By Bamidele Ademola-Olateju
For along time, I wanted to write this. Today I found the time and inspiration to touch a very painful truth, deserving serious examination among the Yoruba. Belief in witches is destroying Yorubaland, not in some abstract, philosophical way, but in the most practical and intimate sense. It is hollowing out families, emptying villages, isolating elders, distorting faith, and paralyzing responsibility. It has become a convenient explanation for everything we are unwilling to examine honestly about life, economics, health, and adulthood.
At the center of this crisis is a dangerous misreading of human experience. It is not that success is interpreted as spiritual theft or prosperity framed as evidence of evil. The deeper problem is that every life challenge is now interpreted as witchcraft. Illness is no longer a biological event or a medical condition; it is a spiritual attack. Mental health struggles are possession. Infertility is sabotage. Aging is guilt. Misfortune, delay, grief, and even ordinary stress are treated as evidence that someone, somewhere, is “after” you. And that someone is almost always an old woman in the village. What Nigerians casually call “village people” is really a modern euphemism for scapegoating the defenseless. This framing is seductive because it offers certainty without effort. Witchcraft explains everything without demanding study, patience, or humility. It removes the discomfort of not knowing and replaces it with the comfort of accusation. Once witchcraft becomes the default explanation, medicine looks weak, doctors look clueless, science looks optional, and reason looks suspicious. Prayer replaces diagnosis. Deliverance replaces treatment. Fear replaces care.This belief system thrives because it allows people to abdicate responsibility. Instead of reading life honestly, people outsource cause and effect to invisible enemies. Consider the very common example of a young, successful bachelor. He comes home for Christmas, reconnects with family, meets a woman, gets married by June. The following year, a child arrives. Suddenly, there are two extra mouths to feed. Expenses multiply. Rent feels tighter. School fees loom. Medical bills appear. His income has not increased, but his responsibilities have. This is not mystery. It is arithmetic. It is adulthood. Rather than confront the need for better planning, higher income, or delayed gratification, the story is rewritten. “Since I went home, my life has been attacked.” The village becomes the villain. An old woman becomes the explanation. Witches are blamed for what is simply the weight of new responsibilities. This narrative is often comforting because it preserves ego. If witches are responsible, then nothing needs to change. No new skills. No new strategy. No sacrifice. No growth. The worse is when irresponsible religious leadership is added to the mix. It seals this escape from maturity. Many pastors do not challenge this thinking; they validate it. They name enemies instead of naming habits. They prescribe fasting instead of budgeting, deliverance instead of career development, prayer instead of planning. Responsibility is not merely abandoned; it is spiritualized away. Failure becomes proof of attack. Reflection becomes doubt. Adulthood is postponed indefinitely.
Prosperity preaching adds another toxic layer. It sells a natural impossibility; work like an ant and eat like an elephant. It promises disproportionate reward without proportionate effort, time, or structure. When this fantasy inevitably collapses, witchcraft is again called in to explain the gap between promise and reality. The believer is never taught to ask whether the promise itself was false. Even more damaging is how some pastors actively sever family bonds. Parents are blamed for real and imagined misfortunes through the language of “foundations,” “altars,” and “ancestral covenants.” Mothers and fathers who labored, sacrificed, and endured are turned into suspects. Young people are subtly trained to distrust their homes while transferring emotional loyalty to church leaders, calling them “mummy” and “daddy” while their real parents age in loneliness. This is not spiritual fatherhood; it is emotional displacement. In the churches, control is maintained through exhaustion. They overcrowd calendars with endless programs, vigils, rehearsals, fasts, retreats, and emergency prayers, especially during holidays when families should reconnect. Young people are kept too busy to visit home, too tired for recreation, and too distracted for deep thought. A mind that never rests never questions. A body that is always at church never returns to the land.
The consequences are visible everywhere. Young people languish in urban centers, underemployed and anxious, while farms are abandoned. Villages empty out. Agricultural knowledge disappears. Land lies fallow, not because it lacks value, but because it has been spiritually demonized. Meanwhile, strangers move in. Outsiders cultivate the land, exploit resources, and sometimes violently assert ownership over spaces the original inhabitants fled in fear. Inheritance is lost not through conquest, but through superstition. Old women bear the heaviest cost. Women who spent their youth raising children, caring for families, and holding communities together are abandoned in old age. Instead of honor, they receive suspicion. Instead of care, accusation. Longevity, once seen as a blessing, is now treated as evidence. A society that turns its elderly women into witches is announcing its own moral collapse.
Nollywood has played a powerful and often unexamined role in cementing this mindset. For decades, it has normalized the image of the wicked old woman, the village coven, the jealous auntie, the supernatural enemy behind every hardship. These stories are not neutral entertainment. They train imagination. They provide scripts for fear. Accusations are validated, not interrogated. Old women are exposed, punished, or killed, and the audience is invited to feel satisfied. There are few counter-stories where illness is biological, poverty is structural, or failure is human. Fiction becomes theology. Theology becomes accusation. Accusation becomes social practice. The Yoruba who once prized ọgbọ́n inú – inner wisdom, discernment, the ability to connect cause and effect. We understood that life is complex, fragile, and often unfair. We believed in balance, restraint, and communal care. What is happening now is not tradition. It is fear without wisdom. It is religion without responsibility. It is spirituality without compassion. A society that cannot accept illness, loss, failure, and limitation as part of the human condition will always need witches to blame. But no land can grow where elders are afraid, families are fractured, farms are abandoned, and responsibility is treated as optional. Yorubaland does not need more deliverance. It needs courage. Courage to name reality. Courage to protect its elderly. Courage to restore family bonds. Courage to separate faith from manipulation. And courage to accept that many of our problems are not spiritual attacks, but the ordinary, demanding work of being human.
The Way Forward
The way forward is for us to reclaim reason, responsibility, and community. If Yorubaland is to heal, the first work is intellectual courage. We must relearn how to explain life honestly. Not every problem has a villain. Not every illness has an enemy. Not every delay is sabotage. Societies mature when they can sit with complexity, uncertainty, and limitation without reaching for scapegoats. We must normalize biology, economics, psychology, and chance as legitimate explanations for human experience. Faith should help people endure reality, not deny it. Religious leadership must be confronted and reformed. Churches and mosques must be held to ethical standards that forbid the demonization of parents, elders, and entire communities. Clergy who trade in fear, accusation, and perpetual spiritual emergencies must be challenged by their peers and by an informed public. Teaching responsibility, planning, work, rest, and compassion should be considered core spiritual duties. Any faith that breaks families and terrifies the vulnerable is already bankrupt.
Families must be restored to the center of moral life. Parents should not compete with pastors for legitimacy in their children’s lives. Holidays should be reclaimed for rest, reflection, and reconnection. Young people need space to think, to question, to fail quietly, and to grow without being told that every struggle has a spiritual culprit. Adulthood must be redefined not as constant victory, but as the capacity to bear consequences with dignity. Education and media carry a heavy responsibility. Nollywood must be challenged to tell better stories. Filmmakers shape imagination as powerfully as preachers shape belief. Stories that humanize aging, explain illness, show economic cause and effect, and portray responsibility without ridicule are not boring; they are necessary. A society that cannot see itself clearly on screen will continue to live in fantasy offscreen. Economic reconnection to the land is also essential. Young people must be encouraged, not spiritually discouraged, from returning home to farm, invest, and build. Land should be seen as inheritance, not as cursed territory. Community-based agriculture, cooperatives, and modern farming must be protected and promoted. When people return to their land without fear, villages revive, elders are cared for, and strangers no longer fill the vacuum. Finally, elders, especially elderly women, must be publicly protected and honored. Clear community norms must make accusation a moral offense. Longevity should be celebrated as wisdom, not feared as guilt. A culture that cannot safeguard its oldest women has no moral authority to talk about destiny or blessing. The future of Yorubaland will not be secured by louder prayers or longer fasts, but by clearer thinking, braver conversations, stronger families, honest work, and humane faith. When responsibility is reclaimed, fear loses its power. And when fear is disarmed, development becomes possible again.
