Money-making rituals

There’s nothing quite as heartbreaking as googling “Nigerian news” and being bombarded with news of suspected ritualists and wanton killings: three young Yahoo Plus Plus  men in custody for murdering  a 20-year old woman, gouging out her eyes and her heart, an uncle who murdered his two nieces – a nine year old and a seven year old – and removed their private parts, allegedly for money-making rituals; a man who claimed that the human head in his room came from a “native doctor” to whom he’d paid N200,000 and who promised him that bathing with the head at 1am every day for a month would make his small business boom; a 47-year-old football coach who was caught with the dismembered corpse of his ex-girlfriend.

Last week, a young, recently graduated nurse was found dead, her corpse abandoned and mutilated. Her intestines removed. The person that shared the news on Twitter – including the video of the corpse in all of its goriness – also shared videos of the young woman at her graduation, and at an after-graduation celebration wearing the same outfit she would be murdered in later that day.

The belief in money/success coming from body parts isn’t new but the killings seem to have risen – together with the rise in abductions for ransom – in recent years, arguably because of the country’s worsening economic situation. So much so that the House of Representatives asked last year for a state of emergency on ritual killings in the country to be declared by the federal government. They blamed, among other things, Nollywood for its depiction of successful money-making rituals using body parts. Kanayo O. Kanayo, they are blaming you ooo. Never mind that in these movies, the perpetrator always regrets what they’ve done and repents of it. Remember Living in Bondage? Didn’t Andy regret his deed, lose all that money go mad eventually?

In any case, what is more baffling to me than folks who can’t tell the difference between movies and  real life, is that even in the most unlikely of places, the belief that money can float out of the open mouth of a sacrificed victim seems to hold firm. In March 2022, the BBC ran an article in which they quoted a certain Dr Olaleye Kayode, a senior lecturer in African Indigenous Religions at the University of Ibadan, who “told the BBC that money-making juju rituals – where human body parts mixed with charms makes money spew out of a pot – really work. The naira notes that supposedly appear “are gotten by spirits from existing banks”.

Okay oo. I guess these are the same kind of spirits that some chancer once claimed could go into the US embassy and get a visa for someone he had prayed for. There ought to be a name for wanting something without having to work for it.  

Folks can believe what they want to believe, no matter how embarrassing and wild (I think) that belief is – but once that belief enters into the territory of doing harm/killing others, then it becomes a menace that must be eradicated. So, how do we solve a problem like ritual killing? How do you convince those who truly believe that bathing with the decapitated head of their fellow human would make them rich that they are being both foolish and evil?  

As with almost everything in life, the best place to begin is probably with a re-education and a rejigging of our value systems. I’ve written extensively in the past about the seeming obscene obsession with wealth prevalent in today’s Naija. Young people wanting to ‘hammer’ but not caring much how, the end justifying the means and so on.  So, we have teenagers wanting to make as much money as possible without working for it, worse, killing for it. In this case, burning the head of their victims – the unsuspecting girlfriend of one of them – in a pot.  

While we try to readjust the settings on the values we hold dear as a society, these criminals must be hunted down and tried for murder. Additionally, the babalawos who encourage them to kill and hack off body parts must be fished out. They too should be punished for their culpability.