Kogi State just like any other part of Nigeria today stands at a moral crossroads, drowning under the weight of festering social ills. The cancer is no longer at the fringes; it has metastasized into the very marrow of society—manifesting in kidnapping, grinding poverty, social media noises, prostitution, duplicity in relationships, hypnotic manipulation, venomous hate, and unrelenting misery. What once appeared as isolated stains has become an ocean of decay.
In the wake of this disintegration, alternative but perilous pathways have emerged, masquerading as enlightenment. Yahoo-yahoo fraud is celebrated as ingenuity. Idolatry and even witchcraft worship is disguised as cultural revival. A retrogression to ancestor-only lifestyles is praised as authenticity. Strange and dangerous mystical experiences are pursued, sustained by the reckless consumption of narcotics and hallucinogens.
The people, in their hunger for hope, have stumbled into abysses. As the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once wrote, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” Silence in Kogi today is complicity. To avert societal implosion, one must confront the truth: moral anesthesia has crippled the conscience of a generation.
Parents who once condemned fraud are now proud of children who return from cybercrime “initiations” with wealth dripping from their pockets. Community leaders who once condemned witchcraft now patronize shrines under the cover of night. The sacred has become profane, and the profane is now canonized as sacred.
The philosopher Edmund Burke warned, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Yet, in Kogi State, even the good men appear numbed—benumbed by poverty, silenced by fear, or seduced by false promises. The youth who should be custodians of truth are ensnared in a vortex of nihilism and drug-induced ecstasies. The elders who should be custodians of wisdom are either too weary to speak or too compromised to act. What emerges, therefore, is a society haunted by shadows of its own making.
The question is whether there is a way out. History tells us that there always is—but only when a people embrace brutal honesty and radical reformation. Singapore, once written off in the 1960s as a backwater of poverty, crime, and corruption, stands today as one of the world’s most functional societies. Its transformation did not fall from the skies; it was wrought by deliberate leadership, uncompromising law enforcement, massive investment in education, and a cultural revival that prized dignity over debauchery.
Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of that nation, declared, “If you deprive yourself of outsourcing your thinking to others, you are less likely to fail.” Singaporeans were forced to look inward, build systems of accountability, and accept that survival depended not on illusions but on collective sacrifice. The lesson for Kogi is urgent: no society ascends by glamorizing shortcuts. Nations do not rise on fraud, witchcraft, or narcotics—they rise on truth, discipline, and a shared moral compass.
For Kogi to emerge from this present twilight, it must confront its contradictions head-on. The state must reclaim its youths from not the jaws of yahoo-yahoo but money rituals, not by mere sermons but by creating economic pathways that make crime less attractive. It must tackle poverty with intentional and real investment in skills, agriculture, and infrastructure, rather than wasting resources on political jamborees. It must reinstate cultural pride that is not built on the fetishism of shrines but on the discipline of heritage and the wisdom of forefathers who knew that dignity is the true measure of greatness. The law must cease to be an ornament of the powerful and become the sword of justice for all. Leaders must summon the courage to confront the shrines of hypocrisy and refuse to dance with shadows.
This is the hard truth: societies that work, work because they make conscience fashionable and corruption shameful. The rot in Kogi will not end until money rituals and fraud is ridiculed, until witchcraft is unmasked as impotence, until drug abuse is replaced with dreams worth living for. The truth may be bitter, but as the African proverb says, “He who swallows truth must have strong teeth.” Kogi State must grow such teeth and chew its bitter truth until it births renewal. If Singapore could rise from slums and ganglands to skyscrapers and order, Kogi too can rise from its chaos to light. But that journey demands sacrifice, sincerity, and the death of illusions. Without it, the shadows will thicken, and the promise of tomorrow will be buried in the ruins of today.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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