“One man’s food is another man’s poison” is a time-honoured truism. I am afraid, you may not find today’s piece quite palatable to savour. But I have to serve it up all the same in spite of myself. That is the price columnists have to pay… to serve the mouth-watering meals and the ones that make you feel like throwing up.
Last Saturday, the media space was awash with the story of an Ibadan-based trader, Emmanuel Egbu, caught munching sliced bread held together with faeces in his shop located at the Sango area.
Whistle-blowers who sighted him having the weird meal raised an alarm that attracted a huge crowd. And it took the timely intervention of the police to save the faeces eater from being lynched. His rescuers are holding him at the Sango Police Station while investigation is ongoing. The cuisine has also been sent to the laboratory ostensibly to establish the ownership of the meal.
Egbu trades in cosmetics and Brazilian hair. Hoodlums cashed in on the situation to loot his shop. I am no great shakes as a lawyer. But I know that the law, being an ass, will find a way of nailing Emmanuel Egbu especially if the faeces turns out to be another person’s discharge.
The reason for the attack on Egbu could be tied to a Yoruba movie I watched recently on the Africa Magic channel. Three young men, who had been held ruthlessly between the jaws of poverty for long, approached a babalawo for a way out. The jujuman told the desperate trio that the solution to their wretchedness was to feast on bread and faeces. As if that was not disgusting enough, he told them they had to consume the weird meal with gusto… no frowning of faces and no throwing up.
Those Ibadan whistle-blowers and the mob might have watched the money ritual movie in the belief that Egbu must have procured the faeces of an innocent person for a babalawo to ritualise it for him as a way to escape poverty.
Now let us cast our minds back to December, last year when a 30-year-old dad was caught on camera recycling the solid waste of his three-year-old daughter into her system by way of force-feeding in Port Harcourt. The dad named Francis Silas was caught on camera as he pinned the poor girl down to drive down his waste-to-food regime. Unlike those who eat the faeces for wealth, Silas’ motive was not known.
He was swiftly arrested and charged to court where he was granted a bail. No one knows the stage the prosecution has reached eight months on. A little over a decade ago, a man was arrested in Utako, a location in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), for feeding a child with faeces. Reacting to the report in my column which I was running in the LEADERSHIP, I asked thus: “Is the Utako cuisine also a therapy?”
The question was informed by the practice encouraged by some herbal medicine folks that ingesting early morning urine, foaming like beer larger, is a “gbogbonise” therapy. So, I asked the alternative medicine practitioners if eating faeces, swarming with all manner of (unfriendly) bacteria and parasites, also had its own medicinal values. After all, both urine and faeces are wastes from the human system. I got no answers. Those who quaff their own urine as a therapy must have been encouraged by some herbalists and hawkers of agbo, the local herbal concoctions, who oftentimes lace the stuffs with cow urine! If people can drink cow urine in agbo, why can’t they drink their own urine?
As for the faeces-eating trio, their ritual worked for them. According to the story line, one of their victims, a wealthy woman, was based in the United States. They charmed her to part with huge amounts of dollars which they were to use to build mansions for her back home in Nigeria. The faeces charm was to ground their victim in the States until the end of her days. She was also to see Nigeria like shit (excuse the language) with no intention to return. However, the ritual, like all rituals with termination date, expired. The conned lady returned home to the consternation of the trio. In anger, they stormed the babalawo’s house to complain. A serious quarrel ensued. In the end, they murdered him, while they too ended up being arrested by the lady for fraud.
Until I read about the Ibadan trader who was caught savouring bread with faeces, I thought what the trio did was a make-believe. How could human beings descend to the level of dogs just to escape the dog’s life? Faeces is known to be dogs’ favourite meal. Back in the day, dogs were were employed by nursing mothers to fight open defecation, so to speak, especially by toddlers and young kids. All the mothers needed to do was to announce that their kids were defecating or had just defecated. Lokili is the name dogs are called among the Yoruba. Once the neighbourhood dogs heard “Lokili o, gba, gba, gba”, meaning “Dogs, take, take, take”, they would race from different directions for the meal, served hot. The dogs would snaffle up the faeces. Where the kids were in the process of defecating, the impatient ones were permitted to be packing the substance and even use their mouths to force out hard stool. After that, they would employ their extra-long tongues as tissue papers to clean up the anuses.
It is so sad to note that while hardworking folks in other climes are working their fingers to the bones to make money, we depend on charms to capture easy wealth. Our media space is awash with stories of innocent people being killed and their organs harvested for money ritual. There are those who raid neighbourhoods for female panties and use menstrual pads for money-making purposes. It got to a stage that ladies had to be going about pant-less!
Parents are also known to use their kids for money ritual and vice versa. Some men even sacrifice their manhood to escape poverty, while women surrender their wombs so that the families could hug opulence. All these “blessings” packaged and delivered by the quick-money giver (Satan) come with grave consequences. The only blessings that come without any strings attached are from God. The problem is that they don’t come cheap and fast. We have also heard or read about fathers who sleep with their biological daughters or forbid them from getting married so that they could become rich. In some East African countries, albinos are the targets for money rituals. The belief is that ritualising them would fetch hard currencies.
It is this get-rich quick mentality that has also driven many Christians to the church in search of solutions to their poverty situations. But instead of getting rich, most of the smart pastors have cashed in on their desperation to fleece them of the little (cash) they have in the name of sowing seeds in exchange for miracles or breakthroughs.
If eating feaces could bring fortunes, dogs would have been the richest animals under the sun!
