By Adedamola Adetayo
One must say that first and foremost that it will take a condition of very irresponsible negligence of duty and an absence of initiatives or perhaps a deliberate plan to make monkeys of the masses of Yoruba land for the Governors of the SW States to allow and tolerate the obscenity of “commercial motorcycle” operators aka Okada.
Up until the early 1990s it was such a ridiculous suggestion, something one would never have believed could happen to Lagos or anywhere in the SW.
In those days we used to hear the stories of commercial motorcycling coming from Calabar and Uyo and we in Lagos marveled and wondered how it was possible.
Suddenly it was not only in Lagos but in all the cities, towns, villages and hamlets of Yoruba land.
It has become an eyesore especially now that the Abokis are taking over the business all over the South-West.
There are two (2) very important things we don’t seem to reckon with in this development.
1. It has become a conduit pipe for smuggling POTENTIAL TERRORISTS from the North and all over the Sahel into the Yoruba towns and cities, absorbing them to blend into the society and prepping them as rapidly mobile CELLS across Yoruba land.
2. The have become an ECONOMIC THREAT to the Yoruba people. They come totally empty handed, immediately given bikes from their network and they begin to MOP UP CASH from our poor people, money which they very rarely or hardly return back to circulate in the system thereby adding to the increasing mpoverishment of the already beleaguered people!!!
How are these rather obvious things so difficult to see?
I have been observing things about the Aboki riders which is totally out of character of HAUSA PEOPLE. These people ARE NOT HAUSAS.
1. The typical Hausa man, once you speak Hausa to him, he is sufficiently disarmed, he begins to warm up to you and become very friendly. You are likely to get better deals from him on account of the Hausa language you speak with him.
Not so with the “aboki” Okada riders I have patiently observed in Abeokuta. They DON’T ENCOURAGE conversation with you and they are hardly impressed by your show of speaking Hausa, if ever they are they don’t show it. Most of them DON’T even want to talk to you beyond the matter of the transaction which brought you together.
They act like people on a mission, never interested in the least to socialise with the local population.
2. If you flag down the typical “aboki” Okada rider in Abeokuta, first thing you notice is that they are impatient and they, very unusually of Moslem Northerners, barely manage not to treat you with contempt.
You can imagine a dirty-looking idiot looking down at you as though you were not a human being.
This is the way most of them are.
You can almost feel the disdain and bottled hatred in most of them.
It’s something I have seen too often, everyday I observe it.
3. If you flag down the typical “aboki” okada rider in Abeokuta, you tell him your destination, he may say, for example, ₦700.00.
Believe me, that “aboki” most of the time will stick obstinately to that figure and he is prepared to run his bike empty through several kilometres back to base rather than come down to ₦650.00, unless you BEGGED him seriously.
He will rather go EMPTY.
And if you call the next bike, he will very likely give you the same price and treatment.
They have unionised on fares to charge us and they stick to those prices like cultists.
A Yoruba Okada rider WON’T do that. It will be stupid of him to run his bike empty when it was running on Petrol @₦950/litre. He will rather bend to take the half bread.
4. What makes No. 3 above worrisome is that the “abokis” have virtually monopolized all the routes of the HIGH POPULATION DENSITY areas of Abeokuta e.g Adigbe, Obada, Lafenwa, Olomoore and many more. There are many places they have taken almost 100%. When our people try to compete they deal with them with low prices until they are forced to leave the route. And the typical Yoruba passengers will definitely patronise the aboki when he was cheaper than the Yoruba riders.
The sheer population of the abokis on the roads and in yjr parks is enough to scare away competition.
These are places that buses and taxes don’t ply and you don’t have much choice than to take bikes.
Many of these neighbourhoods are not easily trekkable so most times you are just stuck with the “abokis” who have suddenly become Shylocks.
They are more or less RIPPING OFF the people out of their little funds.
And they HARDLY return the money back into circulation. They keep it to circulate amongst themselves.
They BUY FOOD only from their own women who buy the raw stuff from aboki traders. The women set shop in the locations of the abokis which look like camps.
They DONT take accommodation in tenament houses but sleep on their bikes, under and on top the bridges and every available spaces they find.
They DON’T bath and when they do they have their native soaps and they use chewing sticks which comes from the North. They hardly do any shopping. Even now they have another set of “Abokis” in the network, they are in every angle of Abeokuta selling rubbers shoes, clothes, snacks, fruits, commodities and the aboki riders buy from them.
When they pay taxes and levies, 90% of it end up in private pockets of our Agberos, Civil Servants and Politicians. Btw the money is still our money, the abokis mopped it from our people!!!!
This points to ONLY ONE conclusion: These guys are aiming at economic and physical terrorism, economic coming first.
It is no different with what the Ibo Zionist have been doing for over 40years.
5. These “aboki” Okada riders bond together like flies. They are rapidly mobile. They know every inch and angles of their coverage areas, all the in and outside routes into every community. They know every house and face on every street. They have a command structure and leadership. They are ethnic driven. They are INSTINCTIVELY VIOLENT, always prepared, regimented and very capable of rallying into a murderous mob in matter of minutes.
They move about in cult format. You touch one of them, a mothly crowd of them will gather around you within seconds and they can actually beat you to death on the spot and in broad daylight and nothing will happen.
6. We don’t have that rallying force because we are essentially a REACTIONARY PEOPLE.
When a people are REACTIONARY they are just the kind of people who can be perfectly terrorized.
These guys are BUILDING POPULATION all around our cities. They are waiting for the right level of their Population.
When they get that population and their feudalist controllers ever get the right excuses these guys will be activated and unleashed to TERORRISE US.
Terror aims to instill FEAR such that it will be very difficult to rally to confront it especially when you don’t have that kind of structure in place. It is worse in Yoruba land where religion has polarized us and broken all of our rallying points. Those guys will hit, run away, return to hit and run away and hit again and again and again until we are afraid to sleep in our houses.
That is what they have demonstrated in Edo, Benue and Plateau. It’s not as though the people of those lands can’t rise bravely against them but who are you rising up against?
You don’t even know them but they know you!
You won’t know them and they will usually operate in large numbers at night, nobody will come out but crawl under beds praying, those guys will wreck havoc and simply disappear to return again.
7. The best thing to do is for the Governments of the SW to outrightly ban commercial Okada.
Alternatively, we can have legislation to efficiently REGULATE it. We can go back to the bike Hailing idea such as was done by O’Ride and the rest of them. That would require sensible to operate and should therefore give more jobs to Yoruba youths in Yoruba land. How can it be that “abokis” will use sheer force of human and motorcycle population to edge out our people from business on their own ancestral land?
Our State Governments must wake up.
OR RATHER, THE YORUBA PEOPLE MUST WAKE UP TO WAKE THEIR SLUMBERING GOVERNORS TO ACTION AND COMMONSENSE !!!!