Nigeria’s university system used to be the finest in West Africa, but today’s classes are overcrowded, buildings are crumbling and the curriculum has remained unchanged for years. Cults have emerged from the shambles. Started as confraternities of the most academic students, they have deteriorated into gang violence. The Exam Ethics Project, a lobby group, says that inter-cult violence killed 115 students and teachers between 1993 and 2003. The real number may be much higher.
The situation is particularly bad in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, the country’s wealthiest state and centre of the oil industry. Here cults have spilled beyond the campus walls to mix with the political militants, thugs and crooks responsible for a violent insurgency in the Niger Delta. Most city residents believe that nearly all of today’s most prominent militant leaders were, or still are, cult members.
How did the cults become such a problem? Wole Soyinka, a Nobel prize winner for literature, helped found the Pyrates Confraternity, the first such group, in 1952 at the elite University of Ibadan. Slowly, splinter groups emerged: The Black Axe, the Klansmen Konfraternity, and numerous others. It was harmless fun to begin with. But military leaders of the 1980s and 1990s saw the groups’ growing membership as a chance to confront leftist student unions, often aligned with pro-democracy movements. So the confraternities were given money and weapons. They turned against student activists — and against each other. By the mid-1980s, violence had become so fierce that Soyinka tried unsuccessfully to disband his former creation.
As their strength grew, the cults’ influence on universities became more malign. They exacerbated the corruption that had already bred in unmanageably big classes and deteriorating facilities. Today, older students and alumni flood campuses in the first weeks of the new academic year to recruit for cults. Omolade Adunbi, an anthropologist, says that some students, fearing that they will be failed in exams, believe the only way to protect themselves is to belong to a cult where they can “harass professors”.
Rivers State outlawed cultism in 2004, setting up rehabilitation committees and special courts to try those accused of membership. But the law has had little effect, since politicians play a big part in keeping the groups rich in cash and arms. “In Rivers State everybody is fighting for the soul of governance in the state, and you need everything —everything — to get it,” says Prof. Chiedu Mafiana, a director at the National Universities Commission. Politicians use the students to intimidate opponents, he says.
The pay-offs after university can be rewarding. With a well-connected alumni network, students hope that their cult membership will win them jobs in a country where most graduates are unemployed. Alumni of the Vikings Confraternity, for example, claim at least 11 members of the Rivers State House of Assembly.
Some progress has been made in tackling the cults at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, thanks to 200-odd security officers, covert surveillance and student informants. For the first time in over a decade there were no gunshots on the campus last year. Yet many students say the violence has not ceased; it has just moved into the streets. Recently, a new vice-chancellor took over the university. Asking him to do the job, the Rivers State governor, Rotimi Amaechi, put the task simply: “Go on a rescue mission for me.”
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)