Opinion

Yahya Jammeh: A Messiah Of African Dictatorship

Published

3 years ago

September 9, 2021

NewTimes

Dele Jegede In Conversation With Prince Yemisi Shyllon

Toyin Falola

Africa, a continent noted for its immense natural wealth and potential—symbolized by vast arable lands, precious minerals, and a young vibrant population—has failed to fully utilize these assets in achieving progressive socio-economic transformation after sixty years of self-rule. One central reason identified for this misfortune is the prevalent cases of bad leadership. Except for few occasions of exemplary stewardship from the likes of Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, and John Kufuor, Africa’s post-independence leadership history has comprised a litany of sit-tight despotic and kleptocratic regimes—both military and civilian. This tragedy of Africa’s leadership situation is even more apparent when one considers that, about half-a-century or so ago, the indigenous political forces of then nascent African nation-states rallied around ideals of freedom, equality, and good governance to protest against the injustice of colonial rule and demand independence.

The unfortunate post-independence tradition of tyrannical leadership in Africa has followed a pattern where, after independence, a charismatic figure from a politically (sometimes numerically) dominant ethnic group of a typical multi-ethnic post-colonial African state becomes president and assumes complete control of economic and political power through a network of patrimonial/client-patron relationships, and the use of state’s instruments of coercion. Firmly in place, such leaders then initiate constitutional reforms which accord them extensive powers and provide a cover of legitimacy for undemocratic draconian practices. Consequently, protests from politically and, most times, numerically less privileged ethnocultural groups, who are alienated and subjected to deprivation and abuse through the self-perpetuating intrigues of the incumbent, provide the basis for a military coup (take-over), the only other means (after death) of changing such sit-tight leaders.

With military governments, the experience is also mostly similar. Taking a leaf from the ousted dictator’s book, the “interim” military government promises to hand over power after righting the political mess of the ousted government. As such, it schedules transition/handover dates that are repeatedly post-postponed until such a time when its head can, with some confidence, arrange for a transition process—complete with a constitutional coup—that guarantees his/her emergence as president. Such a government, with its military background and extensive constitutional powers, becomes nearly impossible to replace through ballot. It deploys every option available to remain in power, and even when, by some chance, it does lose at the ballot, it voids the election.

However, from the 1990s, Africa has recorded significant transformations in the political systems of many of its countries. These changes involved the collapse of several military and civilian dictatorships, as well as the emergence of rule-of-law-based governments, such as South Africa’s non-racial democracy. Notwithstanding these (democratic) gains , many countries in Africa have continued to struggle with deepening and institutionalizing democracy. As such, there is yet very little check on government impunity, especially in the areas of the abuse of executive power and human rights violations.

At the far left are countries like Togo, Uganda, Cameroon, Chad, and until recently, the Gambia, which are still under the despotic regimes of sit-tight “leaders.” These countries have remained notorious for their hostile political environments, economic hardship, poor records of human rights, and an ever-present threat of conflict. They not only symbolize the threat to Africa’s blossoming democratic culture, but also stand as an inspiration for other despotic ambitions yet lying fallow. As constant reminders that Africa yet faces the possibility of sliding back to the pre-1990s levels of authoritarianism, the event of a political transition in any of these countries mentioned above represents hope; as another vital step away from Africa’s leadership albatross.

One country where recent political developments best capture this patent threat to Africa’s democratic gains is The Gambia. A small, English-speaking, West African country with at least ten different ethnic groups, the Gambia (named after the Gambia River) won its independence from Britain in 1965. And in the more than five decades of its independent existence has had only three presidents! The Gambia’s venture into what has become a long and perilous post-independence leadership history began with the tenure of Dawda Jawara, the country’s first president who went on to rule for almost four decades between 1965 and 1994. Under Dawda Jawara, the country was, for all appearances, a liberal democracy. The political atmosphere was, in principle, one of competitive politicking, complete with regular elections into five-year tenures. However, it was a one-party monopoly state where power was centered around the dominant figure of President Jawara and his People’s Progressive Party (PPP).

With monopoly control over government resources and a dictatorial communications regulations policy, the president’s party maintained an undue advantage over the opposition, which was left weak and in constant danger of being declared subversive. Jawara’s government also imposed strict restrictions on civil society and the activities of political organizations. It was embroiled in numerous allegations of misconduct, including vote-buying, opposition intimidation, and election tampering. And with no limit set for terms, Dawda Jawara was able to perpetuate himself in office as president of the Gambia for thirty-nine years until the Yahya Jammeh-led military coup of 1994.
Twenty-nine-year-old Yahya Jammeh, lieutenant officer and leader of the Armed Forces Provisional Council (AFPC), seized power through a bloodless coup d’état in 1994. Having assumed power, Jammeh, as military dictator (1994-1996), set out to consolidate his power.

Beginning with a suspension of the constitution, Jammeh went ahead to round up and detain some of his superiors in the military. He also placed Jawara’s ministers under house arrest, banned political activities, and announced a four-year transition period to democratic civilian rule. The four-year transition period was later reviewed and reduced to two years in January of 1995 by the National Consultative Committee (NCC). In April, three months after, a Constitutional Review Commission was established. The resultant constitution, which was drawn up to accentuate Jammeh’s economic and political power, allowed for multi-party elections, a limitless number of five-year tenures, and allowed the president to appoint judges directly. Then, Jammeh tactfully retired from the military at the rank of colonel, just a month before the presidential elections of September 1996. He contested during the elections and was declared the winner by an electoral commission of his own selection.

As civilian president, Yahya Jammeh ruled the Gambia with an iron fist. His reign of terror was enacted through a litany of draconian laws and anti-people policies that infringed on the people’s rights to information, expression, and interaction. Typical of a brutal authoritarian regime, Jammeh’s government sought to control information coming in and going out of The Gambia. It reduced state-owned communication networks (both television and radio) to government (Jammeh’s) propaganda outlets and moved to suppress the “independent” press by enacting laws that undermined their operations. Some of these laws included the 1994 Newspaper Act (reviewed again in 2004), which made it mandatory for news agencies’ owners to pay expensive registration fees yearly; the National Media Communication Act, which required journalists to divulge confidential information to the police and judicial authorities; and the 2004 Criminal Code (Amendment) Bill, which stipulated prison terms for defamation and sedition.

Following the enactment of these laws, there were several attacks on the country’s independent press and its personnel. As the years passed and Jammeh successfully influenced the outcome of election after election, his hold over The Gambia’s grew even more resolute. With the aid of armed groups like the defunct “Green Boys,” some state security agencies such as the Police Intervention Unit of the Gambian’s police force, the Serious Crimes Unit, and the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Jammeh enacted his diabolic reign of terror. Individuals and journalists who criticized his government were picked up to undisclosed locations, never to be heard from again. Before long, it became a practice for Jammeh’s rivals at the polls to seek refuge outside the country. Yahya Jammeh gradually reduced The Gambia to his personal fiefdom and started to equate any criticism on his person as sedition, disturbing the nation’s peace.

After a botched coup attempt in 2006, Jammeh became even more resolute in his oppressive strategies against the Gambian populace. People were jailed without trial, there were allegations of extrajudicial killings, and journalists disappeared without traces. Famous amongst his victims were the April 2000 student massacre; the over fifty West African migrants from Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Ivory Coast, and Senegal murdered by the NIA; the one thousand Gambian citizens arrested and tortured on allegations of witchcraft; journalists Deyda Hydara and Ebrima Manneh; and the victims of Jammeh’s fictitious HIV/AIDS cure. These do not include other allegations of rape, embezzlement, and cases of summary detentions for indefinite periods. By and large, Yahya Jammeh became a symbol of all that was wrong with democracy in Africa.

Opinion

Reading List For Public Servants And Reform Managers

Published

8 hours ago

February 5, 2025

NewTimes

Prof. Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

Since its inauguration many decades ago, public administration has generated a permanent discursive framework that ensures that it has the theoretical and practical contents to sustain the professionalism and efficiency that the public service requires to complement the state everywhere. This becomes even more critical given that the democratic imperative keeps articulating and aggregating the significant political preferences of a citizenry that knows what it wants from a leadership and its administrative apparatuses. This therefore means that for public administration to fully and adequately complement the democratic imperative—for the public service to optimally aid democratic governance in any state—the public administrative discourse must always be in full swing to ensure it is not outstripped by the discourse on democracy.

This, I suspect, is not the real challenge. This is because the public administration discourse has remained fundamentally fecund in terms of its inner dynamics of responding to the challenges that confront public administration and the public service over the decades. From Max Weber to Woodrow Wilson, and from the new public management (NPM) to the new governance theory, public administration has kept up with the changing dynamics of the times that enables it to overcome critical hindrances and challenges from the first to the fourth industrial revolutions to the transformation of the nature of the state, and from artificial intelligences to the new normal instigated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the polycrises that have engulfed the world.

The real challenge, I think, derives from the capacity of public servants to keep up their intelligence quotient with the vast array of discourses that public administration throws up. The twenty-first century demands a public servant that is knowledgeable, intelligent, adaptable and a transformative leader with the preemptive capacity to articulate a vision, design a strategy and get things done. This challenge to the intelligent quotient of the public servant, like most issues, is again more crucial once we begin to speak about the postcolonial public servant caught within the dysfunctional grip of a postcolonial public service like Nigeria’s. This puts a double bind on such a public servant to do more in order to be able to live up to the national and global expectations of a twenty-first century public servant charged with the fundamental responsibility of crafting and implementing public policies with the tools of modern decision science.

One significant way, and a most difficult one at that, by which a postcolonial public servant and public manager in a country like Nigeria can keep abreast of the public administration discourse and the challenges of remaining effective sufficiently to man the new public service is to have an up-to-date reading list of books that embody the trajectories of the challenges, triumphs and directions of the public administration apparatuses, especially within a specific context. What I want to do within the limited space of this piece is to outline a few critical books that speak to how far public administration and the public service have advanced. And the methodology is to combine books that provide both global and national perspectives. This speaks to the necessity of inserting a public manager within a global-local context of operation that ensures that such a public manager can think globally and act locally with the discursive resources garnered from such critical intellectual and theoretical-practical resources.

The first book on my list is Zeger van der Wal’s The 21st Century Public Manager (2017). The book is fundamental because it is sufficiently situated in a time that captures the fundamental challenges of public administration in times of crisis (except that it is three years shy of one of the most fundamental challenges to humanity and public administration, the COVID-19 pandemic). However, the book recognizes that we live in a VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—time; a VUCA environment that was aggravated by the pandemic and polycrisis the world, and public administration, are currently confronting. The author was motivated to write a book that demonstrates that “public administration matters.” It is a book that was “hands-on, actor-driven, and speaking to the daily life of public managers who often operate in tough circumstances.” And with the book, the author meant to “speak to (aspiring) public managers across the globe. A book that would take their issues, pains, and challenges but also their optimism, clever solutions, and coping mechanisms as a starting point…. A book, above all, that would take senior practitioners seriously by providing them with examples, perspectives, and strategies grounded in the latest research evidence and best practices while being accessible and actor-driven at the same time. A book, lastly, that would be relevant and timely to public managers in the developing as well as the developed world, in the West and the non-West.”

In chapter four, van der Wal enumerates what he calls the “seven clusters of demands, dilemmas and opportunities” that public managers need to think through to operate optimally within the VUCA administrative environment. The first demand is that of “managing stakeholder multiplicity.” The new governance space now carries the burden of a multitude of stakeholders with diverse and often ambiguous demands, attitudes and styles. The dilemma is how to design and deliver a coherent administrative and managerial vision to such a diverse audience. The opportunity however derives from the benefits of leveraging the unlimited channels and supports that come from such diverse audiences to push through policy goals. The second demand is “Managing authority turbulence.” This implies that an average public manager is caught within an authority matrix that limits her capacity to utilize her formal power to enact critical decisions. The dilemma for the public manager is that of how to demonstrate collaborative capacity, even with those lacking the requisite skills while still holding on to critical authority. And yet, there is the opportunity of shared accountability that comes from the collective ownership of policies and programmes. The third demand for the twenty-first century public manager is “managing the new work(force)”. The public manager is confronted with the changing nature of work itself, and with an emergent workforce that incorporates new workforce, new worldviews and new generations, from Gen Z to Generation Alpha. This new workforce consists of a young, educated, knowledgeable, tech-savvy and assertive citizenry with a mind of its own. The dilemma is that of how to accommodate this new idea of work(force) while pushing it efficiently to achieve service delivery. The opportunity comes from the ability to remove bureaucratic constraints while achieving performance and productivity.

The fourth demand is that of “managing innovation forces.” Innovation forces are the critical resources, especially innovative technologies, that a public manager requires to keep the public service system as optimal and efficient as possible. The challenge however is that of being as innovative and entrepreneurial as possible within the ambit of budgetary limitations and ambiguous expectations from the politicians and the public. The opportunity that faces the public manager is that of experimenting with newer and developing innovation to achieve effective policies. The fifth demand is “managing ethical complexities.” Public administration is now embroiled within a global ethical governance framework that is enhanced by digital technologies and the need for accountability and transparency. The public manager therefore faces pressure from politicians, citizens, global innovations, and so on. The challenge is that of how to manage the public service ethically while facing enormous scrutiny from multiple publics with competing value sets. The opportunity comes from leading ethically in ways that achieve bureaucratic legitimacy for the state. The sixth demand comes from “managing short versus long time horizons.” This situates the public manager within the need to respond to the need for short-term goals by politicians and long-term planning for overall institutional resilience. The opportunity is that of deploying scenario-building techniques and technologies to anticipate future challenges.

The last demand is “managing cross-sectoral collaboration.” This is demanded by the new governance space that involves new and multiple stakeholders and non-state actors. The public manager needs to mediate this space to achieve extensive buy-in and ownership of ideas and policies, generate financial assistances and expertise, and tap into innovative ideas. The dilemma is how to balance this partnership while managing trust and power relations.

In Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector (1992), David Osborne and Teed Gaebler make the critical case that government can follow the logic of performance that have transformed capitalist corporation into performing better and achieving more efficient productivity result. And to make government work more efficiently and productively, the authors argue that government needs to be reinvented through the sweeping away of all bureaucratic bottlenecks that had made government too cumbersome to achieve democratic governance. An entrepreneurial government, as they call it, envisions some broad social goals and objectives, put in place performance management systems that strategize about these objectives, and employ people to sign performance contract to achieve the goals.

Osborne and Gaebler envision the responsibility of government as that of steering and not rowing; government’s responsibility is not to deliver services, but to articulate strategies that will enable the service delivery function to be outsourced to private contractors. Reinventing Government follows up on the managerial revolution brought about by the new public management and the objective of making government more flexible, lean and effective for the sake of performance. It demands that the public manager must be more than a thermostatic administrator who is merely gauging the institutional temperature of the public service. She must be more of a leader; a manager who anticipates challenges and coaxes the public service into more entrepreneurial and innovative performances.

In the 2007 book, The End of Government…As We Know It: Making Public Policy Work, Elaine Kamarck takes on the thread of the need to rethink how government business should be pursued for better result. The end of government as we know it is the end of the idea of government circumscribed by a bureaucracy that encumbers government from performing. It is the end of the traditional Weberian framework of government and its deadweights of hierarchies and red tapes. In the post-bureaucratic state, argues Kamarck, government needs to get tools that will facilitate the right connection between policy design and implementation. These tools are categorized into three: reinvented government, government by network and government by market. All three are meant to get the public sector to work in ways that involve externalities and outsourcing modalities that enable government to achieve efficient performance.

In its 2011 publication, The Future of Government, the World Economic Forum provides more recent contents that sum up the institutional reform objective of bringing the idea of government up to the requirement of the twenty-first century. What the managerial revolution demands is that government must be FAST—flatter, agile, streamlined and tech-enabled. The traditional structure of the bureaucracy, being rigid, inward-looking and founded on outdated competencies, must be modernized in ways that make it more collaborative, transparent, flexible and participatory. In other words, government and its public service must reflect the demands articulated by van der Wal in The 21st Century Public Manager.

The key issue that links all the preceding publications is that of public value that the new public service must create as a response to citizens’ informed demands. This is the focus of Mark H. Moore’s Creating Public Value (1995). In the book, Moore “sets out a philosophy of public management—an idea of what we citizens should expect of public managers, the ethical responsibilities they assume in taking offices, and what constitutes virtue in the execution of their offices.” Within the new managerial imagination, the public manager is more than an administrator who is supposed to look downward in terms of “the reliable control of organizational operations; she is rather meant to look outwards “towards the achievements of valuable results” or upwards “towards renegotiated policy mandates.” A public manager therefore becomes an explorer who is concerned with discovering, defining and producing public value.

These preceding books and publications sum up the global dimension of the materials that ground the postcolonial public managers and the public servants, especially within the Nigerian public service system, within the demands of public administration as a universal endeavor concerned with what the government does and the paradigms, trajectories of discourses and methodologies by which government can become more efficient and more productive. However, this global managerial imagination must be reckoned within the context of the inherited public service system Britain bequeathed to Nigeria. In my inaugural lecture, Big Bad Bureaucracy: Reinventing the Bureaucracy as a New Public Service in Nigeria (2018), I took all these preceding books, as well as my many years as a critical insider in the dysfunctional public service system in Nigeria seriously. The publication therefore becomes a critical leeway into how the Nigerian civil service system, founded on the traditional Weberian institution, works in stimulating what I have called bureau-pathologies that have compromised the search for a workable developmental state in Nigeria, post-independence. And how an insider perspective could enable a proper understanding of what ails the system, what needed to be done and how to go about reinventing the government from an approach that is not just universal, like Osborne and Gaebler’s, or Kamarck’s or Moore’s; but one that is rooted in contextual administrative dynamics. This provides a situational context by which public managers in Nigeria could begin to relate to what these non-Nigerian administrative theorists are saying about the nature of government and the reinvented mandates of the public manager.

This therefore makes even more fundamental the administrative memoir as a cogent introduction to how Nigerian public managers and public servants navigated the dysfunctionality of the postcolonial system while striving for a more efficient and optimal public service that will instigate developmental planning and democratic governance. Two of such memoirs are crucial, in my reckoning: Chief Simeon Adebo’s Our Unforgettable Years (1984) and Tunji Olaopa’s The Unending Quest for Reform (2023). Simeon Adebo represents a critical administrative figure in the emergence and consolidation of the public service and public administration discourse in Nigeria. He was one of the founding pioneers that ushered in what has been called the golden age of public administration in Nigeria. Indeed, his administrative commitment in the old western region led to the formulation of the Awolowo-Adebo paradigm of the politics-administration dichotomy, one of the defining dichotomies around which public administration emerged. Adebo’s public service reform efforts constitute a key framework for rethinking the institutional rehabilitating and reinvention of the civil service system in Nigeria. On the other hand, The Unending Quest for Reform articulates a challenging reaction to the bureau-pathologies that ate up the civil service system after the pioneering efforts of Adebo and his cohorts unfortunately went into critical debilitation. The Unending Quest for Reform serves the function of outlining what I consider a philosophy of institutional reform founded on many years of not only participating in the dysfunction of the civil service system, but also researching its root causes and administrative and political trajectories from pre-independence to date.

I am recommending these books—of course there are more—as the first level of challenging the intellectual acumen of any public manager who is willing to place herself within the VUCA and postcolonial environments of the public service in Nigeria, and dare to be critical sufficiently to become a significant part of the reinvention of the new public service as a world-class institution for making democratic governance productive for Nigerians. It is best to end this reflection about public administration discourse and the books public servants could start reading with Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician: “The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”

. Olaopa, Professor of Public Administration, is the Chairman,
Federal Civil Service Commission,
Abuja.

Opinion

Act Now To End Witchcraft Accusations And Ritual Attacks

Published

5 days ago

January 31, 2025

NewTimes

Witch Burning, Impunity And Abuses Linked to Witchcraft Beliefs In Benue State

Dr Leo Igwe

Dear Sirs/Madams,

This is an open letter to you, Emeritus Professors, Professors, Senior and junior lecturers, deans of faculties, heads of departments, and school teachers. I am writing because I feel heartbroken, disappointed, and betrayed. I write you because I believe, as educators, we are failing in our duty and obligation. I am writing to draw your attention to a disturbing and dangerous trend in our country: witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks. These practices are an ill wind that blows nobody any good. I urge you all to get involved in addressing this menace, campaigning against these harmful practices, and educating and enlightening the public. As you may have noticed, recently, our society has been witnessing a growing wave of attacks and killings linked to witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks. The situation is getting out of hand.

There have been rampant cases of abuse, savage acts, murder of suspected witches, and horrific killing of other human beings by ritualists. Men and women, youths and adults, children and elderly persons have been victims. The perpetrators have mainly been youths. These revulsive acts are motivated by misconceptions about nature and how nature works, by irrational and superstitious beliefs about causes of illnesses, death, and other misfortunes. These barbaric killings are motivated by mistaken ideas about wealth and riches, about how to make money or become successful. Witch hunting and ritual attacks persist because many people are deluded and have refused to confront and combat their delusions and superstitions. Witch hunting persists because many people believe strongly that human beings can turn into birds and cats, that human beings can harm others, and cause accidents and death through spiritual, magical, or supernatural means. These are nonsensical ideas, aren’t they? Ritual attacks take place in our society because many people believe in the potency and efficacy of ritual sacrifice of humans and animals. A notion that is outright hogwash!

Distinguished colleagues, you would agree with me that witch-hunting and ritual attacks persist due to the failure of our schools and teachers to educate and reorient the minds of our students, youths, and other members of society. We must admit that we have failed in our duty as educators and enlighteners of students and society. But we can rectify this failure, fix this problem, and combat the menace of witch hunts. Unfortunately, many lecturers and teachers hold and enable these superstitious beliefs. They reinforce these misconceptions in the minds of their students. Many lecturers are witch hunters; they are witchcraft imputing and exorcising pastors/imams or members of witch-hunting churches/mosques and shrines. Many teachers believe in ritual money, engage in ritual sacrifice, or sanction ritual beliefs and practices. They defend witch hunting and ritual sacrifice of humans and animals as a part of African culture. As intellectuals, we are complicit in this social menace. And our complicity constitutes a betrayal of intellectual and moral trust.

So, I urge you to have a change of heart and mind because our society is smoldering away due to superstitious nonsense. As intellectuals in a country like Nigeria, you are the people’s last and best hope. I urge you all to step forward and provide the intellectual and moral leadership that the situation urgently requires and help get our society out of this mess and danger.

There are two ways you can do this. First, before every lecture or class, remind your students that no one can harm or kill them through spiritual and supernatural means. Tell them nobody turns into a bird and flies out at night to harm others. Tell them that ritual money is fiction and has no basis in reason or reality. Second, liaise with the Advocacy for Alleged Witches to organize a seminar or a debate on witchcraft and ritual beliefs in your institution. Create opportunities for your students to discuss, challenge, and interrogate witchcraft and ritual narratives, exchange ideas, and share experiences.

Please, let’s begin to push back. Let’s start reorienting our students and youths for a better tomorrow.

Treat as urgent

Sincerely

Leo Igwe Ph.D (Bayreuth), Director, Advocacy for Alleged Witches, Affiliate Researcher, Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, University of Lagos. Research fellow, Institute for Policy Research and Integration in Africa, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Tel 08130593605

Opinion

Ritual Killings: Resurgence And Need For Urgent Action In Nigeria

Published

5 days ago

January 31, 2025

NewTimes

Dooyum Dominic Ingye

By Dooyum Dominic Ingye

Before the end of last year, I watched several video clips on TikTok in which some Nigerian youths boasted about engaging in money rituals to get rich. I vividly remember a video showing several young people gathered in the home of a traditional priest for consultation on money rituals. Furthermore, the internet was flooded with videos of young Nigerians declaring, “As 2024 no work for me, na rituals we go do for 2025.” These were disturbing signs of the events that would later define 2025.

Due to the number of ritual killings recorded in 2025, Nigeria’s House of Representatives urged the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency. This was partly in response to figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which indicated that over 150 ritual killing cases linked to young people seeking quick wealth had been recorded in the six months leading up to January 2025. Many of these cases occurred in the western part of Nigeria and the Federal Capital Territory.

For those wondering, ritual killings have always been practiced in Nigeria—from the Ogbuefi and Otu-Edo ritual killings in pre-colonial times to the Otokoto ritual killings in post-independence Nigeria. In 1910, British High Commissioner Sir Hugh Clifford documented various ritual killings in Southern Nigeria. Essentially, where superstitious traditional beliefs held sway, ritual killings were practised.

Prior to Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999, most ritual killings were performed for so-called traditional religious purposes. However, contemporary Nigeria is characterized by exploitative ritual killings driven by superstition, greed, and power. Vulnerable people—such as women, children, and the elderly—are the primary targets.

Many youths who engage in money rituals today likely grew up in the early 1990s and 2000s, a period when Nollywood movies and the media romanticized or sensationalized money rituals. Films such as Living in Bondage (1992), Circle of Doom (1993), Idejimba (1995), Blood Money (1997), Rituals (1997), and Last Burial (2000) effectively promoted ritual themes that not only evoked strong catharsis in viewers but also solidified their belief in rituals and other superstitious nonsense.

During this period, Nigerians were still reeling from the effects of the Structural Adjustment Program, which caused widespread hardship and suffering. Many saw these movies as validation of the effectiveness of rituals, believing that they could be used to escape poverty. These fictional narratives became ingrained in the minds of children who grew up admiring actors such as Kanayo O. Kanayo, Clem Ohameze, Kenneth Okonkwo, Pete Edochie, and others as classic examples of the success of rituals. They aspired to become like the fictional characters these actors played.

Similarly, the release of Isakaba in 2001 actively promoted the belief in magical powers, particularly Odeshi—the belief that certain charms can make the human body impervious to bullets and machetes. Isakaba depicted a society plagued by crime, where the policing system had failed. The introduction of the Isakaba Boys, who possessed magical powers to apprehend and kill criminals, was portrayed as a welcome solution.

The impact of this movie was profound: it resonated with Nigerians’ real-life experiences, and many wished for a real-life Isakaba to deal with criminals. As a result, many Nigerians grew up believing that certain rituals could make them invincible.

Furthermore, Nigeria’s weak law enforcement system has allowed ritualists to operate freely. Corruption and lack of consequences have emboldened those who engage in money rituals, as they see no one willing or able to stop or prosecute them.

Coupled with increased economic hardship—especially in the last two years—and social media pressure, many young people have been driven to kill others for ritual purposes. In a country where wealth is glorified without question, where education lacks critical thinking, and where social values are eroded, the belief that human body parts can be used to attain wealth or power reigns supreme.

These beliefs have led to the deaths of many young Nigerians with promising futures.

For instance, in January 2025 in Ogun State, four teenagers were arrested for the murder of 20-year-old Sofiat Kehinde. They allegedly decapitated her and burned her head, intending to use it in a money-making ritual. In Ushata village, Nasarawa State, a suspect was arrested for allegedly killing his friend’s seven-year-old son for ritual purposes. The arrest followed a report by the boy’s father regarding his son’s disappearance. In Kwara State, Ismaila Saliu, a 25-year-old herbalist, and an accomplice were arrested by the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps for allegedly murdering Saliu’s 14-year-old brother for a money ritual. Reports indicate that he conspired with another herbalist and an accomplice to commit the act. In Abeokuta last month, Taiwo Yemitan was arrested by the Ogun State Police Command for possessing a fresh human head and dismembered body parts of a female victim. Last year, in Isua Akoko, Ondo State, Yusuf Adinohi was apprehended for allegedly possessing eight human skulls.

These killings have created fear and paranoia in communities. Feelings of trust and friendship have been completely eroded. Women and girls, who are often the victims, increasingly see men as dangerous predators. Worse still, ritual killings are now so rampant that ritualists kill their own wives and children, believing that sacrificing their loved ones will bring them wealth. The most sought-after human body parts for rituals include private parts, eyes, breasts, hearts, heads, tongues, and hands.

To address these issues, the government, as the major stakeholder, must take a decisive action by creating jobs and youth empowerment programmes to reduce desperation for quick wealth. There is a need to introduce stricter punishments for ritual-related crimes to deter offenders and to sponsor national awareness campaigns that educate Nigerians on the dangers of ritual killings. It is also necessary to address misconceptions around wealth and superstition by partnering with organizations such as the Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW), which has spent the last four years addressing witchcraft accusations and ritual killings in Nigeria.

This year, AfAW launched the “Stop Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Killings” campaign to tackle witch hunts and ritual killings by teenagers. Now is the right time for the government to support AfAW and end this menace once and for all.

Dooyum Dominic Ingye is the Program Manager of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.