LEWIS OBI
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THE beheadings in Abia State University (ABSU) are perhaps the latest symptom of how sick the Nigerian society has become. The country is back-sliding, returning to a state of nature, retreating into the jungle, losing the gains of the last 80 years.
Two 3rd year university students were beheaded and it was as if nothing actually happened. Not a single arrest has been reported. The university appears unperturbed. The Vice-Chancellor Prof. Eleazar Ikonne visited the scene of the beheadings and advised ABSU students “to desist from cultism.”
The Abia State Government is reported to have set up a committee, in other words, the government intends to do nothing about the atrocities. In more enlightened times, the university would have been closed, even if only in memory of the murdered students, even if only to protest the barbaric, dastardly manner of the murders. Indeed, Prof. Ikonne should have been invited by the visitor and asked to hand over to his deputy, to relieve him of the burden of running a cultists-infested university. The students themselves ought to have been given some time to rest at home and to re-appraise their careers. It is obvious that some of them would have done much better serving as assistant butchers at the killing camps of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
A university that breeds violent cultists, or accommodates them, or turns a blind eye to their activities, as the ABSU has demonstrated more than once, is on the wrong track. Its contributions to society are likely to be largely negative. Many of its products would be more like viruses which are bound to infect the society with devastating consequences. Lecturers have been known to award marks under death threats of such evil cults. Students have been known to surrender their loved ones because a cultists’ leader covets someone’s girlfriend. Unless ABSU is reorganized and re-orientated, under a new management that would decree zero-tolerance to cultism and savagery, Abia State Government would be wasting the people’s money.
The seven students, including Prof. Wole Soyinka, who are credited with having founded the first Nigerian campus fraternity in 1953 known as the Pyrates Confraternity must be lamenting what they had unleashed. At a time Joseph Conrad’s the Heart of Darkness was the image of the African, it is understandable why Nigerian university students should want to demonstrate how proud they are of their African and Nigerian heritage. They also wanted to tackle the issue of tribalism, to protest the imposition of foreign conventions, at a time of colonialism, and to protest what they called ‘elitism.’
African heritage, to them, included the worship of traditional African gods, paganism and superstition, and the proud embrace of traditions and cultural practices and dressings. Prof. Soyinka wrote a whole body of literature in support of those beliefs and practices which was highly acclaimed worldwide and which in no small measure helped clinch the Nobel Prize for Literature for him.
No one is still sure now at which point the confraternity crossed the line and turned into murderous secret cults. But we did have traditional secret cults which were often credited with enormous powers, much of which no one was ever able to prove, power which probably did not exist. But the perpetuation of superstition has been maintained by our traditional beliefs and the high level of injustice prevalent in the system. Again, phenomena of everyday life have to be explained, and much of it goes up to superstitious beliefs. The most popular rave today is the so-called “money ritual” by which so many Nigerians have come to believe that money could be made through no effort at all than fetish practices and fetish sacrifices, including, perhaps, human sacrifices.
A university environment by design should proclaim the direct opposite. Yet every year, scores if not hundreds of young Nigerians are killed in our campuses as these evil cults compete for supremacy. The beheadings at ABSU were over the competition between a campus cult known as the Mafia and another known as Burkina Faso. One of the leaders of the Mafia known as “Biggy”, a final year Microbiology student, died in one of those contests. After his burial on the 12th March, the Mafia cultists in their primitive superstition went into an orgy of violence in which they beheaded in the fashion of ISIS, Chukwuebuka Nwaigbo, student of Estate Management, and Samuel Nwokolo, a political science student.
The unwillingness of the Federal Government to take strong actions against the cults is responsible for their persistence and their impunity as they spread their terror from the University of Benin through the University of Port Harcourt to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. And part of the problem is that the cultists are often the children of the most powerful men in society – governors, senior police officers, senators, ministers, commissioners, deans, professors and traditional rulers. Of the hundreds of Nigerians students killed on Nigerian campuses through the past 10 years, there is no record of anyone having been sentenced to a prison term for the crime.
University security outfits are left to prevent these crimes, but anyone with the faintest idea of the capabilities of these cults would know they are nothing short of organized crime and can only be countered by strong, determined effort by a specialized investigative force which probably would labor for years to be able to break the circle.
The vice-chancellors are not being held accountable enough for the cults. It is not enough to exhort students to avoid cultism. Unless the leaders of the universities push and utilize every means at their disposal to fight the scourge, including having to resign in a case where students were actually murdered or severely injured, as occurred in ABSU, cultism in Nigerian campuses would never end. It will continue to weaken the Nigerian university system, corrupt the society and entrench mediocrity.
It is short-sighted to view the cults as merely a campus phenomenon. These are the organizations that perpetuate corruption in Nigeria, which act as militia for hire available for politicians. They train and lead the thugs who make Nigerian politics an armed warfare.