OVER the past week, a group of us got discussing the Okija shrine incident, which is still very much a topical issue. When we got around to the issue of the alleged register of names of the shrine operators’ big-time customers and the stir that will follow the eventual publication of the names, a member of the group erupted: “Police container has arrived”.
In commercial circles, when a person’s “container arrives,” it means he is in for a very engrossing and lucrative business time. It is time for him to be besieged by buyers, and of course, it is in the character of traders to sell to the highest bidders and maximise profit. Unless the Nigerian Police Force, particularly its helmsmen at the very top, have changed overnight, the juju priests' register is liable to be turned into a hot commodity. And for this reason, we may expect to be disappointed over Police Inspector-General, Tafa Balogun’s pledge to expose the names to the public. That is one. The other disappointment dish we may be served is the promise to commence a nation-wide hunt to expose and similarly eliminate other blood-sucking fetish shrines, which dot many communities around Nigeria.
The scepticism surrounding the first point is informed by our experience in the ways that our Police force handles issues. Bad eggs in the top echelon of the police rarely approach their job with professionalism. When any big case breaks, the first tendency is for them to check out the political interests of their overall political masters who reside in Aso Rock, Abuja. How do we mean by that? The Commander-in-Chief, who hires and fires the top echelon of the Police and other branches of the Armed Forces, could be politically interested in the Okija shrine register, especially as he has an unfinished business in Anambra State. The Governor of Anambra State, Dr. Chris Ngige, is still in power in spite of series of attempts to unseat him, always with the Tafa Balogun-led Nigerian Police as the paramount tool of execution.
WAS it not the same Tafa Balogun-led force that Ngige’s so-called political mentor, Chris Uba, used to abduct the Governor on July 10th, 2003? Apart from the retirement of an already retiring Assistant Inspector-General of Police, Raphael Ige and his subsequent mysterious demise a few months later, nobody has been sanctioned for that brazen daylight political brigandage. Was it not the same Tafa Balogun-led Nigerian Police Force that removed the police guards of Dr. Ngige since the beginning of this year, refusing to obey court orders to restore them to the Governor? Is it not the same Police that have blamed every major political killing on “armed robbers”?
If the Okija shrines were the same that Dr. Ngige told Nigerians that Uba’s men “took me” to, it follows that the names of both the Governor and his so-called mentors could be in the black book, among many others, some of whom may not even be Igbos. It would then be up to the camp of Ngige’s enemies to concoct another alibi out of the existence of these names in the list and make another go at the current chief occupant of the Anambra State Government House.
But in the surprising case of the Presidency not having any political mileage to make out of the list, the Presidency might then make a spirited move to have the names exposed after “a thorough investigation”. That is when the “container trade” could be in full swing. People might then have to buy themselves out of it. Before you know it, many registers could crop up even outside the confines of the Police custody, and anybody’s name could be in any of them.
I’m afraid, unless the top berets of the Nigerian Police Force clean up their act, this kind of cynical suspicion will trail their every move even when they are not up to their usual political and “business” pranks.
THE other promise on the Okija shrine crime the nation looks forward to but which may not materialise is the idea of exposing and closing down other blood-sucking shrines around the country. There is little doubt that the Okija shrine is not the only one of its type in Nigeria. Just as the proprietors of the Okija shrine have their own register of clients, both big and small, its peers in other parts of Nigeria are liable to have theirs, even if not in documented form. There are two major reasons the Police bravura may end in Okija and perhaps one or two other isolated forays in that environment. The first is that, just as the Okija shrine draws its clientele mainly from people within its locality, its equivalents in other areas will also have as their clients big politicians and businessmen and women from their immediate localities. These might well include top officers of the Nigeria Police and their paymasters in high places. Would they gladly invade the shrines where they also took oath and regularly visit to “top up”?
BESIDES, we are talking about principalities and powers of darkness. Even the Bible recognises their existence, and the Lord Jesus observed that you cannot enter into the house of a strong man unless you have overcome and bound him first. It is not everybody who can simply walk into the grooves of these dark powers and not come down with real or imagined retributive affliction, or at least, so it seems.
The fact that you are wearing a police uniform does not immunise you from the psychological terrors you may have to carry about for having stepped so impetuously into the domain of blood-guzzling spiritual mediums. It may be what Ben Gbulie describes as “Figments and Nothing”, but not every police officer is spiritually equipped to withstand numinous persecution that one could automatically import into his own psyche for having trespassed into a so-called “powerful shrine”. For all you know, some of those policemen who sacked the Okija shrine might already be imagining the deity set to retaliate one way or the other. Some may be seeking other “more powerful” shrines to help them overcome the supposed effect of having participated in the punitive expedition against the Okija groove.
What we are saying here is that the discovery and elimination of evil shrines by Police action may not be as simple as Tafa Balogun makes it seem. Evidence of this will be apparent in the very likelihood that the “war against evil shrines” will cool off after Okija, for the above-stated and other reasons.
THERE is only one way to solve the Okija shrine register issue as well as succeed in the elimination of all human blood-drinking fetish temples: police professionalism. The police must discard political and selfish considerations in investigating and exposing the patrons of the Okija shrine as contained in the said register. The exposure of these criminals will help in no little measure in uprooting evil from Anambra State.
But are the powers that be, which created the platform for the emergence of these evil men and women, allow their own local agents to be exposed and uprooted? Can the powers that be, which have persecuted Anambra State since 1998, allow themselves to be stripped bare in the public? We watch and see. Will the bad eggs of the Police pass up the opportunity to make themselves some smelly money? We wait and see. Will Balogun proceed to implement professionally his self-declared campaign to rid Nigeria of evil shrines, or will this be another fire-brigade operation to portray the Igbo as a “barbaric” people who do not deserve to be given a chance to lead the country? We wait to see.
Will we wait in vain?
