Cameroon's president Paul Biya, pictured above, who will be 83 next week Saturday and has been president since November 6 1982, has heeded the call by chiefs of Cameroon's East region to allow them use witchcraft in "finishing off" Boko Haram.
A Cameroonian investigative journalist with the twitter handle @ChiefBisongEta1, tweeted the request by the chiefs in Cameroon's East region to the president to allow them use witchcraft to oust the insurgents who had recently increased their attacks in the country, as well as their stronghold of Maiduguri in north east Nigeria.
Boko Haram suicide bombers attacked a school in Cameroon last Thursday, January 28, killing four, including the two bombers, and causing injuries to an undisclosed number of persons. The insurgents also attacked targets in Dailori and Walonri villages near Maiduguri, Borno state, Nigeria where they were engaged in a fierce gun battle with the army who intercepted their attacks, but not before they had killed scores and caused many more to flee their homes. The death toll from Saturday's attack stands at 91.
President Biya's approval of the use of witchcraft or juju in fighting the Boko Haram insurgency is not a novel idea. He was beaten to the punch by the governor of Nigeria's Adamawa state (Cameroon also has an Adamawa region as one of its 10 regions) who spent the equivalent of a million dollars on 'prayer warriors' to seek divine intervention to the Boko Haram problem. It is left to see if there would be any monies allocated to those who will bring their powers of witchcraft to the fight against the deadly sect. Superstition is still rife in Africa, and especially so among the very poor and illiterate that are, unfortunately, in the majority.
When the governments of, especially, subsaharan African countries where such superstitions hold sway, begin to invest in the education of their children, they will reduce the pool of idle and impressionable young minds available for recruitment by Boko Haram. When they begin to encourage their children to pay attention to evidence based scientific facts rather than religious claims and falsities, then sects like Boko Haram which are against western education, and seek to establish sharia law across Nigeria, and the world, will find it extremely difficult to take root.
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