If the report of the arrest of three youngsters alleged to have killed their girlfriend, severed her head and burnt same for money ritual has not finally driven home the message about the depth of anomie already threatening to torpedo the already diseased social order, it seems unlikely that the nation will ever learn its lessons let alone profit from such ugly developments.
Were the details not so gory and tragic, it would seem the perfect Nollywood stuff. Crime scene was somewhere in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital; featuring the quartet of Wariz Oladeinde (17), Abdulgafar Lukman (19), Mustakeem Balogun and another individual named Soliu said to be the boyfriend of the victim whose name was given as Rofiat. The chief protagonist, Soliu was said to have lured the girl to his room, where he held her down and asked one of his friends to slaughter her with a knife.
Thanks to a rather vigilant community security guard, one Segun Adewusi; he was said to have raised the alarm on observing four boys burning something suspected to be human head in a local pot. Three of the boys were subsequently picked up by the police who swung into action as the fourth had escaped before they arrived. Mercifully, the lone suspect said to be on the run has since been picked up by the police.
In the video clip that has since gone viral, one of them, Balogun, was heard in a chilling, unnerving tone of about their motivation: “We wanted to use just her head alone for money ritual. Soliu strangled her and he told me to assist him and we cut off her head.” End of story – or destiny!
Familiar? You bet. Of course, stories like these abound everywhere across the country. They only vary in minor details. Recall that last week, I wrote about the Bayelsa’s trio of Emomotimi Magbisa, Perebi Aweke and Eke Prince. As if drawing from the same playbook, the three, all of them said to be 15 years of age, were said to have accosted one 13-year old Endeley Comfort, hypnotised her, and subsequently got her to follow them to the apartment of Emomotimi Magbisa in Sagbama community. There they cut her finger and sprinkled the blood on a mirror for ritual purposes.
Trust Nigerians to pour out their indignations about the anarchy finally let loose on our world. However, like I hinted also in the piece on the five-year old Hanifa last week, killings for money – whether through ransom or for ritual – may have only become the new norm; truth is, it has merely morphed from the ages. To those in wonder about where our famed craze for the filthy lucre and its underlying philosophy of wealth without work would lead, our youngsters have not only handed themselves the baton in furtherance of the disease, they seem in their desperation to join the big league, resolve to teach the rest of us new lessons in un imaginable savagery.
And talking of the myth of so-called blood money and its associated ritual in particular, it is, like several other dysfunctions or derivatives of our intensely religious and profoundly superstitious, pre-industrial society, a phenomenon that has actually endured through all ages. Ever heard of saying of the fear of the gbomogbomo being the beginning of wisdom in the late 60 and 70s? Our rural and not so rural folks left out of the Nigerian gravy, have merely dusted the books; after the long hiatus of the oil boom, they have taken off from where their father left things a short while ago in the cold business of blood money. For the latter-day gbomogbo in his new, fulsome mutation, it is no more than a return to the old craft with all its associated cannibal fiesta.
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Yet, as abhorrent as the cannibal fiesta appears, it is, in fact a summation of the Nigerian society in its many grotesque manifestations.
The other day, I was in company of some fellows, who actually believed that ‘miracle money’ was not only real but divinely sanctioned. The background of course was the controversy which broke after a popular preacher claimed to have conjured those miracle bank alerts and of which many actually testified took place! Never mind that no one has yet successfully explained the origin of the supposed transfers; one is supposed to believe in the existence of the imaginary vaults somewhere minting and dispensing hard currencies for the benefits of the Nigerian believer! Trust the two audiences in Canada and Nigeria where these reported miracles took place: they are almost exclusively Nigeriana!
Back to those fellows; they were quick to remind yours truly of the feeding of the five thousand in the Bible as proof of the infinite possibilities in divine provision and the sometimes unknowable ways that the Divine Hand can choose to get things done. Trust me, I countered with the Biblical story of the Christian avatar, Jesus Christ Himself, when prompted to pay tax thought nothing of invoking the miracle to pay Caesar. Could He not have simply decreed wads and wads of the Roman currency without the need to re-draft Peter from his long-abandoned fishing trade just in time to get the Roman tax authorities off their backs?
Here is what He did: cause Peter to temporarily suspend the new-found vocation of fishing for men’s soul for the gruelling task of going after those troublesome fishes with those rusty nets! Meaning, the Master knew that anything else would amount to conjuring fake or juju money – not backed with the authority of the Roman treasury; suspect currency unlikely to be acceptable to the tax authorities of the time.
As we all know, such delicate care for the rule of process or similar niceties seems unlikely to impress the new money men: not the misguided theologians for whom such things as propriety mean nothing; or the puerile capitalists without the encumbrances of the tough protestant ethic; the con-men yahoo-yahoo or the yahoo-plus boys; the politicians and the bureaucrat who must prey on the public till to make it big. I guess the above will also apply to the head-hunters for whom the human cranium has become the latter day piggy bank where fresh notes (naira or it dollars) are minted. All share in the same sustaining myth – not faith – that sees the end as sufficient to justify the mean-ness! (Apologies to the revered Tatalo Alamu)
Welcome to the new age where money and money alone answereth all things.