DNA is traceable.

And then… the moonwalk.

Let’s slow down here, because history deserves proper pacing.

1983. Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. A stage. A man. A fedora. A black jacket catching light like it had its own agenda. The music starts. Billie Jean. The crowd is already losing composure. Then it happens.

He steps back.

But he doesn’t move.

Or rather, he moves in a way the human eye had not negotiated with before.

The moonwalk was not just a dance move. It was a glitch in reality. A betrayal of physics broadcast live to millions. People screamed like they had just witnessed a miracle that refused to explain itself. Grown adults stood up involuntarily. Some laughed. Some shouted. Some simply froze, trying to process how a man could walk forward while moving backward like time itself had been bribed.

That moment didn’t just trend. It rewired performance forever. Overnight, every dancer on earth developed an urgent need to slide. Floors became testing grounds. Socks became equipment. Childhood became a training camp.

Back to the absurd facts that sound fictional until you realise they are not. This man sold out seven nights at Wembley Stadium with over 500,000 people attending. His Bad tour pulled in over 4.4 million fans globally. He has 13 Grammy Awards, including eight in one night, which is not an award show, that is a corporate acquisition.

Popularity. Let’s speak plainly. This was the closest thing to a global monarch without a throne. The only human you could reasonably argue stood in second place to Jesus Christ in terms of recognition. There are places on this planet where people don’t know what snow looks like, but they know Michael Jackson. The man was more familiar than weather patterns.

Influence. He didn’t just influence music. He rewired it. There is no country with a functioning speaker that doesn’t have at least one artist spiritually indebted to him. And then there is impersonation. Entire careers built on resemblance. People surgically negotiating with their own faces just to echo his existence.

Seventeen years gone, and the numbers still look alive. Billions of YouTube views. Streaming stats on various platforms casually competing with and surpassing industry giants. Thriller still reigning. His HIStory era had giant statues of him placed in cities like he was announcing a new world order.

He patented anti-gravity lean shoes for Smooth Criminal. Not satisfied with breaking dance, he went after physics itself. He turned a glove into a global symbol, made a silhouette more recognisable than most logos, and forced MTV to confront its own bias when Billie Jean broke through their resistance to Black artists.

And then the mythology starts to sound exaggerated until you realise it isn’t. Pablo Escobar plotting his kidnap just because he is a fan. Cartels acting as his security and keeping the peace in Rio also because they are fans. A Los Angeles Lakers game disrupted because one man walked in and suddenly, sitting down became a group project nobody could complete. Crowds collapsing and even dying just from his stillness. Not performance. Presence. People fainting before the beat even dropped. Humans overwhelmed by spectacle.

And when he died, the world didn’t just mourn. It malfunctioned. I remember it clearly. School went quiet in a way silence had never been experienced before. Not discipline silence. Not fear. Just absence. Like someone removed a frequency we didn’t realise we depended on.

Being an MJ fan comes with the usual recycled accusations, served by people who treat headlines like scripture and research like optional coursework.

Your MJ turned white.

Vitiligo. Documented. Medical.

Your MJ molested kids.

Courtrooms exist. Verdicts exist. Acquittal exists.

What of the Leaving Neverland documentary?

Yes, the one collapsing under its own contradictions that had to even be taken down for false stories, please skip.

Didn’t he do drugs?

After a pyrotechnic accident during a Pepsi commercial burned his scalp, leading to chronic pain and insomnia.

Why was he always around kids?

Because he spent his life grieving a childhood he never had and tried to recreate it for others. Neverland wasn’t a gimmick. It was therapy built on land.

But really, none of this is surprising. History has a habit of resisting those who dare to rewrite it. Michael didn’t just enter the industry, he audited it.

In a casual conversation with Paul McCartney, he asked what it would cost to own the The Beatles catalog. Paul joked. Michael didn’t. Forty five million dollars later, he owned it. Add 50% of Sony/ATV, and suddenly he’s profiting off the very ecosystem that thought it owned him.

There were whispers; Marvel acquisitions, power moves stacking quietly. And then, like clockwork, the narrative shifted. Allegations appeared. Reputation got dragged through a media marathon.

Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

But honestly, what do I care?

To me, Michael Jackson remains the peak of what a human can be when talent meets obsession and empathy refuses to be optional. A man who didn’t just sing about healing the world, he attempted it with his own resources.

He also holds a Guinness World Record for supporting the most charities by a pop star, over 30 organisations benefiting from his direct involvement. Not tweets. Not hashtags. Actual money, actual effort, actual impact.

Heal the World, Earth Song, We Are the World, They Don’t Care About Us, Black or White, Human Nature.

These weren’t just songs. They were instructions disguised as melody.

So no, you won’t catch me slandering Michael Jackson in this lifetime. If humanity had more of his kind, not his fame but his intention, we would be living in a very different world.

Rest in power, King.

And yes, maybe this movie is another machine monetising your name. But it proves something undeniable.

The world still remembers.

Empires rarely introduce themselves honestly.

They arrive wearing poetry.

The Romans spoke of civilisation. The British spoke of trade and enlightenment. And the modern superpower, the United States, speaks the language of salvation.

Not religion exactly, though the structure feels familiar. A troubled land appears somewhere on the world stage. A villain rises. Democracy trembles. Innocent civilians are said to be in danger. Then, almost on cue, the cavalry arrives from across the ocean; aircraft carriers, coalition statements, humanitarian language, and a narrative that has been repeated so often that many countries have learned to whisper it to themselves before anyone else does.

America will save us.

It is one of the most powerful geopolitical stories ever told. And like most powerful stories, it contains elements of truth, layers of exaggeration, and beneath it all something quieter and far less romantic, interests that rarely make it into the press conference.

Modern civilisation runs on energy. Oil, natural gas, coal, electricity; the invisible arteries of the global economy. Every factory, airplane, shipping lane, and data center is plugged into this network of energy flows. The countries that secure energy supply lines secure industrial power. The countries that secure industrial power shape geopolitics.

The United States contains roughly four percent of the world’s population, yet it consumes about sixteen percent of global energy. In the early 2000s that number approached a quarter of the planet’s total consumption. Suburbs stretching across thousands of miles, highways thick with vehicles, a military apparatus spanning continents, and an economy built on constant motion require enormous fuel. If those flows stop, the system trembles. Energy security therefore became not just an economic priority for Washington but a strategic doctrine.

If one studies a map of the world’s largest oil reserves, a curious pattern begins to emerge. Saudi Arabia holds about 267 billion barrels. Iran about 157 billion. Iraq around 145 billion. Russia more than 100 billion. The United Arab Emirates nearly 100 billion. Libya roughly 48 billion. Nigeria about 37 billion. Many of these regions have experienced American military presence, strategic alliances, or direct intervention at various moments over the past several decades. Coincidence is possible, of course. But geopolitics tends to follow patterns more than coincidence.

The architecture of this system took shape during a crisis in 1973. That year the Middle East erupted into conflict in what history remembers as the Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. The United States supported Israel. In response, Arab oil producers led by OPEC imposed an oil embargo against Western nations. The result was immediate and terrifying for industrial economies. Oil prices quadrupled almost overnight. Fuel shortages appeared across Europe and the United States. Gas stations closed. Lines stretched for miles down American streets.

For the first time since the industrial revolution began, Washington confronted a stark reality: the world’s largest economy depended on energy controlled elsewhere. A strategic solution was needed. That solution arrived quietly through a partnership with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia agreed to sell its oil exclusively in U.S. dollars. In return the United States provided military protection and security guarantees. Other oil producers followed the same model, and the petrodollar system was born. Oil, the most important commodity in the global economy, would be priced largely in dollars. Every country that needed energy would therefore need American currency.

The implications were enormous. Global demand for dollars surged. The U.S. currency became the dominant reserve currency held by central banks around the world. Energy and finance fused into a self-reinforcing system: oil flowed outward from producing countries, and dollars flowed back toward the United States through global markets. This arrangement strengthened American economic influence and helped finance an enormous global military network.

But systems like this rarely remain uncontested forever.

In the early 2000s Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein announced plans to sell Iraqi oil in euros instead of dollars. Three years later the United States invaded Iraq under the administration of George W. Bush. The justification presented to the world was that Iraq possessed dangerous weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. Those weapons were never found. What Iraq undeniably possessed, however, was one of the largest oil reserves on Earth, roughly 145 billion barrels.

The war lasted years and reshaped the Middle East. More than 4,400 American soldiers died. Civilian casualties in Iraq are estimated in the hundreds of thousands. The financial cost to the United States climbed above two trillion dollars. Yet once the war subsided, Iraq’s oil sector reopened to international energy companies and production climbed again toward four million barrels per day, restoring the country as a major supplier in global markets.

A similar narrative appeared in Libya nearly a decade later. In 2011, under Barack Obama, NATO intervened in Libya during an uprising against long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi. The intervention was framed as a humanitarian mission designed to protect civilians in the city of Benghazi. Libya surprisingly happened to hold the largest oil reserves in Africa, about 48 billion barrels. After the NATO campaign, Gaddafi was killed and the Libyan state fragmented into rival factions and militias. Yet oil production eventually resumed because global markets depend heavily on Libyan crude.

Not every strategic energy relationship arrives with bombs and missiles. Some are quieter. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, sits atop about 37 billion barrels of oil and produces roughly 1.3 to 1.5 million barrels per day. Its offshore fields in the Gulf of Guinea form an important component of global crude supply. For decades the region has drawn Western attention not only because of its oil, but because of its position along key Atlantic shipping routes.

Yet Nigeria’s importance to global strategy may be evolving beyond oil. Geological surveys in parts of the country have identified deposits of rare earth minerals; a family of elements essential for modern technologies such as electric vehicles, smartphones, advanced batteries, wind turbines, and military electronics. At present, the overwhelming majority of the world’s rare earth processing capacity is concentrated in China, which has spent decades building dominance in this critical supply chain. China controls a large share of global rare earth production and an even larger share of refining and processing.

For Washington, this dependence has become a strategic vulnerability. Rare earth minerals are vital for everything from fighter jet guidance systems to renewable energy infrastructure. Reducing reliance on Chinese supply therefore became a growing priority in American industrial policy and national security planning.

Countries with emerging rare earth potential suddenly gained new strategic significance, and Nigeria sits among those being studied more closely by Western investors and policymakers. A foothold in Nigeria’s mineral sector; if commercially viable deposits are developed could contribute to diversifying supply chains away from China.

In this context, geopolitical narratives can sometimes intersect with domestic tensions in complicated ways. Nigeria has long experienced conflicts framed through religious or communal lenses, particularly between communities identified as Christian and Muslim. International advocacy groups, media outlets, and foreign policymakers often interpret these conflicts through the language of religious persecution or ideological struggle. While such interpretations sometimes highlight genuine humanitarian concerns, critics argue that geopolitical competition can quietly shape how global powers engage with these narratives.

For the United States, strengthening strategic relationships in Nigeria could simultaneously serve multiple objectives: securing energy partnerships, maintaining influence in the Gulf of Guinea, and potentially gaining future access to rare earth resources that might reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains. In the wider strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, even mineral deposits buried beneath remote landscapes can acquire global importance.

Far west across the Atlantic, another energy struggle has unfolded in Latin America. Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves in the world, even larger than those of Saudi Arabia. For years its government under Nicolás Maduro pursued closer economic ties with China and other non-Western partners. Venezuelan oil exports increasingly flowed toward Asian markets, and discussions around trading oil outside the traditional dollar system occasionally surfaced, including the use of China’s currency, the yuan.

Washington responded with years of sanctions, indictments, and diplomatic pressure. In 2020 the United States formally charged Maduro with narcoterrorism and offered a reward for information leading to his arrest. By 2025 the bounty had risen to $50 million, the largest reward ever offered by the United States for a foreign head of state.

The confrontation escalated dramatically in early 2026. A U.S. military-supported operation captured Maduro and transferred him to the United States to face federal charges. Venezuelan authorities described the event as a kidnapping, while Washington framed it as a law-enforcement action against an indicted criminal leader. The operation resulted in dozens of casualties among Venezuelan and allied security personnel during the raid.

The geopolitical implications were immediate. Oil markets reacted sharply, and analysts began reassessing global energy flows and alliances following the capture. China, Venezuela’s largest oil buyer and financial backer, strongly condemned the operation, describing it as a violation of sovereignty and warning it could destabilize regional politics.

Farther east lies one of the most critical chokepoints in the entire global energy system. The Strait of Hormuz is only about thirty-three kilometers wide at its narrowest point, yet nearly one fifth of the world’s oil supply passes through it each day. Nearby sits Iran, a nation holding around 157 billion barrels of oil and vast natural gas reserves.Every tanker leaving Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, and the UAE must pass through it. The global economy quite literally squeezes through this corridor.

Control Hormuz, and you control the valve of the modern world.

Iran sits beside it.

This alone explains why Iran has been the subject of relentless geopolitical pressure for decades. Sanctions. Proxy conflicts. Nuclear negotiations. Military threats. Any disruption in the strait could send global energy markets into immediate crisis. It is therefore unsurprising that the United States Navy maintains a powerful presence in the Persian Gulf. Protecting shipping lanes is not simply regional politics; it is insurance for the entire global economy.

In April 2026, Donald Trump publicly threatened Iran with annihilation if it did not comply with American demands surrounding the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. He warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran ignored his deadline.

The language was not subtle.

It was not diplomatic.

It was naked!

The message was clear: open the artery of oil or face destruction.

Within hours, the threat sent shockwaves through global markets and diplomatic circles. Eventually, Trump paused the planned strikes after negotiations produced a temporary ceasefire tied to reopening shipping lanes.

But the threat itself revealed the deeper truth.

When American presidents speak about Iran, they rarely speak about oil.

They speak about nuclear weapons.

They speak about terrorism.

They speak about freedom.

Yet the strategic map tells a simpler story.

Iran is not just another Middle Eastern state. It is a gatekeeper of global energy circulation.

Energy again appeared at the center of geopolitics when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Before the war, Europe depended on Russia for roughly forty percent of its natural gas supply. Sanctions against Russian energy triggered a dramatic reconfiguration of global markets, increasing demand for alternative suppliers including liquefied natural gas exports from the United States. Meanwhile the contested peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, sits near significant offshore gas reserves in the Black Sea, strengthening Moscow’s control over regional energy resources.

Maintaining influence over these global energy arteries requires enormous infrastructure. The United States spends more than eight hundred billion dollars annually on defense and maintains military bases in more than seventy countries. Major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman receive large government contracts to produce aircraft, missile systems, and surveillance technology. Meanwhile energy companies benefit when geopolitical tensions push oil prices higher. War may be expensive for governments, but it can be profitable for certain industries.

Military strength alone, however, cannot sustain global legitimacy. Stories are required, narratives that transform strategy into moral purpose. For decades the United States Department of Defense has collaborated with Hollywood productions. Films such as Top Gun and Black Hawk Down received access to military equipment, aircraft carriers, and training facilities. In exchange scripts are often reviewed before cooperation is granted. Over eight hundred films and television projects have involved Pentagon assistance, producing decades of cinematic storytelling in which American soldiers appear as heroic guardians of freedom.

While the true depth of this influence is often obscured, estimates suggest that billions of dollars are funneled annually into the broader infrastructure of narrative control. This is not just a budget; it is a global subscription fee for a reality you did not realize you had signed up for. The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) broadcasts "liberty" in forty languages, while the Department of Defense (DoD) operates specialized Entertainment Liaison Offices for each military branch. These offices have assisted in over 2,500 war-themed movies and TV programs since the dawn of the industry, trading access to billion-dollar warships for the right to edit the American story.

The true brilliance, however, is not the spending; it is the casting. Each president is simply a new lead actor brought in to freshen up a long-running franchise that refuses to be canceled, ensuring the "Saviour" brand remains intact while the real agenda: dominance and resource acquisition, remains buried in the fine print.

In the real world, the invasion of Iraq killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Iraqis, yet movies like American Sniper (2014) focus on the heroism of the sniper as a protector.

​Because "We need to control the flow of natural gas and secure trade routes" does not test well with audiences.

But "We are here to save the world" gets a standing ovation every time.

​History does not remember what happened; it remembers the version that was told with the biggest marketing budget.

America does not just fight; it produces. It does not just intervene; it casts itself as the only possible protagonist in a world it spent billions of dollars convincing us was falling

“But, Baron, you're just over thinking it, with your constant pessimistic mindset, America is the good guy”

Well, none of this means that every American intervention is motivated solely by oil or minerals, nor does it mean ideals play no role in foreign policy. Nations rarely act from a single motive. Ideology, alliances, security concerns, and humanitarian pressures all shape decisions.

But energy and strategic resources remain among the most consistent forces guiding global power.

And so the saviour narrative persists.

A crisis erupts somewhere in the world. Cameras turn toward the conflict. Politicians deliver urgent speeches. Headlines describe the defense of democracy and the protection of civilians. And across the ocean, an aircraft carrier quietly adjusts its course.

Perhaps the mission truly does protect innocent lives. Perhaps it stabilizes a fragile region.

What do I know?

But somewhere behind the speeches and headlines, there is often another map, one showing pipelines, mineral deposits, shipping routes, and narrow waterways through which the lifeblood of the modern world continues to flow.

Because behind every empire’s moral story, there is usually something far more practical.

Energy. Minerals. Supply chains.

And whoever keeps those moving, keeps the modern world and their power within it alive.

You are the last generation that remembers a world without the internet.

Not slow internet. Not unstable connection. I mean a world where “going online” was an event; a decision; a journey.

You played outside until darkness swallowed the sky. Car horns were your notification bell. When you heard your father’s Peugeot 504 horn, that was the system update telling you to go home. If your mother shouted your full government name across the compound, that was a push alert with consequences.

You agreed to meet at 4 p.m.; you showed up at 4 p.m. Because if you did not show up, you had vanished from the earth. There was no “sorry, I just saw this.” If you missed it, you missed it.

You knocked on doors to call your friends out; you stood at gates rehearsing your lines like lawyers. “Good evening, ma; is Baron around?” No texting. No “where you at?” You physically presented yourself. If they said he was sleeping, you accepted fate and walked back home dramatically.

You drank water from kegs and steel cups; that “555” steel cup was the closest you had to a water dispenser. Drinking water from that cup felt like heaven. You watched cartoons at specific times, on specific channels, with fuzzy signals; you adjusted antennas like engineers.

You memorized phone numbers; not one or two, but dozens. If you lost your small black contact book, you felt like you had amnesia. You knew birthdays without Facebook reminders; you knew directions without Google Maps. “Turn left at the big mango tree” was enough.

You drank water from sachets and blew air into them to make balloons. You watched wrestling and argued about The Undertaker raising from the dead as if it was national politics. You rushed home to catch a favorite show because if you missed it, you missed it. No replay. No streaming; just regret.

You recorded songs from the radio onto cassette tapes; you pressed record and prayed the presenter respected your destiny. If he spoke over the intro, you swallowed the pain. You had a book of lyrics you made from pausing and playing a song and guessing words; you held it like your personal manual to life. You created mixtapes for people you liked; carefully selecting track order like you were curating emotion itself.

You remember when the internet required preparation. You dressed intentionally to go to a cyber café; you bought thirty minutes and felt rich. The timer in the corner of the screen was your silent enemy. You typed fast; browsed faster; logged into Yahoo Messenger and prayed someone you cared about was online. When your time finished, the system removed you without apology. You stood up quietly and stepped back into the analog world.

You remember dial up tones; that robotic scream that sounded like two machines arguing before granting you access to knowledge. You could not use the phone while online; the whole house negotiated around your browsing time.

You remember when love was expensive. You waited for free night calls; you flashed someone and prayed they would call back because you had 12 naira left. You typed long messages using T9 on the indestructible Nokia 3310 and felt accomplished when you did not make a typo.

Long before Airdrops and Quick Share, you remember infrared transfers; two phones pressed back to back, unmoving, because any shake would cancel the song. You remember Bluetooth names that were unnecessarily dramatic. You remember buying ringtones from roadside vendors.

You remember renting and watching films on VHS; rewinding with patience that would humble today’s streaming generation. You remember VCD players overheating; you had to master the art of cleaning a VCD so the movie would play smoothly. Those chaotic 24 in 1 DVDs where you searched endlessly for the one movie you actually bought it for. You remember renting a movie for a weekend and watching until your eyes hurt because Monday meant returning it.

You remember lantern light; the smell of kerosene; the fragile glass casing that required steady hands and quiet prayers. Homework done under flickering flames because electricity had its own mood swings. When power returned at midnight, the entire street shouted “UP NEPA” in celebration.

You remember lantern books; when literature was honest and mischievous; when Mr. Tortoise was the smartest creature in the animal kingdom. You learned about greed from the “My Name Is All of You” story, where cleverness without character collapsed under its own pride. Those stories disciplined you more than motivational speakers and Podcasters ever could.

You remember the first time you heard about the September 11 attacks and felt the world shrink. You remember reading about the fall of the Soviet Union in textbooks and not realizing you would live through your own global shifts. You graduated into the 2008 financial crisis and entered adulthood during instability; then came a pandemic that paused weddings, careers, dreams.

You remember when photos were taken to studios and printed from film; you waited days to see how you looked. Now you delete a picture in 0.3 seconds because the lighting offended you. You remember burning CDs for crushes; now playlists are shared with a link. You remember when calling someone internationally required planning and courage; now you complain about poor connection on video calls.

You remember when mastering dance steps felt like victory. Doing the Daddy Shoki at a family party was applause worthy; that was your TikTok challenge before TikTok existed. You danced for joy, not metrics.

You remember Y2K fashion; jean skirts that swished with confidence; oversized jean trousers that swallowed your shoes; big sunglasses that announced your arrival before you spoke. Low effort; high presence. You did not have stylists; you hadattitude. So when you transitioned into curated feeds and Instagram aesthetics, it was not a shock. You were trained in self expression long before filters existed; fashion was not optional. It was identity.

You remember when friendship meant sitting on a curb and talking for hours; sharing snacks; walking each other home; passing notes in class. You remember heartbreak without screenshots; fights that ended face to face, not in comment sections. You remember those long landline conversations cut short by parents shouting, “Drop that phone!”

You remember saving files on floppy disks and praying they did not corrupt. You remember computer rooms in school where touching the monitor felt like touching forbidden treasure. You remember when getting a 512 MB USB drive felt like technological royalty.

And now you live here.

Cloud storage. Artificial intelligence. Remote work. Side hustles layered on side hustles. Dating apps replacing gate knocking. Algorithms shaping visibility; notifications interrupting silence.

You were trained for stability and handed volatility. Told to get degrees and find jobs; you got degrees and found competition. Promised upward mobility; given economic gymnastics.

They told you if you studied hard, you would get good jobs. You studied; the jobs disappeared. They said you would live better than your parents; instead, you mastered survival in a system that kept shifting the goalposts.

You were fed the golden lie from the cradle: “You are the leaders of tomorrow.” You nodded, marched into universities, collected degrees like Pokémon cards, hoarded skills like survival kits for a future you were promised. And then ~plot twist~ the same voices that sold you the dream waltzed in, snatched the throne, used university strikes to make you older and left you clutching your resumes like sad confetti. Leadership, it turns out, wasn’t yours to inherit; it was a magic trick, and you were the audience applauding your own disappearance.

You are the generation that watched your parents own homes and start families at 25. You saw photo albums of their first apartments, their weddings, their stability. At 25 they had mortgages. At 25 they had toddlers. At 25 they were building something that looked permanent.

At 25, you are refreshing job portals.

At 30, many of you are battling what feels like a midlife crisis without having lived a full first life. You are calculating rent increases. Watching inflation rise like an unwanted guest that refuses to leave. You are distracted by economic survival. The cost of groceries alone feels like a plot twist.

You are not delaying family because you are unserious. You are calculating. You are cautious. You are tired of building castles on unstable ground.

You were promised stability if you followed instructions. Study hard. Get a degree. Get a job. Buy a house. Start a family. Instead, you got contract work. Gig economy. Rising fuel prices. Rent that behaves like it has ambition.

Your parents climbed ladders that were intact. You are climbing ladders missing steps.

They call you confused. They call you unserious. They say you are afraid of commitment.

But commitment requires stability. And stability has become a luxury product.

You are navigating adulthood in a world that changes faster than you can emotionally process. You are managing careers that did not exist when you were children. You are building digital portfolios while carrying analog memories.

And here is the uncomfortable truth you carry quietly.

You were told to respect your elders. Respect them without question. Respect them because age automatically equals wisdom. Respect them because tradition demanded it.

You obeyed.

Then you grew up.

And you began to see how some of those same elders mismanaged systems, looted opportunities, protected corruption, and borrowed from the future you were supposed to inherit. You saw broken institutions. You saw resources diverted. You saw promises recycled every election cycle.

You were taught morals so strong they almost became restraints. Be polite. Do not talk back. Do not question authority. Do not disrupt. Endure.

Now you are adults looking at the consequences of decisions you did not make.

Too aware to be blind.

Too moral to be reckless.

Too trained in obedience to revolt easily.

You carry a strange tension. You were raised to be respectful, and that respect sometimes turned into silence. You were trained to endure, and that endurance sometimes became docility.

You are angry, but you are careful.

You are disappointed, but you are disciplined.

You question systems, but you still greet properly.

That contradiction lives inside you.

You survived analog hardship and digital overload. You survived boredom and overstimulation. You survived economic collapse and social media comparison. You survived waiting; you survived immediacy.

You know the weight of time because you have seen how quickly it changes shape. You know the value of presence because you remember when moments were not content.

You are the last generation that remembers when the internet was a place you visited; and the first that understands it is now a place you live.

You are the bridge between lantern smoke and LED glow; between VHS rewinds and instant streaming; between folktales of Tortoise and viral threads; between handwritten letters and disappearing messages.

You did not just adapt; you absorbed shock after shock and still learned new software.

You are not confused; you are layered.

You are not soft; you are stretched across two eras.

You are a living memory.

With love,

Baron

There is something profoundly Nigerian, and profoundly ironic, about our national obsession with class, in a country where roughly sixty three percent of the population lives in multidimensional poverty; yet if you listened only to Nigerians speaking online, you would assume we are a nation of quiet billionaires temporarily inconvenienced by poor internet connection.

Nigeria is one of the few places where poverty is widespread; but performance of wealth is a cultural obligation. Not subtle performance; not quiet confidence; full theatrical production. Lighting, costume, script, audience participation.

Many Nigerians are multidimensionally poor; yet we behave like we are one business deal away from buying half of London.

The truth, unfortunately, is simpler. The only people most Nigerians successfully deceive about their financial capacity are themselves, their family members back home and the immediate community that measures success by visible signals. New phone; new car; new hair; new accent; new attitude. Suddenly you have arrived. Nobody asks how you arrived; the fact that you arrived is sufficient evidence.

The conversations Nigerians have with other Nigerians online can be unintentionally comedic. Two Nigerians arguing about levels; tax bracket; superiority; class; social standing; inside an economy that should have humbled everybody into cooperation. Instead, what we have created is competitive illusion.

You will see a Nigerian telling another Nigerian, with full confidence, that they now hold a certain passport or hail from a different time zone and therefore are not on the same level anymore.

A Nigerian; speaking to another Nigerian.

It is always fascinating how quickly identity begins to adjust. A person who once complained about traffic on Falomo Bridge suddenly begins to behave like Nigeria was merely a temporary field assignment. Memory becomes selective; identity becomes flexible; accent becomes adjustable.

Phones are one of our favorite ranking tools.

You hand someone your phone; they do not even pretend anymore. The device will immediately be flipped over. Not to admire the design; not to check anything useful; they are inspecting the back like investigators trying to determine your social category. The model of the phone will decide how they address you for the rest of the interaction.

If it passes inspection; respect increases. If it fails; you will notice the tone shift. Subtle; but present.

Nobody asks whether the phone is paid for; nobody asks whether you are using it productively. What matters is the signal it sends.

Cars are an even bigger theatre.

The way Nigerians talk about luxury cars you would think the average citizen is choosing between a second Mercedes and a third one for emotional balance. Someone will casually ask whether your car is a more recent model; as if these vehicles are distributed during routine life events.

Meanwhile many people are calculating fuel costs before leaving the house.

That is how you will see someone driving a very expensive car that spends most of its life parked; because fueling it has quietly become a negotiation with reality.

Invite someone to your house; the inspection continues.

The television becomes the main suspect.

Nigerians have a remarkable ability to enter a living room and locate the television within seconds; like trained investigators. Eventually the question arrives. “How many inches?”

Suddenly your television is defending itself in court.

If it is not large enough; the mood changes slightly. As if they expected a cinema experience but discovered a normal human life.

Even churches are not immune.

There have been situations where people arrive early; yet they are asked to park far away because their Camry does not look impressive enough for certain sections of the parking area. Imagine attending worship and your vehicle is quietly graded.

God must occasionally look down at Nigeria and sigh.

Nigerian parties are another arena where class performance becomes obvious. Anyone who attends enough events will notice it. From the moment someone walks in; they are scanned. Hair; wig; shoes; bag; jewelry; perfume; outfit. Everything is data.

People spend enormous amounts of money preparing for weddings that are not theirs; because “people go talk” is stronger than financial discipline.

Online, the madness becomes even clearer.

Someone complains that they paid 500k for a service and it was terrible; immediately another person appears to dismiss the complaint. They ask if the issue is really about that amount of money; as if the amount being discussed is insignificant.

Inside a country where the minimum wage struggles to survive the month.

Another strange area Nigerians have converted into a class battlefield is accent.

Yes; accent.

You will see Nigerians shaming other Nigerians for how they pronounce English words; as if pronunciation has now become a certificate of social rank. Someone speaks English with a local influence and suddenly they are corrected; mocked; dismissed.

Which becomes deeply ironic the moment you remember one simple fact. English is not our language.

Language naturally shapes accent; environment shapes pronunciation; culture shapes speech patterns. Yet Nigerians have found a way to create hierarchy inside a borrowed language. The more foreign your accent sounds; the more some people assume you have ascended socially and economically.

It becomes almost comedic when you step back and observe it.

This same mindset appears everywhere.

Someone will build a beautiful house; but refuse to construct proper drainage. When the rainy season arrives; the same person is struggling to enter their own home like someone fighting nature itself. In their mind they are wealthy; their environment quietly disagrees.

Another interesting pattern is how Nigerians export classism and then import it back with enthusiasm.

Some musicians behave normally abroad where systems enforce order. The moment they return home; performance begins. Suddenly one car on the road is not enough. Six cars must appear; security must surround them; roofs must come down; music must announce their arrival.

It begins to resemble an overfunded wildlife documentary.

And it is not only musicians.

Even Nigerians who once swore Nigeria was the problem can return after saving a modest amount abroad; and immediately feel the urge to prove something. Suddenly they are competing with the same people they once criticized.

Validation is powerful.

Recently I even read someone suggesting people are judged based on whether their house has a particular type of ceiling.

A ceiling.

That was the moment I almost choked laughing.

The part that worries me most is how this mindset affects young people. You hear statements like someone refusing to use a certain phone model; or rejecting Android entirely; because they believe it lowers their perceived status. This is a statement made by a young teenager who has no source of income.

Meanwhile the phone works perfectly.

Someone will say they cannot drive a certain corolla model; even though that car is reliable and financially reasonable. Do people realize that purchasing some of these cars would take someone earning minimum wage more than a decade. Heck, some Nigerians who will even rate you lower for the car, may not even have a bicycle in their name.

Yet we have managed to become ashamed of things many Nigerians cannot even realistically afford.

Transport is another example. People proudly say they cannot enter any thing short of an Uber/Bolt; yet a simple ride hailing trip can already consume a serious portion of the average person’s income. What happened to Danfo or commercial vehicles? “I can't be seen jumping a bus, Baron” Ah okay!

Food has also joined the hierarchy.

Some Nigerians will say they do not eat at Chicken Republic or The place and would prefer high end restaurants or fine dining. They even feel ashamed of getting foods in those places, God forbid ! You look at the person and begin to wonder if they believe food in those places is free.

Then we carry this same thinking into events.

Weddings become productions; birthdays become economic experiments. Every event must appear larger than the previous one. Vendors observe this behavior and adjust prices accordingly. Slowly; basic services become more expensive.

Then people begin to complain about inflation.

But sometimes inflation is simply society overcharging itself in the name of pride.

Nightlife venues understand Nigerians extremely well. They know presentation matters more than substance.

A drink that cost far less for the original at duty free would be remade, mixed with nonsense and sold at a premium; if it comes with lighting; music; atmosphere.

People celebrate; record videos; upload proof.

Presence becomes currency.

Education is not spared either.

You will hear parents proudly announcing the large amounts they pay for basic education; not university; basic education. A four year old paying millions per year; and everyone nods like this is normal.

You will think the child is studying robotics; engineering; international diplomacy simultaneously.

Social media occasionally exposes the culture perfectly. Someone once showed off a perfume collection online as a symbol of sophistication; only for people to quickly identify many of them as fake.

That reminds me, people have even started paying for fake money bouquets to gift themselves and oppress each other. Such a razz dirty culture.

At that point you begin to ask the real question.

Why go that far just to perform wealth.

Relationships are not safe either. Two people earning the same salary can work in the same office; yet one believes the other is not on their level. Nobody knows who created these invisible rules; but Nigerians follow them with dedication.

Family pressure makes everything worse. A relative wants to visit home; immediately there is discussion about who built a house; who bought a car; who has progressed. Suddenly a simple trip becomes a financial performance review. People begin considering loans just to avoid appearing stagnant.

School reunions have quietly become Olympics of achievement. Someone with a perfectly decent life may avoid attending; because they know the moment they arrive the scanning will begin.

Your value can be assessed in seconds.

But the biggest contradiction sits quietly across the country every day.

That is why we have beggars littered across the federation; because everybody is rich and nobody is rich at the same time.

You can drive past luxury houses; expensive cars; loud parties; and within minutes you will see people asking strangers for money just to survive. That is the strange reality Nigeria has built. Wealth and poverty standing side by side like neighbors who refuse to speak.

There is so much wealth surrounded by so much poverty.

Yet instead of confronting that imbalance honestly; we built a culture where appearing successful sometimes matters more than actually being stable.

There is a popular financial rule that says ‘before making a large purchase you should be able to afford it twice.”

Nigeria has created its own version.

“Yesterday’s price is not today’s price; so buy it now even if you cannot afford it once.”

Borrow the money; perform the success; let people see you have arrived.

This is how you find people with very expensive phones but no data; big cars they cannot fuel; lifestyles that look impressive from far away but become stressful up close.

Even our elites reflect the same mentality. Politicians understand that visible wealth can be used as persuasion. If they appear richer than everyone else; some people interpret that as authority. This is why embezzlement has become a culture; steal enough, use the stolen funds to force the class and influence elections.

Display becomes strategy.

While writing this; someone asked a question many people ask whenever this topic comes up.

“Baron, Is classism not a form of motivation.”

I understand the logic behind the question; but I disagree. Classism isolates; it does not insulate or build.

In a society already struggling economically; a culture that constantly emphasizes hierarchy pushes people to compete for appearances rather than build systems that actually generate wealth.

When aspiration becomes individual theatre instead of collective progress; society slows down.

For a country that is a dumping ground and produces nothing, Nigeria simply cannot afford to be this classist.

At some point we have to decide whether we want real development; or a permanent performance of success.

Because right now it sometimes feels like we are living inside a showroom of status symbols; bright lights everywhere; everything polished; everything loud.

But step behind the display for a moment; and you will quickly notice that many parts of the building are still under construction or have even been demolished.

There is something heavy in the air lately; you can feel it whenever another story begins to trend. One moment it is a case of sexual abuse; the next moment it is a debate about false allegations. People rush in with opinions, anger, and loyalty to whichever side they already chose; but in the middle of that storm are real people whose lives have already been altered in ways that do not disappear after the timeline moves on.

This conversation deserves more than noise. It deserves honesty; it deserves seriousness; it deserves reflection. Because once you begin to look at what is happening around us, it becomes impossible to ignore.

In Nigeria, stories of sexual violence are not rare events whispered in corners anymore; they are recurring realities that many women quietly carry with them. Surveys and social research over the years have painted a disturbing picture; a significant portion of women report that at some point in their lives they experienced sexual abuse.

I think we need to speak about this carefully, emotionally, and honestly. Not just with anger, but with clarity. Not just with opinions, but with numbers.

Because numbers reveal what emotions sometimes hide.

In Nigeria, sexual violence is not a rare headline; it is disturbingly common. Surveys conducted across several states have suggested that roughly half of women reported experiencing some form of sexual abuse during their lives. In some age groups, the number rose dramatically, with estimates reaching close to eighty percent among older women reflecting on their lifetime experiences.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has reported that the number of women who were rape victims in Nigeria increased from 48 percent in 2021 to 65 percent in 2022.

When researchers examine annual reports and victim demographics, the pattern becomes painfully clear: women and girls remain the overwhelming majority of victims.

Think about what that actually means in human terms. It means classrooms where several girls are silently carrying trauma; families where daughters never told anyone what happened; communities where people walk past victims without ever realizing the weight they carry.

It becomes even more painful when you realize how often abuse begins early; sometimes not by strangers hiding in darkness, but by people who are trusted within families. There are cases where uncles molest nieces at very young ages; men who are supposed to protect instead violate that trust. A child who should feel safe around family suddenly learns fear; learns confusion; learns silence. Many children never even have the words to explain what happened to them; they only grow older with the memory.

That kind of damage does not disappear; it settles into the mind quietly.

This is why the conversation becomes complicated when someone responds to these discussions by saying men also get molested. Yes; men and boys can be victims, and their pain matters deeply. But the broader reality remains that women and girls are affected on a much larger scale; and when the discussion constantly shifts away from that reality, it begins to feel like victims are being talked over rather than heard.

And this is not only happening in one country.

In India, for example, official crime records have shown tens of thousands of rape cases reported every year. Recent national crime statistics have recorded more than thirty thousand rape cases annually, which means dozens of women report rape every single day. Many researchers and advocates believe the real number is higher because sexual crimes are widely underreported due to stigma, fear, family pressure, and distrust in the justice system.

In South Africa, authorities have recorded some of the highest reported rape figures globally, with tens of thousands of cases documented each year. In parts of Botswana and other regions, the rate per population is extremely high compared with global averages. Even in wealthy nations such as the United Kingdom and the United States, sexual violence remains a persistent crisis, with thousands of reports recorded annually

Different societies; different cultures; yet the same pattern keeps showing itself. At some point, we have to stop pretending this is random. It is systemic.

And when people begin asking the difficult question about who commits most of these crimes, the answer is uncomfortable but consistent.

Most perpetrators are men.

This is not an accusation thrown at every man; it is a reality that requires serious reflection.

Biology plays a role in the discussion, although it does not excuse anything. Adult men generally have testosterone levels that are about ten to twenty times higher than women. Testosterone is associated with sexual drive, dominance behaviors, and risk-taking tendencies. This does not mean violence is inevitable. What it does mean is something deeper and more important.

Self-control becomes critical. Essential. Non-negotiable.

Yet society has made a serious mistake in how it raises children. From a young age, girls are disciplined about their bodies. Girls are warned repeatedly about consequences;

Close your legs. Protect yourself. Do not get pregnant. Be careful where you go.

But many boys grow up without the same intensity of moral instruction about desire, boundaries, and power. The conversation with boys is often incomplete or entirely absent. No one sits them down with the same urgency and explains what their strength, sexuality, and influence can do if it is not controlled.

As a result, some boys grow up believing something dangerous without even realizing it;

They assume their sexuality carries no harm. They assume their actions will not destroy someone else’s life. They assume masculinity comes without responsibility.

That is a cultural failure.

And culture shapes behavior far more than people are comfortable admitting.

That misunderstanding does not remain theoretical; it shows up in real life; Men commit sexual crimes for different reasons; sometimes it is about power, sometimes entitlement, sometimes frustration, sometimes environments where law enforcement feels weak or distant. In poorer societies, the psychology becomes even more troubling; some men chase a sense of control through sex because they feel powerless in every other aspect of life.

It becomes a distorted way of feeling significant.

And when society fails to respond strongly, the behavior quietly spreads. Some perpetrators receive minimal consequences; others are protected by influence, money, or silence within communities. Over time, what should be treated as a horrifying crime starts to feel normalized in certain circles.

That normalization is dangerous.

In extreme situations, violence against women is even used as a tool of terror. Groups like Boko Haram kidnapped schoolgirls and abused many of them; turning human bodies into weapons of psychological warfare. Some of those girls returned carrying unimaginable trauma while the world debated politics and strategy.

And then there is the other side of the conversation that also deserves attention; false allegations. They do exist, and when they happen they damage trust in serious ways. Each false claim plants doubt in people’s minds; and that doubt sometimes ends up hurting real victims who are already struggling to be believed.

So both realities must be addressed honestly; genuine victims must be protected and taken seriously; false accusations must also face consequences so that truth is not undermined. But even with that complexity, one thing remains clear; There is a deeper cultural problem that many societies are refusing to confront:

We are raising boys without teaching them enough about restraint, responsibility, and the consequences of violating someone else’s dignity. We warn girls about danger; yet we sometimes fail to teach boys how not to become that danger.

That imbalance cannot continue. If fathers, uncles, teachers, and communities began teaching boys self control with the same seriousness used when advising girls, the future could look very different. Boys would grow up understanding something fundamental about being a man.

• Desire does not mean permission.

• Power does not mean entitlement.

• Another person’s body is not something you take.

And when people say this is unrealistic, that nothing will change, that the world has always been like this; that mindset itself becomes part of the problem. Because history has shown that societies change only when people refuse to accept harmful patterns as normal.

Something should happen. Not because it is easy; but because doing nothing allows the problem to keep shaping the next generation.

And a society that ignores this issue risks raising boys who never fully understand the damage they are capable of causing.

The genie story always sounds simple until you stare at it long enough. Three wishes, nothing more; a shortcut through the maze of ordinary life. But the moment you actually try to write the wish, truly write it, punctuation tight, clauses airtight, language disciplined like a contract, you begin to feel the trap forming, slowly, like fog wrapping around your ankles.

Because a wish is never just a wish; it is a contract with the universe, and the universe, inconveniently, is a very literal lawyer.

At some point the wish stops behaving like a sentence and begins to resemble a system design document. The deeper truth hiding inside the myth is this: power without clauses is not power; it is an accident waiting patiently to become permanent.

The paradox of the genie wish is subtle but ruthless: every ability that feels like escape quietly demands governance. The moment you begin adding conditions to prevent disaster, the wish expands, mutates, and grows structural bones; suddenly it is almost as complex as the reality you were trying to bypass.

Let me paint a picture; I will be your guide, and we will explore some popular wishes together while I handle the drawbacks. Deal? Good. Let us begin.

Invisibility:

At first it feels like freedom, real freedom. You vanish, just like that; you observe the world without being observed, a silent spectator in the theatre of human behavior. But invisibility is not a single change; it is a cascade of physical, social, and biological implications unfolding all at once.

You quickly realize you need activation control; without it, you become permanently absent from visibility, a ghost trapped inside the living world. So you add a clause: invisibility must be turned on and off at will.

Now the genie asks a question that sounds innocent, almost casual, but it is not: what exactly counts as will?

Do you say a word? Do you think it? Do you gesture? What happens if you activate it in your sleep, or worse, if a dream triggers it? Imagine waking up invisible in the middle of a hospital corridor, or standing in an airport security line while confusion begins to spread faster than your explanation can travel.

Then comes the physics of light; this is where things become delicate. True invisibility means light passes through you instead of bouncing off you; however, if light passes through your eyes as well, you cannot see anything at all. Your clever wish has accidentally blinded you.

So you add another clause; light must still interact with your eyes normally while ignoring the rest of your body. At this point you are not wishing anymore, you are drafting a new branch of optics.

Then there is sound: footsteps, breathing, the vibration of your voice traveling through the air. If you forget to regulate those variables, invisibility simply becomes a floating noise generator; people will hear the ghost before they fail to see it.

And then the machines arrive; surveillance systems, thermal cameras, motion detection grids, infrared scanners, the quiet electronic nervous system of modern cities. Did your invisibility cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum, or only visible light? Because machines see in ways humans never evolved to.

You thought you wished to disappear; instead, you are negotiating with physics, biology, and technology simultaneously.

Super Speed:

Speed feels like domination over time itself, a kind of personal acceleration beyond the slow rhythm of the world. But time is not something you outrun; time stretches, distorts, and sometimes traps you.

If you move extremely fast relative to everyone else, perception changes in strange ways. The world slows down, yes; however, your brain begins processing entire stretches of subjective experience compared to the outside world. Imagine waiting for someone to finish a sentence that lasts two real seconds but feels like twenty minutes inside your mind.

You begin aging mentally at a strange rate compared to everyone else.

Then friction enters the conversation; air resistance becomes violent at extreme speed, heat accumulates, and objects in your path transform into projectiles because relative velocity amplifies everything.

You run into a mosquito at that speed, and suddenly you are learning physics the painful way.

So you add clauses: immunity to friction damage, protection from thermal buildup, automatic collision avoidance, environmental awareness, enhanced neural processing, safe deceleration.

Now the wish is not super speed anymore; it is an engineered ecosystem designed to keep you alive while moving fast.

And then something quieter appears, something psychological.

If you can move faster than the world, loneliness expands; social life becomes a strange performance where everyone else is moving like statues while you wait politely for time to catch up.

But wait, you still have three wishes, remember? Two more wishes cannot insulate you from the complications the first one has already introduced.

So you abandon speed and move forward.

Flight:

People imagine flight as a clean escape from gravity, something poetic and effortless; just rise, glide, disappear into the sky. But gravity is not the only thing that defines flight.

Altitude matters; temperature drops rapidly the higher you climb, oxygen levels decrease, wind speeds intensify, and weather systems transform from scenery into hazards.

So you add clauses: your body must tolerate altitude shifts, you must breathe normally at any height, your physiology must survive extreme temperatures.

Then aviation reality intrudes; air traffic corridors exist, radar systems exist, military airspace exists, and storm systems move unpredictably across the sky.

Even navigation becomes a problem, because humans were never designed to orient themselves naturally in open three dimensional aerial space over long distances.

Now the wish is no longer about flying; it is about becoming a biological aircraft equipped with aviation safety systems.

Can I not just catch a break, you ask yourself, as you flee from flight and rush toward the next wish.

Mind Reading

People imagine mind reading as a doorway to truth; however, human thought is not neat, not orderly, not organized. It is chaotic.

If you suddenly hear everyone’s thoughts around you, the mind becomes a crowded room with no exit. People do not think in polite sentences; thoughts leap between fear, memory, fragments of music, unfinished worries, and emotional static.

You begin hearing half formed ideas, private anxieties, songs looping endlessly inside someone’s head.

Without filters, mind reading becomes mental noise pollution.

So you add conditions: activation must be controlled, focus must be limited to one person at a time, irrelevant thoughts must be filtered, psychological overload must be prevented.

Then a deeper technical question emerges; do you hear thoughts exactly as they exist, or translated into something intelligible? Because raw thought is often not structured language.

Now the wish requires cognitive translation systems.

You asked for truth; instead, you are building a mental firewall.

“Baron, please, let us move to the next one; it cannot all require clauses. There cannot possibly be a downside to teleportation”

Teleportation:

Teleportation sounds elegant, almost mathematical in its simplicity; leave one place, appear somewhere else, instant travel.

But matter occupies space; if you teleport into a location already occupied by another object, physics becomes deeply uncomfortable.

So you add a clause: safe landing space must always be guaranteed.

Then navigation becomes important; do you teleport by visual memory, by coordinates, or by conceptual recognition of a place? What happens if you misremember the exact layout of a room you visited years ago?

You might arrive inside a wall.

Another layer emerges: momentum. If you teleport from a moving vehicle, do you retain the velocity of that vehicle when you arrive?

Teleportation quietly transforms into a mathematical precision problem.

“Stop this, Baron! Stop this! You are just fear mongering; there is definitely no downside to super strength”

Super Strength:

Super strength appears straightforward until you try to shake someone’s hand.

If your muscles suddenly become capable of enormous force, ordinary interactions become hazardous; opening a door, picking up a phone, hugging someone, even sitting on a chair.

Without perfect control, strength becomes constant damage.

So you add clauses: precision modulation of force output, structural awareness of surrounding materials, automatic adjustment in fragile environments.

You are no longer simply strong; you are operating a continuous force regulation system.

“Fine. Enough of this. I will just wish for immortality”

Immortality:

Immortality is the wish people often believe is clever; infinite time must mean infinite opportunity, right?

But time changes everything else.

People age; societies evolve; languages drift; the places you know slowly disappear.

Without memory management, your mind becomes overloaded with centuries of experience; without emotional adaptation, grief accumulates across generations.

So you add clauses: controlled memory retention, emotional resilience, optional cycles of rest or renewal, perhaps even the ability to eventually stop existing.

Notice what just happened.

You quietly turned immortality into a system with an exit door.

“You know what, Baron, I will simplify it; I will just wish to live a very long life”

Well…

A Very Long Life:

You believed you were safe; you avoided immortality and simply extended life. Unfortunately, you forgot to specify aging.

So the years pass.

You cross one hundred years; then one hundred and fifty; then two hundred.

Your body continues following biological aging processes.

Skin loses elasticity, muscles weaken, bone density declines, neural speed slows, organs deteriorate.

Except you do not die.

This creates a strange biological contradiction.

Your body continues aging, yet mortality has been disabled.

You are now living inside something medicine does not currently have a category for: extreme senescence without terminal failure.

Aging is not merely wrinkles; it is a layered accumulation of cellular damage.

Telomeres shorten; proteins misfold; DNA repair efficiency declines; inflammation spreads across tissues.

Normally these processes eventually lead to death.

But in your case, death is not allowed.

So what happens?

Your body continues deteriorating beyond the limits evolution ever prepared for.

Medical science has never seriously studied what occurs when humans age far beyond natural limits without dying; cognitive decline may continue indefinitely, mobility may collapse toward near immobility, and consciousness may remain trapped inside a body that barely functions.

This is not immortality.

It is prolonged biological erosion.

Another dimension appears, one most people ignore.

Identity systems assume human lifespan ranges; governments, banks, and legal records were never built to process someone who is two hundred years old and still alive.

Documentation systems may flag you as an error; inheritance law becomes tangled; family generations pass while you remain; property rights begin behaving strangely because assets outlive entire legal frameworks.

Society shifts around you; languages evolve, technology transforms, cultural context moves forward while you remain stretched across centuries.

You become historically displaced.

Not dead, yet not fully part of the present either.

“Fine, Baron, enough of these impractical wishes; I will wish for money. Yes, that is the one. My clause will be simple: my dollar doubles every second”

All right.

Dollar Doubling Every Second:

This wish creates exponential growth with a base of two; economists and mathematicians recognize this instantly as a runaway function.

If you earn even a single dollar, the sequence unfolds like this:

Second 1: $1 Second 2: $2 Second 3: $4 Second 10: $512 Second 20: $524,288 Second 30: $536,870,912

After one minute, that single dollar becomes more money than many national economies produce in a year.

After an hour, the number stops behaving like currency; it becomes astronomical. Within a few hours, the quantity of dollars exceeds the total money supply circulating in the global financial system.

This is no longer wealth accumulation; it is a liquidity explosion.

What Happens to the Dollar?

Economically, money derives value from scarcity and trust. When the supply of a currency expands faster than the goods and services available in the economy, inflation appears; however, this situation is not normal inflation, it is hyperinflation at a speed no market has ever experienced.

Technically speaking, the money supply expands beyond the capacity of production output, financial clearing systems, banking infrastructure, and monetary policy controls.

Even institutions like the Federal Reserve would be unable to manage something growing every second at exponential scale.

Eventually your personal balance becomes larger than the entire monetary base supporting the dollar system; that fractures several pillars of modern finance.

Liquidity balance inside banks collapses; interbank settlement systems destabilize; currency stability models fail; debt markets tied to dollar valuation unravel.

At that point the dollar collapses, not because you became rich, but because the signal of value itself has been destroyed.

Currency works because it represents limited claims on real resources; if your wish produces unlimited claims instantly, the currency loses meaning.

Prices explode because sellers realize that dollars are multiplying faster than goods can be produced; markets panic, governments intervene, and banks freeze accounts.

What began as a personal wish becomes a systemic shock.

In economic language, you have created a catastrophic imbalance between money supply and real output; demand becomes effectively infinite relative to supply, and the pricing mechanism breaks.

Eventually people abandon the dollar entirely.

Your wish did not make you rich.

It erased the concept of money around you.

Another detail people rarely consider is this: the financial system itself is not designed to handle numbers of that magnitude.

Databases storing balances have limits; banking ledgers rely on digital architectures that assume realistic financial ranges; once your account values exceed system capacity, software failures begin appearing everywhere.

Payment processors freeze; fraud detection flags everything; regulators intervene.

Even global financial networks like SWIFT begin seeing transactions that should be mathematically impossible.

Your wealth becomes unspendable because the systems required to move it collapse under the weight of its scale.

Meanwhile, the genie is still smiling.

Because you forgot to cap the growth.

Even before the final collapse, your activity distorts the market.

Imagine you begin purchasing assets; property prices spike because your purchasing power is expanding faster than anyone can react, and stock markets destabilize because one participant suddenly carries effectively infinite buying pressure.

In economics this becomes a dominance problem; one actor with disproportionate capital concentration disrupts price discovery.

Markets stop reflecting value; they start reflecting your existence.

And when markets stop discovering prices, economic coordination begins to fail.

Your wish turns the economy into noise.

At the beginning of the story, the genie looks like a shortcut.

But the deeper truth is this:

Power is never isolated; it always sits inside a network of consequences. And the faster the power grows, the faster those consequences multiply.

Which leads to the real paradox.

The more carefully you design your wish to avoid disaster, the more it begins to resemble the same complexity you were trying to escape in normal life: regulation, balance, limits, safety systems, compatibility with others.

By the time you finish writing the perfect money wish, complete with capped growth, economic stabilization, inflation protection, and systemic safeguards, you have effectively reinvented monetary policy.

At that point, the genie is no longer granting magic.

It is quietly asking whether you are ready to run the universe like an engineer, instead of dreaming like someone searching for an easy exit.

“Baron, you just ruined our childhood wishes, you are such a joy killer, with your unnecessary pessimism”

Well, you're welcome!

As a strong political commentator, a person who can turn a casual hangout into a constitutional summit without touching a microphone, one feedback trails me like background music. “Baron, you love politics too much. Carry this your debate somewhere else. Let us talk about something light.”

And when I stretch the conversation beyond our borders, when I mention wars in Europe or tensions in Asia, I hear it again: “Why are you worrying about other countries? Face Nigeria.”

Then comes the final line, the one people think settles everything: “No matter how you talk about it, nothing will change.”

It sounds calm. It sounds grounded. It sounds like someone has accepted the limits of individual power. But let’s be honest: it’s comforting nonsense. A lie we tell ourselves to avoid thinking too hard, to avoid the headache of acknowledging that our lives are entangled in things we cannot see. Yes, I may not stop wars. Yes, my commentary may not rewrite national budgets. Yes, one citizen cannot single-handedly redirect global capital flows. But awareness is not about controlling the storm. Awareness is about not being swept away by it. And in this country, in this city, in this life we live, not being swept away is power.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, missiles flew thousands of miles away, but the shockwave landed in Nigerian markets. Wheat exports tightened. Fertilizer prices surged. Oil markets reacted violently. Bread prices climbed. Animal feed costs rose. Poultry prices followed. Transport costs spiked. The naira trembled. Households adjusted. Mothers whispered about how the price of yam would stretch just a little less this month. Fathers calculated how much fuel they could afford before their wallets screamed.

A war in Eastern Europe did not stay there. It restructured household budgets in Lagos, Kano, and beyond.

When tensions flare between Israel and Gaza, the logic is the same. Oil markets price in uncertainty instantly. Nigeria, whose fiscal planning depends heavily on oil revenue, becomes vulnerable. Revenue projections wobble. Public spending calculations twist and turn. Investors rethink. Geopolitical instability abroad becomes economic instability at home.

When rivalry intensifies between China and Taiwan, semiconductor supply chains tremble. Taiwan dominates advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Semiconductors power smartphones, medical equipment, point-of-sale terminals, communication networks, industrial machinery. Nigeria imports nearly all of this. A disruption anywhere in that supply chain hits our economy like a power cut during a Lagos rainstorm. Device prices spike. Telecom expansion slows. Medical equipment becomes more expensive. The digital economy, which many pin their hopes on, becomes vulnerable. A superpower spat in East Asia can quietly alter startup costs in Yaba.

Closer to home, coups in Niger and Burkina Faso are not distant dramas for diplomats. They destabilize the fragile Sahel belt bordering Northern Nigeria. Arms circulate. Extremist groups regroup. Borders become porous. Security risks rise. Agricultural production drops. Food supply chains tighten. Government spending pivots toward defense, often at the expense of education and health.

Even policies abroad, like the Trump-era trade wars or US monetary tightening, ripple here. The dollar rises. Nigeria’s dollar-denominated debt gets heavier. Imports cost more. Inflation intensifies. When the global financial center tilts, the naira reacts. Nigeria is already entangled. It is plugged into commodity markets, capital flows, global supply chains. You cannot “face Nigeria” without acknowledging the forces acting from continents away.

Here is the uncomfortable layer. Global shocks are inevitable. Domestic policy choices are deliberate. Sometimes Nigeria magnifies the impact of external turbulence through its own structural decisions. Exporting crude oil while importing refined fuel exposed us to double volatility. When global oil prices rise, subsidy obligations expand. When subsidies are removed abruptly, transport costs surge overnight. Market prices adjust upward within weeks. Wages lag. Real income collapses. Years of multiple exchange rate windows created artificial calm. When corrections finally came, the naira depreciated sharply. Businesses dependent on imported inputs faced soaring costs. Some shut down. Others downsized. Households absorbed inflation layered upon inflation.

Border closures meant to protect domestic agriculture disrupted supply chains, raised prices, and expanded smuggling networks. Security expenditure continues to rise due to persistent instability, competing with health and education funding. External shock plus internal fragility equals amplified crisis.

Geopolitics exposes structural weaknesses. Domestic policy determines whether those weaknesses collapse the system.

And then there is that familiar sentence: “Nothing will change.” Maybe not immediately. Maybe not because I speak. But change is inevitable. Oil prices fluctuate. Interest rates rise and fall. Exchange rates adjust. Commodity cycles rotate. Capital flows move.

The real question is not whether change happens; it always does. The question is whether you are prepared for it. Understanding geopolitics is not just civic engagement. It is survival.

Awareness allows you to anticipate rising food and energy prices when conflict erupts in Eastern Europe. It allows you to prepare for currency pressure when US monetary tightening strengthens the dollar. It allows you to foresee technology price spikes when East Asian supply chains face disruption.

You may not control the global stock market. But by watching policy direction, central bank behavior, and geopolitical alignment, you can anticipate whether markets are leaning toward risk or caution. You can know what to stockpile and what to discard. You can identify sectors vulnerable to policy shifts. You can anticipate inflation before it fully manifests. You can reduce exposure to currency shocks. That degree of awareness insulates you from the cost of ignorance.

Politics is not noise. It is architecture. It designs the environment within which your income exists. It shapes the value of your savings. It influences the cost of your essentials. It determines whether shocks are absorbed or amplified.

Resignation is not strategy. You may not command the system, but you can understand it. You can anticipate it. You can position yourself within it. In volatile economies, the difference between the informed and the uninformed is not small. It is stability. It is opportunity. It is resilience. It is survival.

And yet there is a human dimension we cannot ignore. I have watched families quietly recalibrate when the price of bread jumps overnight. I have seen students delay tuition payments because currency fluctuations made previously affordable fees suddenly unattainable. I have met small business owners who, by noticing the signals;oil price trends, shipping delays, currency moves; avoided bankruptcy while others shuttered. Awareness translates into action, and action translates into resilience.

You may not rewrite the global political map, but you can navigate it with foresight. You can allocate resources with prudence. You can protect the fragile equilibrium of your household before external shocks arrive. The illusion that nothing will change is comforting. It allows us to avoid thinking too hard. But that illusion is expensive. Every day, every market fluctuation, every political headline carries consequences for those who remain unaware.

That is why politics is personal. Because the architecture it designs is the architecture within which your life unfolds.

So yes, I speak of Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan, the US, Niger, Burkina Faso, not because I believe one essay or one conversation can rewrite these events, but because the consequences land in Lagos, Kano, and Abuja regardless. Nothing will change in the abstract, but being unaware guarantees that you will bear the cost unprepared.

Understanding changes how you interact with the economy, how you plan your life, how you absorb shocks, how you seize fleeting opportunities. It does not make you omnipotent. It makes you competent. It makes you informed. It gives you agency where agency is often assumed absent.

The conversation may feel heavy, even exhausting, even relentless. But in a world governed by geopolitics and policy, awareness is insulation. And insulation, especially in turbulent times, is power. Informed observation is the closest thing to control we possess, and it is a shield that protects what matters most; the life you live, the resources you steward, the family you provide for. That is why I cannot stop talking about it. That is why you cannot stop me from analyzing it. Because the storm is real. And those who understand its patterns rarely get caught flat-footed.

So yes, it concerns you! E concern you die!!!!

There was a time when love felt like a public institution: it was not private, not hidden, not rationed. It was loud, dramatic, and almost embarrassingly sincere. Lover’s Day was not a marketing cycle; it was a cultural atmosphere. You could feel it in the air, in the way people carried themselves, in the softness of their voices when they said someone’s name.

Back then, a single “hello” from your lover could recalibrate your entire being; your day could be collapsing quietly, but the moment your phone lit up with their name, your bloodstream shifted temperature. Suddenly, life was manageable again. Suddenly, you were chosen.

We were not desensitized then: we felt everything.

The end of the day was sacred. You were not performing online; you were waiting; waiting for that call, waiting for that text, waiting to pour your heart out in paragraphs that would make Shakespeare uncomfortable.

And the letters:

“I picked my pen from the basket of love.”

Who allowed us to be that poetic?

We wrote like we were signing treaties. People sprayed perfume on paper, because scent was part of the message; some of you kissed the envelope to seal the emotions properly, as if the postal service required proof of sincerity. Ink carried longing. Handwriting carried personality. Every curve of every letter was effort.

Love was tactile: you could hold it, fold it, hide it under your pillow.

Then came the adverts.

When MTN released the “Oh Jerry, now you gonna make me cry” advert, with their pen gliding across paper like the opening scene of a romantic novel. That advert did not sell airtime; it sold vulnerability.

“Oh Jerry, now you gonna make me cry.”

The softness in that line alone was enough to destabilize you. It felt like we were all characters inside a love story, waiting for the next confession. Calls were not just calls; they were plot twists.

The media was complicit in raising romantics.

Paloma and Diego suffered beautifully; Passions and Sunset Beach convinced us that love required intensity, sacrifice, and the courage to fight for connection. We grew up believing that if it did not almost ruin you, it was not real.

The musicians baptized us in rain:

Chris Brown spinning in emotional thunderstorms;

Ne-Yo apologizing like regret was a sacred ritual;

Usher confessing with choreography and conviction.

People memorized every line from Bracket's Yori Yori, and remixed it for their lovers;

It was as if knowing how to sing was a prerequisite for getting into a relationship, because people were singing; the frog and angel voices alike.

They stood in the rain for love, and we believed that standing in emotional rain was noble.

The world felt softer then.

We danced in actual rain without worrying about aesthetics; weekend visits were spontaneous. You knocked on a friend’s door and entered with familiarity. If rice was cooking, you ate; if prayer started, you bowed your head. Families gathered around one table: they ate from one pot, argued together, prayed together, forgave together.

There was wholesomeness because pride was not the foundation of society; vulnerability was.

Intentional vulnerability:

The kind that says, “I am wrong.”

The kind that says, “I miss you.”

The kind that chooses repair over ego.

Now?

Our hearts are like stone.

It is as if the world has stiffened us into emotional death: we do not flinch; we do not melt; we barely react. Someone sends you “I love you,” and it lands like a forwarded message; it does not carry the sacred weight it once did. Sometimes people respond with a WhatsApp reaction, a red heart emoji, a thumbs up—as if love is content to acknowledge, not a truth to receive. Sometimes, people do not even believe it.

Ties break too easily.

Years of friendship are discarded over a single misunderstanding; a bruised ego becomes more important than shared memories. People would rather preserve pride than preserve history. Families go silent for years over small disputes. Brothers stop speaking; cousins become strangers; holidays pass without calls; weddings happen without reconciliation; funerals happen without closure. Emotional distance has become normalized.

This is the generation where blocking someone is a badge of honor: “I cut them off.” Applause. “They no longer have access to me.” Celebration. We glorify detachment as discipline.

Acts of kindness now feel revolutionary; everything is transactional. Affection is calculated. Emotional availability is rationed. We call it protecting our peace. We call it standards. We call it wisdom.

But sometimes I wonder if we have simply hardened ourselves.

Did capitalism kill love; or did survival rebrand it?

When everything became about grinding, monetizing, optimizing, and securing the bag, did love become inefficient? Did vulnerability become poor investment?

Because once upon a time, we cried over adverts. We wrote letters that smelled like perfume. We showed up at people’s houses unannounced. We ate together, prayed together, forgave each other.

The world felt softer because we were softer.

Maybe love is not dead.

Maybe we have just turned our hearts to stone and convinced ourselves it is strength.

Maybe the real tragedy is not that people do not say “I love you,” but that we no longer know how to believe it.

There was a time when a letter could make us cry, when a “hello” could fix a bad day, when vulnerability was courageous and pride was optional. Perhaps the question is not whether love exists, it is whether we still allow ourselves to feel it.

Thank God today is Valentine yes, that corporate-approved reminder that love is supposed to be a thing we actively market once a year. But forget the chocolates, the overpriced roses, the social media flexing. Today, I’m talking about the old-school kind of love.

And no, it doesn’t have to be a lover. If your romantic life is in quarantine, good. There’s still life to be lived, hearts to be touched, and grudges to be burned. Call your family, yes, even the ones who give you side-eye at every family gathering. Text your friends, the ones you ghosted over nonsense. Hug that person you’ve been avoiding because your ego is apparently bigger than your heart.

Repair that relationship. Swallow your damn pride. I said swallow it whole. Life is short, my people, shorter than your attention span for drama, shorter than the patience you give yourself to fight for what matters.

Today is the day to show love not as a transaction, not as a flex, not as a postable moment. Show it as it used to be: messy, inconvenient, brave, human.

Go on, send that message. Make that call. Kiss that paper, if you must. Just make sure someone knows today that they matter.

But Baron what if they do not respond ? Well, that is not your business. Do your part !!

Because tomorrow, we’ll all be scrolling again. And pride? Pride won’t save you from regret.

Laws 37-48:

37. Words Reveal Character (Proverbs 13:3) “The one who guards his mouth preserves his life, but the one who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.”

Words are not mere sound; they are instruments of reality. Every word you release shapes perception, influences outcomes, and imprints consequences on those around you. Modern culture treats constant expression and viral speech as power, yet Proverbs warns that unguarded words are liabilities. To speak recklessly is to weaponize your life against yourself. Those who master speech preserve relationships, build trust, and create influence that compounds quietly over time. Guarding your words is not censorship but strategic integrity. Silence, deliberation, and precision are the hallmarks of a disciplined and intelligent life.

38. Avoid Rash Promises (Proverbs 20:25) “Do not make rash vows to God, and do not say, ‘I will pay what I vow’ before considering it.”

Commitments carry weight beyond the immediate moment. Rash promises are moral and social debts that bind the soul and restrict freedom. Modern society glorifies impulsive authenticity and overconfidence, but impulsivity erodes credibility and builds invisible chains. Proverbs emphasizes that foresight, consideration, and deliberate intention are essential to integrity. To speak a promise is to invest yourself, and a life built on unconsidered promises is vulnerable to failure and mistrust. Moral maturity begins with measured commitment.

39. Knowledge Is Only Useful When Applied (Proverbs 18:15) “The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge, for the ears of the wise seek it out.”

Information without application is decoration. Knowledge must be processed, tested, and transformed into action. Modern society inundates us with data, trends, and clever ideas, yet the mere possession of knowledge does not elevate life. Proverbs teaches that wisdom is active and discerning. The wise listen, reflect, and integrate knowledge into their decisions. Knowledge is power only when it guides behavior and shapes outcomes. Understanding without execution is vanity; action without insight is chaos.

40. Anger Is a Fool’s Weapon (Proverbs 15:18) “A hot-tempered person stirs up conflict, but the one who is patient calms a quarrel.”

Anger feels like control but is often the fastest path to self-destruction. Modern culture valorizes emotional intensity as passion, yet unrestrained rage destroys relationships, reputation, and clarity. Patience and measured responses are true power, capable of resolving conflict and shaping outcomes without collateral damage. Anger is a temporary surge that blinds judgment; restraint is enduring strength that multiplies influence. Those who control their temper govern themselves and shape the world around them, while the uncontrolled live in perpetual chaos.

41. Reputation Is Priceless (Proverbs 22:1) “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.”

Wealth and material possessions can be lost, but reputation endures. Modern culture often prioritizes fame, social media validation, and ephemeral attention, yet Proverbs elevates the quiet power of integrity and esteem. Reputation functions as a currency that opens doors, commands respect, and multiplies influence. A life built on respect generates opportunities and shields against betrayal. Protecting your reputation requires consistent ethical conduct, honesty, and discernment in relationships and speech. Esteem is earned slowly, but its dividends are lifelong.

42. Avoid Gossip (Proverbs 11:13) “A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret.”

Speech can destroy or preserve. Gossip masquerades as entertainment, connection, or wisdom, but it corrodes trust and erodes social capital. Modern communication culture treats gossip as harmless or even strategic, yet Proverbs demonstrates its true cost: fractured relationships, damaged credibility, and moral compromise. Trust is an invisible asset, more valuable than material wealth. To cultivate influence and integrity, one must practice discretion, silence when necessary, and careful observation. Trustworthiness is rare, and it amplifies power in ways the loud cannot comprehend.

43. Correct With Love, Not Wrath (Proverbs 13:24)

“Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”

Correction is an act of care, not cruelty. Guidance without empathy breeds resentment and rebellion. Modern culture often confuses intensity, punishment, or confrontation with effectiveness. Proverbs teaches that shaping hearts requires patience, clarity, and moral alignment. Instruction must be firm but redemptive, correcting without breaking the spirit. This principle extends beyond parenting to mentorship, leadership, and relationships. True correction builds capacity, instills discipline, and aligns others with long-term growth.

44. Prudence Protects (Proverbs 22:3) “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.”

Forethought and caution are essential survival skills. Optimism without assessment is naive, and ignoring warning signs invites disaster. Modern culture often frames prudence as hesitation or fear, but Proverbs demonstrates it as proactive mastery of reality. Prudence is not avoidance; it is calculated action informed by awareness. Those who anticipate risk, prepare defenses, and act strategically maintain stability and leverage, while the careless are constantly reacting to crises they could have prevented.

45. Avoid Self-Glorification (Proverbs 25:6) “Do not exalt yourself in the king’s presence, and do not claim a place among great men.”

True influence is earned quietly. Modern culture celebrates self-promotion, public recognition, and performative humility. Proverbs warns that elevation without substance is brittle and dangerous. Authority rooted in patience, competence, and restraint is enduring. Inflated self-presentation invites scrutiny and resistance, while modesty allows achievement and skill to speak on its own. Strategic humility is not invisibility; it is deliberate, silent leverage over perception and relationships.

46. The Righteous Shine (Proverbs 4:18) “The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.”

Righteousness compounds over time. Every ethical decision, disciplined habit, and moral choice amplifies influence and clarity in ways that are often invisible in the short term. Modern culture glorifies instant results, visibility, and viral recognition, but lasting power is built gradually through integrity, consistency, and moral alignment. Those who live with virtue illuminate their environment and attract trust and opportunity organically. Righteousness is both shield and spotlight, steady and unstoppable.

47. Control Desire (Proverbs 23:4-5) “Do not wear yourself out to get rich; have the wisdom to show restraint.”

Unchecked desire enslaves. Greed, lust, and obsession distort judgment and erode freedom. Modern culture equates indulgence with authenticity and instant gratification with progress, yet Proverbs frames restraint as true liberation. Mastery of desire allows one to act with clarity, balance risk and reward, and avoid destructive shortcuts. Self-control is the foundation of freedom, enabling life to be shaped deliberately rather than being dictated by impulse.

48. Live a Life Worth Remembering (Proverbs 31:30) “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”

Legacy is the ultimate measure of a life. Surface charm and transient recognition cannot endure the test of time. What matters is moral fiber, consistency, and alignment with timeless principles. Modern society worships appearance, status, and fleeting influence, yet Proverbs teaches that character, virtue, and reverence are what endure. A life built on principle, courage, and integrity leaves marks invisible to casual observers but indelible in the fabric of reality. To live well is to invest in eternity, shaping a story that outlasts fame, wealth, and circumstance..

These twelve principles complete the final stretch of the Proverbs Wisdom Manifesto, and together with the previous 36, form a comprehensive framework for living intentionally, wisely, and powerfully. The Book of Proverbs is not a theoretical guide; it is a map of reality, human nature, and moral consequence. Every law is a compass for thought, action, and character.

Living by these 48 laws is not about convenience, applause, or temporary gain. It is about mastery of the self, control over influence, alignment with truth, and the cultivation of a life that is resilient, respected, and remembered. Modern philosophies can dissect behavior, debate morality, and optimize strategy, but Proverbs gives us something they often miss: a blueprint that begins in the soul and radiates outward, transforming both inner life and outer reality.

If you internalize, apply, and reflect on these laws, life no longer controls you. Instead, you command it with clarity, courage, and enduring wisdom. These principles are not suggestions; they are survival, power, and immortality condensed into guidance that never loses relevance, regardless of era or circumstance.

Laws 25-36

25. Diligent Planning Is Moral Intelligence (Proverbs 21:5) “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.”

Planning is not just a tactic; it is morality in motion. To rush is to treat consequences like trivia, to ignore the weight of tomorrow in favor of fleeting satisfaction. Modern culture applauds speed, glorifies the reckless; move fast and break things, but Proverbs reminds us that haste always comes with an invoice. Diligence is foresight stitched together with patience. To plan carefully is to honor reality, to honor time, and to honor the lives your choices touch. Poverty here is multidimensional; it’s financial, yes, but also relational, intellectual, and spiritual. The hurried mind bankrupts itself slowly, leaving emptiness disguised as progress.

26. Shortcuts Are Long-Term Traps (Proverbs 11:18) “The wicked earn deceptive wages, but the one who sows righteousness reaps a sure reward.”

Quick gains seduce us with glitter and promise, but they carry a hidden toll. Unethical shortcuts may pay fast, but they rent your integrity in the process, and the lease comes due sooner than you expect. Righteousness is slow, sometimes excruciatingly slow, but it cements what it touches. Modern debates wrestle with whether the ends justify the means. Proverbs cuts through the fog: corrupt means always poison the end. Character is the true currency, and any gain that distorts it is debt disguised as profit. What you steal from virtue eventually owns you.

27. Alignment Produces Peace Even With Enemies (Proverbs 16:7) “When a person’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies live at peace with him.”

Integrity is social gravity. When your inner world aligns; no deception, no doublespeak, conflict loses its momentum. Even adversaries sense the calm, the stability, the unshakeable center, and some part of them pauses. Modern leadership manuals call this moral authority. Proverbs calls it alignment with God. Coherence beats intimidation. Power sourced in fear fades fast; power sourced in character persists. Your peace radiates outward, reshaping interactions and neutralizing hostility not through force but through undeniable order.

28. Listening Is the Gateway to Wisdom (Proverbs 15:31) “Whoever heeds life-giving correction will be at home among the wise.”

Correction is not an attack; it is a lifeline. Modern culture, with its ego-obsessed soundtrack, treats critique as humiliation. Proverbs reframes it: correction is an invitation, a whispered map toward higher understanding. Wisdom is not measured by what you know, but by what you can receive. To truly listen is to suspend your ego, to let reality in without resistance. The doors of insight do not open to the stubborn or the defensive; they open to the willing.

29. Obsession With Wealth Deforms the Soul (Proverbs 23:4–5) “Do not wear yourself out to get rich; do not trust your own cleverness. Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone.”

Wealth itself is neutral; obsession is the disease. Fixation narrows perception, distorts priorities, hollows out meaning, and leaves the soul fatigued. Modern hustle culture glorifies exhaustion, packages it as virtue. Proverbs exposes the emptiness: riches can vanish in a glance, but the erosion of character is permanent. Those who chase money as the end will wake up one day guarding illusions, prisoners of something inherently unstable. True wealth is measured by integrity, resilience, and the unshakeable sense of self.

30. Speech Reveals Moral Maturity (Proverbs 10:32) “The lips of the righteous know what finds favor, but the mouth of the wicked only what is perverse.”

Speech is the x-ray of the soul. The righteous are not merely polite; they are discerning. They measure timing, tone, and the weight of truth before releasing words into the world. Modern culture worships volume, constant expression, and the tyranny of social media. Proverbs honors restraint. Knowing when to speak, when to remain silent, and when silence itself is strength; this is wisdom in action. Maturity is not verbosity; it is precision, subtlety, and the courage to hold some truths for the right moment.

31. Foolish Company Is a Slow Poison (Proverbs 13:20) “He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm.”

Friends and companions are vectors. They recalibrate your standards, normalize behaviors, and shape your destiny often without your conscious consent. Modern individualism insists influence is optional; Proverbs insists it is inevitable. Choosing wisely is not optional, it is survival. The fools you tolerate slowly rewrite your habits, your decisions, and even your soul. Wisdom grows not only in solitude but in the deliberate company you keep.

32. Diligence Creates Authority (Proverbs 12:24) “The hand of the diligent will rule, while the lazy will be put to forced labor.”

Authority is the natural consequence of mastery, not coercion. Those who impose discipline on themselves ascend organically; those who reject structure surrender autonomy. Modern thought fetishizes freedom but forgets the scaffolding it requires. Structure breeds competence, competence breeds influence, and influence is the currency of freedom. Diligence is the silent architect of leadership.

33. Integrity Is a Safer Asset Than Wealth (Proverbs 28:6) “Better the poor whose walk is blameless than the rich whose ways are perverse.”

Success measured only in money is precarious. Integrity without wealth is still a fortress; wealth without integrity is a house of sand. Modern society evaluates by external markers—titles, numbers, and bank accounts. Proverbs measures existential stability: can you live with yourself when no one is watching? A clean conscience is an untouchable asset, invulnerable to market crashes and public opinion.

34. Foresight Is a Form of Wisdom (Proverbs 22:3) “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.”

Anticipation is intelligence. To ignore danger is not courage, it is hubris in disguise. Modern optimism sometimes rebrands caution as negativity. Proverbs calls it mastery of reality. To foresee, adjust, and protect yourself is not fear; it is alignment with the forces shaping your world. Wisdom is a preemptive art, a shield crafted in advance.

35. Envy Is Self-Destruction (Proverbs 14:30) “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.”

Envy is corrosive, invisible yet intimate. It does not harm its target; it consumes the soul of its bearer. Modern culture thrives on comparison, measuring life by what others possess. Proverbs exposes the subtle violence of envy. Peace of heart is an active cultivation, a daily exercise in gratitude, self-awareness, and refusal to be defined by another’s fortune. To live without envy is to armor yourself from slow, quiet decay.

36. Self-Control Is True Security (Proverbs 25:28) “Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control.”

Walls were survival in the ancient world. Lacking self-control is exposure; every impulse becomes a siege, every temptation a battering ram. Modern thought often romanticizes desire as authenticity. Proverbs reframes restraint as protection. Security is not the absence of desire but the mastery of it. Self-control turns vulnerability into strength, chaos into order, and fleeting temptations into proof of sovereignty over the self.

Laws 13-24:

13. Don’t Trust Yourself Alone (Proverbs 3:5–6) “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”

Relying solely on your own reasoning is like navigating a dense forest at night with a flickering lantern. You can see something, but never enough. Modern culture worships intellect, logic, and self confidence as if the human mind is infinite. It is not. Human understanding is fragmented, emotional, biased, and easily deceived by ego. Alignment with a higher order, whether God, moral law, or timeless principles, introduces a compass where intelligence alone fails. Life does not become effortless, but it becomes coherent. When personal effort is fused with spiritual grounding, decisions stop fighting reality, and paths begin to straighten without force.

14. Honesty is Non Negotiable (Proverbs 12:22) “The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.”

Modern society sanitizes dishonesty. White lies. Strategic omissions. Carefully packaged deception sold as survival. Proverbs offers no loopholes. Honesty is not a virtue for idealists, it is infrastructure. It is what sustains reputation, trust, and long term power. Trust is an invisible currency that determines access, influence, and opportunity. Once depleted, no amount of charm or intelligence restores it fully. Speak truth even when it costs you in the short term, because lies always charge compound interest later.

15. Laziness Leads to Want (Proverbs 6:10–11) “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like a thief.”

Poverty rarely announces itself. It sneaks in through habits that feel harmless. Excess comfort. Deferred effort. Small acts of avoidance repeated daily. Modern culture glorifies rest without discipline and pleasure without preparation. Productivity is not oppression, it is insurance. Consistent effort builds buffers against chaos, instability, and regret. The future is not shaped by grand intentions but by mundane discipline practiced when no one is watching.

16. Seek Counsel Before Acting (Proverbs 15:22) “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.”

The myth of the lone genius is seductive and destructive. No one sees their own blind spots. No one is objective about their own ambitions. Wisdom multiplies when ideas are tested against minds that are not emotionally attached to the outcome. Seeking counsel does not dilute authority, it sharpens it. Advice is not submission, it is leverage. Those who consult wisely move faster, fall less, and recover quicker.

17. Righteousness Protects You (Proverbs 28:1) “The righteous are as bold as a lion.

Courage that is not rooted in integrity is loud but fragile. It collapses under scrutiny. Fear haunts those who compromise because they are constantly guarding a fracture. Righteousness creates internal alignment. Nothing to hide. Nothing to fear. This alignment becomes an invisible armor. People trust you. Systems favor you. Even opposition hesitates. Boldness grounded in virtue outlives aggression and outperforms intimidation.

18. Anger Destroys the Mind (Proverbs 29:11) “A fool gives full vent to his anger, but the wise quietly holds it back.”

Modern culture confuses emotional explosion with authenticity. Solomon calls it foolishness. Uncontrolled anger hijacks judgment, poisons relationships, and hands power to whoever provoked it. Restraint is not weakness, it is dominance over self. The calm mind sees patterns, controls timing, and chooses outcomes. The angry mind burns bridges it will later need to cross.

19. Generosity Brings Return (Proverbs 11:25) “A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.”

Self centered accumulation isolates. It shrinks influence while pretending to expand security. Generosity, when practiced with wisdom, creates networks, loyalty, and opportunity. It signals abundance mentality and attracts collaboration. Giving is not loss when done strategically. It is investment. Those who refresh others build ecosystems that eventually refresh them in ways money alone never could.

20. Pride Blocks Learning (Proverbs 11:2) “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”

Pride freezes growth. It convinces you that correction is insult and learning is beneath you. Modern culture rewards self exaltation and performative confidence, yet pride blinds you to error and isolates you from allies. Humility is not self hatred. It is accuracy. It keeps you teachable, adaptable, and resilient. Wisdom flows toward those who can admit they do not know everything.

21. Avoid Debts You Cannot Handle (Proverbs 22:7) “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.”

Debt is a tool, but it is also a leash. Modern finance celebrates leverage without teaching restraint. When obligations exceed control, freedom evaporates. Decisions become reactive. Fear replaces vision. Mastery begins with discipline, not acquisition. True wealth is not what you own, but how little owns you. Freedom outperforms luxury every time.

22. Patience in Speech is Strength (Proverbs 21:23)“Those who guard their mouths and their tongues keep themselves from calamity.”

We live in an age of compulsive expression. Every thought posted. Every emotion broadcast. Restraint is rare and therefore powerful. Words spoken prematurely or emotionally cannot be retrieved. Silence, when intentional, becomes protection. Guarded speech preserves reputation, influence, and optionality. Not everything needs to be said, and not everything needs to be said by you.

23. Wisdom is More Precious Than Gold (Proverbs 8:11)“Wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her.”

Wealth fades. Status shifts. Fame evaporates. Wisdom compounds. It improves decision making across every domain: money, relationships, leadership, and survival. In a world obsessed with accumulation, Solomon reframes the hierarchy. Discernment is the ultimate asset. It outlives markets, regimes, and trends. Those who prioritize wisdom build lives that endure beyond visible success.

24. Anger is a Fool’s Weapon (Proverbs 20:22) “Do not say, ‘I’ll pay you back for this wrong.’ Wait for the Lord, and he will deliver you.”

Revenge promises relief but delivers bondage. It consumes energy, narrows perspective, and stains reputation. Modern culture romanticizes retaliation, but wisdom favors restraint. Letting go of vengeance does not mean passivity. It means refusing to let offense dictate your future. Strategic patience preserves power. Justice pursued with clarity outlasts revenge fueled by emotion.

So, it’s only fair that I pay homage and expand on 48 of the many instructions Solomon wrote. This is more than a theory; it’s survival, strategy and the kind of guidance that whispers in your ear long after the pages are closed.

Welcome to the opening segment of a four part mini-series.

LAWS 1-12:

1. Wisdom Begins with Reverence (Proverbs 9:10) “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding.”

Wisdom is not simply knowledge or intelligence; it is alignment. Modern society worships IQ, innovation, and speed. Proverbs teaches that intelligence without reverence is blind and dangerous. Reverence: an awareness of limits, of a higher order; anchors decision-making. Your choices are sharper when humility is the compass. In practical life, this manifests as ethical business decisions, restraint in relationships, and foresight that others miss.

2. Knowledge Without Humility is Vanity (Proverbs 29:23) “Pride brings a person low, but the lowly in spirit gain honor.”

Knowledge is a tool; humility is the hand that wields it wisely. Today’s culture celebrates self-promotion and instant recognition, but true influence comes from quiet competence. Humility attracts mentorship, collaboration, and trust. A humble person sees mistakes, learns, and grows; pride sees none and crashes against reality.

3. Your Inner Life Determines Your Destiny (Proverbs 23:7) “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

Modern thought often externalizes success; networking, opportunities, luck. Solomon reminds us that destiny is internally compounded. Thoughts shape habits, habits shape character, and character shapes life outcomes. Meditation, reflection, and conscious mental discipline are your invisible infrastructure for success.

4. Discipline is Love in Action (Proverbs 12:1) “He who loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid.”

Correction is medicine, not punishment. Discipline is a form of self-respect: it’s love for the future you. Modern culture confuses comfort with kindness. The person who avoids discomfort avoids growth. Those who embrace correction through mentorship, critique, or personal reflection; accelerate mastery in every area of life.

5. Words Are Powerful (Proverbs 18:21) “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.”

Speech is creative. Words can inspire or annihilate, heal or wound. Social media amplifies this truth: one careless post can derail a career, one deliberate message can build empires. Thoughtful communication multiplies influence. Guard your tongue like a weapon with two edges; choose carefully which battles you fight with it.

6. Pride Precedes Collapse (Proverbs 16:18) “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Modern philosophy sometimes glamorizes self-exaltation, yet every collapse in history: financial, political, personal; stems from pride first. Self-awareness and humility function as shock absorbers, preventing life’s inevitable hits from spinning out of control. Pride may feel powerful now, but humility ensures longevity.

7. Wealth Without Wisdom is Dangerous (Proverbs 16:8) “Better a little with righteousness than much gain with injustice.”

Money is neutral; character decides whether it elevates or destroys. Modern wealth obsession ignores this: unwise wealth is a ticking time bomb. Integrity over accumulation ensures financial freedom without moral bankruptcy. The lesson is simple: be a master of your money, or it will master you.

8. Patience Surpasses Force (Proverbs 16:32) “Better a patient person than a warrior, one with self-control than one who takes a city.”

Impulse is often mistaken for confidence. The truly powerful wait, observe, and act strategically. Patience multiplies effectiveness and reduces avoidable mistakes. In leadership, relationships, and entrepreneurship, delayed action guided by insight beats rash aggression every time.

9. Your Circle Shapes Your Fate (Proverbs 13:20) “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.”

Who you spend time with is the silent sculptor of your destiny. Modern self-help emphasizes mindset, but your associations define the mental, emotional, and ethical terrain you inhabit. Seek companions who challenge, uplift, and model the life you aspire to.

10. Justice Cannot Be Delayed (Proverbs 11:1) “The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him.”

The universe enforces moral laws with precision. Cheating may work temporarily, but long-term, fairness is enforced. Integrity is not just virtue; it’s a survival strategy. Business, politics, and personal dealings all bend toward accountability, even if delayed.

11. The Fool Refuses to Learn (Proverbs 12:15) “The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice.”

Modern culture glorifies certainty, but certainty without feedback is ruinous. The fool ignores correction, while the wise extract insight from every encounter. Cultivate teachability: your capacity to listen is directly proportional to your capacity to win in life.

12. Gentle Responses Win (Proverbs 15:1) “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”

Strength is not volume. Control, patience, and restraint are the silent victories overlooked by modern debates and aggressive self-promotion. In negotiations, family conflicts, and leadership, the soft-spoken often accomplish more than the loudest.

This is a long read, I know. Try, just try, to stretch that attention span of yours to five minutes, no? Okay, fine; four? Three minutes thirty seconds, nko? Alright then, let’s dive in.

Back then, not even that long ago; we knew how to stay. We sat with things. We stayed with television shows that dragged across seasons, episodes unfolding slowly and stubbornly, refusing to reward impatience.

As kids, we could painstakingly count down to 8 p.m. just to catch a single episode of a telenovela we had been following for two solid years. One episode a week. No rewinds. No reminders. No clips. No recaps. If you missed it, you missed it. And yet we showed up anyway. We waited through the day, through homework, through hunger, through boredom, just to sit in front of a television at a fixed hour because staying mattered. Shows like; Binta and Friends, Papa Ajasco, and Super Story dragged on for years, unfolding slowly, sometimes painfully, but we followed every storyline. We retained characters, remembered plot twists, recalled details from episodes aired weeks earlier, and tracked emotional arcs without distraction. No second screens. No notifications. No urge to multitask. Just attention, sustained and undivided.

We stayed with novels where nothing happened for two hundred pages except character development, interior monologues, and a low hum of existential dread that made you question your life choices. We stayed with documentaries on animals that ran for three uninterrupted hours, narrated by one calm British man who spoke like time was abundant and truth did not need to rush anyone. Back then, staying was normal. Presence was assumed.

Now, if a video does not grab us in ten seconds, we are gone. Swiped. Skipped. Emotionally divorced. Our attention span has shrunk so aggressively it makes a goldfish look like a Buddhist monk on a silent retreat. And before anyone jumps up with the lazy defense that it is just content, no, it is never just content. It leaks. It spills. It seeps into how we think, how we listen, how we relate, and how we decide what matters.

Welcome to the Reels, Shorts, TikTok industrial complex, where attention is harvested in fragments and dopamine is dispensed in bite sized pellets engineered to keep your thumb busy and your brain unemployed. You do not watch anymore. You graze. Like cattle. Digitally domesticated. Entertainment used to ask for patience. Now it demands reflexes. Studies have been quietly screaming while we have been scrolling. Microsoft’s much cited 2015 report suggested the average human attention span dropped from twelve seconds in 2000 to about eight seconds, shorter than a goldfish.

Research published in Nature Communications shows collective attention online is shrinking at terrifying speed, with trends rising, peaking, and dying in record time. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Cognition; links constant short form media consumption to reduced sustained attention and shallow information processing. Translation: We are actively training our brains to never stay long enough to understand anything.

And it does not stop at videos. It spills into speech, thought, and intimacy. People now avoid long conversations the same way they avoid long essays. I have watched someone feed a four minute audio note into AI just to summarize it into two paragraphs because listening felt like too much work. Four minutes!! That is not a time constraint; that is a character flaw. Emails are summarized. Meetings are reduced to bullet points. Thoughts are compressed until nuance suffocates. Everyone is rushing. Rushing to reply. Rushing to switch topics. Rushing to minimize the time spent on anything that requires actual presence. And hanging in the air, unanswered and uncomfortable, is the obvious question: What exactly are we saving all this time for?

As if the algorithm alone was not enough, the rise of AI has quietly accelerated the decay. What began as a tool has become a crutch, and we are leaning on it so heavily that our cognitive muscles are visibly wasting away. People no longer just avoid thinking deeply. They outsource thinking entirely. Husbands now ask AI to generate birthday messages for their wives, delegating affection because crafting a few sincere sentences feels inefficient. Wives ask AI what gift to buy their husbands after a promotion, not because love is absent, but because effort now feels optional. Even emotions are being optimized. Thought has been streamlined out of the process.

Creativity, once a slow and sometimes painful act, is now treated like an inconvenience. As though stressing your brain into forming original words is a crime against productivity. As though sitting long enough with a feeling to articulate it properly is a waste of time. Everyone wants the output without the process, the meaning without the mental friction, the intimacy without the inconvenience of thinking. We are not just losing attention. We are losing authorship over our own inner lives.

This erosion bleeds directly into society: A serious issue breaks out; corruption, injustice, death, and we gather like we are about to storm the Bastille. “Breaking news: A Hundred people die in a terrorist attack ”, Twenty four hours of rage, Hashtags, Threads, Hot takes, Moral urgency performed at full volume; Then tomorrow arrives, and we are back to discussing Veekee James and the latest emasculating circus trick her husband was asked to perform on camera. Serious issues do not get resolved anymore. They get cycled. Outrage now runs on a timer.

Take the Epstein files; When they dropped, people spoke as if heaven would be dragged down and hell raised. Think pieces everywhere. Moral posturing at Olympic levels. Accountability was supposedly imminent. Then the Super Bowl buffet arrived; And just like that, the outrage deflated like a punctured beach ball. No resolution. No consequences. Just vibes, ads, halftime shows, and collective amnesia. The algorithm moved on, and so did we.

This is the real tragedy: We are being conditioned never to dwell. The algorithm does not reward depth; It rewards movement. Switching, not sitting. Reacting, not reflecting. Long form thinking is punished. Complex conversations are buried. Anything that demands sustained attention is branded boring, which is just modern slang for mentally demanding. And this conditioning will not stop, not because it is inevitable, but because it is profitable.

It feels eerily like the 2011 film In Time, where time itself became currency, hoarded, spent, transferred, and stolen. Only now, the clock is invisible, and the theft is voluntary. We rush conversations, automate emotions, summarize lives, compress meaning, and hoard minutes as if this saved time will someday be exchanged for freedom. As if one day we will buy a boat with all this efficiency, sail into an ocean of timelessness, and finally learn how to be present again.

But time does not work that way. Attention does not accrue interest. Thought does not regenerate just because the schedule opens up. A mind trained never to linger will not suddenly learn how to stay when silence finally arrives. We are not saving time for the future. We are spending our capacity to be human in the present.

Here is the inconvenient truth no platform wants you to hear. This only changes if people step away from the algorithm. If we relearn how to sit with discomfort, read without checking our phones every five minutes, allow conversations to run long and messy and unresolved, and refuse to let every serious issue be replaced by the next trending distraction. Attention is no longer just a skill. It is a form of resistance. Right now, we are enslaved to forced pacing, scroll speed dictating thought speed, notifications deciding emotional priorities. And until we slow down on purpose, we will keep mistaking motion for progress, noise for knowledge, and urgency for importance.

But what do I know ?

This whole piece, believe it or not, was born from a ten-second conversation with a friend. And just like that, it hit me; I am also a slave to the scroll, chained to the algorithm, nodding along while my own…

Hold on, let me check my Twitter, I just got a notification about Sophia Egbueje's N200 Million Outfit.

BRB…

Being a Nigerian Muslim late 2025, especially a Northern Nigerian Muslim, was akin to being on the FBI person-of-interest list. Why, you ask? Well, a chaotic cocktail of events set the stage: the abduction of school children, the Benue church massacre, and of course, Donald Trump deciding to gatecrash Nigerian insecurity from across the Atlantic, calling it a Christian genocide; suddenly, caution, blame, and hounding became national sports.

Phones were buzzing; memes were dropping. I remember seeing memes about strapping AK-47s to church; others imagined the exact moment they would “defend” themselves if they heard a Fulani accent within a ten-mile radius.

It was free season on attacks. Naturally, Northern Muslims pushed back; Hon Aliyu Gebi went on Arise TV, waving his hands at Trump, saying, “No, sir, you are misrepresenting the facts, Nigeria is safe!! ”

Middle Belt Christians doubled down, endorsing the Trump narrative like it was gospel. It was a wild, wild trip; the spaces, the wailing, the hashtags; all of it.

Now, what do I think about this circus? Should Northern Muslims be branded and hounded for a religion they inherited? Absolutely not.

Jihadist extremists among them should be called out and arrested; the average Muslim, however, should not carry the sins of 0.01 percent criminal elements. But here is the caveat: full surrender to the constitution and the rule of law in handling extremists amongst them.

Here is the part that only a few people may want to admit: Northern Muslims are conservative not because they are inherently rigid, but because decades of historical, social, and political conditioning have taught them caution, distrust, and community preservation. Centuries of colonial interference, religious wars, political marginalization, and economic neglect have instilled a mentality of defense over experiment.

Religion, in this context, becomes a fortress; culture, a shield. When extremists hide behind Islam to propagate violence, it creates a dangerous mirage: the conservative instinct to protect faith kicks in, and suddenly, ordinary Muslims find themselves unconsciously defending a terrorist agenda. The line between defending religion and defending criminals blurs; a meme, a retweet, a statement of loyalty, and unconsciously, the extremist is endorsed. This conditioning does not vanish in an instant; it is embedded in collective memory, in the way generations were taught to protect identity, to guard honor, to survive political neglect.

Now layer this with what security experts, researchers, and field analysts have explained about Zamfara and the wider North. Terrorism there did not begin as jihad. It began as state abandonment. Rural communities without policing, justice, or economic protection became fertile ground for armed groups. Bandits started as cattle rustlers, local militias, and survival gangs. Over time, with porous borders, illegal mining networks, ransom economies, and no meaningful state response, these groups evolved into warlords. The religious ideology was adopted later because it offered legitimacy, fear branding, and recruitment efficiency. Religion became a costume; violence became the business model.

Religion, like everything else in life, was made to serve man: spiritually, mentally, and morally. In its pure form, it can commit no sin; only humans can. Same logic for weapons of destruction: spears, guns, bombs; none of these magically appeared. Humans made them to harm humans; humans wield them, humans decide the casualties. Guns do not kill people; people kill people.

Every genocide, every act of terrorism, is a human production. From Congo, to Rwanda, to the Holocaust, it has always been a few extremists propagating hate; hate breeds more hate, and chaos follows. The criminal element is extremism and the willingness or more often, the unwillingness of the state to confront it.

This is why Nigeria’s terrorism is not religious at its core; it is political. It exists because it is useful. Insecurity is weaponized. Chaos creates leverage. Extremists roam, kidnap, rob highways, and massacre villages not because the state is helpless, but because the state is selective. Nigeria has six to seven active terror factions operating with audacity; blame religion, blame ethnicity, blame ideology, anything except the political economy of insecurity. In places like Zamfara, insecurity has become an industry: illegal gold mining, ransom pipelines, protection rackets, and local power brokers benefiting quietly while civilians bleed loudly.

In the words of the late General Sani Abacha: “Any insurgency that lasts more than twenty-four hours, a government official has a hand in it.”.

Do not get it twisted; religious ideology can fuel violence, yes, but in Nigeria, it is not the sole engine, and it definitely can't sustain it wirhout state resources and enablers. When extremists are left unchecked, dysfunction falls back on the state. And in Nigeria, dysfunction is deliberate; it is silence, it is complicity, it is the elite enjoying and profiting off the chaos while blaming everyone else.

Instead of throwing pointless religious rants and hate filled remarks at each other; ask your government to:

• Arrest extremist Imams like the UAE does.

• Examine every Sheikh/scholar; if they preach jihadism or wahabbism throw them in jail.

• Make the region unsafe for extremism, by organizing frequent raids; at reported villages housing extremists. Round them up and treat them with no mercy.

• Encourage and promote Imams with the Sufism (Tasawwuf) school of thought, use that to replace Wahabbism and Salafism school of thoughts.

• Invest heavily in education and;

• DO NOT FORGIVE OR NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS!!!

But Baron, it can't be that simple

Yes, it is that simple!!!

Daily, we are flooded with headlines of embezzlement, contract procurement scandals, budget misappropriations, and other government misdeeds; Twitter explodes, newspapers churn, ministers issue statements, and hashtags are born and buried in the same week. But there is one silent constant ; a theft so quiet it makes all those other scandals look like street beggars waving for attention. No press conferences, no investigative panels, no public outrage, no viral threads. Just pipelines flowing, spreadsheets reconciling themselves into oblivion, and billions vanishing while the world pretends to blink.

Nigeria does not only steal loudly; it does not always hire masked men or detonate barrels of drama on Twitter. No, Nigeria also steals politely, under fluorescent lights, through reports, memos, spreadsheets, and euphemisms. For nearly two decades, from 1999 to 2018, billions of dollars of crude oil vanished quietly from Nigeria’s pipelines, while audits documented the disappearance in polite bureaucratic language that no one read past page ten.

It started simply: the Trans Niger Pipeline, carried crude from onshore fields to Bonny terminal. But nobody really measured how much entered the pipeline; nobody measured how much left. Instead, operators sent estimates, and Nigeria accepted them faithfully, because numbers without verification are easier to believe. The 2009 NEITI audit calls it gently: “absence of metering at critical points.” Translation: your wealth is a guess. Operators reported numbers; officials accepted them; and the oil quietly disappeared.

By 2007, the whisper became a roar if you were reading the right documents. Losses of 100,000 barrels per day were quietly noted; at $70 a barrel, that is billions per year. The NEITI 2007 audit warns: “Operational losses unaccounted for; revenue impact cannot be reliably determined.” Millions evaporated quietly. Reports existed; action did not.

The Bonny, Forcados, Qua Iboe, Brass, and Escravos terminals followed the same pattern. Oil lifted under joint venture schedules was reconciled quarterly, not daily; that means, for three months at a time, nobody could tell whether a cargo had actually existed, been stolen, or evaporated into the ether. By 2011, daily unaccounted-for crude reached 150,000 barrels, enough to fund any number of national dreams if only someone had measured it. NEITI 2011 states: “Absence of calibrated meters at key nodes contributes to uncertainty in revenue reporting.” The auditors were polite; the thieves were quiet.

The House of Representatives got a glimpse in 2012. Members asked about operational losses, and officials answered in ritualistic, soothing tones: “This includes sabotage, measurement discrepancies, and theft.” Translation: billions vanish; everyone knows it; nobody acts.

By 2014, PwC confirmed in a forensic audit: independent verification was absent; losses could not be disaggregated. Soldiers were guarding infrastructure; pipelines flowed; oil vanished; memos existed; accountability did not. Between 2015 and 2018, the daily unaccounted-for oil skyrocketed to 400,000 barrels per day; at market prices near $50 per barrel, that is $20 billion per year quietly leaving Nigeria’s hands while reports whispered: “Material risk to revenue assurance persists due to inadequate metering infrastructure and reconciliation practices.”

This is not incompetence. This is design. Losses were normalized; estimates replaced accountability; euphemisms replaced prosecution. Security existed to protect pipelines, not numbers. Wealth could leave without a fingerprint; accountability could never catch it.

To make it clearer, here is a timeline of Nigeria’s unaccounted-for pipeline losses, with daily barrels, pipelines, terminals, and estimated dollar losses:

1999–2000: Trans Niger Pipeline, Bonny terminal; daily unaccounted oil ~80,000 barrels; annual loss ~$1.5B; NEITI 2009 retrospective: “absence of metering at critical points.”

2001–2003: Forcados and Bonny terminals; daily unaccounted oil ~50,000–70,000 barrels; annual loss ~$1–$1.5B; monthly reconciliations created months-long gaps.

2004–2006: Kaduna–Port Harcourt trunklines; daily loss ~70,000 barrels; annual loss ~$1.5–2B; internal NNPC memo: “Operational losses cannot be verified; estimation methodology relies on outdated flowmeters.”

2007–2008: Trans Niger Pipeline and Bonny terminal; daily loss ~100,000 barrels; annual loss ~$4B; NEITI 2007: “Operational losses unaccounted for; revenue impact cannot be reliably determined.”

2009–2010: Qua Iboe and Brass terminals; daily loss ~120,000 barrels; annual loss ~$5B; cargoes scheduled weekly, reconciled quarterly, allowing months of untraceable oil.

2011–2012: Trans Niger Pipeline, Escravos, Bonny terminals; daily loss ~150,000–180,000 barrels; annual loss ~$6–8B; NEITI 2011: “Absence of calibrated meters at key nodes contributes to uncertainty in revenue reporting.”

2013–2014: TNP, Bonny, Brass, Escravos terminals; daily loss ~200,000–220,000 barrels; annual loss ~$10–12B; PwC forensic audit confirmed independent verification was absent; losses could not be disaggregated.

2015–2016: TNP, Bonny, Forcados, Brass terminals; daily loss ~250,000–300,000 barrels; annual loss ~$14–16B; NEITI 2015 report emphasized real-time metering, still not installed; soldiers patrolled pipelines without scales.

2017–2018: All major pipelines; daily loss ~350,000–400,000 barrels; annual loss ~$18–20B; NEITI 2018: “Material risk to revenue assurance persists due to inadequate metering infrastructure and reconciliation practices.”

2021: Nigeria lost 68.47 million barrels of crude oil; estimated value ~$4.85 billion; sources: NEITI audit.

2022: Nigeria lost 36.69 million barrels; roughly $2.6 billion; continued evidence of sabotage, theft, and unmetered production.

2023: Losses dropped to 7.68 million barrels (~$550 million), but the pattern remained; crude continued to vanish quietly.

Notice the tone; it reads like a confession. Pipelines, soldiers, memos, auditors, and ministers all performed their parts; oil left without a name, without a hashtag, without anyone raising an alarm.

This story never went viral because it has no dramatic villain, no explosion, no WhatsApp clip; just audits, minutes, and spreadsheets documenting billions of dollars leaving without fingerprints. Nigeria did not fail to secure its oil; Nigeria chose not to know how much was leaving.

And that, dear reader, is how the richest pipelines in Africa became silent accomplices to the quietest theft in modern history; how design replaced crime; how billions disappeared daily while the world looked elsewhere, believing what it wanted to believe, ignoring what it could not bear to measure.

Hell is empty; yes, empty. Not because evil has disappeared, but because it has migrated. It has learned to walk upright, to speak fluently, to wear suits and uniforms and holy garments; it has mastered bureaucracy, ideology, and silence. It has perfected the art of being human.

Turn on the television or scroll through the internet; Apologies, i take that back the TV or internet is unnecessary; reality is louder. The World Health Organization estimates that one in three women globally has experienced physical or sexual violence, most often at the hands of an intimate partner. That is not a statistic from hell; it is a census of our neighborhoods. A father violates the sacred covenant of parenthood. A wife brutalizes her help. Abuse does not hide; it circulates, normalized by familiarity and protected by indifference.

Lift your gaze from the household to the halls of power. The World Bank estimates that over one trillion dollars is lost annually to corruption worldwide. In countries where hospitals lack oxygen and schools lack roofs, political elites siphon public funds into private vaults. In Nigeria alone, successive reports estimate hundreds of billions of dollars lost to corruption since independence. These are not victimless crimes; they translate directly into maternal deaths, collapsed bridges, untreated cancers, and classrooms without teachers. Families bury loved ones while perpetrators issue press statements. No guilt; no reckoning. If hell were truly a place of punishment, such men would fear it. They do not.

Now consider how nations choose to spend what remains. Year after year, the largest single budget line for any nation, is defense; trillions poured into weapons systems, surveillance architectures, and nuclear stockpiles capable of ending civilization several times over. Listen to the language of pride with which these tools are unveiled. Ask the obvious question that no one wants to answer; who are these weapons for? Not demons. Not angels. Other human beings. Cities imagined as targets. Children reduced to collateral. And still we insist hell must be elsewhere.

Do not wait for demons with horns. That imagery is a comforting lie; a way to externalize evil and absolve ourselves. Read the court filings and investigative reports on Jeffrey Epstein, whose trafficking network abused dozens of underage girls over decades, protected by wealth, influence, and powerful associates. Judges, politicians, financiers; names that never fully surfaced. Ask yourself: what demon from mythology could compete with men who industrialized exploitation and insulated it with power? Hell did not imagine them; humanity did.

Again, hell is empty!

Consider genocide; the most efficient form of evil humanity has ever engineered. The Holocaust exterminated approximately six million Jews, alongside Roma, disabled people, political dissidents, and others, through meticulous record-keeping, rail schedules, and industrialized killing. In Rwanda, about 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in roughly 100 days in 1994, often by neighbors wielding machetes, encouraged by radio broadcasts and political leaders. In Bosnia, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were executed in Srebrenica while the world debated jurisdiction. These were not acts of madness; they were acts of organization.

Racial killings persist; less systematic but no less deadly. In the United States, studies consistently show that Black people are disproportionately killed by law enforcement, often unarmed, often without consequence. Names become hashtags; hashtags become fatigue. In South Africa, apartheid’s legacy still echoes in inequality so sharp it functions as a slow motion massacre of opportunity. Across continents, skin color becomes a verdict.

Xenophobic violence follows fear wherever it is fed. In Nazi Germany, Jews were first labeled foreigners in their own land before being erased. In modern times, Rohingya Muslims were driven out of Myanmar; over 700,000 were forced to flee amid mass killings and village burnings. In parts of Africa and Europe, migrants are hunted, beaten, or left to drown at borders hardened by policy and apathy. The crime is not invasion; it is existence.

Then there is marginalization; the quiet, bureaucratic cruelty. Entire communities excluded by design. Indigenous populations displaced for resources. Disabled people institutionalized. The poor criminalized. LGBTQ+ individuals imprisoned or executed in some states simply for being. This is violence without spectacle; suffering without headlines. A slow suffocation dressed as order.

Do not exempt the sacred. Documented cases across continents reveal clergymen and priests exploiting their congregants, abusing positions of trust, and violating even young boys under the cover of doctrine and silence. Institutions built to shepherd souls instead perfected concealment. Files were moved; offenders reassigned; victims instructed to forgive quietly. If demons exist, one wonders whether they are taking notes from us.

Wars, too, are born from human vanity; ego trips disguised as ideology; proxy battles framed as destiny. The Iraq War alone is estimated to have caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, justified by falsehoods and pride. The conflict in Yemen has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises; millions face famine while arms manufacturers post record profits. Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan; different geographies, same script. Leaders argue in insulated rooms while bodies fall elsewhere. Eventually, the dead become numbers; numbers become acceptable.

And sometimes the horror needs no ideology at all. A young man wakes up, kills his girlfriend, locks her body in the house, and travels as though nothing happened. No war. No doctrine. No manifesto. Just a human being exercising a terrifying capacity for detachment. If that is not demon behavior, then the word has lost its meaning.

Terrorism completes the circle. Groups like ISIS publicly executed thousands, enslaved women, and erased ancient cities; all while filming the acts for spectacle. Boko Haram has killed tens of thousands and displaced over two million people in Nigeria and neighboring countries. They wait, perhaps, for demons with horns, unaware that they have already become the very thing they claim to fight. They do not fear hell; hell does not frighten men convinced they are righteous.

This is the most unsettling truth; the demons are not elsewhere. They are here; in offices of power; in defense budgets; in sanctuaries; in families; in institutions. Evil no longer announces itself with fire and brimstone; it signs legislation, builds warheads, manages public relations, launders money, and smiles for the camera.

I do not fear demons.

I have seen worse.

I have seen men.