Ghost of the Witchfinder General

I don’t get involved with what the security services do or how. Their ways are so complex and their motives so unsearchable that sometimes you’ll be forgiven for thinking that working from the answer to the question is the standard operating procedure. Of course, you are told that whatever happens in between is in the public interest.

As far as fiction imitates life, there is a striking resemblance between the recent hyperactivity in Nigeria’s security services and what happened in a novel set in mid-17th century England.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (famously called “Double Trouble” by the English press) is a comedy about the birth of the son of Satan and the coming of the End Times.

The part that reminds me of what is obviously a hectic season for the security services – from the arraignment of the #EndBadGovernance protesters on charges of felony to the police raid on Labour House and run-ins with the NLC president and civil society activists – is the time in England when, according to Pratchett and Gaiman, witch-finding was a respectable profession.

General Hopkins

At that time, there was a certain General named Matthew Hopkins. You would think that in pre-industrial England, when poverty, disease and unemployment were rampant, the last thing the state would be interested in would be a witch-hunt. But no. Witch-hunting was good business.

Hopkins charged each town and village nine pence for every witch he found. But that wasn’t enough. Since he wasn’t paid by the hour, and the reward for not finding any witches was a thank you and a bowl of soup, he invented a way to earn more. He went out of his way to find witches, which made him unpopular in the towns and villages.

When Hopkins’ madness became insufferable, the villagers framed him as a witch, much to the pleasure of the local authorities, who were also tired of paying him. They hanged him. Hopkins, by many accounts, became the last Witchfinder General in England.

The world may have substantially passed the time when people were hunted, hanged and burned at the stake on suspicion of witchcraft. But I’m concerned that there is a growing similarity between witchcraft and how Nigeria’s security services look for enemies.

A British suspect

Listening to the spokesperson of the Nigeria Police Force, Olumuyiwa Adejobi, explain why the force raided Labour House, the siege on the Labour leadership, and the charge of treason against protesters and their alleged British sponsor, Andrew Martin Wynne, I can almost see the ghost of 17th century England. By his looks – and one must respect his decision to keep his shaggy hair and matted beard – Wynne might have been lumped together with those in the “pointy hat” in those days.

Not in Nigeria

But Nigeria is not Hopkins’ England. This is not 1961 when Joseph Tarka was detained for three weeks and charged with treason by the Crown for “inciting” the protests in Tiv land, only to be acquitted later for lack of evidence.

It is not the Nigeria of 1962 when Chief Obafemi Awolowo was prosecuted for treasonable felony for purportedly working with Ghana to overthrow the government of Nigeria, a scandalous charge borne out of politics rather than law.

Anthony Enahoro, a journalist’s journalist and scourge of the British government, was also jailed twice for sedition, once for an article mocking a former governor and then for another article “inciting Nigerian troops against the British army.”

Then, he was deported from England as a “fugitive offender” and jailed a third time along with Awolowo for treasonable felony.

This is not the Nigeria of military president General Ibrahim Babangida, where human rights activists Gani Fawehinmi, Femi Falana, Beko Ransome-Kuti and Baba Omojola were hounded and imprisoned on the spurious charge of treason by a military government that had lost its way. It is not the Nigeria where Babangida deported sociology lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Patrick Wilmot for the “treasonable sin” of teaching what “he was not paid to teach.”

Or the one where General Sani Abacha hounded NADECO leaders, including President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for standing up to the extreme human rights abuses of that government.

In 2024?

This is 2024, with a government that parades some of the most well-known human rights figures up and down the corridors of power and even among the principal officers of the national assembly. Where is this ghost of 17th-century England coming from?

Let me be clear. Protest is not – and should not – be chaos and anarchy. The killing of protesters and police officers during the #EndBadGovernance protests in August, which left seven persons dead, the arson at the NCC building in Kano, the open calls for a military takeover, and the symbolic insinuation that Russian intervention was welcome are inexcusable.

The silence of some top politicians and leaders, especially from the North, fueled suspicions of complicity if not connivance. Yet, why add a third if two wrongs don’t make a right?

I don’t know what intelligence is saying or the briefing President Tinubu is getting. Of course, he needs them. We need them, too, as citizens. No modern state can do without them. But in many countries, their job has become more valuable and sophisticated – and one might even say, often dangerously sophisticated – far beyond the voodoo of Hopkins’ witch-hunt in the east of England. 

Like Aziraphale and Cowley

For example, for decades in the US, and going back to the Vietnam War, through the Nixon years and the Cold War and even the destabilisation of Libya, the Intelligence services perpetrated some of the vilest acts in pursuit of the so-called enemies of the state, actually a mask for vendetta and a ladder for the ascendancy of the deep state.

Like the angel Aziraphale and the demon Cowley in Good Omens, the good and bad guys in the security services have shared interests. They routinely collaborate for good and ill, sometimes at the state’s expense.

Take heed

Tinubu must take heed. He has a competent attorney-general and minister of justice in Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, who should advise him to tread softly. The history of our security services, especially the bad habits inherited from colonial rule and reinforced by the long years of military rule and entitled politicians, hasn’t changed much. 

It’s not the business of police officers, the state security service or special advisers to run the government. That’s not their job. They cannot abridge the people’s freedoms in a quest for ascendancy. Those who breach the law in exercising their liberty should not face the justice that reminds us of Hopkins’ England but a process consistent with modern progressive society, one that Tinubu was voted to uphold.

As the veteran journalist Owei Lakemfa said in his column last week, the danger is not so much the protesters, their sponsors or the witches in a coven somewhere. The biggest threat to the land is the hardship in plain sight, compounded by the lavish lifestyle of government officials and the lack of clarity about what is next. And the president doesn’t need Witchfinder General Hopkins to tell him.

Ishiekwene is editor-in-chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book Writing for Media and Monetising It.