Old Beliefs & Modern Media: Ending Ritual Killing in the South West

“I grew up listening to radio programs, watching TV shows and movies, and reading Yoruba newspapers that seem so focused on emphasising the genuineness of various murderous rituals”.

Last week, Nigeria was shaken by the murder of 18-year-old Sofiat Kehinde allegedly by her equally teenage boyfriend, Soliu Majekodunmi and his friends in Abeokuta. The suspects in their confession said they had killed Sofiat in a bid to use her for money ritual.

While murderous money ritual is a very old phenomenon in the South West, Soliu and his friends might be the youngest to have tried it, or perhaps the youngest to have been caught. They broke the record set by 22-year-old Adeeko Owolabi who allegedly conspired with his mother and an herbalist Segun Philip to kill Favour Daley-Oladele, a 22-year-old final year student of Lagos State University in December 2019.

What, however, makes the new case more shocking is the fact that the suspects are claiming to have taught themselves how to prepare the ritual by following materials on a Facebook page. The idea of a bunch of teenagers teaching themselves on killing a human being for ritual is scary.

The South West has now come to face the consequence of allowing murderous ideas to dominate its society unchecked for decades. I grew up listening to radio programs, watching TV shows and movies, and reading Yoruba newspapers that seem so focused on emphasising the genuineness of various murderous rituals. Growing up, it was hard to find anyone who didn’t believe that it was possible to ground human flesh into money or turn someone to yam, or for a human touch in a marketplace to “disappear” someone’s penis.

It was Voltaire who said that “those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” It’s therefore no wonder that some of the young people who have been brainwashed all their lives about the efficacy of rituals are now putting the idea into deadly practise.

The question now is, how do we get out of this self-inflicted jam? An immediate solution is rigorous, community-based law-enforcement. It has to be clear to all that the police will solve every single case of killing or kidnaping to deter people from thinking they can get away with dastardly crimes. Corruption within the police can be major impediment to this as officers themselves have been accused repeatedly of taking bribes to scuttle an investigation. This has to change.

Preventive policing will also be key, relying on intelligence to help prevent some of these crimes. Some proponents of money rituals are on both traditional and digital media and it’s time to end their evangelism. Any idea, religious or otherwise, that threatens human lives has no place in our society and there are laws already to deal with the propagation of such ideas. It’s time to implement those laws.

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There are other possible solutions, but I will end with one that I consider a crucial long-term solution and that’s high-quality primary and secondary school education. The role of education in shaping society and engendering development by moulding children into adults with rigorous minds has already been established so there’s no need rehashing them.

Sadly, the public school system is severely damaged. The World Bank in 2018 had reported that 80% of children in Nigeria who had completed 6 years of education could not read. Some of the repercussions of this can be seen in the millions of young people who have spent up to 12 years in school without receiving any education they can rely on to make a living. They can barely read or write. They have no interest in learning a trade. They have no skills, no hope, no career path but, like everyone else, do not want to live a life of poverty. It doesn’t take any special intuitive skill to know that many of them are going to choose crime. We need to rebuild our public school system and help children expand their worldview and acquire new but legal visions for their lives.

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