Bigger breasts, bigger buttocks, bigger penises: Smaller common sense
Tunde Odesola
(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, October 2, 2026)
Exactly on June 17, 1958 – two years before the oxygen of independence filled Nigeria’s lungs, and eight years before Nigeria began to fall apart to political crisis – a 27-year-old savant, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, published a globally acclaimed masterpiece in African prose: “Things Fall Apart”.
Sixty-eight years after the watershed publication, were Achebe alive, he is likely to ponder two questions. One: When was the Nigerian woman reduced to a pair of breasts perching above a Brazilian Butt Lift? Two: When did the Nigerian man become a penis beneath a six-pack?
Achebe is likely to ask these questions because the meaning of beauty that glows through “Things Fall Apart” has been lost to Nigeria’s youth culture. Achebe is likely to sigh: There was a country!
Set in the late 19th-century colonial and pre-colonial African
community of Umuofia in Igboland, “Things Fall Apart” is the compelling story of Okonkwo, a courageous and proud tragic hero, whose pathological fear of weakness pushes him down the precipice of personal ruin and communal calamity.
My choice of “Things Fall Apart” is deliberate because it portrays in its pristine form how Umuofia, a model African community, values, enhances and preserves beauty.
Unlike the maddening craze for bigger sexual organs among today’s youth, coupled with indecent breasts and buttocks exposure, the youth in Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” have an understanding that physical beauty sits within a larger aesthetic system involving health, vitality, adornment, skill, character, fertility, social reputation and accomplishment.
From Umuofia to Mbanta, men find women attractive and vice versa. But in the attraction cycle, Achebe does not discredit physical beauty. In fact, he credits Ekwefi, Okonkwo’s wife, as “the village beauty”, noting that Okonkwo’s victory over Amalinze the Cat helped win her heart.
Thus, Ekwefi’s beauty is part of her social identity, which she never flaunts like most Nigerian celebrities and the younger generation. Because it was arguably not the practice to flaunt body parts in Umuofia, Achebe does not spend the novel describing Ekwefi’s breasts or buttocks, nor does he sexualise any of his characters in “Things Fall Apart”.
Ezinma, Okonkwo’s daughter, is an even more important example. Called “Crystal of Beauty”, Achebe says, “Ezinma grew up in her father’s exile and became one of the most beautiful girls in Mbanta.” But Ezinma’s beauty is inseparable from her personality: she is intelligent, perceptive, affectionate and strong-minded. Okonkwo famously laments, “I wish she were a boy.”
Ezinma possesses beauty, intelligence, character, emotional intelligence and filial devotion. She does not see life through the lens of breasts, buttocks and penises. Neither does the Mbanta society sexualise her, like modern Nigerian society sexualises its youths.
Today, many Nigerian ceremonies, including marriages, christenings, housewarmings, movie premieres, etc., are, no doubt, obscene avenues to feed sexual body parts to ogling eyes. It is not so in Umuofia, where Akueke, on her day of marriage, has her hair elaborately arranged, her skin nourished with camwood, and the beautifying ‘uli’ pattern drawn over her body. In Umuofia, beauty enhancement does not go down to surgical reconstruction of private parts prevalent among the youth today.
“Things Fall Apart” recounts that physical beauty isn’t the only form of beauty. Achievement itself is beauty. Look at the way Achebe introduces Okonkwo: “His fame rested on solid personal achievements.” In Umuofia, therefore, physical prowess, courage, achievement and reputation carry aesthetic and social values. In Umuofia, a man’s worth is not measured by the size of his muscles, the thickness of his wallet or the length of his penis. The man, Okonkwo, is a husband, father, farmer, leader, warrior, elder and statesman.
If Achebe gave an insight into how the African defines beauty before the White man came and put a knife to what held us together, making things fall apart, Wole Soyinka, in “The Lion and the Jewel”, interrogates a society where attention is on physical beauty, penis power and dark fantasies – the same way many of today’s young males and females sexualise their body parts.
At just 24, Soyinka staged “The Lion and the Jewel” in 1959, more than 50 years before Instagram and TikTok turned the human body into a permanent billboard. The play explores the themes of vanity, masculine virility, obsession, eroticism and objectification.
“The Lion and the Jewel” is the story of a self-assured gazelle (Sidi) who intentionally strays into the barn of an old lion (Baroka). On a number of occasions, the cunning lion attempted to maul the gazelle, but she was too swift for the tricky beast. As the popular saying goes: every day is for the thief; one day is for the owner of the house. Sidi, who thinks she is smarter than the lion, eventually discovers that the lion has fangs, when it is a shade too late.
In Sidi, the heroine of the play, Soyinka makes beauty a powerful weapon – the same way a lot of today’s young ladies use their beauty as bargaining chips to get what they want.
Sidi is “the village belle” and the “Jewel” of the play’s title. Teacher Lakunle desires her. The village head, Chief Baroka, desires her. The travelling photographer, whose photography platform equates to today’s social media, also chooses her as the face of Ilujinle.
Sidi becomes conscious of her beauty after seeing her photographs in the magazine, announcing: “My name is Sidi, and I am beautiful.” Like social media turning unknown youth into instant celebrities, the photographs turn Sidi into a much-sought-after beau, blunting the fact that before the photographer arrived at Ilujinle, Sidi was beautiful. And when Sidi possesses her photograph, the image changes her social consciousness the same way fame distorts the perception of Nigerian youth in relation to beauty, wealth and power.
Soyinka distinguishes beauty from mere bodily exposure. Sidi is not presented as beautiful because she exposes her breasts and buttocks. Her beauty operates through her face, youth, dance, movement, personality, costume, and culture.
But Soyinka does not idealise African modesty in Sidi. Rather, Sidi is flirtatious. She enjoys being admired. She is self-conceited about her beauty. The more Lakunle and Baroka try to woo her, the more she enjoys the game, seeing herself as a beautiful butterfly who knows when to perch and when to fly.
At 92, Soyinka needs not be asked why Nigeria is a country where a woman can be instantly famous for the circumference of her backside rather than the circumference of her intellectual capacity. No one should trouble Kongi with any stupid questions. Has he not been fighting Nigeria’s battles since before independence? Did he not describe a people as a wasted generation? Did he not lament that the man died? Perhaps what Nigeria needs is not another homily about the death of the man. I think what Nigeria urgently needs is to wake the man up!
Like Baroka, British-Nigerian businessman and social media influencer, Igho Ubiribo, was obsessed with masculine potency. At 62, Baroka wants to demonstrate that he remains virile. At 43, Ubiribo wanted a bigger penis, so he headed to Bangkok with his wife, Danielle Simba Allen, on March 5, 2026.
Reports said that handsome Ubiribo underwent a penis enlargement procedure at a Bangkok clinic and all seemed good afterwards, until he collapsed twice while receiving a massage from his wife.
A story, “Influencer dies after penis enlargement procedure in Thailand,” published by Bangkok Post on September 7, 2026, said that the British-Nigerian “died in Thailand in March after undergoing a procedure involving the injection of 40 millilitres of hyaluronic acid and lidocaine; an inquest in London was told last month”.
Bangkok Post explained that the rich influencer was taken by ambulance to Sukhumvit Hospital, where doctors found a blood clot blocking blood flow to his lungs.
The news medium said, “A CT scan was recommended, but Ubiribo lost consciousness before it could be performed. Medical staff then attempted resuscitation for about 100 minutes, before he was pronounced dead in the early hours of March 6.
“A post-mortem examination in the UK found cellular material in his lungs consistent with the hyaluronic acid administered during the procedure. The findings supported the conclusion that the injection had resulted in a blood clot.
“The coroner recorded the death as being caused by a pulmonary embolism following the injection of hyaluronic acid into the penis, concluding that Ubiribo had died ‘as the result of a cosmetic procedure abroad’.
“Ubiribo, who had around 185,000 followers on Instagram, was buried in London in May, according to the Daily Mail.”
Not everyone who goes under the scalpel for cosmetic surgery is morally deficient. I am not against cosmetic surgery. Far from it. But I disagree with cosmetic surgery when it is done out of dissatisfaction with the image of God in us. I disagree with cosmetic surgery done in the delusion that bigger is better. I wholeheartedly say yes to cosmetic surgeries like the correction of cleft lips and cleft palates.
Aside from Ubiribo, there is a growing list of young Nigerian females and males who have died after going under the scalpel of the cosmetic surgeon for BBL, breast lifts or penile enlargement.
In March, 2026, a certain socialite and influencer, Elena Jessica, died following complications reportedly associated with BBL. In 2024, a 36-year-old lady named Abiola was reported to have died while undergoing a Brazilian Butt Lift in Lekki, Lagos. In June, 2022, Vanguard newspaper reported that friends alleged that a Port Harcourt-based lady died following a failed plastic-surgery procedure.
The list of deaths arising from BBL, penile enlargement and breast lift is not limited to Nigeria alone. The main national public health agency of the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control, investigated 93 deaths of U.S. citizens following cosmetic surgery in the Dominican Republic between 2009 and 2022.
A paper by CDC titled “Deaths of U.S. Citizens Undergoing Cosmetic Surgery – Dominican Republic, 2009–2022,” and published on January 25, 2024, said that in the deaths examined in detail, gluteal fat transfer was involved in 22 (92%), while breast augmentation was involved in 11 (46%), just as liposuction and abdominoplasty accounted for 100% and 58%, respectively.
The 2024 CDC investigation found that 93 U.S. citizens died in the Dominican Republic within three weeks of cosmetic surgery between 2009 and 2022. Of 29 deaths recorded in the peak years of 2019 and 2020, medical records were available for 24; all 24 had undergone liposuction, 22 had received gluteal fat transfers, 14 had undergone abdominoplasty, and 11 had undergone breast augmentation or reduction. Many had undergone several procedures in the same operation.
The growing snarl of cosmetic tourism recorded the deaths of a mother of five, Alice Webb, 33, thought to be the first UK death associated with “liquid BBL”, according to The Guardian; Joy Barbera, 48, died in the United States in 2025 after a 10-hour cosmetic-surgery session that included BBL and breast augmentation, while a Brazilian mother and social media content creator, Derleya Alves, 26, died after developing serious complications that followed her breast augmentation.
Wait! Let me throw this in real quick. In faraway Sweden, an unnamed 30-year-old Swede went the way of Ubiribo after penis-enlargement surgery went awry. As reported by the Journal of Forensic Sciences in a 2017 publication, the Swede suffered a pulmonary fat embolism after abdominal fat was injected into his penis.
In the publication titled “Swedish Man Dies During Penis Enlargement Surgery,” written by De Elizabeth, the patient’s death was the first reported death from penis enlargement surgery, “but medical experts caution people against this procedure, warning that it has very little success rate”.
Sounding a strict note of warning, urologist Tobias Kohler of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told BuzzFeed that, “It’s a completely useless procedure that never works and disfigures men, and could kill you. This (Swede’s) is the worst case, but there are lots of other horrible consequences, from disfigurement to permanent erectile dysfunction to even worse. Nevertheless, approximately 8,400 enlargement surgeries are performed worldwide each year. Despite this fact, the American Urological Association has ruled that the procedure is not safe or efficacious.”
From Spain to Turkey, France, the UK, India and Nigeria, what does it profit a man or a woman to gain a large dick, parachute breasts, bouncy yansh, and lose their souls?
While justice is available abroad for medical negligence that results in fatalities, the same is not the case in Nigeria, where many medical staff have turned themselves into Alápadúpẹ́ butchers who must be worshipped.
Baroka wanted to prove that the old lion was still virile. Igho Ubiribo wanted to make the lion bigger. This is despite scientific records that inflated dicks do not send Eves to Cloud 9; virility, techniques and mood do.
Lest Adams and Eves experience blowouts in motion, let’s follow the advice of the legendary bean seller at Sàpọ́n, Madam Sebiotimo: be contented.
///////
Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com
Facebook: @Tunde Odesola
X: @Tunde_Odesola
