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NEWS ANALYSIS/NIGERIA/AFRICA
Obasanjo, Atiku in Juju-Marabout
Row
Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
Kofi Akosah-Sarpong examines the implications of the
juju-marabout row between Nigeria’s President Olusegun
Obasanjo and his deputy, Atiku Abubaka, in the larger
development process of Africa
In Africa’s cultural and development context, it is not
strange that Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo accuses
his deputy, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, of craving to kill him
through the dreaded juju-marabout spiritual practice.
Obasanjo’s claims that Atiku has been “consulting Islamic
holy men on the date of his demise,” as the BBC reports (21
May 2007), reflects the huge unrefined elements within the
African culture waiting to be polished for progress. "Don't
worry, the president will be dead soon," a juju-marabout
medium told is said to have told Atiku. More expression of
the deeper under-currents of the troubles of the African
development process, Atiku responded that Obasanjo's “mind
was full of “the cobwebs of juju or occult.”
Developmentally, and in an era of the on-going African
Renaissance process, it is culturally healthy that such
incidents are coming from the top of African ruling elites,
who have been linked to dabbling in irrational juju-marabout
mediums to the injury of Africa’s progress. Reasons are not
far-fetched; such practices have been part of African
culture for thousands of years, especially in West Africa,
the most juju-marabout and witchcraft infested region of
Africa. The imperative is that African elites are yet to
have a fuller grasp of the realization that juju-marabout
and other such practices are counterproductive to progress.
The idea of African leaders dabbling in juju-marabout and
other such practices, as development experts debate its
implications in national development, is that it weakens the
rulers’ ability to totally rationalize developmental
problems on the ground. As the Obasanjio and Atiku row
demonstrates, juju-marabou and other such practices not only
weakens trust, a key ingredient in national development, but
it also undermines "national morality, because they are
based on irrational spirit power," as Robert Kaplan reports
in “The Coming Anarchy.” African experiences show that
developmental problems are not solved by dabbling in juju-marabout.
Nigeria's Gen. Sani Abacha's juju-marabout-directed
murdering spree to transform himself into not only civilian
President but also solve his mounting problems is case in
point.
The history of Africa’s development process shows that
leaders, both military and civilians, who dabble heavily in
juju-marabout either paralyze their country or blow it into
pieces or are blinded from reasoning properly to solve the
problems. From Liberia's Gen. Samuel Doe to Uganda's Gen.
Idi Amin to Central Africa Republic's Jean-Bedel Bokassa
(who ate human flesh as part of his juju-marabout rituals),
dabbling in juju-marabout weakens the rational abilities of
the ruling elites to handle the problems of the people. The
leader becomes unrealistic, depending on illiterate,
irrational, unscientific and impractical juju-marabout
mediums that, in all measure, are immoral and destructive.
The juju-marabout dabbling Africa leader sees critics as
enemies and lives in paranoia to the detriment of Africa’s
progress. Such leaders become the manipulative robots of the
juju-marabout and spiritual mediums as we saw in Gen. Idi
Amin’s Uganda, perhaps one of the most rabid juju-marabout
dabblers Africa has seen, who listened to these mediums to
the extent of deport enmass Ugandan-Asians and which impact
destroyed Uganda’s economy till President Yuweri Uneven
stepped in. The Ugandan media described Amin as “spiritually
weak.” In Sierra Leone, Foday Sankoh’s revolution was
derailed partly because of the juju-marabout mediums. And so
was the collapse of Gen. Samuel Doe’s Liberia and mounting
troubles of Guinea Bissau till recently.
In Ghana, Gen. Kutu Acheampong regime not only revealed a
throwback to the ancient times mired in irrational native
spiritual mediums but rule by forces of irrationality. The
era shows a Head of State confused and shifting from one
juju-marabout medium to another. They made Gen. Acheampong
not only terribly gullible but also infantile, believing in
everything the spiritual mediums told him. It is, therefore,
not surprising that Gen. Acheampong was swimming every
mid-night in one of the rivers in Accra, as advised by his
spiritual mediums, ostensibly to ward off being overthrown.
But Gen. Acheampong was overthrown all the same and executed
because he failed rationalize the problems on the ground. In
Nigeria, the juju-marabout mediums had so much grip on Gen.
Abacha that his every move was juju-marabout directed: he
conducted important affairs of state overnight by the advise
of the mediums; he looted the Nigerian treasury in the same
fashion; he killed and jailed in the same vein (He jailed
and nearly killed President Olusegun Obasanjo upon the
advise of his mediums, some of whom come as far as
Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and
India). Nigeria was ruled by so much irrationality that the
country not only became 'dark' but also was on the edge of
another civil war after the Biafran one of the 1960s.
Dirk Kohnert, of Germany's Institute for African Affairs,
argues that the belief in juju-marabout and other such
practices are still "deeply rooted in many African
societies, regardless of education, religion, and social
class of the people concerned." Like any other culture, this
aspect of the African culture is irrational and blinds one
from realistic assessment problems. As Atiku spoke of
Obasanjo, most African elites use religion as smokescreen to
hide their deep-seated juju-marabout dabbling, a practice
that emanates from the African culture. Said Atiku, “Unlike
Obasanjo who uses Christianity as a smokescreen while
engaged in occultism and diabolical acts, I am a devout
Muslim who has always striven to live in accordance with the
teachings of Islam… The next occupant of the State House
(presidential villa) will need to spiritually cleanse the
presidential lodge to make it habitable for normal people.”
Such counter-productive thoughts by African elites show how
the irrational African cultural values appear to outweigh
the rational parts, and how such patterns persist in
Africa’s development process. While the scientific side of
the African mind demands objective evidence as to why juju-marabout
should influence them, their brains’ mythopoeic, irrational
juju-thinking side entices them to irrational marvels – to
evil spirits, juju, or demons. Can these matters be
addressed with a whole mind, as the African media and other
members of Africa’s objective society mount campaigns to
refine some serious inhibitions within the African culture?
Can the two instincts of the African brain, the rational and
the irrational, formed by the African culture, be made to
fit together?
For the sustainable development of Africa, it is healthy
that African elites re-think the relationship between their
culture and progress, especially how to refine the
inhibitions within their culture to facilitate progress, as
the Europeans did during their Enlightenment struggles in
their development process. That’s partly what Nigeria’s
Nobel Prize-winning laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, was saying
when he told an Accra audience recently that “trokyosi,” a
cultural practice among West Africa’s Ewe ethnic group,
where teenage girls are enslaved to shrines for sins
committed by their parents, be abolished for the larger
progress of African women. And it is in the same vein that
today the Ghana Police Service and the South African Police
Force (it has an Occult Unit) now implicate juju-marabout
and spiritual mediums in crimes if they are proven to be
linked as facilitators in terms of sing their craft to help
criminals. Despites these positive attempts, African elites
are yet to tackle these aspects of their culture in their
development process.
Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, Canada
May 23, 2007
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