Ìkà
By Toyin Falola
Ìkà is an evil person.
Wicked people exist in numbers, littering every place they are with their evidently obnoxious, outrageous, and even sadistic attitudes. Yorùbá people accurately define the wicked ones whom they call Ìkà, in their sayings that Ìkà kò kò, kí oun tó dùn kó bàjé, which literally means “the wicked one does not mind if tragedy replaces joyous experience.”
An Ìkà attributes your success to diabolical means. To ika, your success can be turned against you. If the world honors you, the Ìkà thinks you don’t deserve it since those belong to him. “I do my work not for honors,” the Ìkà says, but when he gets one, the world must know, as an Ìkà can be narcissistic. To Ìkà, win a Nobel Prize, you are not a scholar! The Ìkà is an evil person whose skin is a parchment of evil. When he sleeps, the Ìkà’s dreams are about the downfall of another person, even of ex-wife or ex-friend. When you are on the road, the Ìkà stays glued to his radio, waiting to hear of the announcement of your death by accident. Get sick and go to the hospital; the Ìkà is awaiting the news of your death.
What did you do to an Ìkà?
Nothing. The Ìkà desires to be like you, and the more impossible this becomes, the more his anger and hatred.
Can you appease an Ìkà? Don’t even try. His composition is evil. Don’t leave your drinks and food on his table; he will poison you.
The Ìkà is a killer. A killer by words. A killer by deceit. He can kill physically, and he can kill verbally.
Usually, wicked people feel depressed, downcast, and discouraged when they realize that an individual or a group of people is joyous about something. They are internally disposed to seeing others sad and are happy when their evil intentions materialize. One can never know the reasons behind wicked people’s disposition towards others, and neither can there be rationality for their indignant behavior shown when others are making impressive strides in their lives. It is this tendency to be utterly dangerous, evil, or ill-intentioned that informed the reason why the Yorùbá people add to the adage above:
“ààlò ò ran eni tí kò féràn eni”
One’s enemies are never persuaded to change their hatred by the target’s good deeds to them.
This attests to the fact that wicked people are immersed in their evil intentions, thinking and disposition so much that innocent targets barely have anything to do to change their minds, notions, or opinions about them. While the results of their evil intentions cannot be difficult to identify, wicked people sometimes perfect their acts so well that one cannot readily associate evil activities with them. Despite these complications, however, some things define them more readily.
Wicked people are unexplainably cruel. There is a level of cruelty that wicked people show that one would never disagree if their mental status at that moment of their anger is categorized as some form of psychological sickness. Of course, it is even hard to defend against the idea that wicked people do not have effectively functional brain systems. But the fact is that most wicked people are conscious of their wickedness and sometimes invest so much into evil activities that one would think they derive a form of benefit from the engagement. In many cases, they are vocal about their hatred against others, show no remorse for the misfortune of others, and feel accomplished when they are even the architects of that melancholy of others. The cruelty of the wicked people is an investment that defies actual logic. One can never understand why others would be so interested in demolishing, damaging, and destroying what has been strenuously achieved by others for a very long time. Wicked people do not necessarily have any reason to be hateful of others; they are pushed into their evil activities sometimes strangely. When they are not visibly voicing their anger and displeasure to others, wicked people will undertake people’s destruct using stealthy methods. They sometimes destroy the foundation of other people’s happiness, knowing that it would crumble them inside out.
Meanwhile, wickedness is not defined by social status. People are rich who demonstrate cruelty of unmitigable magnitude. There are poor people in this category, too.
Wicked people have sometimes shown their incomprehensible commitment to other people’s downfall in different dimensions. Among other things, they have shown that they are happy when others are in pain, courtesy of their actions. For that reason, you cannot place a wicked person under the category of people who have sympathy or are empathetic toward others. Rather than feel remorse for their harmful actions, they are always seeking additional ways through which they could hurt people, regardless of who the victims are family, friends, acquaintances, and business partners, among others. So long that others are in a perpetual state of agony, pain, lack and inadequacy, wicked people do not concern themselves with the tranquility of others.
Unsurprisingly, they have a cold heart, evil mindset and hard nature that does not allow them to behave admirably towards others. It cannot be overemphasized that when evil individual commits themselves to activities that foster evil, they sometimes do not care about putting others down. Without minding the chain of people that would be affected by their disingenuous behavior, wicked people are always mindless of the consequences. In as much as their intentions are fulfilled, they are unbothered by the conditions of their victims. The strangest thing about wicked people is that they sometimes do not mind if their evil activities affect them in return. As long as that would mean that their target is maximally hurt, they are usually concerned only with the actualization of their terror on others.
Underneath the mind of every wicked individual is a desire to be manipulative and controlling of others. It is going to make sense when it is discovered that most of the evil people come to that condition because of their envy of others. Evil people cannot stomach the fact that another individual is receiving the necessary attention that would help to stimulate their growth. With the expectation that such development should be theirs, they resort to actively hating others in the expectation that their success will be redirected to them. This means that the evil individual wants to be in control. Where their wickedness is not encouraged by the desire to steal another person’s success; it is inspired by their intentions to remain in control. At every given opportunity, they always want to oversee other people’s lifestyles and involvement. They become so obsessed with this so much that they instantly switch to blackmailing others when they realize that their intentions will not materialize.
In some cases, when they want to achieve a dangerous and detrimental goal in one’s life, they sometimes may show a little act of kindness. That kindness obviously is not coming from their good-natured disposition. Instead, it is a tactic used to trap their target and make them susceptible to their evil manipulations. Wicked people would appropriate any formula or method that they believe would bring the downfall of their targets. They can appear as though they are with you, but deep down, they plan their evil activities in ways that the victims would never imagine.
Similarly, wicked people are most of the time spiteful. They are usually unconcerned about how they are being affected by a decision; if it brings woeful and dangerous consequences to their targets, the wicked individual is satisfied. Programs and projects that would bring financial liberation to others would be earnestly denied by a wicked individual if they are convinced it would necessitate the downfall of their targets. Whether they would be affected by that decision or not would not matter to the wicked people; they are only satisfied that others would never achieve that thing that they wanted. Usually, when opportunities prop up, people are expected to benefit from the engagement without ending. Whereas wicked people are always plotting ways through which the said benefits are not open to those who they think are their enemies. At the family level, it happens because there is an underlying unhealthy competition among members who believe that others are in a race of superiority over them. Wicked people at that level would disrupt opportunities that are made available to the family members, and if they have the power, they can completely deny the opportunity from coming at all. The one thing that is strange about wicked people is that they may be self-sufficient in this case. What they wanted is that others do not achieve or get to the point where they would be financially liberated to take decisions outside of the influence of this benefactor. Here, the wickedness is just unfathomable. At the business level, association level, countries level, wicked, powerful people impede the growth of their countries because they want to remain popular.
Wicked people across the world are self-serving. They usually expect that everything should revolve around them, and when this is not happening, they often become unsettled. The sense of overblown importance informs the thinking that other people cannot make great decisions for themselves that they have about themselves. They are often convinced that they have attained a higher pedestal of thinking to determine and decide what progress is for other people. They have the wrong evaluation of their importance and an over bloated imagination of their usefulness. Wicked people in this category often make decisions for others under the assumption that they know what is best for them, even without being in their shoes or living their experiences. Although this savior syndrome may appear great on the surface, it remains an undeniable reality that they always have exploitative ambitions behind it. In essence, they undertake actions and events that they assume would be in the best interest of their targets, but in the long run, they have always poised to take advantage of the situation without remorse. That way, they would have successfully blocked the individual from being successful and, indeed, effective.
May I conclude that wicked people are enticed to evil activities and consequences? Wicked people feel happy when others feel pain. They are joyous when others are confronted with melancholy. Without a dint of remorse, they would celebrate the fact that others are faced with troubling situations, and that has always defined how committed they are to their machinations. Generally, they feel a level of entitlement to the success of others, and for that reason, their ego is bruised when they are not being recognized by the people whom they expect to control their lives. They want to be praised, honored, and even recognized for the success of others, to which they literally have no contribution. When they are not given the recognition that they fantasize about, they would contribute to the destruction of the individual and feel no remorse or shame in doing it. If anything, they are convinced that the destruction that people experience is what they deserve. They do not feel bad at all when they cause the downfall of others.
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