In Nigerian parlance, ‘money rituals’ are fetishistic, talismanic, activities that magically make people rich. People use their blood and different parts of their bodies for these rituals. Worse still, they use their children, family members, and friends for these things. And worse still, they kill innocent strangers for these purposes. From time to time, we receive the gory news of a dead toddler with body parts missing, the corpse of a lady without the breasts, etc. We discover, in bush paths, a bag containing a human head or the carcass of a newborn baby. Pregnant women get missing. Albinos get abducted. And innocent hunchbacks are a prime target. And different shrines are discovered from time to time — the popular Okija shrine of few years ago, the Ibadan house of horror of 2014, etc. It’s real. People do money rituals.
But the question remains: are these money rituals effective? Has anyone truly gotten rich via these rituals? Well, don’t let me preempt myself. Let me go to the title of this article. Let me jump into the three reasons why you shouldn’t believe that money rituals work.
1. Because Money Rituals Don’t Work
Any money rituals that require you killing or maiming a whole human being but won’t make you appear on the world’s richest people’s list should not be taken seriously. If I need to kill someone to become rich, I’d better own the whole universe in the end!
Are money rituals real? It depends on what you mean by ‘real’. If ‘real’ means that people do money rituals, yes they’re real. If it means that people get rich because they do money rituals, the answer is no! Obviously no. At least, no evidence that they work. Or rather there’s evidence that they don’t work. Let’s look at the evidence.
I won’t pick up on the fact that the juju men (babaláwo) that do these money rituals for people are poor themselves. Picture a doctor that’s never healthy, a mechanic whose car never works, and a painting artist whose house is not adored with beautiful paintings. The lazy explanation is that the juju man must not own a part of the money. That’s the instruction from the spirits, they say. The money that’s being generated by the spirits is only meant for those who patronize him, not for him. What do I say to that? I say, LOL! How else do you treat adults like children just because they can’t think for themselves?
The list of the richest people in the world is updated periodically. Open that list, scroll from start to finish and point to one person that did money rituals to enter the list. None. Nobody. Bill Gates is on top there. He came to one babaláwo in Ugheli, Nigeria to sacrifice a newborn baby? Come off it! So why do you believe such an inanity? Ooohhhh…people travel to India for talismans. So how many Indians are on the list of the world’s richest billionaires? Shouldn’t you be smarter than that? So why should you believe something that’s not true? Any money rituals that require you killing or maiming a whole human being but won’t make you appear on the world’s richest people’s list should not be taken seriously. If I need to kill someone to become rich, I’d better own the whole universe in the end!
There are different ways by which people explain this money rituals of a thing. According to hearsays and Nollywood movies, there’s a creature (or a petrified human victim) that vomits money in a corner of your house. Somehow this thing vomiting money knows the currency you want and in what denominations. If you want British Pounds, it won’t vomit Japanese Yen. And if you want £100 notes, it won’t give £5 notes. It’s that accurate? And how does it get the note serial numbers correctly? And the security features on the notes? Are you aware that the volume of currency in circulation is strictly monitored by the central banks? So if another source of currency from your room becomes operational, wouldn’t the banks notice? And this petrified human being vomits dry notes that are not stained with vomits, blood or saliva?
Others say that the money that appears in your room simply disappears from bank vaults and some other people’s savings. Really? How many times have you heard banks reporting that money has miraculously gone missing from their vaults? Petti-traders do notice that some ₦20 or ₦100 is missing from their piggy banks but have you ever heard billionaires complaining of some huge cash missing from their savings? So your money rituals can only lift ₦100 from somewhere else into your room? Are you thinking at all?
OK. The most rational believers say that the money rituals don’t make money appear magically in your laps. They say they just make your business grow astronomically, more than anyone can explain.
Anyway, let all business consultants close down. Why should anyone struggle to pick up entrepreneural skills when money rituals can grow a business overnight? Why get an MBA? And why employ qualified marketers in your business? Why advertise? It just doesn’t make any sense.
None of it makes any sense — a supernatural ATM in your house, demons breaking a bank for you, your business growing suddenly from online promotion by the spirits. You shouldn’t believe a lie. If there’s none other reason why you should doubt money rituals, doubt it because you don’t have the evidence that it works.
2. Belief in Money Rituals Tends to Make You Lazy and Poor in the End
I don’t have problems with illiterates believing these things. But when educated people with all the access to information and have perhaps travelled far and wide believe these primitive tales, I get very worried and feel sorry for us as a people.
There’s this belief that people get rich by supernatural forces, whether good or evil, and they become poor supernaturally too. If you pay tithes, god will make you rich. If you don’t, you become poor. If you offer human flesh to the gods, they make you rich. If you don’t, you become poor. This belief has a tendency to make you lazy. The laziness is first of all mental. There are reasons why you’re not making it but you won’t find out. There’s a reason why someone is making it but you won’t find out. You’re there giving every excuse for why you’re not getting rich: it’s because you can’t do money rituals, you tell yourself. Some people won’t even work because they believe they will later go for money rituals.
They ask you not to emulate a rich person as he might have gotten rich through money rituals. Don’t bother to look up to him. And don’t look at him and feel sorry for your poverty. And don’t find out from him. In fact, don’t move close to him. He might use your skull to service or update his money rituals at the next opportunity. This is how you’re born into poverty, grow up in poverty, and die in poverty. It’s terrible mental laziness. I don’t have problems with illiterates believing these things. But when educated people with all the access to information and have perhaps travelled far and wide believe these primitive tales, I get very worried and feel sorry for us as a people.
That’s not good for you. Poverty will strike your neck so hard that you won’t like yourself. And on a larger scale, it can affect the economy. Once you have a large number of people with this belief, they won’t contribute anything to the economy and thus they’re a waste of the population. There are young boys who are waiting for their own time to do their own money rituals. Once they meet the required criteria for it, they go for it. This is a terrible societal evil.
3. Belief in Money Rituals Makes People Commit the Most Heinous Crimes
You may hold the belief and claim that you won’t do the ritual but by holding the belief, you’re part of the people keeping it alive for those that will act on it and commit atrocities. Beliefs exist in pools.
This is the major one.
Sometime last August, a sixteen year-old boy was arraigned by the police in Lagos for luring a four year-old boy to a lonely place, killing him, and removing his intestines, kidneys and penis. Someone who believed that it was possible to do money rituals and become rich asked the boy to get him human organs for a sum of ₦50,000.
One of the greatest evil discoveries in human history was made on March 22, 2014 in Ibadan, South-West Nigeria. Nicknamed ‘Ibadan house of horror’ and monikered ‘Soka‘, a site of intense ritualistic killing was accidentally discovered. According to Wikipedia, over twenty decomposed human bodies and hundreds of human skulls were found dispersed throughout the forest, and over twenty people were rescued from the forest. Imagine the weight of that horror!
That’s why I won’t let you hold or spread that stupid belief in the efficacy of money rituals. You may hold the belief and claim that you won’t do the ritual but by holding the belief, you’re part of the people keeping it alive for those that will act on it and commit atrocities. Beliefs exist in pools. Human brains constitute the pools. And the bigger pool, the more the belief is actualized in the society. I will do my part to eradicate the cause which is superstitious belief.
You can counter by saying that superstitious belief is not the cause of the crime. After all, many people hold the same superstitious belief but don’t go about killing people. You know that it’s not every victim of social injustice that has joined Boko Haram but you believe that social injustice is one of the causes of the Boko Haram scourge and thus to eradicate Boko Haram, we need to eradicate social injustice.
However, you believe that superstitious belief is not the reason for ritual killing. How can you be so intellectually dishonest? Just like religious terrorism, the crime of ritualistic killing won’t be squashed by security forces alone. Ideological re-engineering is very necessary. This is where write-ups like this come in.
Because the belief in money rituals is very much alive in our society was why the rate of kidnapping increased everytime a bigger denomination was added to the Nigerian currency. And it’s the reason why our children are not safe in the neighbourhood and on their way to and from school. Before ransom kidnapping, kidnapping for ritual purposes was the order of the day. It hasn’t died down. It has only been joined by ransom kidnapping.
That’s why someone like me earnestly desires that you stop believing in the efficacy of money rituals. I will oppose you vehemently if I discover that you believe that some people became rich via money rituals. Yes, you’re entitled to your belief but if I observe that your belief is detrimental to the society, it’s my right and duty to pull that nonsensical belief down. Let it sink into your skull: nobody can get rich by doing money rituals. It’s all a myth.
The Origin of the Money Rituals Myth
The belief in money rituals came from our ignorance of how people make wealth and our jealousy for them. So we fabricate a story that absolves us of any blame for our own poverty. Thus we say they must have done something beyond the ordinary before they became rich. If it was ordinary, we ourselves would’ve become rich. But we didn’t become rich: so those who became rich did something outside of the ordinary. Supernatural is outside the ordinary and money ritual is supernatural. The equation is complete!
Money rituals are a conspiracy theory. The ignorant poor masses who are lazy to find out how someone became rich are the ones spreading the thing amongst themselves. Note that it’s an age-long myth that started when access to information was low. It was also prevalent in societies like Africa where people hoard information.
Anything that wasn’t understood by people was shrouded in secrecy and mystery. Rich people wouldn’t tell the whole world how they became rich. So the rest of the society were free to fill in the gaps with something even if the thing sounded crazy and stupid.
Rich people hardly mix with poor people. Rich people only move in the company of fellow rich people. Therefore they must be in a cult, some occultic society where they get powers to become rich. That’s how people got all those ideas you see in Nollywood movies.
Rich people’s lives come under intense scrutiny such that any negative thing that happens in their lives attracts a negative implication. If he has fertility problems (just like everybody else in the society), it’s because he has used his ‘manhood’ for rituals. If any of his children or family member dies or becomes handicapped, it’s because he used them for money rituals. If he himself is struck by a strange disease or he even dies, it’s because the money rituals have boomeranged on him.
These are exactly the same things that happen to ordinary members of the society without any negative explanation attached. Instead of a madman to receive compassion from the society, they go around saying that he must have run mad while trying to do money rituals. Myths! Crazy stupid myths!
Also it may be virtuous to be poor. It’s more difficult for ‘a camel to enter through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven’. So a rich man must be an immoral person. What’s more immoral than money rituals? Nothing. Thus a rich man must’ve done money rituals. So we’re satisfied. The rich man may enjoy the riches we don’t have but we need to enjoy our sanctity that he doesn’t have. It balances out and it’s a good psychological opium that soothes the pain of poverty.
Poverty mentality. You better wake up and receive sense today that money rituals aren’t effective. No one has gotten rich by rituals. I won’t scare you with stories of how your life may not end well or how you or your children may reap the evil fruits of your crimes or how you might burn in the everlasting oven called hell. I don’t believe in such stories and I know that they’re not very effective in scaring people into moral straightness. Instead let me just tell you that it doesn’t make any sense to do something that won’t yield the required profit. In case you’re planning to kidnap a baby or harvest someone’s internal organs because you think you will become rich thereafter, you’ve missed it.
Please don’t commit that crime against humanity for something that won’t yield any result.
People only get rich by legitimate business, by fraud, by inheritance or by embezzling public funds.
Let me repeat. People only get rich by legitimate business, by fraud, by inheritance or by embezzling public funds.
Now hold your ears and repeat after me
People only get rich by legitimate business, by fraud, by inheritance or by embezzling public funds.
By Peter Adeosun
from Nigerian: Breaking News In Nigeria | Laila's Blog http://ift.tt/21T0tmj
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