His body was still warm but the steady stream of blood flowing from his neck showed that he would not be alive for much longer. A pair of scissors was found beside him. The scissors had been swiftly used to cut the vein in his neck while he was still alive and begging for his life. The old farmer who found him raised the alarm but the dying man died before they got him to the hospital.
Five days later, another man, another victim was found not far from the same spot. His jugular vein had been severed with a pair of scissors too. He bled to death, still fully clothed in round-neck shirt and denim.
According to findings, the native doctor behind the scissors ritual has told his clients to bring the ‘life blood’ of a man still breathing that he would be used to concoct a potion that would make them rich overnight. Those two bodies were found somewhere in Ogun State.
Somewhere in Lagos State, policemen at a checkpoint caught a mother and her son with fresh, still-bleeding head of her other son wrapped in a rice sack. The witch doctor had told his client that she had to sacrifice the head of one son to make the other son rich.
In Osun State, it was a young undergraduate who connived with his mother to kill his girlfriend. Their ‘native doctor’ had requested for the heart of a woman for the sacrifice. So the desperate undergraduate lured his girlfriend to his mean mum in Osun. They drugged the girl who thought she was home to meet her future mother-in-law and delivered her to the native doctor who removed her heart. All three were caught with the heart.
In October 2024, a girl was found bound hands and feet in a hotel in Osogbo. Her Yahoo boyfriend had secured her in the room and gone to discuss how she would be sacrificed for rituals to make him wealthy with his ‘collaborators’.
From Kaura Namoda to Uyo, each day these days seem to be throwing in our faces new and more gory cases of ritual killings. The actors are usually young men who have been brainwashed by evil men who have convinced them that there are shorter routes to the market of wealth and success than hard work.
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‘Bring the hymen of a virgin and you will be richer than Dangote.
‘Bring the head of two maidens and you will be richer than Mike Adenuga’
‘All you need to do is bath in broad daylight on a popular street in Lekki’.
‘Rub your manhood with this potion and sleep with seven virgins. All their life’s wealth will be yours.’
Our world is now full of young men who think education is scam and hard work is for the stupid. They have found allies in red-wrapper-tying bigger scammers, and worst still, all of them are being protected by mothers, parents who want to eat the ‘fruits of their labour’ now. Family values and societal values have finally been swallowed by instant wealth and fake native doctors.
Why are our governors afraid to take the axe to the root of this evil, like their colleague in Anambra? Is it that they simply don’t care or are there things they know about this crime they are not telling us?
In developed societies, Yahoo means a new media platform and search engine. In Nigeria, it is a frightening word. It evokes blood, stumps of bodies without heads and female corpses without breasts and gouged out eyes.
It’s not new course of disgraceful dearth of values. It is just worse now. From the days of Otokoto Saga to the 2004 police discovery of Okija shrine in Anambra State, the belief that human organs and blood contain alternatives to hard work and good education have continued to gain traction. Though the emphasis has shifted from oath-swearing diabolical politicians to placenta-eating young men who will rather die young than live long in poverty.
Unfortunately, in most states, the sample horror stories here have ended in varieties of cul de sac embarrassment with the authorities spewing suspicious lines.
‘The case is in court.’
‘It has been adjourned till next year.’
‘Investigation is still on.’
Even where there were convictions, the governors were too afraid to sign death warrants where they were necessary.
At the very best, the governors and the government organised workshops and seminars where they had ‘robust discussions’ by already ‘robust panelists’ who dissected papers delivered by very robust scholars.
End of story. So, the ritual continues.
Enter Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo, Governor of Anambra and former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. He had had enough of the fake DiBia nonsense and deceit. So he took an axe to one of the roots of the problem, the scammers posing as powerful native doctors. He hauled them into jail; charms, incantations, red wrapper, everything. And if you were expecting them to mumble some magical lines, hit their feet on the ground and disappear out of police custody, it didn’t happen. Maybe they couldn’t do it because they did not have such powers or their areas of specialty were money rituals only. Maybe they just didn’t want to frighten Governor Soludo. Whichever one it is or was, Prof has humbled the fake native doctors. And why shouldn’t he? Their offenses are great.
The Governor has hard evidence. ‘One of the native doctors from Okija we arrested who is always boasting of making people rich under four days, his son is a waiter in a hotel in Owerri. ‘
Don’t laugh, there’s more.
‘They make our youths believe they could carry drugs abroad and when they enter the airport, the white man’s scanner will go blind and they will go with their drugs. When they get arrested, they tell them it’s because they winked at a woman at the airport and that was why the charm failed.’
Pathetic! You see why Prof was pissed! Anambra State has ‘representatives’ in every jail across the world because of these fake men.
Professor Soludo’s pain, like that of his other colleagues, is the deceit of these fake native doctors and how they continue to let our young men get into foreign jails instead of into wealth. To prove that he knew what he was doing, he gave all the arrested old ‘scamping’ rascals (as my late boss, Dimgba Igwe would have called them), get-out-of-jail-free-cards; disappear from police custody and all charges will be dropped.
When I heard that last part, I was happy for them and waited for the news of their magical escape. But no, these fake native doctors ‘fall my hand’. Their “ofe’or ‘egbe’ did not fly them out of police custody. All 30 of them could not. Their ‘oke-ite’ failed. The ones who were not caught have since fled with their fake tails in between their frightened legs.
Seriously, how did we get to this point where all our inadequacies are now research materials and topics? Once upon a time, our family values used to be objects and subjects of pride. Young men had role models in the society. Daughters wanted to be like their mothers. These oke-ite hawkers and babalawos-without- NAFDAC-numbers knew that the family units have failed so they moved in to raise our unraised children. They saw parents chasing what was not running and steadily moved into our children’s heads and minds to teach them evil. With ordinary chalks and dusting powder with two yards of red fabric as paraphernalia, they turned themselves into destiny changers.
Bring blood.
Bring human heart.
Kill your grandfather.
Bring the breasts of the woman you love most.
The scamming rascals promised our youths invisibility and invincibility. They filled their heads with all kinds of alternatives to the truth and the gullible, untrained and unbaked children end up in world prisons instead of on world map’s achievement in science and technology.
The real native doctors who inherited real powers from their forebearers are still where they are. They do not boast, they do not advertise. With the number of ritual killings that have been reported, shouldn’t Nigeria be full of billionaires? Shouldn’t our economy have improved? Why are our roads full of vehicles that were manufactured 20 years ago after several severed manhood and harvested organs?
Where are the parents who will save our tomorrow? Why are our governors afraid to take the axe to the root of this evil, like their colleague in Anambra? Is it that they simply don’t care or are there things they know about this crime they are not telling us?
*Egbemode ([email protected])
