The jarring scream ripped through the suffocating 2 a.m. silence.

“Armed Robbers!”

My wife’s voice was a ragged, terror-soaked thing, the sound of a nightmare brought vividly to life. I bolted upright in bed, heart hammering against my ribs, instantly disoriented.

Then, clarity returned. We were on the 32nd floor of Lotte Castle Empire, a fortress of glass and steel piercing the skyline. I gently pulled her close, the memory of that forgotten fear still vibrating in her body.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” I whispered, nudging her back down. “No armed robber is getting up here. If someone manages to scale thirty-two stories of sheer glass wall, I’ll open the door and serve them tea. They’ve earned it.”

My joke was met with a shudder, not a laugh. I knew why. Her trauma wasn’t born of the present, insulated comfort; it was a ghost clinging fiercely to a past life, a past life lived off an untarred backroad in Eyita, Lagos.

Three years earlier, our reality was utterly different. This was a time of brazen criminality. We lived in the heart of it, a period when robbers were so confident they would send advance warning letters to streets, instructing residents to prepare their “booties.”

We hadn’t been warned, but the siege was no less terrifying.

My wife woke first, sensing the wrongness in the pre-dawn air. A quiet peek through the sitting room curtains revealed the horror: dark figures with guns have broken through our fence and were marching toward the house. She flew to our room, clamping a hand over my mouth before the panic could escape: “Armed robbers!”

There was no time to think, only to react. I could see their silhouetted figures now surrounding the house completely, about eight of them. The thunderous, rhythmic impact on the door began, punctuated by chilling, guttural shouts: “If we break it down ourselves, someone will die!”

With my wife and children huddled in a separate room, I opened the door. The immediate reward for my coward-defying bravery was a barrage of humiliating slaps, a gun pressed cold against my temple, and the chilling demand: “Where is the money?”

For the next half hour, our sanctuary was desecrated. Wedding rings ripped from fingers, electronics and personal items, including shoes, carted away and then—the ultimate, terrifying punctuation—a local pistol fired. The bullet narrowly missed my crouching wife and infant daughter, lodging itself into the wall below the window, leaving a permanent, dark scar on our home, and an indelible one on her soul.

When the dust settled, and it was day break, the community did what communities do: they came to commiserate. Among them was Baba Cellular, a well-known, elderly man in our Residents Association. He was an Ijebu man, illiterate, yet known for his air of mystic self-assurance.

He sat me down and, instead of offering genuine sympathy, offered a sales pitch.“

This would not have happened if you were fortified,” he declared, nodding sagely. He boasted of a range of powerful charms and fortifications he could arrange—the invisible armour against mayhem.

Humiliated, violated, and desperate, I was ready to buy anything—a security system, a dog, even a black-market rifle. But what Baba Cellular was offering was a fantasy: a spiritual shield made of superstitious mumbo-jumbo. I politely refused his ‘market.’ For weeks, life remained a tightrope walk. Every night was a gamble; every unexpected noise, a spike of adrenaline. The robberies continued.

Then came the news that shattered the myth: Baba Cellular had been robbed.

How? The question echoed in my mind. How could the purveyor of invisible, iron-clad protection, the man who marketed potent charms to his neighbours, be victimized at 8 p.m. in the evening while sitting outside his own house?

I had to pay him a visit. I found him outside, sitting on a chair, stripped of his former bravado.

After commiserating, I finally had to ask the question that hung heavy in my mind: “Baba, what happened to your fortifications?”

His reply was a masterclass in deflection, a desperate attempt to protect a failing brand.

He explained that the thieves had marched him inside his house and robbed him of his wife’s jewellery and other belongings. His defence? He had a “yara agbara”—a specially fortified, spiritual strongroom. He claimed that if the thieves had made the mistake of entering that one particular room, they would never have left alive.

My brain stalled. The logic was ludicrous.

“If you have such powerful fortifications,” I asked, utterly bewildered, “why place them in a back room? Why not place the protection at the main entrance? Why allow the robbers into your house at all?”

He mumbled a strained reply, insisting that the power of the charms worked more effectively in that designated room.

It was in that moment, watching the lie unravel from the mouth of its creator, that I understood the colossal folly of placing faith in local charm.

The great musician Sikiru Ayinde Barrister captured it perfectly: “Teni ta ba n’paro fún kò bá mọ, ẹni tó n’paro mo lọ́kàn rẹ pé òun ó sọ oto.” (Two people cannot be fooled with a lie; if the person lied to doesn’t know he is being fooled, the person lying knows he is lying.)

Baba Cellular knew he was lying. His ‘strongroom’ was nothing more than a desperate excuse for a shattered belief system, a hollow alibi for his own vulnerability. The incident was not a failure of placement; it was the ultimate, devastating failure of belief.

The myth of the all-powerful local fortification, the invisible shield, is a crutch built on fear and marketed by the desperate. It fails at the precise moment you need it most, leaving you exposed, violated, and ultimately, robbed.

From that day forward, whenever I saw Baba Cellular, his persona reeked not of mystic power, but of the common human weakness he sought to exploit. I left that street knowing that true security is built not on charms and whispers, but on tangible action, clear-headed assessment, and a healthy distrust of anyone selling an easy, magical way out of a difficult reality.

Psalm 20:7 "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God".