By Rasheed Iskilu

Man’s origin is naturally beyond his powers as every man is but the outcome of the intimacy engaged in by opposite-sex lovers without consideration for desirability of the mating patners’ origin to the soul being sought to be, perhaps unintendedly, begotten. Granted that an adult could either naturalize or hold
dual-citizenship depending on the applicable immigration laws, one’s origin, yet remains sacrosanct.

For those of us who have no place to lay claim to as our ancestral homes than Abeokuta, it’s almost becoming inadmissible that one is from the ancient town given the rising spate of killings for ritual purposes around the ‘town beneath the rock’ lately. Even though, it could be argued that ritual killings especially for sacrifices on African soil dates back to the stone age, how Abeokuta has, in the last few years, constantly been in the news for uncovered heinous crime of killings that are wealth-motivated leaves so much to be desired. Even in the stone age, it’s very unimaginable that minors could rise to the position of priest offering human blood to the goddesses of those era talkless for individualistic goals as sometimes ago reported.

The connivance of 3 boys, among whom the oldest was 19 years old, to lure a girl reported to be into affairs with one of them; decapitate her and proceed to burn the fresh human head in a earthen pot for money-making concoction of soap around Oke-aregba is about the most odious crime I’ve heard in my entire life. With the several reported similar cases that predated that heart-wrenching occurrence and subsequent ones about apprehended same crime perpetrators all within Abeokuta, it is, perhaps, safe to conclude that; in no distant future young men of Abeokuta descent will find it extremely difficult to find ladies yielding to their marriage proposals while their kinswomen too foreseeably remain unmarried out of stigma.

How would Abeokuta girls have marriage proposed to them when, in one of the cases, a lady allegedly lured her friend over, sedated, slaughtered her victim and even dismembered the body all alone while her husband waited outside their residence at a remote part of quarry road of the city.

Most recently, the media has been awash with reports of how the long arms of the law caught up with Taiwo & Kehinde Yemitan (both 47) and another accomplice (Kazeem) after killing one Darasimi and marketing her remains for wealth-provoking juju in ‘premier’ area of the same city of Abeokuta.

Obnoxious news like these should have attracted the attention of Abeokuta elites. How on earth could a state that has organs of government in place, boasts a two-time president and chairman of world ex-presidents – Olusegun Obasanjo, Wole Soyinka, first class Obas, famed business men & women, industrialists, internationally-acknowledged religious leaders and so on be on the verge of being declared the number one city of ritual killers globally. All hands need to be on deck immediately.

Drastic orientation prefixing the full weight of the law should be evolved. Governor Dapo Abiodun, being at the saddle presently, should, as a matter of urgency, send a bill seeking amendment to relevant sections of the state’s criminal code to impose more stringent punishments for violators to the Lawmakers for consideration and passage. Else, no one, especially those abroad and those of us resident in other parts of the country, would proudly own-up to having ABEOKUTA as his/her ancestral home any longer.

Rasheed Iskilu, a social commentator, writes from Isolo, Lagos.