A WITCHCRAFT HAUNTED STATE

Just after midnight, the pastor seized a woman's forehead with his large hand and she fell screaming and writhing on the ground. "Fire! Fire! Fire!" shouted the worshippers, raising their hands in the air.

“I have been delivered from witches and wizards today!" exclaimed the exhausted-looking woman.

This church scene was taken from an Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, CNN report (August 28, 2010.)

It appears some pastors in Akwa Ibom State now specialize in delivering the congregation from what they firmly believe to be witchcraft. The pastors charge a fee for these deliverance sessions.

These Pastors allege that illness and poverty are caused by witches who bring terrible misfortune to those around them. And those denounced as witches must be cleansed through deliverance or cast out. Children are cast out of their homes for causing the premature deaths of their siblings with black magic. Some of the children are thrown into the river, buried alive or stabbed to death. They are beaten and forced to make confessions of killings and causing misfortunes. These children bear the scars of being beaten, attacked with boiling water, and cuts from machetes.

When Mary Mitchell Slessor left Aberdeen, Scotland on August 5, 1876 for Africa, her intention was to touch the lives of the people. Mary Slessor lived all her life in the coastal areas and villages around Cross River and Akwa Ibom States saving twins and empowering women. She was stunned when she arrived and learnt that slavery and the killing of women and slaves was commonplace.

Basically, the people then - and even now from all indications - lived in horrifying and barbaric conditions of superstition, ignorance and sickening cruelty. At that time, twin babies were thought to be evil and were cruelly murdered while their mothers were driven from their homes to die in the jungle. Mary Slessor, despite the inherent dangers, moved around the coastal and riverine villages in an enlightenment campaign. She went on to discover sets of twins abandoned to die and saved them - eventually stopping the hounding of their mothers and killing of twins.

Unfortunately, the age of enlightenment has still not arrived Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria despite Mary Slessor’s inspired efforts. It is still a witchcraft haunted enclave and seemingly some pastor’s delight. Blames for natural incidents and personal misfortunes are still laid at the doorsteps of mystical beings or witch children.

Human (child) sacrifices are still being made to appease the “gods”, stop diseases and dispel ill-luck. Despicable and false prophets are reaping bountifully from the ignorant under the cloak or guise of religion.

Babbling esoteric nonsense and waxing scriptural, they befuddle and hoodwink the gullible and leave them impoverished and worse off. It is a case of the blind leading the blind. The congregation - sheep following blindly, unwillingly to challenge the pastors – are forced to perform criminal and self-demeaning acts.

It is far easier to follow the crowd and beaten path than blaze a new trail. The people, especially the parents in Akwa Ibom State, just need to take their minds out of the Neanderthal age and think independently for themselves and ask more self-enlightening questions.

The state government however feels the incidents are exaggerated. They argue instead, that a new Child Right's bill outlawing child stigmatization has largely ended the problem.

But despite some arrests, so far, the government acknowledges, there have been no prosecutions.

“It’s been blown out of proportion and people are capitalizing, on what ordinarily may be a social problem, across the globe in painting Akwa Ibom state black - that is the aspect we say no to. We will not allow the image of our state to be smeared." said Aniekan Umanah, the Information Commissioner of Nigeria's Akwa Ibom state.

Surprisingly, I haven’t heard or read anywhere else of this social problem trending across the globe, where when night comes, bishops or pastors torture their congregations in the name of deliverances and child witches are cast out.

The dehumanised children of Akwa Ibom State are another sad tale in our abysmal depths of human right abuses. One of the ‘clergymen’ in the state was bold enough to say that he had killed 110 of these children whom he had tagged witches.

It is instructive to note that these spurious allegations and dehumanisation of children has gone on for years. It took the broadcast of a video by the British Channel 4 documentary ‘Saving Africa's Witch Children’ on British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC in 2008 to expose the macabre child-witch situation. That was the prodding the state government finally needed to wake up and intervene in the child abuse, molestation, torture and killings that had been going on for months in the state.

The Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly suddenly woke up from a comatose state after the British documentary was broadcast on their channel 4 with a plea to save the unfortunate children of Akwa Ibom state. They shook off their state of inertia and hurriedly passed the revised Child Rights Law, making it an offence with a punishment of 10 years imprisonment without an option of fine for anyone who subjects a child to inhuman treatment in the process of purporting to cure, purge or exorcise a child of witchcraft. The police also swung into action arresting the ‘clergyman’ who claimed to have killed a 110 of these children. I wonder if he has killed as many as 110 cockroaches in his life-time.

Has human life become so cheap? The suspect, with the self-acclaimed appellation of ‘Bishop’ Sunday Ulup-Ayah told the documentary film team that he delivered children from demonic possession. It was a barbaric and bestial video of horrors. If indeed these children had any demonic powers, the charlatan Bishop would not be alive to tell his sorry story. These were defenceless and deformed children with nails struck in their heads, lost sight, mutilated limbs, bathed with all sorts of corrosive chemicals and inflicted with torture marks beyond what words can describe.

Illiteracy and abject poverty is the common link found among the hoodwinked parents that give up their children for slaughter and torture in Akwa Ibom state.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, (UNESCO), reports that the number of illiterates over the age of fifteen in Nigeria is 25 million and that over 55 million Nigerians are stark illiterates. Such illiterate minds are prone to superstitious, irrational and ignorant beliefs.

The fingered clergymen in Akwa Ibom State must not go unpunished. That’s the only way to stop the unfortunate recurring incidents of child abuse and killings. This proclivity for deceiving and stealing in the name of religion has to stop.