Simple Means Of Ending Cultism In Ikorodu By Sulaimon Mojeed-Sanni

Simple Means Of Ending Cultism In Ikorodu By Sulaimon Mojeed-Sanni

For years, I have looked at how we handle the issue of cultism in Ikorodu and how we so gracefully pass the buck. It is almost an everyday occurrence to see young people kill themselves in a supremacy contest without remorse.

But do you know the root cause of this decay is actually not being addressed? Most times, we look to the political class who aid and abet the cultists with undue patronage for ulterior motives, for example, a politician who finds it difficult to give a student or a responsible young person N20,000, will gladly give a cult group N100,000 (for social protection right? But he could have paid the same amount of money to the police to lock the miscreants up). On second thought, you realised even the politician is only feeding a social menace, he or she did not give birth to, so who did?

Today, in Ikorodu, we have hundreds of young single mothers with many practising prostitution – Olosho (it started some 25 years ago or more), these inexperienced parents were churning out children without complete parental guidance, sometimes, no home nor proper care, no father figure. How can a mother that cannot feed herself take care of her child? The end product is the high level of hooliganism, cultism and distorted society we have today. Though this situation is not peculiar to Ikorodu, our case is more worrisome because it is embedded in our Oriki (omo ase le jeje…).

Then you ask yourselves, who are the irresponsible lots putting the young girls in the family way without taking responsibility? It is the men; our fathers and brothers, we know them and we know ourselves. Can’t you see even our oriki shamelessly celebrates our manhood of birthing a distorted society – fornicating up and down like someone who has never met a woman before? Who carved that?

We can then narrow the trouble down to the families that gave birth to the grossly irresponsible males or the ones that were too rigid to manage the mistakes of their wards. Some of those pregnancies came as a result of youthful delinquencies, but most families disown the mother and the child then it spirals down, year on years and we arrived here.

To address the issue, we must return to the roots; first mop up the young people with profitable engagements both male and female, begin a massive reorientation campaigns in schools, change this our Oriki, apply a carrot and stick to any young person that fails to conform and do a public shaming of any politician who is either part of the cult gang or supports them either openly or closely. These solutions might seem like tall orders, but we only need the political will and one crazy fellow to do it.

Be Safe. SM-S