We used to know what human sacrifice looked like.
There was usually a wicked king, a frightened village, a greedy priest and an angry god who apparently had an insatiable appetite for other people’s children. There was a god that would demand a virgin, twins or the first son of a particular family. Drums would roll. Mothers would wail. The victim would be dragged to the shrine, sometimes in broad daylight or at night. We all have heard such stories, right?
Then civilisation came and we congratulated ourselves. We abolished the evil forests. We retired the bloodthirsty priests. We stopped burying human beings with dead kings and ended a dark era.
Or so we thought.
But did human sacrifice really leave? Perhaps it simply acquired a new face, possessed a new body, moved from the evil shrine, opened an office, a bank account and printed a business card.
The shining Italian shoes and designer wears had us fooled. The flowing agbada and assuring smiles deceived us.
The blood-sucking shrine is back in its gory glory! The priests have formed a deadly cult where members speak ‘English’ during the day and drink blood at night. Their sputum is frothy white but their bellies are full of snakes.
They have shrines everywhere. We are just pretending that they are not there. Don’t you think the new shrines is a mining pit?
Perhaps the new oracle simply says: Profit must not fall.
Thirty-seven human beings died after being taken into the custody of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps in Niger State. They were among 67 artisanal and suspected illegal miners arrested during operations around M.I. Wushishi and Lukoto on September 15 and 16. What precisely killed them is now the subject of several investigations. Survivors have spoken of overcrowding, poor ventilation and desperate struggles for air. The NSCDC initially mentioned a suspected disease outbreak, but its national authorities subsequently said the actual cause had not been established. The Federal Government has suspended officers involved and set up an independent committee.
Those are the facts we know.
We must not manufacture the ones we don’t but there is another question that an autopsy cannot answer.
What kind of society produces children and young men desperate enough to crawl into dangerous holes in the earth so that other people can become rich?
That is where my human-sacrifice theory begins.
I am not talking about calabashes, incantations, white pigeons or blood poured at midnight at a crossroads.
I am talking about the human sacrifices we make to the god of greed every day in Nigeria.
Consider the profile of today’s cult of priests.
Their own children are investments; other people’s children are implements.
Their children study in London, holiday in Paris and complain about slow Wi-Fi in New York.
Somebody else’s child descends into a dangerous pit so that the money keeps coming.
Their children have tutors.
Other people’s children have shovels and wheelbarrow.
Their children do internships in air-conditioned offices.
Other people’s children dig for gold.
Their children are told, “Be careful, darling.”
The poor man’s child is told, “Enter there.”
And if he does not come out?
Well, there are many hungry boys outside.
That is the obscenity we should be discussing.
Illegal mining is not powered by ghosts. Gold does not wake up in Niger State, dig itself out of the ground, climb into a sack, find transportation and mysteriously enter the marketplace.
There is a chain.
Somebody finances something.
Somebody supplies equipment.
Somebody buys.
Somebody transports.
Somebody sells.
Somebody profits.
Those who are paid to suffocate other people’s children will also live long enough to watch their own children struggle for breath.
And somewhere near the bottom of that food chain is a desperately poor Nigerian whose principal qualification for the job is that he is hungry enough to risk dying.
Then we arrest him and call him an illegal miner.
Maybe he is.
The law must take its course.
But where are the prosperous people in the chain?
Where are the men who do not look like miners because their fingernails are clean?
Where are the people whose clothes never smell of the pits?
Where are the people who know the international price of gold but may never have held a shovel?
Nigeria has developed an extraordinary talent for arresting poverty while wealth drives away.
We catch the boy carrying the sack.
The man who owns the business is on the phone asking somebody whether Heathrow is foggy.
This is bigger than mining.
It is our national business model.
Look at our roads.
A government awards a road contract. Somebody collects mobilisation. Somebody inflates something. Somebody supplies half of what was specified. Somebody signs a certificate saying everything is wonderful.
Then rain comes.
The road develops craters.
One night a bus enters one of them, somersaults and a family dies.
We call it an accident.
Was it?
Money meant to prevent that death disappeared into somebody’s account.
Nobody stood at a shrine.
Nobody chanted incantations.
But human beings died so that somebody could have more money.
Tell me what to call that.
We budget for hospitals.
Somebody eats the money.
A woman arrives haemorrhaging after childbirth. The hospital has no blood. The equipment is not working. The doctor improvises. The woman dies.
We say maternal mortality.
Very tidy phrase.
No fingerprints.
No murderer.
Just statistics.
Meanwhile, somewhere, somebody who participated in eating the hospital budget is flying abroad for his annual medical check-up.
His prostate must be protected with the best technology money can buy.
The poor woman’s uterus can negotiate with God.
Human sacrifice.
We award contracts to build schools.
Someone takes the capital and the profit together and go shopping.
Children sit under leaking roofs. Teachers teach without equipment. Laboratories contain three test tubes and one dead Bunsen burner. Another generation graduates badly educated and unemployable.
The contractor’s children attend schools where robotics is an extracurricular activity.
Then he returns home and complains that Nigerian graduates are not employable.
Sometimes wickedness has excellent diction.
And now mining.
Look at the ages reported in some accounts of the Minna tragedy. Reuters reported that many of those who died were teenagers between 14 and 18.
Children.
At 14, a child should be fighting with his mother over homework.
At 15, he should be discovering deodorant and believing every girl in school is looking at him.
At 16, his biggest excavation should be searching the refrigerator for the piece of chicken his sister hid.
He should not be burrowing into the earth for minerals that will make adults rich.
Yet poverty rearranges childhood.
Hunger steals adolescence.
Desperation issues employment letters that no responsible company would dare print.
And greed waits at the other end.
That is why I refuse to look only at the 37 bodies.
I want to look at all the angles.
Follow the mineral.
Follow the money.
Follow the licences.
Follow the buyers.
Follow the trucks.
Follow the exporters.
Follow every naira and every dollar until we reach the people whose palms are soft because other people’s children have done the digging.
If crimes were committed, prosecute those responsible at every level.
But please, don’t give Nigeria only the poor boys.
We already know how that movie ends.
The poor man becomes the face of the crime while the rich beneficiary becomes a stakeholder.
One is paraded.
The other watches from his yacht
One is photographed sitting on the ground beside exhibits.
The other sits in the front row wearing agbada.
Sometimes they even invite him to speak about youth empowerment.
Nigeria can be wicked with a straight face.
We must also demand the complete truth about what happened after these particular miners were arrested.
Thirty-seven people cannot enter the custody of the state and simply become a sad press release.
They had names.
A list of the dead has now been published: Ibrahim Sani. Fahad Sa’adu. Abdulsalam Ismail. Usman Aliyu. Abubakar Alhaji. And 32 others.
Not 37 statistics.
Thirty-seven someone’s sons.
Thirty-seven voices.
Thirty-seven stomachs that got hungry.
Thirty-seven people who woke up on their last morning without knowing that they had run out of tomorrows.
Whatever the investigations ultimately establish as the medical cause of their deaths, accountability must follow the evidence.
And after accountability, Nigeria needs to ask a harder question.
Why are there always enough desperate poor people available for dangerous work?
Why is poverty our cheapest raw material?
Why do powerful people repeatedly prosper from systems whose risks are borne by people who have almost nothing?
Therein lies my anger. Those ancient priests at least admitted that a sacrifice was being made. The town crier went round the village to announce a sit-at-home, a curfew. The people knew that anybody who defies the order became the ‘oluwo’ , the one whose blood was used to cleanse and appease.
Now that we are sophisticated, enticement and entrapment are the carrots of seduction. Children whose destiny had already been twisted by terrorists are further entrapped by blood-sucking billionaires to work as semi-slaves on mining sites with diggers and shovels! Are there not equipment designed for gold exploration? What these mean investors do, would they wish it on their own children?
‘Omo olomo l’a ran nise de t’oru t’oru.’
The Yorubas among the modern priests should interpret that to their partners in crime.
But we are all complicit. Out of fear, we are all guilty of criminal silence.
Negligence.
Illegal mining.
Poor regulation
Substandard construction.
Lack of equipment.
Overcrowding.
Administrative lapse.
The list of the charges against both the government and the governed is long.
We have found long English expressions with which to bury poor people.
But strip away the grammar and sometimes what remains is brutally simple:
Somebody wanted money badly enough to accept that somebody else might die.
That is the shrine that must be dismantled.
Not with cutlasses.
Not with incantations.
With investigations. Prosecutions. Regulation. Working institutions. Transparent mineral supply chains. Contractors made to deliver what they were paid to deliver. Public officials made to account for public money.
Mining businesses must be forced to account for who actually enters their pits and under what conditions.
And, above all, with a country that finally decides that the poor man’s child is not disposable.
That helpless, dirty and desperate child is also an investment.
His mother carried him for nine months too.
His father named him.
Somebody celebrated his first steps.
Somebody once stayed awake because he had fever.
Somebody had dreams for him before poverty reduced those dreams to someone’s meal. His life cannot become worthless because his country and government put personal wealth above his welfare and security.
He cannot become an implement simply because another man’s son needs school fees in London. His blood should not be used to buy big houses abroad.
It is unfair.
It is enough.
‘O to gee.’
If your prosperity requires a permanent supply of the blood of desperate human beings, and orphans from IDP camps whose deaths will not disturb your sleep, what you have built is not a business empire.
It is a shrine.
And sooner or later, you will pay.
Your children will pay.
Those who are paid to suffocate other people’s children will also live long enough to watch their own children struggle for breath.
*Egbemode ([email protected])
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