Nigeria is an extraordinary country. The price of bread is doing high jump, and we are trying to catch up. The price of fuel is doing marathon and we are chasing after. Rent prices is doing gymnastics – if your landlord increase rent today, he will add some charges tomorrow and introduce a new fee the next day. But somehow, one of the loudest emergency in Nigeria is still… what some adults are doing with other consenting adults’ bodies. It’s always funny to me.
Our moral inflation in Nigeria is perpetual. Moral outrage is always amplified faster than outrage about food prices. So imagine my lack of shock when social media came with Oshiomole giving a foot massage in a private jet after he declared that food inflation no longer exists, in a country where children still go about picking leftovers to eat at parties. Le Shaan Da Gama, who was the recipient of the foot massage in the video is documented to have a foot fetish on Tiktok, but my real concern is not that somewhere in the corridors of power, someone important might be an enthusiastic foot-lover.
There is nothing revolutionary about discovering that politicians are human beings with bodies, desires, eccentricities, and kinks. What’s revolutionary is when that demystification encourages us to challenge them. If history has taught us anything, it is that the people who shout “OUR CULTURE!” the loudest are often running a private kink show behind closed doors. The real comedy is, therefore, not the alleged foot enthusiasm of Oshiomole.
The real comedy is our national double standard. Because in the same country where political elites weaponize “tradition” to harass LGBTQ people for having consensual harmless sexual orientations, this same elites move across the world with a loud confidence of people who know their own bedroom biographies are not exactly Sunday school material, and that there is nothing any poor religious or conservative Nigerian can do about it, but to look away. Your politicians don’t actually care about ‘purity.’ They care about power. Morality is just a strategy to divide and rule, for them. It’s all about power over you.
While the National Assembly have passed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) and fellow citizens are busy forming investigative committees about who might like what in the bedroom, nobody is forming investigative committees about why salaries now evaporate before the 5th of the new month. Moral panic is the subsidy that needs to be removed from our politics. It keeps the poor and oppressed emotionally invested in culture wars while the rich ruling elite remain financially invested in the real war – the war against your pocket. And this strategy is global.
We’ve all watched powerful men and women across the world fall out of the Epstein files like coins from Jeffery’s pocket. Theirs wasn’t about harmless kinks. That was about child sex trafficking. That was about exploitation, coercion, and abuse. That’s actual harm. Real victims. Real crimes. Done by the most powerful people in the world. Royals. Politicians. Billionaires!
The elite almost never get exposed for consensual non-exploitative adventures. They get exposed for things that involve power being used to harm other people. Their kinks and fetishes are often not harmless. Yet the public is trained to obsess over whether someone’s desire offends heaven instead of whether someone’s behavior harms other humans. That’s the misdirection that we have been subjected to continually.
We are taught to judge sexuality from a “God is watching” lens, not a “who is being hurt?” lens. But that’s not how it should be. How it should be is that we should prioritise humans. If it’s two or more consenting adults? It is not the government’s business. If there is coercion or exploitation? It automatically becomes the government and everybody’s business. Coercion and exploitation is the case against Senate President Akpabio by Senator Natasha, but we are yet to seriously make it our business. The political class has flipped it upside down. Harmless identities get criminalized. Harmful power gets normalized.
And then there is a final layer that most of us don’t know about called prohibition economics. It applies to marijuana and some recreational drugs that have been legalized in some parts of the world, but remains illegal in the country of the president who was confirmed to have ‘drug money’ in his account. The more a government loudly bans something people naturally do, the more it creates a black market of the same thing for money, for control, for blackmail. This is the whole concept behind Jeffery Epstein’s operation. Public morality is used to repress sexual freedom, and then that sexual repression creates a black market for sex and all kinds of kinks. The rich then go into that black market looking for luxury kinks that can make them feel more powerful than the rest of the people in that black market, and people have to get harmed in the process of delivering that luxury service or limited edition product to them. Nothing fuels dangerous underground economies like the moral drama of the public.
So when leaders scream about “protecting our culture and tradition,” check very well because historically, that is what these pickpockets use to distract us when something else is being taken. And if your outrage about sexuality only activates when the people involved are poor, queer, or powerless but goes silent when the powerful are involved, then your morality is not spiritual. It is political. And politics is the kink nobody wants to admit they’re into, because the government keeps fucking us all over against our consent, to the point that even common Garri is expensive.
My point is that we need to reset our morality. We need to get angry at the fact that a country as rich as this has the highest number of multidimensionally poor people in the world. We need to be angry that a country that does not provide free or affordable housing is demolishing the makeshift houses that poor people struggle to build for themselves, so that they can build overpriced estates. We need to be angry that a country with millions of out-of-school children is actively privatizing education and normalizing commercial practices like student loans in public universities. We need to be angry that a country where politicians fly around in private jets is the same country where the government is owing workers the meagre salary that they are supposed to be paid. We need to be angry that the Nigerian police now operate like kidnappers who pick people up to take ransom (also known as bail) or kill them and empty out their bank accounts. We need to be angry that we are approaching 2027 general elections with an electoral system that none of us has any modicum of belief in. We need to be angry that women across the country are still being subjected daily to cruel violence by those closest to them for no other reason than the fact that they identify as women. We need to be angry that young men and women are being brutalized and murdered (kitoed) across the country because someone thinks that their sexuality does not sit well with their religion or culture. We need to be angry that half of the hospitals in Nigeria do not have anti-venom treatment (something that should be inside every first aid kit) in their hospitals, and you’re more likely to survive a snake bite in the house of your village trado-medical healer than in a city like Abuja. We should be angry that a government that is doing literally nothing for us is about to tax us all into coma. Dear Nigerians, we should be angry. We should be outraged – at the things that really concern us.
Omole Ibukun
4-2-2026
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