The recent arrest of an Ilorin-based cleric, Abdulrahman Bello, who allegedly murdered and dismembered Ms Yetunde Lawal, a final-year student at Kwara State College of Education, in the same town has seen us doing the same things we do virtually every time the situation arises. We point accusing fingers at religion and certain sectarian beliefs, culture, society, and one another while wheeling out the squeaky machines of ethical reforms in the bid to charge ourselves to good behaviour. Religious and traditional rulers have been making routine calls for moral reforms.

According to reports, Ilorin Emir Alhaji Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari not only condemned the killing but specifically directed Islamic leaders to ensure their sermons are more pointedly focused on moral values, ethics of hard work, and respect for humanity. Indeed, such moral charges are urgent in a society where the life of a whole human—if one goes by the amount of money Bello allegedly sold the young woman’s dismembered body parts—is far cheaper than that of goats and cows.

The fantastical imagination that money can be procured out of the air rules our society with a force that propels men to do some really terrible things. That is why one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Bello was into the so-called money rituals even though he—like most who have been arrested for the same crime—looks seriously impoverished. Every single person who has been arrested due to their claims of possessing power to make money through supernatural means always looks like they would faint if they ever saw a million naira (just naira o!) in cash laid out at their feet.

When these things happen, we never get to know anything about the apprehended killer beyond labelling them as misguided youths looking for money. There is a serious shortage of knowledge about these individuals and their circumstances that leads us to assume that this is always what they say it is. But what if these guys are bipolar and have a history of delinquent behaviour or anti-social character? For instance, if it is true that Bello has a collection of women’s property stored in his bedroom as a trophy, that might be a pointer to the nature of his psychopathy. We might be dealing with an extreme case of misogyny, a man killing a woman (or women) just to feel like a man.

In Nigeria, once we diagnose “money ritual” as the standard explanatory paradigm for a type of homicide, all judgment on what else might be at play gets suspended. We turn to ourselves and begin to preach about our materialism and how we ought to shun the path of quick wealth, sermons that will find no feet to stand on the complex grounds of Nigerian reality. How do you sincerely preach the virtues of hard work to people who have seen industry systematically diminished by the socio-political and socio-economic processes? Even our religious and traditional leaders who make the call embody the same phenomenon of wealth without work. They are also the ones who legitimise the crooked people who have managed it to build wealth.

The truth is, you do not need to “work” in the traditional sense of being productive before you can be wealthy and celebrated in present-day Nigeria. You only need to be connected to a grid of individuals whose social network allows them to access the political power that allocates resources. Nigeria is that one place where you can sleep poor and wake up stupendously rich, and that is only because you managed to get into bed with the right person. Since such magical transformation is not seen to be produced by anything tangible other than mere social connections, it acquires a spiritual character.

The yawning gap in the reality of the route it takes to become wealthy is what the likes of Bello exploit by claiming they too have the power to connect others to the source of such wealth. Since you have a moneyed class who do not produce, pretenders of various hues also claim the expertise of the charms of creating something out of nothing. That is why our society is currently swarming with snake oil merchants, charlatans, crass illiterate and self-commissioned prophets, and simonist preachers, all of them promising to help us access magical prosperity.

 

In all the various calls for moral reforms, nobody seems to be asking professionally trained experts in the academy and elsewhere to divine the nature of the problem we are dealing with so we can accurately direct our moral reform efforts. What if the individuals amid the various instances of the killings for so-called money rituals are just people with varying levels of mental health issues? What if much of what we call “money rituals” are just psychopathic manifestations that very much interact with our larger cultural psychology?

From the reports, it seemed self-evident that this is another case of money ritual. But certainty can also be the enemy of truth. Is there a method to the killing that suggests that there are other psychological factors at play? This is not me asking to be perversely entertained with the lurid details of a homicide, but accounting for the underlying psychology of the alleged killer.

There have been different instances of women killings that were chalked down to ritual murder. At a time, women’s corpses would be found in hotel rooms where they had been killed by a supposed paramour who lured them into those places. Knowing how our morally pretentious society reacts to the news of a woman visiting places like a hotel, some of those murders merely became avenues for sermonising to women about their virtues and the companies they ought to keep. But what if some of those killers are merely hiding behind the popular narrative of ritual murder to perpetrate other sick fantasies? We should not foreclose the possibility that some of these people are sick men who found an outlet for their proclivities through spiritual work.

In Western societies, where serial killings also take place, and where they do not have terms like “money ritual” in their vocabulary to explain seemingly senseless killings, they are more prone to exploring such delinquency more objectively. Fans of crime documentaries will readily testify to the methodical ways they approach those killings to find the killer and understand their underlying motivations. For us, it is always just “money rituals”, as if society and its people cannot also be more complicated. Part of the problem is that the police do not report a forensic investigation into these crimes. Virtually everything we get to know comes from gossipy uninformed media networks more interested in catering to sensationalism than offering clarity. But what if, in our bid to provide a moral explanation for the murders and advocate for ethical reforms, we are lumping different things into the big basket called “money ritual”?

Let me make it clear that asking for some clarity into the nature of the malady that disturbs these killers is not a call for their exoneration. The point is not to give them an alibi that allows them to walk free but to arm the observing society to speak of these things beyond the standard (and superstitious) explanations.

A correct understanding of the substance of psychopathy will go a long way in addressing how, in diagnosing money rituals, we use official means to propagate what might be objectively untrue. The trouble with making money rituals the standard explanatory paradigm is that it becomes a self-reproducing truth. There are people out there who will think there might be some truth to the whole affair and indulge in it too. They will, of course, never make any money but will take lives testing the bunkum!