By Lasisi Olagunju
Ours is a country where piety and perfidy share a table — where, as William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” The Christian Lent is on as I write; Muslims are on with the Ramadan fast. Both seasons stand in spiritual symmetry. Ramadan calls the faithful to discipline: no food, no water, no sex, no smoke, no slander. The fasting mouth must not gossip; the fasting tongue must not wound; the fingers of the fasting must not kill. Yet in our republic, leaders fast by day and poison the nation by night. They do so and soothe their consciences. They act as though they stand above the law and religion. And they truly are.
Northern Nigeria’s sharia enforcers, Hisbah, arrested nine people in Kano last week for not fasting. It is an annual ritual. The arrested are the poor — anonymous, expendable. In that city, the moral police are everywhere. They patrol the markets, cafés are searched, and bodies are inspected for piety. Yet, iniquity reigns undisturbed in the gilded palaces of those who commissioned the Hisbah to enforce morals.
“We have arrested them and they are with us where we are going to be teaching them the importance of fasting, how to pray, read the Quran, and become better Muslims,” Hisbah’s deputy Commander -General, Mujahid Aminudeen, told the BBC. He said the nine were made up of seven males and two females, and accused them of feigning ignorance that Ramadan had begun. The report said the arrested were still in detention as of Friday.
The trickster state polices the stomach and ignores the soul. Kano is the national headquarters of millions of street children wandering in search of hope. Northern Nigeria’s collapse of order radiates outward in kidnapping, banditry, and mass murder. The North is the reason every Nigerian is unsafe. Yet the North’s moral police and their enablers find no urgency in restraining those who kill and maim during Ramadan – and those who sponsor them.
What they sell is not what they eat. In March 2000, Bello Jangebe had his right wrist cut off in Zamfara for stealing a cow. Politicians who stretched sharia beyond the civil in recent decades have EFCC cases for stealing states, people, peace, and destinies—but they are not tried in sharia courts where limbs are lost. Their cases are in courts where white thread and black thread do not contrast. The system is rigged against the poor.
A northern Nigerian sheikh is in the news for urging bandits to “pause” kidnapping “because of the month of Ramadan.” An influencer from the Muslim North watched the video and wondered if morality had become seasonal. He asked the sheikh whether his statement meant that “once Ramadan ends, kidnapping becomes acceptable again.”
I have searched in vain for any sign that the moral police or other authorities of Nigeria, in the North, have confronted the aberrant scholar. But they are quick to recite the Qur’an to the poor who eat in daylight during Ramadan. When will they recite Surah Al-Ma’idah to Bello Turji and his bandit brothers killing the young and the old across the country? The Surah declares: “Whoever kills a soul… it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves one, it is as if he has saved all mankind” (Qur’an 5:32).
The Hisbah proclaims its duty to teach good Muslim conduct. Yet an authentic Hadith, recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, preserves the Prophet’s definition of a Muslim. Narrated by Abu Hurairah, The Messenger of Allah [SAW] said: “The Muslim is the one from whose tongue and hand the people are safe, and the believer is the one from whom the people’s lives and wealth are safe.” When are northern Nigeria’s moral policemen going to teach this to the mass murderers of Kebbi, Kwara, and Zamfara?
When a state enforces fasting but cannot guarantee safety, it has abdicated its first covenant with God and man.
In unremitting mass murders during Ramadan; in the contrived crises in the polity; in legislative voice votes that smother audible majorities; in hurried passing and signing of electoral laws; in the brazen boast that future election results will be written in bedrooms and handed to the electoral umpire at midnight, we see a fasting nation reconciled with sin, and rehearsing its own collapse.
Scholars remind us that fasting at the very beginning of man prepared rulers for sacred responsibility. In ‘Fasting and Modernization’, Joseph Tamney draws on figures like A. M. Hocart and Jan Wagtendonk to show that ancient kings fasted before coronation; they called it symbolic death before moral rebirth. In some Yoruba cultures, the oba-designate does not eat on his way to Ipebi, his place of orientation rites. Hocart wrote in his ‘Initiation’ in the journal, Folklore, of December 31, 1924, that kingship aspirants fit themselves for duty by fasting in seclusion. In those days of piety, fasting was consecration, a discipline aligning private conscience with public duty.
Today, fasting has become a reluctant routine, a spectacle. Ours is a post-religious age. We mistake paralysis for presence; oversight operates as obstruction, even as deliberate confusion. Every act of state, long before this Lent and Ramadan, already bore the colour of class and politics. That we fast now has changed nothing.
Very religious Nigeria increasingly resembles a trickster state. Esu is the Yoruba trickster deity. In our politics, Esu routinely walks in “through the gutter… when people are on guard against his coming through the gate.” While you guard elections, party congresses, and legislative debates, power slips through violence, through procedural gutters and sewage of technicalities, through voice votes and opaque manoeuvres.
Esu’s oríkì, heard through a page of Abiola Irele’s ‘The African Scholar’ (1991), tells us exactly who the trickster is and how he works on a heedless nation:
“Esu sleeps in the house
But the house is too small for him;
Esu sleeps in the front yard
But the yard is too constricting for him;
Esu sleeps in the palm-nut shell
Now he has enough room to stretch at large.”
Read the praise name beyond the ambivalence. The disruptor does not shrink to fit the space; it is the space that shrinks to reveal his measure. Boundless in confined places, he needs only a palm-nut shell to stretch at large. And when a nation makes itself small through deceit and injustice, disruption finds in its narrowness all the room it requires.
The restless trickster does more than ambivalent disruption. Many thanks to Joan Wescott and Peter Morton-Williams, two white people who translated other lines of the oríkì in June 1962 for me to use freely now with my own infusions: Esu is the god who comes on horseback through the gutter of the house when people are guarding against his coming through the gate. He is the man with sixteen hundred clubs. When he sees two people quarrel, he brings out a rod so that one can beat the other to death. He stands at the pounded yam seller’s stall, not to buy but to shoo away real customers. He sits at the pounded corn seller’s and, again, does not buy. Esu works on his choice to their ruin. But one whom Esu is working on will not know it…
A nation can be acted upon by Esu while believing itself sovereign. “One whom Esu is working on won’t know it.” A trickster state survives on cunning and on citizens who refuse to recognise when they are being worked upon. The tragedy is not the trickster manipulating the nation; it is the pretence that we are unaware of it.
Yet we are a very religious nation. We bind the devil and stone al-Shayṭān, but we are governed by paradox. Leaders abstain from bread and water, yet feast on moral rot and public betrayal. They advertise denial of earthly pleasures, even as they dump political and economic toxic waste into our collective backyard.
Fasting is supposed to discipline appetite, impeach injustice, and enthrone fairness in leadership. But from the north to the south, the pyramid of justice and peace is inverted in Nigeria. Yet, we are fasting, Christians and Muslims. We pray in ostentatious pursuit of piety and penitence, but our deeds betray what we are.
We started fasting last week. Inside the chambers of the Senate and the House of Representatives, lawmakers, Christians and Muslims, sat side by side, abstaining from food and drink, in fasting and penitence. Yet when the clause of a bill mandating electronic transmission of election results was put to a vote, a loud “Aye” was struck down as “Nay,” and a fasting majority rejoiced.
What fast or religion legitimizes iniquity in high places? In Christianity, Lent is both an act of penance and prayer through abstinence. Read David Lambert’s ‘Fasting as a Penitential Rite.’ In Islam, Ramadan teaches self-discipline and moral responsibility. Yet in northern Nigeria, we see religious hypocrisy writ large: a state that enforces fasting on the poor while tolerating murder, banditry, and theft by the powerful. Rituals are performed, prayers recited, bodies restrained, but hands that maim, steal, and oppress remain free.
Fasting is for moral and spiritual transformation; it is not social posturing or hierarchical display. In both Islam and Christianity, it is not theatre. The Qur’an declares: “Believers! Fasting is enjoined upon you, as it was enjoined upon those before you, that you become God-fearing.” The Bible asks: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to lose the bonds of wickedness… to undo the heavy burdens?” (Isaiah 58:6).
A nation does not rise on ritual; it rises on righteousness. If abstinence is purification, let it cleanse everyone dirty – and we all are. Otherwise, we are left with the spectacle of men who conquer hunger but not hubris; men who fast by day while feasting on sin by night.
This holy period should call the human mind to justice and to peace where there is war. But the deceitful state does not settle disputes; itses them. Esu is a man of 1,600 clubs who brings out a wooden rod for the quarrelers. The cunning authority does not end quarrels; it cultivates them. In its court, conflict becomes curated theatre; ethnic and religious identities are wielded as a murderous rod. The regime alternates between referee and combatant. Think Rivers. Think Kano and its stalemated emirship. Thinkabout our politics and the crises within the parties. Think.
Nigeria need not remain enchanted by the trickster. The charge in the oríkì of Esu is instructive: “All in our house pay heed to the trickster.” Vigilance must move from ritual to righteousness. If fasting is purification, let it cleanse the conduct of the high and the low. If it is self-restraint, let it restrain power. A nation does not stand on spectacle; it stands on justice, on gates guarded against the subtle seepage through the gutter, against visible and masked trickster intruders. Forces of iniquity act as though they stand above law and religion — and our silence crowns them. Enough.
