One Million Boys
“One Million boys” is the self-styled name of the gangs of vicious machine gun toting robbers in the south of Nigeria who have spread their intense terror through the metropolis of Lagos. The appellation derives from the sheer numbers of each swarm when they descend on a neighborhood or a gated community. The name reminds those who want to call the police not to bother : they regularly outnumber and out-gun the police. The police have now chosen to address distress calls hours after they are made, allowing the boys to finish their “business”, before they go to crime scenes. They don’t want to be sitting-ducks for the “One Million boys” hail of bullets.
Crowd crime has always been acceptable in Nigeria. Local newspapers are littered with references of an “irate crowd” taking the law in their hands, apparently in righteous indignation. This mind-set is fearful indeed. In rough neighborhoods, young men watching football on television will burn down the neighbourhood office of the power company, should Nigeria’s epileptic power supplies cut the entertainment short. Newspapers describe these louts as an “irate crowd” and not simply, arsonists. Murder and now mass murder, too, now appear justified once it is the deed of an “irate crowd”.
This is the background of impunity from which this specifically-Nigerian form of crowd crime developed. The “One Million Boys” has its origin within the Igbos from the south east of the country. The South-East of Nigeria is of course, a fearsome bastion of gun-toting robbers, wild kidnapping and occult-murder. In Lagos, the “One Million Boys” phenomenon erupted in Ajegunle, a neighborhood of people from the South East. Recruitment has obviously been frenetic. On November 4, 2012 a swarm of “One Million boys” numbering just 32 descended on a gated development called Sharon’s Court, for 4 hours. It is less than 600 meters from ExxonMobil’s Nigerian head office and the 4-star Sheraton Four Points Hotel. It is in Victoria Island, one of the “high brow” neighborhoods of this awful, squalid, congested, crime-infested disgrace of a city.
Should the police show up at all, gang members kill a number of them and then escape on the commercial motorcycles known in Nigeria as “okada”. Other cities in Nigeria have given the boot to these dare-devil commercial motorcyclists. They have therefore migrated to Lagos, a no-man’s-land magnet for all Nigeria’s undesirables. The motor-cyclists apart, except for the few arterial roads owned by the Federal Government within the city, street-lights everywhere else, do not work. Lagos is exceedingly crime-friendly : open sewers (called gutters) line every street, providing the perfect trench for gunmen in need of good shooting positions. Nobody knows if the police have any helicopters. Without helicopters, the “One Million Boys” turn crime scenes into killing fields and then, just ride away into the night. Police often run into ambush laid by them. The “One Million Boys” take no prisoners. They shoot policemen, to kill policemen. Each month, almost a hundred policemen are killed around Nigeria. Policemen who are still alive never forget this.
All said, the psychological horror of these gun-point robberies pales in comparison to the accompanying, brutal “conveyor-belt” gang rapes carried out by the murderous swarm. Their method is to raid victims for money and valuables, killing anybody who manifests the least resistance and afterwards, gather all the residents of a set of apartment blocks or of a gated development into a large room at gun point. Then the brutality begins. Mothers and sisters are brutally raped in front of fathers and brothers, neighbors altogether : stripped of all dignity, as Nazis once did to new arrivals in concentration camps. The hideousness and barbarism of the mass rapes are simply inexcusable : scornfully and disgracefully mutilated, these professional, often middle-class women end up in hospitals. Horribly bruised and unable to look their neighbours in the face afterwards, families often move out of their homes forever to stay in rented apartments in distant neighborhoods.
Women who are raped during these violent robberies naturally prefer not to recount the harrowing humiliation of these rapes to the police. Rape is taboo in Nigeria. A woman known to have been raped will in all likelihood, never get a husband. The rapes are noted for the sobbing in hospitals afterwards. “One Million Boys” gang members captured by the police have had the gall to ask for an unconditional release by threatening to tell the world how many of them raped each woman in turns !
Now, North Nigeria has been shut down by the incessant sporadic killings of Christians by the Islamic sect called Boko Haram. Like never before, every day, hordes of young men, displaced peasant farmers and hordes of street-beggars from semi-arid North Nigeria, stream into Lagos. They are packed standing-space-only in the backs of empty freight containers with doors open, coming down from North Nigeria. These are containers in which material is daily hauled to the Abuja – the shining new wasteful capital in the north of the country. These new entrants into Lagos arrive with no luggage, no money, no education, no urban skills and no empathy for the city. Given that people from South East are habitually killed in religious riots in the North, they avoid the South East. The “One Million Boys” of the South East, they know, can’t wait to get their hands on them. They give the new capital, Abuja, a miss : its clean, neat, wide, tree-lined streets and planned environment are simply not vagrant-friendly. “One Million Boys” will never be short of new recruits.
Lagos, the world’s largest concentration of black people, and willy-nilly, the hallmark of black civilisation, is a hellish cauldron of brutal and brutish crime.
The policy of Nigeria’s central government, run by a carnal, clueless Chauncey Gardener character, said to be partial to the bottle and the fairer sex, is that these horrific crimes must not be reported in the media. It is never reported on television. In Nigeria, a banana republic on steroids, very few newspapers choose to defy the village tyrant.
So, talk to your attorney and write your will before you go to Nigeria. You would never know, until it is too late
Crowd crime has always been acceptable in Nigeria. Local newspapers are littered with references of an “irate crowd” taking the law in their hands, apparently in righteous indignation. This mind-set is fearful indeed. In rough neighborhoods, young men watching football on television will burn down the neighbourhood office of the power company, should Nigeria’s epileptic power supplies cut the entertainment short. Newspapers describe these louts as an “irate crowd” and not simply, arsonists. Murder and now mass murder, too, now appear justified once it is the deed of an “irate crowd”.
This is the background of impunity from which this specifically-Nigerian form of crowd crime developed. The “One Million Boys” has its origin within the Igbos from the south east of the country. The South-East of Nigeria is of course, a fearsome bastion of gun-toting robbers, wild kidnapping and occult-murder. In Lagos, the “One Million Boys” phenomenon erupted in Ajegunle, a neighborhood of people from the South East. Recruitment has obviously been frenetic. On November 4, 2012 a swarm of “One Million boys” numbering just 32 descended on a gated development called Sharon’s Court, for 4 hours. It is less than 600 meters from ExxonMobil’s Nigerian head office and the 4-star Sheraton Four Points Hotel. It is in Victoria Island, one of the “high brow” neighborhoods of this awful, squalid, congested, crime-infested disgrace of a city.
Should the police show up at all, gang members kill a number of them and then escape on the commercial motorcycles known in Nigeria as “okada”. Other cities in Nigeria have given the boot to these dare-devil commercial motorcyclists. They have therefore migrated to Lagos, a no-man’s-land magnet for all Nigeria’s undesirables. The motor-cyclists apart, except for the few arterial roads owned by the Federal Government within the city, street-lights everywhere else, do not work. Lagos is exceedingly crime-friendly : open sewers (called gutters) line every street, providing the perfect trench for gunmen in need of good shooting positions. Nobody knows if the police have any helicopters. Without helicopters, the “One Million Boys” turn crime scenes into killing fields and then, just ride away into the night. Police often run into ambush laid by them. The “One Million Boys” take no prisoners. They shoot policemen, to kill policemen. Each month, almost a hundred policemen are killed around Nigeria. Policemen who are still alive never forget this.
All said, the psychological horror of these gun-point robberies pales in comparison to the accompanying, brutal “conveyor-belt” gang rapes carried out by the murderous swarm. Their method is to raid victims for money and valuables, killing anybody who manifests the least resistance and afterwards, gather all the residents of a set of apartment blocks or of a gated development into a large room at gun point. Then the brutality begins. Mothers and sisters are brutally raped in front of fathers and brothers, neighbors altogether : stripped of all dignity, as Nazis once did to new arrivals in concentration camps. The hideousness and barbarism of the mass rapes are simply inexcusable : scornfully and disgracefully mutilated, these professional, often middle-class women end up in hospitals. Horribly bruised and unable to look their neighbours in the face afterwards, families often move out of their homes forever to stay in rented apartments in distant neighborhoods.
Women who are raped during these violent robberies naturally prefer not to recount the harrowing humiliation of these rapes to the police. Rape is taboo in Nigeria. A woman known to have been raped will in all likelihood, never get a husband. The rapes are noted for the sobbing in hospitals afterwards. “One Million Boys” gang members captured by the police have had the gall to ask for an unconditional release by threatening to tell the world how many of them raped each woman in turns !
Now, North Nigeria has been shut down by the incessant sporadic killings of Christians by the Islamic sect called Boko Haram. Like never before, every day, hordes of young men, displaced peasant farmers and hordes of street-beggars from semi-arid North Nigeria, stream into Lagos. They are packed standing-space-only in the backs of empty freight containers with doors open, coming down from North Nigeria. These are containers in which material is daily hauled to the Abuja – the shining new wasteful capital in the north of the country. These new entrants into Lagos arrive with no luggage, no money, no education, no urban skills and no empathy for the city. Given that people from South East are habitually killed in religious riots in the North, they avoid the South East. The “One Million Boys” of the South East, they know, can’t wait to get their hands on them. They give the new capital, Abuja, a miss : its clean, neat, wide, tree-lined streets and planned environment are simply not vagrant-friendly. “One Million Boys” will never be short of new recruits.
Lagos, the world’s largest concentration of black people, and willy-nilly, the hallmark of black civilisation, is a hellish cauldron of brutal and brutish crime.
The policy of Nigeria’s central government, run by a carnal, clueless Chauncey Gardener character, said to be partial to the bottle and the fairer sex, is that these horrific crimes must not be reported in the media. It is never reported on television. In Nigeria, a banana republic on steroids, very few newspapers choose to defy the village tyrant.
So, talk to your attorney and write your will before you go to Nigeria. You would never know, until it is too late
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