By Olusegun Adeniyi
The superstitious belief that instant wealth can be conjured by herbalists or ‘native doctors’ has sent an inordinate number of innocent people to their untimely death in Nigeria. But how desperate or gullible must someone be not to understand that if these ‘native doctors’ could create money by performing rituals, they themselves would not be so poor? That precisely is the question being posed by Governor Chukwuma Soludo, who has been waging a war against crooked ‘native doctors’ in Anambra State. It is a battle other stakeholders must join if we are to rid our country of these charlatans who are wreaking serious havoc on young people’s lives.
Soludo concedes that there are traditional healers who use herbs to cure ailments, but his battle is against those who sell charms and rituals as ‘immunities’ against criminal enterprises like armed robbery, kidnapping, cyber fraud etc. He is therefore not fighting genuine traditional medicine practitioners but rather those who prey on the greed or ignorance of our young people. “Go to Indonesia, 23 Ndi Anambra are on death row there for drug related offenses. These native doctors will deceive you that they will prepare a charm that when you carry drugs and enter the airport, the white man’s scanner will go blind. These young people believe them and today, many of our people are languishing in jail across the world,” Soludo said last week, while explaining the motivation for his campaign. “If you see anyone who is professing to have the powers to make people rich, tell us, we will bring him to Awka. If he makes one person a millionaire, we will bring Anambra people and line them up. I will equally present myself because I need money too.”
What Soludo is dealing with is a serious moral crisis that is not peculiar to Anambra State. These ‘native doctors’ are everywhere and many are complicit in the crime of kidnapping that is now rampant across the country. In February, the recently installed Asagba of Asaba, Professor Epiphany Azinge, SAN, banned the activities of ‘Eze-Nwanyi’ (female native doctors/goddesses) within his domain, following reports linking one of them to the murder of a kidnap victim whose body was discovered on the Niger Bridge. “The murder of the Anambra lawmaker points to Asaba, where money was cleared, and where the shrine harbouring the kingpin was located,” said the traditional ruler. “These native doctors seem to be aiding not only internet fraudsters (Yahoo Yahoo boys) but also kidnappers and other criminals. Therefore, we are banning them effective immediately.”
While dark powers exist, the notion that anybody could carry drugs and evade detection at airports or conjure money after killing and harvesting the head/internal organs of another human being or that they could be ‘fortified’ against arrest after committing heinous crimes is beyond ludicrous. Unfortunately, these beliefs are now very prevalent among many of our young people who look for easy answers to life’s questions, especially in the desperate times we live in. That has also created a huge industry for these so-called native doctors who are setting up their shops everywhere and luring young people into lives of crime. In the process, many also lose their lives. For instance, following a stranger-than-fiction tragedy involving a teenager in a community in Esan Southeast local government area of Edo State last week, the Police have arrested a ‘native doctor’ and an accomplish. What was their alleged crime?
To prove the efficacy of a charm ritual they had performed on a 14-year-old boy who sought powers that would make him “invulnerable to bottles”, they struck his head with a bottle. Regrettably, the body of the teenager is now in the morgue. For a 14-year-old boy to be looking for a charm that would make his head ‘bottle-proof’, I expect there is a catch somewhere about illicit gain. Otherwise, what would be the point? Six months ago in the same state, there was a similar incident involving a 19-year-old self-acclaimed native doctor. “One Alex Ezekiel, now deceased, went to the ‘native doctor’ to have (bullet-proof) charms prepared for him. After preparing the charms, the native doctor tried to test the efficacy by shooting the deceased with a gun,” according to a statement by the state police command spokesman, SP Moses Yamu. “Unfortunately, the deceased sustained fatal injuries and was rushed to Ifejola Hospital, Igarra, where he was certified dead by a medical Doctor.”
I am almost certain that the young man was looking for ‘insurance’ against bullets with his eyes on a life of crime, possibly armed robbery or kidnapping. So commonplace is the lure of instant wealth that there is a growing belief that some people can create billionaires from charms or ‘fortify’ criminals against detection. Rooted in ignorance and superstition, this is also an African challenge which then explains why albino and people suffering with a hunched back are perpetually endangered on the continent. In 2017, for instance, bald men in Mozambique were warned by the police that they could be targets of ritual attacks, after five such men were murdered within a week. “The belief is that the head of a bald man contains gold,” Afonso Dias, a police commander in Mozambique’s central Zambezia province, explained at the time.
This belief has also led to the creation of ‘professionals’ in the field of ‘head hunting’—people who go in search of body parts, particularly the head and sexual organs, for money-making rituals. Since the only way to get such human parts is by committing murder, it is no surprise that ritual killings are now rampant in cities like Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Benin and Kano. Hardly a week passes without the story of someone being a victim of ritual murder. Indeed, incidence of ritual killings is said to account for many missing people in Nigeria today.
Meanwhile, nobody has been able to prove that the charms by these crafty ‘witch doctors’, can catapult people from penury into instant wealth. At least for now, there is no single person who can be pointed to as having become rich because of human sacrifices, except characters in Nollywood movies. The son of one of the native doctors who is in detention, according to Soludo, is a waiter in a hotel in Nnewi. “If it was that simple, why didn’t he make his son a millionaire?” asked Soludo whose intervention on this matter deserves the support of critical stakeholders because it has brought out the sociological dimensions to serious crimes in Nigeria. “One of them (native doctor who is active on social media) has used things like these to deceive our young people that you can become rich without doing any work, as far as you have done Oke Ite (money rituals)”, he explained. “That is why you see young people who wake up in the morning and retire to a beer parlour drinking, hoping to get rich later in life.”
In his lecture at the 2019 convocation of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL), respected Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Godwin Sogolo, FNAL, spoke to the factors that render a social system dysfunctional, using Nigeria as an illustration. While moral disruptions due to ineffective education or damage caused by failure in governance tend to be more gradual and less perceptible, according to Sogolo, “the effects of disruptions caused by severe material needs and cultural invasions are more dramatic and impactful on human character.” Because, as he argued, such “derails the mind of the individual and causes havoc to the collective psyche. The result, in most cases, is the failure to comprehend the purpose of life, leading to moral apathy and unwholesome acts of violence, aggression and criminality, especially among the youths.”
As I have argued in the past on this page, the tragedy of Nigeria is beyond the failure of government; it is that our society is also failing. Although money rituals have been with us for a long time, the current prevalence can be situated within the context of Sogolo’s thesis. If you listen to the lyrics of most of the artistes who now rule the airwaves and are idolized in social media, dishonest living to make money is what most of them now glorify, in addition to peddling obscenities. And many of their young followers are being conditioned to believe that in life, only the end justifies the means.
Last September, the Kogi State Police Command paraded four suspects in connection with killing a 19-year-old female level student at the Federal University Lokoja. All the interactions that led to the tragic drama started on social media where the prime suspect first befriended his victim before they met physically. In his chilling confessional statement, the 20-year-old boy who lured the deceased girl to the bush before killing her for the purpose of ritual money, also said he met the native doctor—to whom he took her eyes, lungs, liver, tongue and other body parts—on TikTok before they then exchanged messages on WhatsApp.
Although the boy hails from Chikun local government of Kaduna State, he admitted coming to Lokoja to ‘hustle’, and then met the girl who fell for his tricks. “I already had it in mind that I want to use her for ritual. I bought codeine and Sprite and mixed it up and gave it to her. When she drank it, I told her, let us go to my house and she agreed. When she felt weak, I took her to an uncompleted building close to my place and strangled her to death…” he told the police. “The native doctor who resides in Ibadan sent a driver and brought calabash and a knife. It is the knife I used to remove parts of her body…” which the driver took back to Ibadan. These body parts were then processed into making a soap that was sent to the boy. Interested readers can consult Mr Google for the gory details and names of culprits in all the cases I have cited.
What should worry us is the growing sociological problem that we must address. In practically all facets of our national life, many of our young people now look for short cuts to success. Such is the moral decay that students (at all levels of our education) want to pass examination not by reading their books but through ‘microchips’, ‘sorting’ and other malpractices for which there are now fancy euphemisms. And for stupendous wealth, they want to make ‘Cheddar’ so they could ‘hammer’ through fraudulent means. Therefore, until we put a lie to this erroneous belief that money can grow out of the body parts of human beings or that there are charms against accountability, the increasing tribe of ‘native doctors’ will continue to deceive young men and women into believing that the surest way to ‘making it’ in life is not by work but rather through ‘money rituals’.
You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
