Alarming killings for rituals

The rate at which persons are killed for rituals in Nigeria is becoming something of a national embarrassment. No day passes without the gory news of people being murdered in most gruesome manner for ritual purpose. Just recently, a 16-year old secondary school student, Raimi Fatai was killed in Abeokuta, Ogun State following the administration of suspected liquid substance on him by his three classmates during a moneymaking ritual.
Before then, one 44-year old, Shaba Samuel was arrested by the Ondo State Police Command for allegedly beheading his three-year old niece, Dieko Adunbarin for moneymaking purpose at Ikara Akoko area of the state. These two incidences are symptomatic of what takes place daily in many parts of the country, whereby some blood thirsty Nigerians go about snuffing the life out of their fellow citizens in order to use their body parts for money making rituals.  Every year, hundreds of Nigerians lose their lives to ritual murderers, who go in search of human parts-head, breast, tongue, sexual organs-at the behest of witchdoctors, juju priests, and traditional medicine men who require them for some sacrifices or for the preparation of assorted magical potions.
Incidentally, Nigeria is a society where most beliefs are still informed by unreason, dogmas, myth making, and magical thinking. Therefore, many still believe that magical potions prepared with human parts can enhance one’s political and financial fortunes. Moreover, they are of the view that juju, charms and amulets can protect individuals against business failures, sickness and diseases, accidents, and spiritual attacks. In fact, ritual making is perceived as an act of spiritual fortification. Therefore, due to ignorance, poverty, desperation, gullibility, and irrationalism, Nigerians murder fellow citizens for rituals. Virtually every day, many police stations nationwide are inundated with reports of missing persons.
Available records show that less than 10 percent of such persons ever returned home. A scary 90 percent of them were not found and the bodies of a negligible number that were eventually seen, dumped either on the roadsides, bush paths or inside gutters, mutilated and their vital organs removed. Killing of human beings for rituals dates back to the ancient times when people used to appease the gods of the land with human blood and for winning wars. One would have expected that such pseudoscience should rather be imagined than witnessed in Nigeria in this 21st century, when other countries of the world are experimenting and advancing in technology.       More baffling is that some Nigerians still indulge in such superstitious process of ritual killings in spite of the escalation of religious groups across the country as well as the exposure of majority of the populace to education and Western culture.
What is, however, very clear is that this is a law and order failure. Indeed, the increasing cases of ritual killings is a poignant reminder that the police and the other security agencies have not sent a forceful message on what awaits the perpetrators of such a most heinous crime. One or two prosecutions and executions of herbalist that are caught asking for and using body parts will send a clear cut message to all of them that government is out to put a stop to this most barbaric of practices in this modern times.