If an alien is captured in a Hollywood film, the state imprisons it to weaponise its capabilities. Nollywood does not make alien films, but our cinematic representations of contact with non-human forces regularly reflect an individual seeking money. That was how I concluded that if we ever capture an alien in this part of the world, our immediate course of action will be to make it vomit cash. Nothing detains our imagination, absorbs our attention, and conditions our relationship with our humans and non-human beings like money. We fantasise about wealth so much that our popular culture is chock-full of stories of men with magical powers conjuring cash into existence through mystical rituals. The trouble with a society like ours is that the fiction does not merely play out on the magical tube of the television; it also erupts in reality.

 The latest sensational case of money ritual homicide is that of an Enugu-based “native doctor”, Obi Obieze, caught with a 13-year-old he would have sacrificed for his schemes.  What I find rather frustrating about the conversations that attended the man’s arrest were the claims that ritual murder is a violation of the tenets by which “native doctors” are expected to abide, rather than a wholesale debunking of the idea that anyone has the power to make money through such means. It did not help that Obieze’s status as a “native doctor” also fits into the existing belief that practitioners of what we call “traditional religions” have the spiritual expertise to carry out magic such as money rituals (which is why even the practitioners of our Abrahamic religions secretly consult them).

The belief is so powerful that it sustains institutional bias against indigenous religions. Every informed person in Nigeria is aware that those who have been arrested for various atrocities include Christians and Muslims, but it is those of the indigenous religious traditions who bear most of the brunt. For instance, Anambra Governor Charles Soludo has been waging a war against the native doctors suspected of empowering dissident elements in the state by destroying their shrines. Time and space will not permit me to elaborate to Soludo that in the 20th century, the British colonial government also embarked on similar demolitions in Igboland, only to find that their clampdown on shrines counterproductively invigorated the people’s beliefs in their power.

The more we have antagonised our indigenous religions, the stronger the belief in them as repositories of mystical power has grown. There is a generation of people—including charismatic religious movements, charlatans, and a whole lot of other superstitious folks—hell-bent on sustaining beliefs in the magical power wielded by priests of indigenous religions. Their motives are not entirely driven by historical nostalgia nor by the idea that these practices offer ethical guidance for living, but simply because they cannot live without the notion that no god exists anywhere to make money appear from nowhere. That, for me, is where the problem with our cultural attitudes toward our indigenous religions lies. People are more invested in the magical possibilities that these belief systems can purportedly make happen than in the ethical values their meanings carry.

Some years ago, I was at a religious conference in Nigeria where a group of academics presented their research on why people are leaving Christianity and Islam and opting for indigenous religions. It turns out that almost everyone had converted because they were looking for a God that answers by fire, not because they wanted a religion that nudges them to higher values or morals. It is almost as if a magical transformation is the only reason our people seek God. Even our cultural industry does not help the issues. Hardly does Nollywood reflect indigenous belief systems as a source of values and meanings that can reform our social ethics. No, our Gods in our cinema are almost always a caricature.

 To restate what I have repeatedly said in this column, there is no money ritual anywhere that works. No magical (or miracle) expertise anywhere in the world can make cash come out of nothing. What is called a money ritual is mostly a manipulation of credulity. After reading virtually every interview of those arrested for money rituals and the confession statement of the ritualists in documented police reports, I reasonably arrived at the conclusion that those arrested are split into two groups: people who knowingly deceive others, and the sincerely stupid people with a flimsy understanding of the modern monetary system. Those of the former category do not expect anything to happen and merely deceive with gimmickry. The latter, on the other hand, genuinely believes the magic is possible and therefore experiments with human lives. These are the ones who admit to trying out the rituals after learning about them. While no cash appears, they still make some money through sales of human body parts and that increases their motivation to keep trying. None of them has any record of testimonies of prior success, and they are usually men whose poverty is indelibly etched onto their appearance.  They all look like their hearts would stop beating if they were ever handed a cash sum of one million in any currency. As stupid as they are, they are also the foot soldiers of a surreptitious economy of organ harvesting who hide their dealings in human body parts under the amorphous umbrella of “money rituals”.

Here is where their shoddy understanding of the modern monetary system betrays them: the cash they want to conjure is an invention of modernity and therefore relatively recent. The spirits that will materialise have supposedly existed before the existence of the legal tender and should be too timeless to be involved in producing something as vulgar as money. In any case, now that the concept of money in the contemporary economy is evolving into more abstract forms due to digital technology, are those spirits also transitioning to a cashless economy, or are they still stuck on paper money?

 Our fore-parents, who originated the idioms of “money rituals”, were not speaking in the same literal language as the present-day “native doctors” who seek to replicate the magic. Their understanding of money rituals by our ancestors was borne of their observation of an emerging colonial modern economy (the slave trade, in particular), where—unlike the agrarian ones they knew intimately—offered the possibility of wealth without obvious work. Some of the contemporary “native doctors” who sacrifice a living human in their money rituals are either confused pretenders or psychopaths whose sickness has not yet been named.

Obieze, who was busted after a search team for a 13-year-old found her entombed in a sewage pit within an unfinished building used as a shrine, was obviously manipulating his clients’ psyche ink about it, knowing that a charm was produced for you from the blood of an innocent soul will do two things to any human: either drive them crazy or sear the conscience. If the latter happens, one is emboldened to the point of the daredevilry that separates great men from their ordinary counterparts. The effect of such magic is not so much supernatural as it is psychological. If you can live with yourself after taking a life, it also means you can engage in any unconscionable action for money. Your chances of making it increase, even if only marginally. And that is what the ruse of human sacrifice in money rituals is all about, not physical cash materialising out of thin air.