In 2025, I thought a lot about

I was 11 years old, hidden among sacks of grain in the back of a transport truck, watching the stars through gaps in the tarpaulin as we rolled south through the Nigerian night. The truck smelled of diesel and dust and the sharp sweetness of fermented cassava. My school uniform was filthy. I had no money, no clear plan beyond: get to Ibadan. And a hope that the driver wouldn't discover me before we reached somewhere I could call home. 

What kind of desperation leads an 11-year-old child to run away from military school, to climb a fence in darkness, to hide in a stranger's truck, and travel 900 kilometres alone in the vague hope that it would drive through his home town? 

At 47, I can see all the ways that night could have ended differently. 

The driver could have discovered me and dumped me at the roadside in some remote town. The truck could have been stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers or police who would have asked questions I couldn't answer. I could have been trafficked, assaulted, or simply vanished into the vast indifference of a country where missing children were common enough to barely merit news coverage. 

I knew none of this then.

I just knew I had to escape. I took the first opportunity – consequences be damned. 

The Air Force Military School in Jos had seemed like salvation to my parents; a prestigious institution that would instill discipline and leadership in their son. What they didn't know was that the school's culture was built on brutality disguised as ‘character building’. 

We were flogged for infractions as minor as not greeting a senior with sufficient enthusiasm. 

As juniors at a military school, we fetched water, polished boots till they shone like mirrors, and scrubbed floors. But we also endured humiliating tasks and casual violence – all so the seniors could prove to the school administration that they had what it took to lead. 

‘Perching’ was what they called it – where seniors would demonstrate their leadership capabilities to the officers by controlling and managing the junior students. 

Then there was ‘jobbing’ – punishment sessions where seniors would make us juniors perform exercises while practising various aspects of brutality with us. 

This was presented as legitimate military training rather than the institutional abuse it actually was.

I had tried the proper channels. I had written home. I had complained to officers who nodded sympathetically and did nothing. I started to sleep on top of a water tank, in the cold of Jos, to escape the harassment from seniors in my room – hiding there until I was discovered.

That's when I understood that no adult was coming to save me. My parents loved me, but they were  too invested in their belief in military discipline to truly understand. 

If I wanted to survive with any shred of myself intact, I would have to save myself. 

So I climbed the fence and hid among the grain sacks. I gambled everything on a stranger and their truck, hoping it would head towards home. 

Miraculously, I woke up at the moment the truck turned towards Lagos. I leapt off, walking the rest of the way home, to my parents’ surprise. 

They returned me to school. 

I don’t think I will ever forget the final jobbing session I experienced – 70 knuckle push-ups on gravel while belts came down again and again on our backs, boys crying out numbers through tears.

I recounted this experience to my parents, finally finding words desperate enough to make them hear me: 

"This is not military training. 

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This is torture." 

Finally, they took me out and brought me home. 

I thought a lot about myself as an 11-year-old stowaway this year because of a bonding session with a new team at work. Over dinner, we each told a story about ourselves and this was the first that came to my mind. Colleagues’ reactions encouraged me to commit it writing, and here we are.

Writing about it decades later has been harder than I expected. The memories I'd carefully filed away came flooding back – not just the dramatic escape, but the way the institution tried to break its students under the guise of “making men”. 

The attempted suicide by a classmate didn’t “make a man”. Nor did the envy we all felt when he ended up in the medical unit for weeks, away from the torture. 

Many of those boys I knew have likely paid the ultimate price for that military training – for being “made a man”. 

Northern Nigeria has been ravaged by conflict, by Boko Haram and the brutal campaign to suppress them. The Air Force Military School produced officers who would go on to serve in those operations. Some of those faces I remember from dining halls and parade grounds will be gone now. Lost to the violence that has consumed the region. 

Did the seniors who flogged us survive? They were boys themselves but already shaped into instruments of violence. Did they become the officers who protected civilians, or did they perpetuate the cycle of brutality? Did they have a choice? 

The truck driver didn’t know what he carried that night.

He didn’t know that an 11-year-old, hiding among grain sacks, would grow up to be someone who would influence how institutions shape people, and warn them about the cost of blind faith in discipline over humanity. 

And that 11-year-old didn’t know his experiences in military school would help him help others guard against situations in which the systems meant to protect you become the very thing you need protection from.