MY TAKE: Nigeria's romance with farce

Last week, the Kwara State Police Command detained a goat it accused of attempting to steal a car! A joke, you think? Well, the joke's on you.

The police were in deadly earnest. The Nigerian media reported the bizarre news. The report was then circulated globally by the online service of the British Broadcasting Corporation as well as other online and print media.

There's no question that Nigeria continues to blaze the trail in the absurd and farcical. A friend of mine, a Nigerian attorney who practices in Washington, DC, once told me that Nigeria is a space where absurdity makes sense.

When you think it could never get more bizarre, the Nigerian state deploys its genius to invent new depths of weirdness.

I hazard that Nigeria must be the first and only country in the world where a goat was arrested - and paraded to the press - as a theft suspect. This goat was not charged with nibbling lettuce from somebody's garden, it was not detained because it had upturned a street trader's ware. No, we have it on the authority of Tunde Mohammed, public relations officer of Kwara police, that this goat was caught while attempting to steal a car.

TheVanguard ran the story on January 23 with the headline: "Police parade goat as robbery suspect: For attempting to ‘steal' a Mazda car".

You don't believe it? If you missed the Vanguard report, here are its opening lines: "It was a shocking sight yesterday as men of the Kwara State Police Command paraded a goat as an armed robbery suspect...The goat ‘suspect' is being detained over an alleged attempt to snatch a Mazda car.

The mysterious goat, according to the Police Public Relations Officer, Mr. Tunde Mohammed, while briefing bewildered journalists at the Force headquarters, is an armed robber who attempted to snatch the said car, Wednesday night, and later transformed into the goat in a bid to escape arrest." Much of the rest of the world has moved into the 21st century, but what time is it in Nigeria? Going by what many Nigerians believe, we may well be in the 15th century. A few years ago, at an international conference in Ghana, a born-again professor at one of Nigeria's first-generation universities stunned us at lunch by declaring that many of his students were witches and wizards. Two American academics, sharing the lunch table with two Ghanaians and two other Nigerians, roared in laughter; they conjectured that the man was cracking a joke. How quickly they were disabused.

The storyteller told us that, usually after fasting and praying for forty days, he was able to see a gathering of these witches and wizards in his classroom. "They use four different creatures," he announced. "Some of them carry scorpions on their shoulders. Some have monkeys perched on their heads. Some have snakes curled round their necks, and others are half-human and half-fish." "Amazing!" exclaimed one of the Americans, clearly amazed. The Nigerian academic misread the response as credulity. He then related how he once saw a vision of some of his witchcraft-practicing students congregating at midnight under a banana tree. The next day, he confronted one of the members. "What were you doing at midnight under a banana tree?" he asked her. He reported, "She ran away!" Only recently, Britain's Channel 4 TV aired a shocking documentary on so-called child witches and wizards in Akwa Ibom.

It's estimated that more than 15,000 children in that state have been dubbed witches or wizards. Once the stigma of witchcraft is affixed on a child, he or she is immediately ostracized. Some of the children are tortured to confess to responsibility for sickness, deaths and other calamities in the community. Many are starved, abandoned in the forest, or even killed.

As the documentary showed, deranged pastors who arrogate to themselves the pompous title of "man or woman of God," diagnose children as witches and wizards. One of these crazed pastors, who goes by the name "Bishop" Sunday Ulup-Aya, is a self-styled "poison destroyer." He administers a potion to rid children of "witchcraft".

According to the documentary, the darkish liquid contains strong alcohol, a substance called "African mercury," and the "bishop's" own blood! On tape, an apparently inebriated Ulup-Aya boasts that he had eliminated 110 witches and wizards.

After watching the disgusting documentary on youtube.com, I wondered why the Nigerian police had not rounded up the criminals who hurt innocent children while passing themselves off as pastors. Now we know part of the answer. As far as the Nigerian police are concerned, the real culprits are goats.