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An aesthetically-framed portrait of Pablo Escobar, the late Colombian drug-lord of global infamy, is not what one is likely to come across among the assorted articles hawked by teeming unemployed youths in the ubiquitous traffic jams of Lagos – Nigeria. Having earlier cited similar portraits of the deadliest and richest criminal in world history on two different occasions, and in as many days, Yours Truly, therefore, decided to interrogate one of the street hawkers of the photograph upon a third citing.
“This is Escobar the hard man,” replied the teenage hawker in response to my query concerning the identity of the man in the photograph, and in the typical manner of a streetwise salesman, he launched into a flattering introduction: “Escobar was the hardest man in the world; he was the richest bad guy …” He would have continued his aggressive sales pitch had the traffic jam not untangled itself at that particular point in time.
Ruminating over the encounter, it seemed portentous that nearly three decades after he was gunned down by Columbian security forces aided by American special agents, there is a resurgence of fascination for Escobar amongst Nigerian youths, especially the criminal-minded elements. What could have occasioned this renewed interest in the notorious wealthy narco-terrorist who turned his country into a drug war theatre for more than a decade?
Perhaps, the violent criminality (terrorism, kidnap-for-ransom, banditry, cultism, ritual killing, etc.) currently roiling Nigeria has goaded most people, especially criminals, into embracing the attributes of ruthlessness, brutality, cruelty, etc., all of which they associate with the hardihood of a “hard-man.” And in reality, Pablo Escobar epitomized the “hard-man.” In his 2001 historical blockbuster, “Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the Richest, Most Powerful Criminal in History,” Mark Bowden describes Escobar as a man of “lethal violence” who displayed “casual cruelty.” Indeed, his modus operandi was terror: intimidation, blackmail, kidnappings, assassinations, bombings, etc.
Allured by Escobar’s wealth and notoriety, Nigeria’s young criminal elements are, undoubtedly, seeking to borrow from his criminal playbook in their quest for quick and easy wealth. But, unlike the Colombian drug lord, a host of them have resorted to unorthodox criminal ventures, including “blood-money” occultism, with many committing acts of parricide in the process. Presently, hardly does a week elapse in Nigeria without the nerve-chilling news of a blood money-related ritual murder perpetrated by the victim’s relative. From patricide to matricide, fratricide, sororicide, and uxoricide, no act of cold-blooded parricidal murder is too heinous for the criminals to commit. And the killings seem to be getting more gruesome by the day: eyeballs of victims are plucked; some are decapitated; others are disemboweled and their vital organs harvested; many are buried alive; charred remains tell the tale of others, etc.
Were Nigeria’s young parricidal criminals to undertake the exercise of studying the biography of Escobar, they would discover that the murderous drug lord was a man of unquestionable filial affections. He doted upon his family members and went great lengths to ensure that they were never in harm’s way as a result of his criminal operations. Certainly, he would have scoffed at Nigeria’s present-day parricidal killers, who are so bereft of criminal ideas to the extent of murdering their own relatives in the name of blood-money ritual.
Born on December 1, 1949 in Rionegro, Pablo Escobar grew up in Medellin, where he rose to become the world’s wealthiest criminal by the time of his death in 1993, having amassed a colossal fortune estimated at 30 billion US dollars from his monopoly of the cocaine trafficking routes into the United States. A school dropout, he muscled his way into the cocaine trafficking business, and in 1976 he founded the Medellin Cartel, which quickly became the dominant cocaine trafficking cartel in the world.
Escobar’s modus operandi was bribery and murder, summed up in the apothegm, “Plata o Plomo,” (Silver or Lead), meaning: Accept Escobar’s plata (silver) or his plomo (lead). Indeed, those who refused to be bribed by him were cut down in hails of bullets. Through sheer populism, he won an election into the Chamber of Representatives in 1982, but his foray into politics was a crucial blunder as it awakened the United States government into pressurizing the Colombian authorities to extradite him for onward prosecution, based on the extradition treaty signed by both countries in 1979. The efforts to arrest him and his Medellin Cartel associates occasioned a bruising decade-long anti-drug war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, including security agents, court justices, and presidential office aspirants. It culminated in his shooting-death on December 2, 1993.
Murderous as he was, Escobar was a conventional criminal, but the same cannot be said of his present-day young imitators in Nigeria. Steeped in the use of charms complemented by magical incantations, the young criminals comprise mainly school leavers and dropouts, undergraduates and unemployed graduates. Their hedonistic lifestyle is denoted by flashy cars and the constant company of idle young women – some of whom often end up as victims of their blood-ritual activities. Styling themselves “hard-men,” they would have no scruples selling their own souls for money.
Originally associated with hard-tackling sportsmen (especially in the game of football), the concept of “Hard-Man” gained notoriety in Nigeria in the 1980s, when campus cultism spiraled out of control as rival cults battled each other for supremacy, with students of cavalier character (mainly those with little or no inclination for academics) stepping up to the fray. Dubbed “campus hard men,” they assumed the role of hit-men in the feuding cults that had no worthwhile objective other than the production of violence. Their activities climaxed in the Obafemi Awolowo University massacre of July 10, 1999.
Pioneered by the National Association of Seadogs or Pyrates Confraternity at the University College, Ibadan, in 1952, campus cultism in Nigeria has since degenerated into a theatre of the depraved. Their repertoire of criminality range from exam-malpractice to intimidation of lecturers and fellow students, sexual predation and prostitution, acts of extortion, cyber-crime, kidnapping and armed robbery. Many are willing tools in the hands of the country’s numerous unscrupulous politicians. Gone are the days of high-ideals, like mobilizing students against the forces of neo-colonialism as conceptualized by Wole Soyinka (the 1986 Literature Nobel Laureate) and his fellow “Magnificent Seven” founding members of the Pyrates Confraternity.
But, even more worrisome than the scourge of cultism, which is fast-spreading to secondary and primary schools, is the rising wave of ritual killings on the part of young criminal elements across the country. The evil phenomenon has become rampart since cyber-criminals known as “Yahoo Boys” have resorted to blood-rituals in their bid to acquire illusive wealth. From “Yahoo Plus,” which involves the deployment of ordinary charms in their nefarious activities, they have graduated into what is referred to as “Yahoo Plus Plus,” involving ritual murders for the purpose of preparing bloody charms for their criminal money-making activities.
Like loathsome lumps of slime oozing from the sump of human depravity, present-day occultist criminal elements allegedly engage in all forms of mind-numbing fetishism: sleeping at the cemetery; nocturnal parade with human skulls, sexual intercourse with a corpse; nude walk in full glare of the public; bathing naked with bloodied water in public; consumption of human excrement; cannibalism; etc. Perhaps, the country’s anti-crime agencies would have ignored them had their lunacy been restricted to self-debasing actions. But, since they terrorize the general society by their orgies of bloodletting, in course of which they neither spare blood relatives nor strangers, their evil practices cannot go unchallenged.
In 2003, Nigerians applauded the death-by-hanging sentences passed on some members of the murderous “Otokoto” cult involved in the September 1996 ritual murder of an 11-year old school boy. Since then, either due to prevailing crass-materialism or declining moral values in society, ritual murder has been on the rise, while also assuming a more gruesome dimension.
By way of punishment, ritual killers deserve nothing short of the violent death to which they subject innocent victims. And, if there are means by which the pains of execution can be made much more excruciating for a convicted ritual killer, the authorities should not hesitate to deploy them. Man or woman, young or old, ritual killers deserve no iota of mercy, especially the parricidal ones of the most-evil variety.
- Dennis Onakinor is a public and international affairs analyst who lives in Lagos – Nigeria.