Chess Marathon Guinness World Records (GWR) holder and convener of ‘Chess in the Slum’ Tunde Onakoya schooled a man who had ignorantly criticized his philanthropic gesture of helping children from the slum based on tribe.

The antagonist with the handle @mediavdm had criticized the chess master on X, on Saturday posting: “I’ve never seen this guy help anyone outside the Yoruba tribe.”

This came after Onakoya and the ‘Chess in the Slum’ children had returned from New York where they had gone for competition and the convener held another chess marathon for 64 hours, winning another GWR in April 2025.

This caused controversies on the social media as some people came to the defense of the philanthropist convener, however in his defense, Onakoya simply wrote:

“If you put a 100 black ants and a 100 red ants in a jar, nothing happens. But if you shake the jar, the ants start killing each other. Each red ant will believe the other black ant is the enemy, but the real enemy is the one who shook the jar” I’ll pardon your ignorance today.”

Supporting his works and throwing their weights behind Onakoya are some people who are familiar with his work and were able to defend him, some of their posts read

@enyola in Onakoya’s support wrote: “You can succeed where he’s failed. Start up something this beautiful and fix the lapses you’ve noticed.”

@marcaronified: “Yoruba people have so many people, wasting potentials to help that he might not reach in his lifetime. Are you race-less? You don’t have where you come from? If you and few other people from your ethnicity come together, wouldn’t you help people lying fallow and wasting in your homeland? Why are you latching on the Yoruba and blackmailing like a parasite ? Is the Yoruba ethnicity under threat in Nigeria?”

@Mochievous: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood”

@StepheniaOmeh: “I am an Igbo. My unsolicited advice to you is that when they accuse you of helping only your tribe – I want you to tell them to go and help their own tribe too. You are a Yoruba man; it is expected that Yorubas will be more around you just as Igbos will be more around me because I am an Igbo. You are not in the way of anyone that wants to help their own ethnic group.”

@truebenny001: “You are addressing people who are broken beyond repair. Not only are your words meaningless to them, but your kindness and success are something they despise with passion. Don’t make the mistake, their real purpose is not to trim the wick for a brighter light, but to quench the fire altogether. They would rather have you nailed to a cross: you and every other person who bear the semblance of something they can never be themselves. They carry within them the same bitterness and gall that fueled the demand, “Release to us Barrabas”, a murderer picked over The Christ! Sometimes in life, you just have to continue for the sake of those whose lives you are changing, and those who are inspired by your efforts to change things. As it says in the Holy Book, in this particular case, you must “let the dead bury their dead”!”

 Onakoya further wrote a lengthy post, explaining his motives and slum children he had help across the country, from the west, to east, down to the northern part of the country.

He pointed out that he just wanted to give children with little or no chances of hope, survival chances in a cruel world that trample on children and care less about their future.

The Chess Master’s post read: “I have nothing to prove to anyone, but for the sake of posterity, I feel compelled to say this.

“I’ve always tried to “stick to chess” on Twitter, not out of fear, but out of reverence for the sacred work we do. This work is about children and giving them a fighting chance to belong in a world that too often forgets them. It would be terribly selfish to let my personal opinions or politics smear the integrity of this important mission.

“But I worry now. I worry that we’re becoming so divided as a people, so consumed by suspicion and tribal lines, that we’re losing sight of what truly matters. And if we continue on this trajectory of hate, the ones who will suffer most are the very ones we claim to love, our children.

“It is simply untrue and deeply unfair to suggest that I favor any tribe or ethnicity. In all my years of living, the thought has never even crossed my mind. I have stood in IDP camps in Maiduguri and Yola. I’ve held hands with children in Bayelsa, Cross River, and Delta etc. We have supported education projects across every region in Nigeria, and now in over 20 countries across Africa.

“In all my travels, what I have seen is not tribe or religion, but talent, possibility, pain and deep suffering.

‘I have made it my life’s work to stand in the gap for these children and be a voice that compels the world to be less indifferent to their plight. That should be our shared mission: to stand in the gap, together. Not as Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, or Ijaw. But as Nigerians. As humans.

“If we allow those who shake the jar to pit us against one another, we will fail the children and leave behind a legacy of hate. And that would be a tragedy too great to bear.

“I am proudly Nigerian. And my life will always remain committed to helping every child, no matter where they’re from, find their place in this world.

“Because in the end, the true measure of a nation is how fiercely it fights for the children it did not birth, but chose to love anyway

By: Adeoye Olorunseun Elizabeth