Pastor Daniel Osita, a man in his early 30s, held a large group of senior government officials spell bound earlier this week in Abuja. Osita used to be a member of the Buccaneers Association of Nigeria in the University of Ibadan but he renounced the cult in 1999. Since then he alleged that there have been three attempts to assassinate him.
However these evil plots, according to Pastor Daniel, has not deterred him from preaching against cultism and advocating that ex-cultists be rehabilitated instead of being expelled from schools.
Fight cultism from the top
I thank God for making it possible for me to come out of a deadly cult. I should make a point that is very important, I have hammered on it over and over again, and that is if we must fight cultism, if we must make our youth realize that they have to live decent and moral lives, we have to start from up. If the head is sick, the body would not be comfortable and this is one thing we must know. Cultists have godfathers. There is an extent you would go in the university and these boys would come after you with the level of strength that they have. They have weapons. Our cult group boys are even more experienced than the army and the police.
While I was there I had godfathers who were in government. A personal godfather of mine was a Commissioner of Police. The first birthday gift he gave to me was a gun. Now, what does that signify; that I should go and kill? I was in the university and I was training in Libya as a sniper. Renunciation is not the problem. By the Grace of God I am an evangelist. God saved me for a purpose and I must fulfill that purpose. I have been missed three good times. They sent assassins after me. But I am very sure of one thing, if this thing cannot be ended by government, God would deal with it.
My pain is for the children that are coming up; what sort of country are they growing in? We are breeding criminals. Yesterday it was the Niger Delta militants, today it is Boko Haram. Tomorrow only God knows what. Most of us were groomed in the school under a situation where professors were our patrons on campus. You meet a bright child who has just entered university, he is in 100 level and because he refused to do your bidding, the next thing you do is write to the professor who is a patron to say that boy should be failed.
A law prohibiting cultism
I don’t know what is stopping the National Assembly from coming up with a law against cultism no matter who is involved. In the cult, we have what we call Council of Elders and they are aged 50 and above 80. They govern the boys. Nothing goes wrong on campus without their consent. This thing is highly organized. If we must eradicate these things from our campuses, then the President must come out and say I was never a campus cult member and I still am not and then pass a law that anyone involved in it should be punished. I was trained by somebody. When I was going to school it was never in my mind that I would end up that way. I was conned into the whole thing.
Rehabilitate ex-cultists
I was in Enugu at one time to preach when we heard cultists had come to the venue with ammunitions in travelling bags but I said I must preach the gospel. At the end of the day, 48 of the members renounced the cultism. They called the police to arrest the rest.
The mistake the university makes is this; these boys are the best tools you can use to eradicate cultism. They know where the problem is. If you rusticate them and throw them out of the campus, did you collect their guns and machetes? It does not take them anything to put that campus through hell.
So, the best thing to do is suspend them and when they come back put them through guidance and counselling; re-absorb them back into the system. Cultists know themselves. The connection among them is strong maybe because of the blood involvement because we go through initiation and drink each other’s blood. Do you know a cultist can renounce today and the next day the police would come and pick him up? While he is still in the cell, you hear he died of injury, because he must not say anything.
His Initiation
The day I was initiated, three people died at the initiation ground and they were buried there. Their parents did not know about this. I was beaten to coma. I spent three weeks in the hospital. My parents did not know anything. When they conducted welcome party for us we saw high profile dignitaries including professors in the university welcoming us to the fold.
Cult members are everywhere, even in the Senate or House of Assembly. Even amongst footballers we heard they are there. If you go to the bank and you apply for a job they would ask you which colour did you fly when you were on campus.
Parents should be more responsible
This correction ought to start from home. Mothers are dressing so immorally, fathers smoke in the presence of the son, what examples are they setting? The father is a drunk, he comes home and beats up his wife in the presence of his children and they are gathering their anger and frustration in their hearts. Then, you want to belong in a group where you can get authority and take revenge. Today, in spite of the bloodshed in my past, I have renounced the group but my pain is that things are worse. Now we are hearing of Boko Haram, very soon it would blow up in our face because they are frustrated.
Parents, you have to sit tight know your children’s friends. How many of us check on our students in their schools? I can’t remember one day when any of my relatives checked on me. Some of your children control millions of Naira and you do not ask them where they get it because you are benefiting from it.
Registered Cults
Whether Pirates is a cult group or not, they started it all. They started shedding blood. As far as they are still carrying out charity and every other thing we are encouraging such groups on campus to continue their acts. Some of these cult groups are registered by the Corporate Affairs Commission. There is another dimension in cultism now. People are creating clubs which on the outside look okay but the inside is something else. Some of the youth when I counsel them say they taught it was a club in school but that after they filled the form they were asking them to shed blood and pass through the devil’s passage, they were taken by surprise.
I don’t see reason why clubs should be on campus. The only bodies that should be given responsibilities over the students should be the Students Union Government. When you have something like Bafana Bafana Club and they write to the school authority to be approved as a club, meanwhile they put aka Buccaneers on a reserved paper. Any school that is experiencing high level of cultism then the character of the Chief Security Officer is questionable. There is no school where you have cultism thriving that the CSO is not involved. They pass information to the cultists. You have to send a private detective to go after your own CSO.
His Sins
We should not base the fight against cultism on freshers’ orientation alone. There should be at least one free lecture day in a semester because it is not all the students who resume at once. We have seen situations where students come to us and say they are telling me to do this and I don’t know what to do and we would take advantage of their vulnerability. They used us then to get humans for sacrifices. They would tell us we have a pyjama party and ask us to get girls. They would give us a bus and if we go with 20 girls we may only return with five girls because we do not know what they do with them as long as they have paid us our money.
Before I left the cult, there was a boy who joined voluntarily and eventually he was given an assignment which he failed to carry out. He also ran out of the campus, after consultation with the godfather we decided to go for his head and eliminate him. I gave order that they should bring him dead or alive. When they got to the village he had not returned and his parents were unaware. They thought he was still in school. So the cult members said we would leave a message and they shot the father. They used white handkerchief to get the blood and when they came back they reported to me.
In Lagos, too, a cult member was supposed to go and kill somebody from another school but because of heavy traffic he got there late and they had gone. The next day they came to his house and were quarreling with him for not doing the assignment and his mother came out when she heard the noise. One said, “you mean you messed up and your mother is still messing?” They shot the mother dead. Eventually the boy had to run away from the school he was transferred to Ekiti but they sent a letter to their affiliate there asking that he should be allowed to join them. Universities should set up offices where these boys can run to trusted staff that would keep them safe and help them out.
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