Sometime in February 2011, parents in Ibadan rushed to schools to secure their wards after rumours that politicians were preying for 200 people who would be sacrificed to ensure their victory in the 2011 elections.
Ordinarily, people would ignore that information, but we live in a society, where someone would readily confirm the potency of traditional preparations made in this way to facilitate the chances of someone at the polls. Ignorance is at the centre of these superstitions.
Illiteracy plays a bold role in the decisions that our people make. Where they do not have an explanation for a phenomenon, they ascribe it to the Almighty, content that He will resolve it at his own time.
Who spread the rumour that food to be served to the pupils had been laced? What was the motive? Did the security agencies make efforts to arrest suspected carriers of this false information? Are we letting them go free to wreck further in other places?
Their story was simple – government was compromising food served in public schools so that pupils would be among the 200 demanded as sacrifices to help some politicians win elections.
In a society grounded in superstition, the rumour sent thousands of parents scampering to their children’s schools to rescue them. The chaos in a city like Ibadan was unimaginable with the number of schools and the millions of pupils who attend daily.
Thousands of parents wanted their children immediately. They were so concerned about them that they broke school rules, disrupted classes, as they peeped from one class to the other in search of their children who must be stopped from patronising food from vendors that serve the schools.
It no longer mattered if the students were expelled from school over the behaviour of their parents, nor did any of the parents have a source from which to confirm the information that set off the panic.
The relief for the panicky parents was more important than anything else. When will our people die to superstitions? If the panic in Ibadan was treated as unimportant, nothing stops the rumour from spreading.
This rumour is capable of affecting school attendance. It is worse that it is coming weeks after pupils lost four weeks to the voters registration exercise. How will schools make up for this latest disruption?
Superstition played a big part in the death of schools meals programme some years ago.First, some parents complained that the designs on the plates used in serving the pupils were occultic. Nothing could persuade parents otherwise.
Then more interpretations of the designs on the plates followed. When they were through, it was certain that the foods programme was dead and it has remained largely so.
Rumours are capable of infinite complications for the society. Things get worse when they lean on superstition to damage a society seeped in ignorance. One way of dealing with these rumours is to find their peddlers and punish them.
