What could be responsible for the rising wave of allegations on the disappearance of male genital organs and witchcraft across the country? That is the burning question our policy makers will have to find answers to and very urgently too.
Perhaps, the way this puzzle is untied will chart the path to effective solutions to festering weird belief systems that have continued to put the lives of innocent citizens at mortal risk. The issue assumed aggravated dimension recently that the Federal Capital Territory FCT Police Command had to warn against the sharing of false information on alleged disappearance of male genial organs in Abuja.
The warning was sequel to mounting mob attacks on innocent citizens over alleged culpability in causing the disappearance of male genital organs. In one of such incidents, one Rokeeb Saheed had accused one Lucky Josiah of causing his male organ to disappear. An irate mob descended on Josiah and was about to kill him before he was rescued by the police.
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After medical examination, the police said Saheed’s organ was found to be in order even as Josiah was treated of the injuries he sustained. But for the intervention of the police, he would have been a dead person over spurious and wicked allegation.
It was a different story for another male adult in the Gwagwalada area of the FCT who was similarly accused. He was not that lucky. He lost his life as a result of the injuries inflicted on him by the surging mob.
Though the police made attempts to save his life, hospital authorities confirmed him dead when he was taken there for treatment. There has been a litany of such false alarms and accusations in and around the FCT in recent times.
Yet, Abuja is not alone in this. The Delta police command just arrested an 18-year old boy for raising false alarm accusing an elderly woman of causing the disappearance of his genital organ. According to the boy, his genital organ disappeared when the woman inside a tricycle touched him.
The accusation prompted a mob to descend on the poor woman beating her to pulp and stripping her naked before rescue came from the law enforcement agencies. On examination, it was discovered that nothing was wrong with the boy’s genital organ.
The police captured the sad scenario thus: “He just lied against the poor woman, a mother, a daughter and a wife. Now the video of her being beaten and stripped naked is all over the place”.
The police are hunting for all those seen in the circulating video for them to face the books. But the harm has already been done. Any respite for the poor woman? What of the rising fad in circulating videos of calamities and sufferings of fellow citizens even when what was direly required at such occasions was help for the victims?
Elsewhere, we are inundated with allegations of witchcraft and associated superstitious beliefs and practices. A mentally challenged woman accused of witchcraft in Ibadan was rescued by the Oyo State government, rehabilitated and sent back to her home.
But in Adamawa State, three women were stripped naked and beaten on allegation of witchcraft. Two of the women were killed in the encounter that saw to the arrest of three policemen for their ignoble role that led to the extrajudicial killing of the women. That is how degenerate the situation has become.
These are just isolated instances of the cascading weird accusations and the jungle justice that trail them across the country. Even as the law enforcement agencies continue to warn against such odious beliefs and practices, they fester because the gullible public believes in their existence.
Ignorance, fear, poverty and disease combine to hold our people hostage to the mundane and the abhorrent. But that is not all. Even among the educated and well positioned in the society, you still find people clinging tenaciously to these fetish and stone-age leanings. Preachers of diverse religious faiths do not help matters either. Their messages, often laden with contents that instil fear on their members, reinforce belief in these noxious practices. It is little surprising such tendencies have refused to wither away.
Sadly, the innocent ones are at the receiving end of this madness. Apart from the intervention of law enforcement agencies when innocent citizens are wrongly accused and attacked, little has come from the government circles by way of engaging the public and interrogating such weird beliefs and practices.
Since these tendencies have refused to fade in the face of increasing contact with modernity, the government has to come up with sensitization programs through seminars and conferences to interrogate the subject matter. It has become imperative to engage these issues to disabuse the minds of the gullible public that they only exist in the imaginations of those who believe in them.
The most recent attempt at such intellectual engagement came through an international conference on witchcraft organized by the Prof. B.I.C. Ijomah Centre for Policy Studies and Research, University of Nigeria Nsukka UNN. It had its original theme as, “Witchcraft: Meanings, factors and practices”.
But as soon as this theme was unveiled, the Nigerian factor crept in. Protests arose from some Christian groups and students regarding the purpose the conference was meant to serve. Allegations were freely bandied that it was going to be a gathering of witches and wizards; an attempt to promote evil.
The promoters were compelled by the UNN management to change the topic or have the conference cancelled. They had to settle for “Dimensions of human behaviour”, as the new theme. But it took a toll on the keynote speaker who refused to be part of the new topic.
The Director-General of the Centre, Prof. Egodi Uchendu was so piqued by these misplaced attacks that she lamented how an ordinary academic engagement was twisted out of context to create confusion.
She captured the contradictions: “Surprisingly some persons erroneously concluded that only witches can discuss witchcraft. We are not witches. We are professors and scholars intrigued by the phenomenon of witchcraft. Our conference is mere academic discussion where we shall review journals and information gathered over the years on the subject matter”.
The frustration of Uchendu illustrates very poignantly the daunting challenge in getting the citizenry part ways with extant prejudices that sustain such superstitious beliefs as the disappearance of male genitals, witchcraft and ritual killings for money. If a purely academic engagement could be so mischievously misinterpreted within a university setting, it remains to be imagined the herculean task in convincing the citizenry that these weird beliefs and practices do not approximate reality.
Nonetheless, the conference held even as the views of experts on the subject matter were quite revealing and instructive. In his paper titled, “The wealthy are no witches: towards an epistemology and ideology of witchcraft among the Igbo of Nigeria”, Prof. Damian Opata argued that the way witchcraft was propagated and believed here had continued to kill the development of knowledge on the subject matter.
Lamenting the deployment by pastors and seers of foreign religions of perceived attacks by witches and wizards to put fear on their congregation, he said witches exist in the minds of those who believe in it and does not exist for those who do not believe in it.
Peter Jazzy Eze, head of department of Sociology and Anthropology, UNN in his paper, “Which Witch? What anthropology knows of the adult Bugbear”, argued that witchcraft did not exist but only existed in the minds of those who believe in it.
For him, science and technology have overtaken superstitious beliefs in witchcraft while urging Africans to drop such beliefs and embrace science and technology that have practical and verifiable applications. These were some of the insights thrown up by the conference that would have been lost had that intellectual gathering been aborted.
But the controversy is a measure of the difficulty in changing stereotypes on superstitious beliefs and practices despite their defects in scientific verification. It is a measure of the country’s level of progress in modernity that people still take quick resort to self-help and mob action to avenge accusations they do not have slight proof for.
The government has a daunting task changing the narrative through sustainable economic development and technological progress.
