The lust for “ritual money” presages Nigeria’s ghastly nature. Its portents fulfill the grisly typecast that has become our fate.
Despite our claims of morality and exaggerated spirituality, the recurrent arrest of teen ritual killers yanks the rug out from under our pretentious ideals.
The most jarring message to date, rattles in Daniel Bamidele’s hymn of progeny as the new fiend. Consider, for instance, the sad case of Samuel, 18, who wanted to be rich. So, he strangled his mother to death and removed her briefs. Then he mounted her corpse and raped it.
The victim, Christiana, didn’t see it coming. Perhaps because no mother ever worries about being murdered and raped by her own son. Samuel pounced on her while she slept, at her residence on Market Road, Ologbo, Ikpoba-Okha local council, Delta State.
The youngest child of the deceased claimed to have acted on the instructions of One Love, a native doctor. He said, “I wanted to use her for money ritual. She was sleeping when I strangled her around 5 am. I was advised by One Love, a native doctor in Oghara, to kill her. After killing her, I slept with her. The native doctor told me to do so and keep her corpse for two days.”
According to him, One Love persuaded him to use his mother for money rituals, and promised to give him N50,000 if he could cut her ears and fingers, and bring them to him. But just before he disemboweled his mother, he got caught. His grandmother saw him with her daughter’s lifeless body and sounded an alarm, which led to the teenager’s arrest.
Six years since the gory incident, Nigeria still grapples with the chimera of bloodthirsty teens as young as 15 years, prowling the country’s neighbourhoods for anyone they could kill for “fast money.”
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed that over 150 ritual killing cases were recorded in the six months leading to January 2025. NAN reports that the police apprehended many of the ritualists including a youth who killed his mother, grandmother, sister and her son on November 27, 2024 in Amaeze, Nsukka Local Government Area of Enugu State.
On Friday, April 5, 2025, in Anambra State, Chidozie Nwangwu, Onyebuchi Okocha and Ekene Igboezekwe were arraigned before Justice Jude Obiorah on charges bordering on their claims to possess supernatural powers to perform money rituals and conspiracy to commit felony, to mention a few.
The three suspects were reportedly arrested by the Agunechemba security outfit as Anambra sought to purge itself of ritual killings, armed robbery, kidnap for ransom, among other crimes.
“We went to the places where these people make the charms they call Okeite, bearing people’s names and pictures. We saw thousands of Okeite. Bad people have entered our land. They are not invisible like the air; they are human beings, and we know them. If you see any of them, just draw our attention to them,” urged the Anambra governor, Prof. Charles Soludo.
Yet, the most jarring message to date, rattles in the hymn of progeny as the new fiend. Against the backdrop of the killings, Nigerian lawmakers have called for an intervention by the state. First, they must deal with the surfeit of incidents establishing teenagers’ reckless lust for money.
Recall that on January 29, 2023, in the misadventure of the quartet: Wariz Oladehinde, 17, Majekodunmi Soliu, 18, Abdul Gafar Lukman 19, and Mustakeem Balogun 20, who were arrested by men of the Ogun State Police Command for allegedly killing a girlfriend of an accomplice for money-making ritual.
On interrogation, they confessed that what they were burning in the clay pot was the severed head of the girlfriend of their accomplice. They gang-raped her before beheading and cooking her.
Their actions aren’t accidental; from plotting to execution, a hideous smattering of bestiality manifests as society’s just deserts. Yet the boys are neither freaks nor social accidents, they are simply karma coming home to roost.
The frantic lunge for sudden wealth by teenagers and young adults establishes the fatal forming of Nigerian maleness, family and society. Toxic families produce toxic wards. Toxic children become toxic citizens. Toxic citizenry become poisonous to nationhood, in the long run.
The interplay of excessive materialism, misandrist-feminism, and the absence of exemplary father figures has foisted upon us a generation of reprobate males.Economic forces aggravate their sense of disenchantment while corrupted gender roles and the denouement of masculinity afflict them with greater confusion.
The lust for “ritual money” presages Nigeria’s ghastly nature. Its portents fulfill the grisly typecast that has become our fate.
Despite our claims of morality and exaggerated spirituality, the recurrent arrest of teen ritual killers yanks the rug out from under our pretentious ideals.
The most jarring message to date, rattles in Daniel Bamidele’s hymn of progeny as the new fiend. Consider, for instance, the sad case of Samuel, 18, who wanted to be rich. So, he strangled his mother to death and removed her briefs. Then he mounted her corpse and raped it.
The victim, Christiana, didn’t see it coming. Perhaps because no mother ever worries about being murdered and raped by her own son. Samuel pounced on her while she slept, at her residence on Market Road, Ologbo, Ikpoba-Okha local council, Delta State.
The youngest child of the deceased claimed to have acted on the instructions of One Love, a native doctor. He said, “I wanted to use her for money ritual. She was sleeping when I strangled her around 5 am. I was advised by One Love, a native doctor in Oghara, to kill her. After killing her, I slept with her. The native doctor told me to do so and keep her corpse for two days.”
According to him, One Love persuaded him to use his mother for money rituals, and promised to give him N50,000 if he could cut her ears and fingers, and bring them to him. But just before he disemboweled his mother, he got caught. His grandmother saw him with her daughter’s lifeless body and sounded an alarm, which led to the teenager’s arrest.
Six years since the gory incident, Nigeria still grapples with the chimera of bloodthirsty teens as young as 15 years, prowling the country’s neighbourhoods for anyone they could kill for “fast money.”
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed that over 150 ritual killing cases were recorded in the six months leading to January 2025. NAN reports that the police apprehended many of the ritualists including a youth who killed his mother, grandmother, sister and her son on November 27, 2024 in Amaeze, Nsukka Local Government Area of Enugu State.
On Friday, April 5, 2025, in Anambra State, Chidozie Nwangwu, Onyebuchi Okocha and Ekene Igboezekwe were arraigned before Justice Jude Obiorah on charges bordering on their claims to possess supernatural powers to perform money rituals and conspiracy to commit felony, to mention a few.
The three suspects were reportedly arrested by the Agunechemba security outfit as Anambra sought to purge itself of ritual killings, armed robbery, kidnap for ransom, among other crimes.
“We went to the places where these people make the charms they call Okeite, bearing people’s names and pictures. We saw thousands of Okeite. Bad people have entered our land. They are not invisible like the air; they are human beings, and we know them. If you see any of them, just draw our attention to them,” urged the Anambra governor, Prof. Charles Soludo.
Yet, the most jarring message to date, rattles in the hymn of progeny as the new fiend. Against the backdrop of the killings, Nigerian lawmakers have called for an intervention by the state. First, they must deal with the surfeit of incidents establishing teenagers’ reckless lust for money.
Recall that on January 29, 2023, in the misadventure of the quartet: Wariz Oladehinde, 17, Majekodunmi Soliu, 18, Abdul Gafar Lukman 19, and Mustakeem Balogun 20, who were arrested by men of the Ogun State Police Command for allegedly killing a girlfriend of an accomplice for money-making ritual.
On interrogation, they confessed that what they were burning in the clay pot was the severed head of the girlfriend of their accomplice. They gang-raped her before beheading and cooking her.
Their actions aren’t accidental; from plotting to execution, a hideous smattering of bestiality manifests as society’s just deserts. Yet the boys are neither freaks nor social accidents, they are simply karma coming home to roost.
The frantic lunge for sudden wealth by teenagers and young adults establishes the fatal forming of Nigerian maleness, family and society. Toxic families produce toxic wards. Toxic children become toxic citizens. Toxic citizenry become poisonous to nationhood, in the long run.
The interplay of excessive materialism, misandrist-feminism, and the absence of exemplary father figures has foisted upon us a generation of reprobate males.Economic forces aggravate their sense of disenchantment while corrupted gender roles and the denouement of masculinity afflict them with greater confusion.
Masculinity flows from nature as an aspect of the birth mother, no doubt, but it is sculpted by society and a father figure into humane and effective manhood. The boy-child learns by instruction, counselling, and imitation.
In an ideal setting, the father moulds his character by careful nurturing, awarding punishment for vice and reward for virtue. Where the father is absent or feckless, the child suffers exposure to degenerate blooming, like Afeez Olalere, who was encouraged to use his younger brother for money ritual by his mother; to embolden him, she fed poison to her younger son and watched him die.
Boys are in trouble. They have become Nigeria’s trouble but society shies away from their plight, gagged by dubious gender politics and the notion that males enjoy greater socioeconomic advantages.
More boys drop out of school to become internet scammers (Yahoo Boys) disguised as bitcoin traders, I.T. and forex gurus. Many of them are casualties of dysfunctional families and the changing dynamics of the new global economy.
That the economy has become less friendly to males is a global problem, however. Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education in her group’s study of lower-income adults in college, discovered that men had a harder time committing to school. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counsellors to help them adjust.
The “protector” and “provider” theories of manhood and fatherhood are continually dismissed as credulous and crude, in a modern world where conservative ideals of masculinity are maligned and fiercely rebuffed.
Responding to my query on the issue, a staff of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) told me recently, that his organisation ignores Nigerian boys and adult males in its intervention programmes because the government has failed to make provisions for them at the policy level.
“The Nigerian government and local NGOs do not consider boys and men worthy recipients of any form of intervention,” he lamented.
It is pleasing to see girls and young women succeed. But it is wrong to neglect boys. This is a sure recipe for disaster, the kind that is happening in real time.
There is a reason the ritual money credo is embraced by increasing number of boys. The exasperating nature of their lusts, dysfunctional families, poverty, misgovernance and societal corruption amplify their rationale for embracing a creed of cruelty and carnage.
The situation is aggravated by the frantic fostering and cues from media and literature. Popular culture’s celebration of grotesque and increasingly infantilised versions of masculinity aggravates the malady – from Nollywood’s neurotic man-boys to the bestial and slacker dudes of feminist-misandrist literature.
Credit:The Nation