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Alarming Rise in Cultism
More articles on this topic: Campus Cults, NigeriaThe fire of cult terrorism on the campuses which smouldered for about one year, after the half-hearted spray of cult antidote by the Federal Government in 1999, has steadily intensified and burst into flames once more.
In the first two weeks of August, this year, 33 students of three universities were brutally murdered in cultic butcheries, suspected to have been perpetrated by cult members among students of tertiary institutions. Of the figure, 15 were of the Ebonyi State University, whose eight other students had similarly been killed in July, last year. The rest 18 were of the Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT) and the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), whose five other students had been shot dead in June, 2002, by cultists.
The toll of the ever-intensifying cultic butcheries is not restricted to students. It is now extended to lecturers and officers of the universities. Barely a year ago, two lecturers, one each from the ESUT and the UNN, were shot dead by suspected cultists. Last April, suspected terrorists threatened to kill the new Vice-Chancellor of University of Benin, Prof. Emmanuel Nwanze, if he failed to dismantle the committee on “Renunciation and Cultism,” which he set up after two medical students of the university were killed by reported cultists. The cultists have also widened the scope of their operation to include armed robbery.
One obvious explanation for the resurgence and worsening of cult crisis on the campuses is the inadequate, half-hearted enforcement of the measures already officially pronounced. The slaughter of five students of the Obafemi Awolowo University in one fell swoop in 1999 prompted Federal Government’s adoption of an anti-cult strategy, part of which was an offer of monetary incentive to repentant cult members among students nationwide.
In keeping with some recommendations of the judicial panel on the cultic killings, too, the government promised to establish a unit to identify secret cults and their activities in all tertiary institutions. Furthermore, the government empowered heads of the institutions to summarily dismiss any student properly identified as a cult member, and proposed a data-bank of students so dismissed to forestall their re-admission into any other similar institution.
Had these measures been adequately enforced, the soaring rate of cultic terrorism would have been drastically reduced. But the government has merely pointed to its anti-cult armoury without really using the weapons to fight the bloody cults. If the government had established the promised special intelligence unit, we are not aware that the unit has identified and blacklisted any secret cults, or attempted to pre-empt any of their excesses in the institutions.
Besides, the government’s order to heads of tertiary institutions to summarily dismiss cult members among their students is rendered ineffectual by the plea of the police, in a number of cases, of non-existence of a relevant law to prosecute students rusticated by their universities for being secret cult members. Brandishing court orders for their reinstatements such expelled students have often safely returned to their institutions. In this way, too, the long-standing decree prohibiting cultism on the campuses is rendered unenforceable, null and void.
The kid-glove handling of serious cult cases by the police and the judiciary, combined with the thickening suspicion that a number of rich parents, influential politicians and government officials sponsor cultism on the campuses, gives the cultists the erroneous feeling that they would always escape punishment, or if at all convicted, would suffer mild punishment.
But it should not be so. It is quite strange that the government cannot secure the universities. The National Assembly should urgently come up with an appropriate statute to stitch up the loophole in the existing order or law and smoothen the prosecution of cultists. If there is no specific law on secret cult, it should be designed, say, in line with Rivers State’s Secret Cult and Similar Activities (Prohibition) Law 2004 enacted last June. Even so, the police do not need any other law to prosecute suspected murderers and armed robbers among cultists.
Beyond enforcing the relevant laws on campuses, the government should step out to improve the university environment, which tends to be a fertile ground that breeds cults. In the uncongenial condition of the universities, sunk in dearth of teaching and learning materials, teachers’ incessant strikes, examination malpractices and school shut downs, students have found cult activities to be the most preferable venture. Their utmost goals of vain glory and supremacy are cheaply attainable through enlistment in cults.
To make up for the lost time when they eventually resume after incessant shut downs, the universities have usually resorted to hurried lessons and crash programmes that churned out half-baked products. It surprises but a few that cultists seek to pass their university examination by foul means, including killing lecturers and principal officers of their institutions. That’s why cultists are most active on the campuses during examinations.
Yet, there is a snag in the fight against the campus cults. The murderous cultists and many other university students today are products of the collapsed school system, the violent electoral system and the disintegrated family, which have denied the students proper parental care and upbringing. The tertiary institutions should think it necessary to introduce programmes to re-condition the minds of the students, to educate them, their lecturers and parents on the dangers of campus cult to the institutions and the larger society.
Afterall, universities are meant to impart knowledge and mould character. And degrees and diplomas are awarded only to people found worthy in learning and character. So, any student identified as cultist, murderer, robber or such serious offenders should be punished accordingly. They must not be allowed to remain hit-squads and agents of destruction of lives and property. Only the full weight of the law can warn them that cultism is evil, and pays no dividends.
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