THE ORDEAL OF KENNETH

Written by: Oyugbo Jonah Osagie 

The dust in Umueze village tasted like home. For Kenneth, it was the taste of his childhood, of kicking a deflated leather ball down the red earth roads, his mother’s voice calling him in for dinner. It was also the taste of sacrifice. His father, a man whose hands were maps of a lifetime of tilling stubborn soil, had sold their best yams to buy Kenneth’s first set of textbooks. His mother, her back permanently curved from bending over cassava plants, had sold her prized wrappers to pay for his JAMB forms. Their dream was a singular, brilliant star guiding the family and their son, Kenneth, would become a Lab Scientist. He would wear a white coat in a clean room, a world away from the red dust.

Kenneth clutched that dream like a sacred talisman. For five grueling years at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, he lived in a world of molecular structures and chemical equations while his family lived on hope and little else. He saw the pride in his father’s eyes during his graduation, a pride so profound it momentarily erased the lines of worry on his face. Kenneth stood in his square cap and gown, the mortarboard feeling less like a hat and more like a crown woven from his family’s sacrifices. He promised himself he would repay them a hundredfold.

But the world outside the university gates was a different equation, one with no clear solution. Job applications vanished into a void of silence. His degree, a parchment he had once believed was a golden key, felt increasingly like a beautifully framed picture with no wall to hang it on. The months bled into a year. The hope in his parents’ eyes began to dim, replaced by a flicker of something he had never seen before called doubt.

To survive, Kenneth used his steady hands, not for pipettes and petri dishes, but for clippers and razors. He opened a small barbershop under a corrugated zinc awning. He called it “The Lab,” a private joke that tasted bittersweet. He found a strange solace in the snip snip of scissors and the low hum of the clippers, the scent of talcum powder and bay rum a far cry from the formaldehyde of his dreams. He was building something, brick by brick, but his parents only saw the smallness of the bricks.

Their resentment was fed by the spectacle next door. Bushi, the neighbour’s son, had been Kenneth’s age but never his equal in school. Bushi was all restless energy and desperate ambition, his eyes always scanning the horizon for a shortcut. The story flew around the neighbourhood like a triumphant. Bushi had braved the Sahara Desert and crossed the treacherous Ocean into Europe. He was a legend, a son of the soil who had conquered the world.

When Bushi returned after six years, he was a king returning from a crusade. He arrived in a cloud of dust kicked up by a sleek SUV, his wrists heavy with gold, his laughter loud and moneyed. The renovation of his parents’ bungalow into a two-story mansion was a daily, noisy rebuke to Kenneth’s quiet struggle. The new house was painted a blinding white, a monument to success that cast a long, dark shadow over Kenneth’s zinc-roofed barbershop.

One evening, Kenneth’s father, emboldened by palm wine and disappointment, shattered the silence of their evening meal. “See Bushi,” he began, his voice gravelly with contempt. “He did not spend five years reading books to end up cutting hair for miscreants. Look at what he has done for his parents! And you, with all your ‘intelligence,’ what do you have for us? This shame.

His mother, usually his quiet defender, looked away, her silence a more painful wound than his father’s words. Kenneth felt the foundations of his world crack. The love that had once been his anchor was now a chain, pulling him under. The desire to “measure up” became a frantic, clawing thing in his chest.

Crushed and desperate, he swallowed his pride and went to Bushi. In Bushi’s new, air-conditioned living room that smelled of new leather and arrogance, Kenneth begged. “Help me, Bushi. Take me with you. I need to go to Europe.”

Bushi smiled, a slow, predatory smile. He saw not a desperate man, but a new recruit. “Europe is not for the faint-hearted, my friend,” he said, pouring a expensive whiskey. “But for an intelligent boy like you, there are… opportunities.”

The opportunity was cocaine. Bushi’s wealth was not built on honest labour but on the shattered lives of addicts and the desperation of men like Kenneth. The truth was a cold stone in Kenneth’s gut, but the image of his parents’ scornful faces was a hotter, more compelling fire. He silenced his conscience, whispering to himself that it would be just one trip, just enough to build a house, to buy his father a car, to restore his mother’s pride.

Bushi assembled his cargo of desperation. Five young men from the community, their eyes gleaming with the same feverish hope that had once blinded Kenneth. The journey was a descent into hell. The Sahara was not a desert but an ocean of sand that swallowed souls whole. They crammed into pickup trucks, their bodies pressed against strangers, the sun a merciless eye in the sky. They saw things no one should see. Bodies left by the trail, sun bleached and anonymous.

Then came the ocean. The inflatable boat was a fragile peanut shell on the roaring, indifferent Mediterranean. They were too many, the waves too high. When the water began to leak in, the panic was a tangible, screaming thing. Kenneth clung to the side, his prayers lost in the wind. The boat capsized, plunging them into the freezing darkness. He fought his way to the surface, gasping, his lungs burning. In the churning water, he saw three of the young men from his village, their faces frozen in a final, silent scream. They were among the over one hundred bodies that would later be found floating, a statistic of a broken dream.

Kenneth and one other survivor made it to Spain, washed ashore like human driftwood, more dead than alive. But there was no time to heal, no time to mourn. The debt to Bushi was immense, and the only currency they had was their bodies.

Less than a year later, Kenneth found himself in a anonymous airport in an Asian country, his stomach cramping with a terror far worse than any hunger he had ever known. He was a mule, a container. The carefully wrapped pellets of cocaine felt like a cancer inside him. As he walked towards customs, sweat beaded on his forehead despite the chilly air. He made eye contact with a stern-looking officer, and in that split second, he knew. He was cut.

The law in that country was swift and merciless. There were no lengthy trials, no considerations of coercion or desperation. The sentence for drug trafficking was death.

In his cold, stark cell, Kenneth wrote a final letter to his parents. He did not write of blame, but of love. He wrote of the taste of the dust in Umueze, of the sound of his mother’s laughter, of the proud glint in his father’s eyes on his graduation day. He wrote that his greatest failure was not his inability to become rich, but his failure to see that the love he already had was the only wealth that mattered. He begged them to remember him not as the criminal he became, but as the boy who dreamed of a white coat.

The story of Kenneth’s ordeal is a tragedy that echoes through generations, a toxic blend of parental pressure and a society drunk on the wine of materialism. Since the 1960s, the definition of success has narrowed into a single, blinding spotlight on wealth. Parents, wanting the best for their children, now push them towards the mirage of overnight prosperity, equating a child’s worth with their bank balance.

Today’s youth are caught in a relentless storm of comparison. It is no longer just about the Bushi next door; it is about the curated perfection of social media influencers, the obscene flamboyance of celebrities, and the brazen theft of corrupt politicians who are celebrated, not shamed. The problem is not the youth’s ambition, but the distorted mirror society holds up to them.

We have lost our way. I recall a mother boasting in the market about her 16 years old daughter making it in Italy, willfully blind to the exploitation that paved her way. I have seen a woman proudly accept a bag of rice from her daughter, a gift from the daughter’s married lover, the transaction sanitized by the groceries it provided. When a bag of rice becomes more valuable than a daughter’s integrity, we are a society in moral freefall.

Our values are eroding at an alarming rate. The internet glorifies the "slay king" who made millions through fraud, and the gambler who wins big. Even our places of worship are not immune; some churches demand tithes that crush the poor, while kidnappers donate their blood money to receive blessings from the pulpit. The hypocrisy is staggering, and the message to the youth is clear, the end justifies the means. Money, however it is gotten, is the ultimate god.

Bad governance is the kindling to this fire. In Nigeria, a weak economy and a population boom have created a generation of educated, hopeful, and utterly idle hands. Our politicians loot billions with impunity, yet we pour more scorn on a struggling graduate than on the corrupt official who stole the funds meant for that graduate’s employment. A man once said to me, “Show me ten youths, and I’ll show you five fraudsters.” My reply was simple: “Show me ten politicians in EFCC custody, and I’ll show you nine elders who forgot their legacy.”

The redemption must be collective. We must rebuild our value system from the ground up, restoring the pillars of integrity, hard work, and community. Parents must teach financial literacy alongside the fear of a God who values honesty, not the worship of a Mammon who demands moral compromise. Schools and religious institutions must make ethics their core curriculum. Our leaders must be held to a higher standard of accountability.

Finally, we Nigerians, both at home and in the diaspora, must stop romanticizing “escape.” We cannot lament a broken society while refusing to pick up a tool to fix it. True progress begins when we celebrate the teacher who inspires, the farmer who feeds, the artisan who creates, and the scientist who heals. We must learn to honour those who build and innovate, not just those who exploit and accumulate.

Let us rebuild a society where a man like Kenneth, with his degree and his barbershop, is seen not as a failure, but as a pillar of his community. A society where honesty is honoured, knowledge is valued, and a person’s success is measured by the content of their character, not the cash in their pocket.

For only then, when we have exorcised this ghost of desperate migration and material obsession, will our collective soul find peace. Only then will we truly be able to dance, not in the fleeting glare of ill-gotten wealth, but in the everlasting, pure light of a Greater Grace.