Taju already knew his mother, Alhaja, was going to have something to say about this visit by Rahman. She vetted all his friends and would question them like she was the Nigeria Police. And we all know that when the Nigeria Police mean to ‘interrogate’ a suspect, they can make him confess to crimes committed before his parents ever met. Alhaja did not use the same ‘friendly’ tactics as the men of Area F Command but she was equally effective. So it was no surprise when she materialised as if by magic just as he let Rahman into their modest home that the first question was “What is your name?” “Rahman” Taju replied. The look his mother gave him silenced him immediately. She turned back to hapless Rahman, smiling. “Whose child are you” she asked, in Ibadan-accented Yoruba. Even before Rahman answered the question, sadness already clouded his face. He knew about Alhaja and though Taju had assured him she wasn’t home and it was alright for him to visit, he had been quite reluctant. “Owokoniran” he said, barely above a whisper. Alhaja glanced at Taju, who knew he was in serious trouble. Still smiling, she asked Rahman if his parents wouldn’t be looking for him already and maybe he should go home. It wasn’t a suggestion. As Rahman slouched off, Taju wished he could go with him. He knew what was coming next.
Over 45 years later, my friend has not forgotten that day. Rahman’s father, Owokoniran was a well known brigand and robber. Nobody wanted to be associated with him publicly and his children were pariahs to the other kids in the neighbourhood. Those were the days when a child could not come home from school with a pencil that did not belong to him without a darned good explanation of how it got into his possession. A good name was valued above gold and silver was the mantra. You definitely did not become popular or have hundreds of thousands of followers simply because you woke up one morning with inexplicable wealth. No matter how many ‘giveaways’ you did (and most families would shun them anyway), you were still seen and known for what you were – a thief. We did not have euphemisms for chicanery. Once you had wealth that the community could not tell how it came about, you were a thief. Not a hustler, yahoo boy, guyman, ritualist, cultist, or any other nomenclature that tend to deflect from the fact that you were a scoundrel, unbefitting of honour in the society.
Sadly, it appears like those days are a distant memory, so far gone you wonder if they ever were. Was there ever a time when Nigerians actually looked down their noses at people who acquired illicit wealth? People below the age of 40 could be forgiven for thinking that such a time never existed. A time when someone aspiring for public office was expected to be of unimpeachable character. We have become inured to evil. Now we have proverbs like “everyone is a thief, it is who gets caught that is barawo”! We no longer expect to have ‘Saints’ aspire to leadership. We are comfortable promoting people for the Presidency that we know were thieves who beat the law and got away with it. We have become a nation of anything goes. I asked a question on my Facebook page a couple of months ago to which I have not received an answer. I asked readers to suggest to me any aspect of our national life that was not corrupt or corrupted and I would show them the lie. Its been almost two months and nothing yet. From the pulpit to the prisons, from the Ivory towers to the mechanic workshops, from Aso rock to the markets, it’s a tapestry of iniquity. Nothing is sacred and nowhere is immune. How can we then be saved?
More recently, the public space has been suffused with stories of killings of a ritualistic nature by all manners of people. From grandfathers to teenagers as young as 17, all of who want to ‘hammer’ or ‘make it’ by any means possible. They have bought into the deception that it is possible to become rich by killing another human and harvesting their organs for the purpose of making some potion that would make them rich. The absurdity of the fact that the person that is telling them what to do is dirt poor is totally lost on them. Once, I came upon a group of young men discussing ‘Yahoo plus’ and how that was the latest thing in town. The chap that had the group spellbound with his tales of how this person or that person had made it through ‘money rituals’ was on a roll. I listened with rapt attention until there came a break in transmission. I asked the group what I thought would be an obvious question: how does the ritualist actually get the money? There was silence. For clarity, I asked again: does he get physical cash (dollars or Naira) delivered to his bedroom by a demon with vertical growth challenges or does his account balance just change from N300.00 to N300,000,000.00? I could see the agony on the face of the Lead Speaker as his brain struggled to come up with something, anything, that would make sense. He finally gave up with “Im sure there is a way. How then do they become rich?”. I asked him if he knew one single person that had become rich from being a ritualist that wasn’t either a drug dealer, scammer, or robber? I tried to explain that since it wasn’t possible for your account to suddenly contain money you didn’t deposit in there unless there was a glitch in the banking system which would be quickly found out (despite the blatant criminal assertions of the fraudster parading himself as a Pastor) and a demon would have to get the cash from somewhere unless it printed counterfeit notes, the money must have come from some earthly endeavour, legitimate or criminal. Killing people for money rituals was a fable. I was even ready to accept that harvested organs were being sold on the black market for medical purposes.
I am not sure how much of a dent I made in their long-held foolishness. Especially when they are daily bombarded with deceitful information, often reinforced by figures of influence, that this madness is real. I know I sowed a seed of doubt in somebody though. I hope it grows and he passes it on. All people of goodwill have a responsibility to counter these lies that are feeding what is fast becoming a virus in the land. Anyone that thinks he is safe wallows in self-deceit. I recently saw a report of some Secondary School teenagers who had murdered a girlfriend of one them (I still find it hard to process) to use for ‘money-rituals’. They confessed they got the idea and formula from a Facebook Group they joined. I checked out the Group and it had 27,000 members. That is 27,000 potential ritual killers. In the course of investigating the Group, I found another one with 52,000 members and a third with 75,00o! Allowing that some members might belong to all 3 Groups, I still guess we are looking at over 100,000 potential murderers. Now if that isn’t scary, I don’t know what is. And these are public Groups with membership growing on a daily basis. Teenagers killing people for money! Mind-boggling!
Nigeria is in dire straits. There is an urgent need to address the epidemic of greed that has bred this insanity. When people of no pedigree who suddenly start flashing money around are celebrated by the media and revered in the society, then we give tacit endorsement to evil. Already, scamming and ‘yahooing’ have almost become legitimised with arrests by the EFCC serving only to burnish the credentials of the fraudsters. Our musicians eulogise them and their activities in song and our politicians are not ashamed to fraternise with them. Even the Clergy stand on the pulpit to receive slaps with wads of notes from mangy looking fraudsters who should be scared of stepping into a church. Parents encourage their children to go into the practice and even enrol them in schools for ‘Yahoo’. A friend once told me that when he went to his hometown as a struggling ‘Youth Corper’, he was asked: “no be the same Lagos wey Fred dey you sef dey?” Fred was the most notorious fraudster in Nigeria at the time, despite being a lawyer. This was about 30 years ago. Today, Fred’s wife and accomplice is a long-serving Legislator, making laws for the rest of us. And she is not alone.
Truly, Sodom is here!
– Bakare is a public commentator