Professor Olaniyi Jacob Babayemi woke up in the morning on a normal day. Part of his daily routine was to tend to the cows that he had crossbred as University of Ibadan’s head of the Faculty of Animal Health And Nutrition department.

His pet project was the practical cross breeding of the breed of cows that could produce 5 litres of milk per day for a start, an obvious improvement on the traditional Nigerian cattle breed that never gave beyond one litre of milk per day, keeping cattle rearers at the margin of subsistence level as opposed to the South African breed that would yield 50 litres of milk per day.


For a start, 5 litres seemed a modest improvement.



But his phone rang that morning and at the other end of the call was the Senator representing his home constituency, Mr Buhari with some good news.


A new university was going to come up urgently, built at Okeho, and his name had been pencilled in as the pioneer Vice Chancellor. Olaniyi Babayemi was excited for several reasons. By a coincidence, Okeho is his own home community and the University was going to be dedicated to Agriculture and Technology.



And as the dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Ibadan, he knew that his path had been carved out.


Just as he was setting out to his home community, news streamed in that some School children in Ogbomoso within Oriire LGA had been kidnapped alongside some of their teachers and taken into the dense bushes of the local government with a teacher already executed by the dare-devil kidnappers who were demanding for ransom in hundreds of millions of naira and the release of their partners in crime who had earlier been arrested and sent to jail.




Being an indigene of Oyo North, he already suspected who the bandit kidnappers could be.



Every child in Oyo North knows the history of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther who was born at Osogun-Iseyin around 1890 and who became one of the victims of slave trade, though rescued along with some other captives by some British anti-slavery frigates on the Atlantic Ocean before the vessel that carried them sailed to the Americas, according to the book, A Patriot to The Core: Bishop Ajayi Crowther by Professor J. F. Ade-Ajayi who was also at a time, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan. He had written the seminal book that equally contained a 182-year old letter, in which Crowther narrated how he was captured as a boy, sold, bartered for disposable articles, but still rescued by a British anti slavery frigate on the Atlantic Ocean.



Those chilling stories continue to rankle all sons and daughters of Oyo North. And they know that the descendants of those earlier slave catchers and traders were still embedded in the forests of Oriire and environs. They never went back to where they invaded most parts of Nigeria from even after the slave trade officially became over.