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Anambra State Governor Charles Soludo has said what every sensible Nigerian has been thinking for years, and he said it so cleanly, so brutally, and so logically that the internet simply cannot move on. Reacting to the sentencing in the Akwa Okuko case — a money ritual saga that shook Southeast Nigeria and beyond — Governor Soludo stepped to the microphone and basically dismantled the entire foundation of ritual money belief with the kind of argument that should be taught in secondary schools across this country.His words? A masterclass in common sense.If you have the power to perform money rituals and make people rich overnight, why are you collecting ₦200 to push a wheelbarrow? Why are you not making yourself rich first? Why are you not on Forbes? Why are you not sitting across the table from Elon Musk and Aliko Dangote comparing investment portfolios?And then he went deeper. He asked the question that should haunt every person who has ever handed over their savings to a ritualist or Yahoo-Yahoo boy promising overnight wealth — if a wheelbarrow pusher earning ₦200 a day undergoes your ritual and is now supposed to earn ₦1 million, where exactly is that ₦1 million coming from? Who is paying it? What is the spiritual exchange rate?
Is there a Central Bank of the Underworld setting these figures? The logic is airtight. And that is what makes it so devastating.Because the truth — the uncomfortable, heartbreaking truth — is that there is no ritual.
There is no power. There is no mysterious transformation of destiny happening in any forest, shrine, or candlelit room at midnight. What there IS, in every single one of these cases, is a con. A predator identifying a desperate person, packaging their desperation back to them as a product, and collecting money — sometimes life savings, sometimes borrowed funds, sometimes everything a family owns — in exchange for absolutely nothing.Worse than nothing. Because in many of these Akwa Okuko-type cases, the victims do not just lose money. They lose their dignity. They lose their minds. Some lose their lives. Young men and women who should have been building legitimate futures got consumed by the fantasy that there was a shortcut — and that shortcut swallowed them whole.
Soludo’s reaction is significant beyond just the wit and the punchline. Here is a sitting governor, a trained economist, a former Central Bank Governor, using his platform not just to condemn but to educate. To puncture the mythology. To laugh — loudly and publicly — at the absurdity of the belief system that enables these crimes to keep happening generation after generation in Igboland and across Nigeria.Because that is the real problem, isn’t it? The ritualists are criminals, yes. But they exist because the market exists.
They thrive because too many Nigerians — young and old, educated and uneducated — still harbour somewhere in the back of their minds the idea that wealth can be conjured. That there is a spiritual hack to poverty. That the right sacrifice, the right charm, the right native doctor can bypass the grinding, unglamorous, uncertain work of actually building something.Soludo is saying: there is no bypass.
There never was.If the ritual money was real, the ritualist would be richer than Dangote. Full stop. Case closed. Court dismissed.Nigeria, our Governor just gave us the economics lecture of the decade — and it did not cost a single kobo
