Nothing Will Improve Until Death Enters the Equation
Or how to live in the Federal Republic of Rape.
As I write presently, in Ozoro, Delta State, Nigeria, Isoko and Urhobo men have declared a seven day moratorium on women coming outside after 12pm for their Uruamudhu Aluejo Festival, and are gang raping any women and girls they find outside.
Besides the fact that this is an illegal restriction on movement which they have no authority to impose, more importantly, the men are coordinating en masse to break into homes, shops and buildings, and drag out more women and girls to rape.
All of this is happening on video being filmed by the men themselves.
Nobody is accusing them, they are manufacturing the evidence of their own guilt.
The videos are not easy to watch, — I have excluded any actual rape and left only the precursor — but I must include them here because we must never diminish the gravity of the truth of what is happening.
Understanding how serious the crime is, is the foundation of understanding how serious the punishment for the crime must be.
The Nigerian police has done nothing about this until prompted by public exposure to make a weak attempt at imposing order.
In fact, when questioned on his generic PR statement about the incident, the Delta State Police Public Relations Officer, Bright Edafe asked the woman questioning him why his tweet turn her on, indicating that he too is of a similar mindset as the people his police force are being asked to arrest.
Countless women and girls in Ozoro are enduring rape and per the men’s own claims this is a tradition so the true number of women and girls who have been raped by their whole community is actually much larger and uncountable.
Almost 20 years ago when I first came online and said based on accurate real life observation from growing up in Nigeria, that the average Nigerian man is a rapist and a paedophile, people reacted as if I was crazy and my claims were outrageous.
Yet they were just factually accurate.
The average Nigerian man you see walking on the street WILL participate in rape if he sees the opportunity to.
Every single man and boy (watch the videos there are clearly male children among the rape mobs in Delta) who is currently participating in hunting for women and girls to gang rape is someone who on any other day, would be considered a normal, average person.
Someone’s brother, someone’s son, someone’s cousin, someone’s friend, someone’s boyfriend, someone’s husband, someone’s uncle, someone’s father.
After this week of gorging themselves on rape to their satisfaction, these men and boys will blend back into their normal lives, go back to calling women and girls who come out to talk about being raped false accusers. They will form mobs online to hunt down women who name their abusers just as they formed mobs in real life to hunt down women to rape in Ozoro and other parts of Nigeria.
Nigerian men know that the average Nigerian man is a rapist.
They just don’t want women to say it aloud because part of the entitlement they feel is the expectation that women should shut up and endure it quietly so that they as men will be able to go on to have happy lives, get jobs, get married, have children, all unimpeded, and enjoy the benefits of being seen as respectable and valuable members of society, despite being the complete opposite.
And we know that they know this is true, because when other men say it or inadvertently admit it, like their Ozoro brother in the video below, they have no rebuttals to make. When women say the same things said in this video word for word, Nigerian men coordinate online to hunt down the woman and try to make her face consequences for telling the truth that they tolerate being said from male lips.
There will be no justice for the latest rape victims because in Nigeria there never has been and there never will be.
Nigeria is a country where rape is built into the very fabric of society and rapists openly hold seats of power.
The only thing for every woman and girl who has been raped in this week’s rape festival in Ozoro is to simply endure the life sentence of trauma from having been raped.
And that’s fine.
No harm, no foul.
But since there is no expiration date on the effects of rape, there is also no expiration date on its remedy.
Like countless men who have raped women as a casual hobby they occasionally indulge in, the men in Ozoro will eventually fade back into the regular background hum of life and all of this will be forgotten as a fun memory of good times with their boys and best bros.
They will come home and sleep in their beds, they will go back to their school classrooms or their jobs, they will wake up in the morning to eat food cooked by women in their homes, sisters, mothers, etc. They will go outside and buy food from mama puts and roadside stalls run by women.
Life supported by invisible female labour will become normal again.
All that matters is that men in Ozoro lose complete access to women and girls as much as possible, and that whether it takes six months from now or six years from now or sixty years from now, the women in Ozoro kill as many of the men who raped them as possible.
There is no benefit to marriage, romantic relationships or even friendships with men for women in Ozoro. What exactly is the point of engaging with the men in this community, when at any moment in the near future, your friend, your boyfriend, your husband, or even your father, will join other women’s friends, boyfriends, husbands, and fathers to waylay you in broad daylight, rip off your clothes, and take turns raping you while they capture your despair and futile screams for help on video to replay and enjoy later?
Why should any woman from this state pretend that it is acceptable to forget what the men around them have done and reward these same men with continued access to women and girls through friendship, relationships, and marriage?
Parents of toddlers and owners of dogs know very well that if you continue to reward bad behaviour, the behaviour will escalate, and the wrongdoer will become emboldened to do even worse than they originally did.
The only way to nip it in the bud is to make those actions negatively consequential.
Consequences for destructive male behaviour like rape matter enormously, so no matter how slow the trickle, as long as the men who participated in these gang rape mobs in Ozoro continue to be killed, that is the only change that can make a difference to ending the impunity of rape terrorism by Isoko and Urhobo men in Delta State.
This is no different to how the only real solution for the women in Afghanistan is to kill as many of the Taliban as possible, men who themselves undoubtedly wear clothes washed by women, rape women forcibly married to them, live in houses run by women, and eat food cooked by women on a daily basis.
Nobody is coming to save any woman who is currently being raped in Ozoro.
Tagging NGOs, calling for DSVA, are all things we do because without doing them, we cannot feel better about the fact that we are powerless to help.
The men of Ozoro and other similar communities with devastating criminal practices targeted at women like mass rape, FGM, child marriage, breast ironing, and so on, always defend these practices saying it is their tradition and their culture.
Culture is what the people of any given group choose to do repeatedly. Tradition emerges when that choice is passed on to the next generation.
The current culture and tradition of Ozoro women is to keep quiet, cry, endure flashbacks, even drink pesticide and kill themselves because they cannot live with the pain, and longterm horrific effects of being raped.
Killing men who rape women and girls is a new culture that Ozoro women can choose at any given time, and one that women can pass on to their daughters and granddaughters to transmit in perpetuity.
After all, men are not the only ones who can determine culture. Culture is made by women too.
The only people who can save themselves from this inhumane barbarity are the women who are themselves subjected to it and who as members of that community, even if they have not already been victimised, are likely to be victimised by the men around them in the future.
This mass rape of women and girls has been going on unabated for decades, maybe even centuries. The only thing that is different now is that there are smartphones with cameras so now the world gets to watch women and girls be hunted in the streets like frightened animals by a laughing, gleeful mob of baying men and boys.
And the video evidence of it will do nothing to deter the crime, because Nigeria is a society in which nobody feels shame for being a rapist. Men who rape are celebrated and elevated and their victims hounded and demonised.
Rather, the videos of this successful rape fest is an advertisement to other men who are eager to try it themselves. Not only will those remote communities in Nigeria who have no such tradition attempt to recreate it on whatever scale they can, but men who are not even from Ozoro will flock to Ozoro at the time of the next festival hungry to participate in rape without consequences.
Consequences are the only thing that can change this kind of mentality at scale.
Until the natural consequence of participating in recreational rape is death no matter how long the timeframe, all documentation of the crime will only drastically increase the number of enthusiasts because it is also documentation that you can reliably get away with the crime of hunting and raping women in broad daylight in 2026 Nigeria.
💛,
Lotanna