I first came across the word “Shadow Pandemic” in Olusegun Adeniyi’s Naked Abuse, chronicling the effects of sex for grade on our campuses and how the menace can be tackled in a way that wouldn’t lead to victim blaming and psychological damage.
The part two of the book was titled ‘A Vaccine for the Shadow Pandemic’.
The preface of part two was followed by an excerpt from the welcome remarks by Professor Eyitope Ogunbodede, the then Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, who was the chief host of a webinar to discuss the menace of sex for grades.
Ogunbodede, in his remarks, said the United Nations’ Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, had referred to the increase in cases of violence against women as a shadow pandemic, just as the global COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging the world.
Antonio Guterres would probably have had Nigeria in mind when he made that statement, but he might have possibly forgotten to address the senseless killings that now accompany the violence.
Last Saturday, news emerged that the Kwara State Police Command arrested a 29-year-old Islamic teacher and cleric over the alleged murder of a final-year female student of the Kwara State College of Education, Ilorin.
The female student, identified as Yetunde Lawal, was alleged to have been murdered last Tuesday by the cleric, whom she met on Facebook.
It was learned that the cleric, Abdulrahman, was alleged to have invited the lady through a phone call on Monday and killed and dismembered her in a location in Ganmo at the outskirts of Ilorin, the state capital.
Pictures of her butchered hands and a bucket of stained blood have been circulating on social media.
Every day, we read news of women being butchered by men for money; from late 2024 to early 2025, social media was flooded with videos of ladies losing their sanity at different locations after allegedly being used by their partners for money rituals.
People now openly flaunt on social media as businesses, soap making, herbal concoctions, and even charms for prosperity.
We live in a society where people glorify riches, not considering where it came from, and those who are hustling legitimately are seen as fools and not being smart enough.
Parents now go the extra mile of taking their children to ritual killers for charms that would make them make money, ‘lock their clients’, or fortify them against the invasion of EFCC.
There is a saying that ‘whoever must identify a killer has to start from locating the blacksmith that fashioned the murder weapon’; we must begin to ask ourselves the inconvenient question of where we got it wrong.
A society where wealth, rather than hard work, is the mainstay, women killers would be everywhere, targeting vulnerable women to harass and kill for instant wealth.
We can start correcting this by changing our society’s perspective on wealth, as it’s a societal problem, and it’s going to take all of society to tackle and solve them.
The government must now rise up to the occasion and make an example of the people engaging in these senseless killings.
The easier it is to get support from the government, the easier it is to be heard with empathy and assurances of redress in appropriate cases, the faster the eradication or reduction of this heinous killing against women.
We must also, as a society, come together to fight this malady, or else we will be at risk of creating a society where instant wealth without hard work is desired and glorified, and our women, who make up 50% of our population, are at risk of extinction.
In the words of Ola Rotimi, “we have left our pot unwashed, and our food now burns”; we have, as a society, ignored this malady for too long, and the time to end this nonsense is now.
Bagbansoro Uthman O.
Twitter: @TheBagbansoro
Mail: Bagbansorouthman@gmail.com
Views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of WITHIN NIGERIA.
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