In her remarkable piece published last Saturday, former Ekiti State First Lady, Mrs Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, recounted a haunting story that ended in tragedy at the family compound of a man renowned as a chronic debtor. The community had held its annual festival for publicly calling out social offenders. Apparently incensed, the man, called ‘Baba Kekere’, emerged from his room with a machete and beheaded one of the young men who had come to shame him. According to Adeleye-Fayemi, that was the last year the festival was held in the Ekiti State community. In their wisdom, the traditional ruler and elders agreed that no tradition was worth the blood of its citizens.

I recall this story because it speaks directly to what happened in Ozoro, Delta State, last week. The images that emerged from what community leaders described as the ‘Alue-Do’ Festival were an indictment on every structure that allowed such an abomination to occur under the pretext of cultural observance. Trending videos reveal mobs of young men chasing women through the streets, ripping their clothes, groping and molesting them in broad daylight. Female students of Delta State University, who were going about their normal activities, suddenly found themselves trapped in a nightmare.

The response of the community leaders has followed a familiar script. The President-General of Ozoro Kingdom, Chief Berkley Asiafa, and the Secretary-General, Prince Obaro Egware, have explained that ‘Alue-Do’ is a traditional fertility celebration during which married couples without children are teased and sand is poured on women as a symbolic invocation. Even if we accept this explanation at face value, and I don’t, the pertinent question is: What kind of fertility ritual publicly humiliates women who are already dealing with the private agony of childlessness? Besides, it says much about the tradition that when a couple is childless, it is the wife that should bear the brunt of being publicly shamed.

The Delta State Police Command has since arrested 15 suspects, including the chief priest and community head. The ‘Alue-Do’ Festival has now been banned. These are welcome steps, but they address the symptom rather than the disease. What happened in Ozoro was the predictable mutation of a nationwide cultural practice rooted in the subjugation of women. Across Nigeria today, women remain prisoners of cultural practices that have long outlived whatever purpose they may once have served.

The ‘Oro’ festival In parts of Yorubaland is perhaps the most striking example. During the festival, women are forbidden from stepping outside their homes, sometimes for days. The penalty, according to tradition, is death. Markets close. Schools are shut. Women in gainful employment lose working days. In a February 2018 perpetual injunction granted community leaders in Ipokia whose residents could no longer leave with daytime processions, Justice Owodunni Sikiru of the Ogun State High Court restrained the ‘Oro’ adherents, “their privies, agents and cohorts from declaring or imposing a daytime curfew, or carrying out activities in any manner that interferes with the fundamental rights of the people to freedom of movement.” Even when the injunction still stands, enforcement has been patchy at best. As recently as June 2025, residents of Ikorodu in Lagos State were still pleading with the government to stop daytime ‘Oro’ processions that effectively place women under house arrest. In 1999, in Sagamu, Ogun State, a Hausa woman who ventured outdoors during the ‘Oro’ festival was killed, triggering an inter-ethnic communal crisis that claimed 68 lives.

Let us be clear about what is at stake here. Whatever spiritual significance it holds for adherents, ‘Oro’ festival operates on a simple premise: Women are so inferior, so ritually contaminating, that the mere sight of them can defile a ‘deity’. This is not theology; it is misogyny dressed in the garments (literally and metaphorically) of religion. Striped of all pretensions, the men who suddenly become ‘deities’ that women must not see were born by women and many of them have female wives and daughters!

But this problem extends far beyond festivals. In some parts of the Southeast, a widow is still expected to drink the water used to bathe her husband’s corpse to prove she did not cause his death. She may be locked in a room with the body, forced to sleep on the bare floor, compelled to eat from broken plates, and have her head and pubic hair shaved by kinswomen. Also, in some parts of the North, child marriage persists as a “cultural” or “religious” obligation, pushing girls as young as twelve into unions that amount to legalised sexual violence. Meanwhile, an estimated 20 million Nigerian women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation, a figure that represents ten percent of the global total, and not a single conviction has been secured under the laws that prohibit it.

The common thread in all these practices is the treatment of women’s bodies as communal property, available for regulation, punishment, and control by men and, in many cases, by other women acting as enforcers of patriarchal norms. This is how deeply these toxins have seeped into our cultural bloodstream. As a fallout of the Ozoro incidence, Adeleye-Fayemi has proposed the establishment of a Panel of Enquiry on Harmful Traditional Practices. I support this call entirely. But I would go even further. Every state in the federation should be compelled to conduct an audit of cultural practices within its borders and identify those that violate the constitutional rights of women. Traditional rulers and religious leaders, who are often the custodians and enforcers of these practices, must be brought into the conversation not as obstacles but as partners in reform.

However, we must also be honest about what is fuelling the Ozoro-type impunity. Male entitlement, youth unemployment, drug abuse, and the toxic amplification of social media have created a generation of young men who believe women exist for their ‘enjoyment’. The hoodlums who descended on those women and girls in Ozoro did not suddenly become monsters during a festival. They were monsters already. The festival simply gave them a cover. Any serious intervention must address the structural conditions that produce such men, even as it dismantles the cultural alibis they exploit.

I am aware that raising these issues invites the predictable accusation of ‘cultural imperialism’. Which is why I must state very clearly that I believe in our cultures and traditions. History teaches that no political order can endure without effective symbols that project the values and beliefs of the people. The issue in contention is that there are practices that might have been acceptable in the past, but which are no longer sustainable. What has become clear from the sexual and physical molestation of women during the ‘Alue-Do’ festival in Ozoro Kingdom is the conflict between a traditional observance and the fundamental rights of citizens in a secular modern state. The point here is not in committing cultural suicide, but rather how to do away with practices that are counterproductive to the health of our society.

As I have argued before, traditions were never meant to be static. They evolve with the times. In advanced societies, the practices that endure are those that serve the common good, promote social harmony, and uphold human dignity. The ones we are discussing today, the use of festivals as cover for sexual violence, do not represent the best of who we are. And we must have the courage to say so plainly, and discard it. No religion, culture, or tradition should be used as a tool to persecute women from one generation to the next. But beyond what happened in Ozoro, we must also deal with the issue of rape which is prevalent. This is compounded by the fact that our society has chosen to criminalise the victims who often suffer in silence, making it very easy for culprits to get away.

I have written several columns on this vexatious issue. My 22nd September 2011 column illustrated this point with a real-life story of a gang of armed robbers who invaded the home of a wealthy family in Lagos. After dispossessing them of cash and valuables, they also decided to rape the women, including a young lady whose wedding was only two weeks away. Done with their despicable act, the robbers left as the violated bride-to-be began to wail. But the mother, who was equally raped, told her to keep quiet: “Why are you crying? You want to draw attention to yourself? Nothing happened! What did I say? I said nothing happened because your wedding must go on.”

I remembered that story last Friday night. At Heathrow airport in London on my way back to Abuja, one of the books I picked up was ‘Shame Has to Change Sides: A Hymn to Life’, by Gisele Pelicot, the French woman whose husband of 50 years had been drugging her and inviting dozens of men to rape his own wife at their home while filming. I read the book on the flight and it was torturing. It is an act of uncommon courage for Pelicot to use her horrific experience to shed light on how sexual violence can occur even within supposedly loving families. Shame, as she argued, must be pushed to the culprits not the victims. That message will serve us in Nigeria where victims shy away from drawing attention to their pain because of the stigma that follows reporting such incidences, even at the police station.

I am delighted that the First Lady, Mrs Oluremi Tinubu, has waded in on the Ozoro matter. She has demonstrated over the years that she stands with Nigerian women on matters like this and I crave the indulgence of readers to digress here with a personal experience to buttress my point. Early in 2020, I was the subject of a barrage of online attacks over the content of a blurb in my book, ‘NAKED ABUSE: Sex for Grades in African Universities’. While I took the blurb (two out of ten paragraphs) from an online statement by the African Feminist Initiative (AFI) and names of signatories on grounds of Fair Use and proper attribution, I was made to understand that not securing their permission undermined the concept of consent, which is a key message of the book.

Fortunately, the 5,000 copies printed were yet to be distributed for sale at the time. So, I distributed them free to 14 universities and 13 NGOs involved in the area of combating sexual violence against women and girls, with each of these institutions receiving between 100 and 400 copies. I also removed any reference to the AFI statement in subsequent editions. And for the sake of transparency, in my column on Ist October 2020, I listed how I shared copies of the book. I also sent copies to all the female federal lawmakers and ministers.

Two weeks later, I received a letter from Senator Oluremi Tinubu. Not only had she (Mrs Tinubu) read the book, but she also highlighted its significance in a long message where she thanked me for adding my voice to the issue. She remains the second person, after the late Comrade Uche Chukwumerije, who would send me a very thoughtful letter based on the content of my book—as distinct from the perfunctory, ‘I acknowledge the receipt of your book…’ bla bla bla messages which I also get from time to time. I still cherish Mrs Tinubu’s presence of mind, especially coming from someone I had never (still haven’t) personally encountered. Now that she is in a position of influence, I believe she can make a difference on the Ozoro lawlessness by nudging the governor of Delta (which happens to be her ancestral state) to set up an enquiry. She can also encourage other governors to pay special attention to the abusive practices against women that are hidden behind the convenient veil of ‘tradition’ in their states.

At the end, it is incumbent on all of us to address the larger issue of cultural practices that target women. Every society makes choices about what it carries into the future and what it discards. The wisdom of Baba Kekere’s community in Ekiti State, where the elders decided that no tradition was worth

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