Will "Feminists" Defend Izzy Ogbeide?
In any other sane society, an actual champion for women’s rights, Izzy Ogbeide, would have been applauded for her bravery.
A few housekeeping rules before you read this. Whatever ideas you have been taught about how to silence people, and silence them permanently and effectively, do away with them. Because if you choose to go forth, you will run into serious problems, and you might encounter some triggers, and no one will be there for you to silence.
This is not the place where we would finally acquiesce that a loud African person on the internet should not be taken seriously for no other reason than they don’t speak English as well as you would prefer. That racist white supremacist idea — that to prove we are civilised, African people must be docile to show our ideas are sophisticated — is dead on arrival, especially at a time when the leader of the free world is perhaps the most garrulous of them all in the history of people screaming at the top of their voices in public spaces.
I want you to see this as a meaningful place to start thinking about personal responsibility and how you can save yourself by saving your society, because we are ultimately the sum total of our society.
In a worst-case scenario, this is where we find ourselves today. You belong to a faction that has been at war with its rival for years. But now your house is on fire, and you and your faction are away. Your rival has abandoned all the disagreements and has organised itself to help quench the fire in your absence. When you return, you see that they have been hard at work on this. So you join them to quench the fire. Because there are times when rivalries become too petty, we must band together to save humanity.
What Izzy Ogbeide’s testimony of her experience as an Edo child has offered us is an opportunity to choose humanity. As an adolescent, her parents damned her to sex slavery in the streets of Italy, like many of her peers. For years, she found herself deep in the throes of sex trafficking until salvation came to her through sheer grit and her ability to hit the restart button — starting life afresh with so many scars and trauma in the UK. It was tough. But we had heard this before — of flagrant sex trafficking of adolescent girls in Edo societies. Years ago, Blessing CEO, another famous online personality, raised the alarm.
Even as we are in the thick of japa planning, as we send our children to schools abroad, in the heat from power cuts, with no clean water, dead broke, steep in debt both on a national level and a personal level, nursing our children as they suffer from lack of basic healthcare, worrying about rising insecurity and terrorism — even as we all personally suffer from a failed state — some of us have created time to play the fool and hold court in Izzy Ogbeide’s comment section to cast aspersions on her claims. Claims we all know to be true because we have heard them before. When Blessing CEO raised the same alarm years ago, that was what we did.
In so many ways, this atrocity is so damning, and the reaction to it by this society so indicting, it can only be supernatural to make sense — like a curse, signed, sealed, and delivered by the devil himself. Go ye therefore, Nigerians, and never see road.
It is therefore perhaps not a coincidence that this is happening in March, Women’s History Month. The devil has so made it so, as a final blow, to look us in the eye and make fun of us. It can only be a curse.
Where are the so-called feminist groups, who very quickly lined up in the last few weeks defending a woman’s right to “train a child up the way he should grow… or force him to kiss you,” now that an actual problem facing a huge swathe of Edo adolescent girls has been brought to the fore? Where is the space for this conversation in any of the panels filled with exquisite English-speaking people, discoursing the travails of their lives — balancing being a wife and holding a career? Who is giving the keynote address at these events?
Nothing else makes sense, and so it must be a curse. In which case, more fasting and prayer is what we need to be delivered.
In any other sane society, an actual champion for women’s rights, Izzy Ogbeide, would have been applauded for her bravery and looked to for a comprehensive solution to solve a problem that has made it so only a handful of Edo adolescent girls can live the lives of their dreams. In sane societies, after she raised the alarm the first time, Blessing CEO would have been on all the talk shows and media platforms.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
In our society, the messenger is a pariah for not having caved to the pieties of a shameless, white supremacist Nigerian ideology. These loudmouth Africans on the internet are uncivilised and bad examples. They are disgracing us.
We must be clear-eyed about the society that we want to live in. We must be clear-eyed about our goals, and we must never lose sight of this, and we must never play the fool.
What is the value of the perfect messenger when an alarm has been raised that our home is on fire? Of what use is English, and being loud on TikTok, to the outrageous exposé on trafficking from a first-person account that Izzy has offered?
Blessing CEO’s words stood as a warning: any society with no moral clarity will fail.
This event feels like the very foundation of our society doesn’t exist, and in its stead, there is a bottomless pit, and we can’t help but fall.
Remove the heroin needle of prestige and class. Root it out, root and stem. It doesn’t matter how the message comes or who the messenger is. What matters is the alarm being raised and how outraged we want to be. From a scale of 1 to 10, you have been told of flagrant child sex trafficking endemic in Edo societies — how outraged do you want to be?