By Hope Eghagha
Kidnapping and ritual
killing seem to be on the increase in Lagos
and around the country. Another way to express this is that there are more
reports of abductions for ritual killings these days than we used to have them.
Red Cross says that it has received reports of 10,480 missing persons in Nigeria . Every
other week or even day, we read reports about ‘ritualists den’ in Nigeria . Two
channels, social media and personal testimonies do a better job reporting the
incidents than mainstream media.
While mainstream outlets can be controlled not
to report the incidents (to give a good albeit false image of security) no one
can really control reports in social media. The latter presents gory pictures
of dismembered bodies. The most recent was that of a 200 level undergraduate at
the University of
Port Harcourt who
butchered a neighbour’s seven year old daughter for ritual, removed parts of
her body and attempted to dispose of the body in a garbage heap. Shocking!
Horrifying!