Wacked out is right...Bola Ige's Murder: Nigeria Gripped By Evil
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, Ottawa
(31/12/2001)The murder of Nigeria’s Justice Minister, Mr. Bola Ige, which has sent shockwaves in a country which normally finds such killings normal, show the increasing growth of evil despite the “trick to persuade us that it does not exist.” The Ige killing has a distinctive atmosphere of evil with open heart—evil is normally close hearted, secret, cunning and deceitful.
The killing of Ige reveals how satisfied evil is in Nigeria—laughing, sated. It’s a dark impression, since it projects a normal situation despite the security crack down, the Nigeria Senate reconvening, and dusk-to-down curfew. More disturbingly, to show how evil has gripped Nigeria, the assassination of Bola Ige, Nigeria’s leading orator, and apparently well protected, sparked intra-ethnic showdown, resulting in over 3,000 people being killed in only two days in the Ife-Ibadan corridor.
Evil is unfastened in a country where ritual murders have become a daily diet, while juju/marabou largely direct thought, the degree of hatred reveals the ascendancy of evil, where mistrust is so high that one has to look at one’s back always for fear of destruction, where fear is so entrenched that to live is to walk with one’s head in the fashion of the proverbial African witch. Evil is so terrible in Nigeria, which should have led Africa not only in economic and political vision but enlightenment, that in Lagos and other cities when one is knocked down by a vehicle or killed by traffic collision or there is an accident, and most times they are brutal, and result in large death, onlookers remark mercilessly, Na god dune punish am (It is God who has punished him/her that’s why they died in an accident) to the innocent dead body lying on the street. A feelingless, heartless, wicked culture, a dangerous mentality.
As one Nigeria newspaper observed, Nigeria is the “devil’s den.” At Nigeria’s Jankala market one can get human body parts—tongue, skull, intestines, lungs, penis, feet, hands, shoulder, legs, biceps, vagina, breast, teeth, heart, kidney, eyes, ears, jaws, hair to buy for juju/marabou charms/potions. Evil has so permeated the Nigerian society that private security outlets are competing head-to-head with the Nigeria Police Force but have not come close to containing the country’s looming evil. Still, evil is so deep in Nigeria that investors are afraid to come to the country—no doubt recently Nigeria’s police top brass visited London, U.K to showcase how “safe” their country is for potential investors in an investors forum. I know a Ghanaian who was teaching in a remote Nigerian village during the oil boom of the 70s and 80s. One day, early in the morning, he woke up to use the toilet, which is at the back of the house. To his shock, he saw the landlord killing one of his children for juju ritual—he left the village immediately for good, abandoning his teaching post and his pay.
The assassination of Ige, 71, reveals the performance of evil in the Nigerian public--brave, lighting, horrid, riding a goat backwards. Here we see evil ruling Nigeria—if you cannot beat them, join them--you either become an evil man or woman, or evil will swallow you. You have to witness argument between two average Nigerians and the language will send your head spinning. Violence is a daily soup in Nigeria—evil thrives in a culture of violence, or mindlessness, of disorder. For the past five years or so, as violence grows, the Nigerian police is increasing its number but cannot contain the increasing evil. The problem is not in the number of police but in the Nigerian culture, a culture mired in dark practices, gullibility, violence, dark forces, hatred, deceit, arrogance, evil, heartlessness. Until recently, in Lagos and other cities one cannot go out in the evening because of the possibility of being killed—some sort of an unofficial curfew prevailed.
Evil walks freely in the Nigerian scheme of things, but the most evil regime, aside from the daily evil deeds of Nigerians, was seen under military junta kingpin Gen. Sani Abacha (Nigerians say privately that Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s regime was the most evil). Abacha, a clearly evil, mean looking man, not only massively looted the already helplessly poor Nigerians, but murdered, cowed, assassinated, jailed (including incumbent President Obasanjo, who has described Abacha as “evil”), and employed one of the largest number of juju/marabou men/women, who were mired in one of the largest mass ritual murders in Nigeria’s dark history, to spiritually pave Abacha’s way to be civilian President (He died in the course of this giant evil project).
But on a deeper level, Sani Abacha’s evil, or Babangida’s “evil genius,” somehow, is informed by the negative culture of Nigeria—no more, no less. They come from the dark culture because they were born and bred in the Nigerian culture—a goat does not give birth to a cat. It is only in Nigeria you will hear a whole President, in the person of Ibrahim Babangida, who is supposed to be a fountain of carefulness, morality, light, love and order, boldly stating, “I am an evil genius.” And Nigerians, soaked in their evil culture, laugh it out with him, and talk so greatly about his “maradonic” dexterity as if he is “god,” despite the fact that this a man who nearly sent Nigeria into another civil war.
Yet despite the face of the sprawling evil, one hears Nigerian conversations punctuated with “Allah is great” and “Praise Allah.” Nigerian evil men and women mix ejaculations of piety with evil—the evil man or woman wears a mask, making it difficult to see him/her (Abacha worn two masks—his natural face and dark spectacles). Abacha and Babangida prayed five times a day, with TV cameras trailing them in the mosque, fast every Ramadan, and gave gifts to people. As Time magazine’s Lance Morrow thinks, in a moving essay on evil genius Osama bin Ladin, “Combine the piety and the thug’s mirth, and you get something of that lounging insolence with which Satan, at the opening of the Book of Job, answers God’s “Whence comest thou?” with: “From going to and from in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. If it has doubts, it would not be evil.” The killers of Bola Ige have no doubt, if they had, they wouldn’t have killed him in such clinical style.
You cannot read the killing of Bola Ige without Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil.” Because the Ige-killing has caused reverberations in Nigeria and the world, people have subconsciously endowed Nigeria with diabolical, supervillain, or superhero size and force. The killing of a figure of Ige’s stature, or to move backward to Abacha’s dark era, the point blank shooting of the left eye of Information Minister, Mr. Alex Ibru, by Abacha’s evil squad, show what ordinary Nigerians go through everyday. Morrow said “Arendt coined the term banality of evil in order to try to define the (terrifying) ordinariness of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureacrat who helped manage Hitler’s killing machine.” As Morrow observed, each age may get its appropriate evil, but the Nigeria evil has persisted for too long, increasing not decreasing, fast turning the country into evil den, making the killing of Bola Ige some sort of expected ordinariness.
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