When Ezra Olubi deactivated his X account on November 13, it wasn’t a confession. It was a strategic retreat.
The Paystack co-founder and OON awardee didn’t apologize. He didn’t issue a statement explaining the tweets that have now resurfaced—tweets from 2010–2012 that reveal not youthful indiscretion, but a consistent, deliberate pattern of sexualizing and objectifying women and children. He simply disappeared from the platform. And that silence, that choice to vanish rather than face accountability, tells us everything about how power actually works when it comes to protecting men.
Let me be clear about what we’re looking at: This isn’t about one crude joke or a bad tweet taken out of context. The evidence shows a sustained pattern of predatory thinking that was rewarded, not condemned, when it happened.
The Pattern, Not the Exception
In April 2010, Olubi posted: “on a lighter note, i hear sex wit a minor cures HIV. so my +ve followers, help yourselves. ur neighbour’s daughter isn’t looking bad today.” That got quite a number of likes. People laughed.
In South Africa, he went further: “In South Africa, rape is always the answer. Rape stopped apartheid, cured AIDS, now it’s been tested on lesbians.”
And then there’s the obsession with children. In 2012, he tweeted about being “deprived of watching sexy 16 year olds with exaggerated breasts.” He commented approvingly on a child’s body. He fantasized about a neighbor’s child. He openly admitted to admiring a 5-year-old girl’s body.
And the bathroom recordings, multiple tweets about secretly recording women, then publicly humiliating them for entertainment.
But there’s more. His humor extends to animal abuse. Tweets about following his cat around the house and blowing air on its anus. Talking about possibly having sex with this cat. About judging women by the sound their urine makes, thanks to the audio recorder he kept in his bathroom specifically to capture intimate moments without consent.
These aren’t jokes. They’re confessions of a mindset that sees women as objects to be violated, children as available for sexual enjoyment, and even animals as subjects for humiliation. This is a pattern of dehumanization, of treating anything without power as something to exploit for entertainment.
What’s worse? His followers rewarded this. Likes. Retweets. Laughter. A culture that made space for him to think this way publicly, repeatedly, for years.
This Is What Impunity Looks Like
Here’s what infuriates me: Olubi built a billion-dollar company. He won a national honor. He mentored founders. He held power over employees, investors, and peers. And for years—years—nobody questioned whether a man who publicly fantasized about harming children and women should hold that power.
This isn’t just about one industry. It’s broader: We celebrate men based on what they build, not on how they think. We separate the “genius” from the person. We say, “Yes, he’s problematic, but look at his achievements.” We create systems where success becomes a kind of armor, where power and visibility become reasons to overlook conduct that would otherwise be disqualifying.
In spaces where resources, influence, and prestige concentrate, there’s often an unspoken agreement: don’t scrutinize powerful men too closely if they’re delivering results. And in that silence, predatory thinking flourishes.
Olubi isn’t unique. He’s just the one who got caught. How many other powerful men are operating with this same mindset right now? How many women have encountered him and men like him in professional spaces, in boardrooms, in mentorships, never knowing what they were dealing with?
That’s the real danger. Not the tweets themselves, but the fact that they existed for years without consequence. That a man could publicly sexualize children and record women without consent and still be considered successful, trustworthy, worth elevating.
The Deflection Is Part of the Pattern
Here’s where I need to pause and address something specific: Already, the narrative is shifting away from Olubi’s actions. People are focusing on Maki, the woman connected to him. They’re saying she’s unreliable, mentally unstable, vindictive, that she exposed him out of bitterness. They’re suggesting she shares blame.
Maybe she does but this is what igbo barbie called out perfectly: “so many distractions that there’s little talk about the actions of the alleged abuser.”
And that’s the strategy. When a man’s predatory behavior surfaces, the response is often to scrutinize the women around him. To find reasons to doubt them. To suggest they’re complicit, or using the moment for clout. To make the conversation about them instead of about him.
Here’s what I need to be absolutely clear about: It does not matter why Maki exposed these tweets.
If she did it out of bitterness, out of revenge, out of a breakup—that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t make her credible or incredible. It doesn’t validate or invalidate what Olubi actually did. Because the tweets exist. They’re public. They happened. Whether she shared them out of principle or spite doesn’t change the fact that he wrote them.
His tweets. His fantasies. His recordings. His words about children. His choice to cultivate an audience that rewarded this behavior. That’s on him. Full stop.
This deflection—”but what about her motives?”—is textbook abuse logic. It’s meant to confuse the issue. To make us question whether truth-telling has to be “pure” to count. To suggest that if a woman’s motivation is suspect, her evidence is too.
That’s bullshit. Predatory behavior doesn’t become less predatory because it was exposed by someone with messy motivations.
When we let the conversation become about the women in a predator’s orbit their credibility, their mental state, their reasons for speaking we’re not protecting anyone. We’re protecting him. We’re saying that the best defense against accountability is to attack the messenger. That if you can make enough noise about the women involved, the actual harm becomes secondary.
Feminists aren’t overreacting to call this out. We’re refusing to let the playbook work.
What Real Accountability Would Require
Let’s be honest about what would actually need to happen for this to mean something:
Paystack’s board would need to publicly investigate whether his leadership reflected these values. They would need to ask: Did he treat women on his team with this same contempt? Did he use his position to access vulnerable people? They would need to release their findings. They haven’t.
They would need to make a decision about whether a man who publicly sexualizes children and records women without consent belongs in a leadership position. They would need to communicate that decision, and their reasoning, to their employees and their community.
Instead, Paystack has said nothing. That silence is a choice. And it’s a choice to protect him.
Now, I want to be clear about something: Olubi built this company. He has co-founder status. That means power. That means a network. That means resources that insulate him from consequences. Paystack enabled him by default by elevating him, by allowing his presence, by not questioning who he was. But this doesn’t absolve him. It just explains the ecosystem he operated in.
This is about Ezra. Not about Paystack’s failure to police him, though that matters. About what Ezra chose to do, what he chose to say, what he chose to think. He owns his words. He owns his behavior.
Paystack can choose to address it or not. But their choice doesn’t change his responsibility.
Why This Moment Has to Mean Something
The GitHub archive tweet I saw about preserving these tweets isn’t just documentation. It’s a refusal to let erasure happen. The Twitter Spaces, the community response these are attempts to make his harm visible when powerful institutions won’t.
But visibility alone isn’t justice. We need:
Institutional response. Email Paystack. Ask them what they’re doing. Don’t accept “we’re aware.” Push for specifics.
Survivor centering. If women have been harmed by Olubi beyond his tweets, their stories matter. They need platforms. They need protection.
Long-term pressure. This won’t fade if we don’t let it. Every time a tech investor considers funding something he’s attached to, make them think about what they’re endorsing.
Structural change. We need to ask why systems that elevate powerful men don’t also hold them accountable. Why does a billion-dollar valuation erase a history of predatory tweets?
The Real Issue
Ezra Olubi deactivated his account, and some people are calling it a win. I’m calling it what it actually is: a man with power choosing to disappear rather than face consequences.
And that choice, that ability to simply opt out of accountability, is the entire problem.
If we let this moment pass without pushing for real institutional response, we’re telling every other powerful man: hide when exposed, and you’ll be fine. Your money will protect you. Your status will shield you. The system isn’t built to hold you accountable.
That’s not a win for feminism. That’s a loss for every woman who has to encounter men like him and never know what they’re dealing with.
Let’s make sure this doesn’t fade. Let’s make sure institutions answer. Let’s make sure his silence becomes impossible to ignore.
Because that’s the only way predators actually learn accountability: when power finally stops protecting them.
To support this accountability: Preserve the evidence. Center survivor voices. Demand institutional response. Don’t let this fade.
AUTHOR BIO
Treasure Affia is a Nigerian sexuality educator, feminist activist and founder of The Feminist Code, a youth-led, pan-african and global south feminist platform. Through her work, she dismantles Western sex-education narratives by centering decolonial feminist, queer, and African epistemologies. She’s reshaping what liberation looks like when we stop teaching from the Global North’s playbook.
