Nelson Dafe

When a teenage boy left his home for football training in the Uwelu area of Benin city,Edo state on March 24, 2016, it felt like a routine walk. He was looking with excitement to having a good session with his teammates in a grassroots club in the area. But moments later an incident would change his course from playing football to being a runaway.

This reporter understands from investigations that Tony Ajatiton was, because he was running late for the session, taking a short-cut and an unusual path to training, a road so tiny and usually lonely and one which people avoided because of its eery quietness and which was feared as a hideout for criminals especially at night.He stopped to ease himself when he noticed from afar about three teenage-looking boys in a scuffle at the corner of the tight, slummy street. Suddenly two of the boys took to their heels unbeknownst to them that Tony was standing afar and trying to understand what was going on.

He tiptoed to the scene where the guys were and to his horror he saw the strangled body of a lad hanging on a bush-mango tree. In shock, Tony screamed out to alert people to the scene. One woman who was passing by came around and joined in expressing horror.

“The men of the Nigeria police, Egor division of Benin City, were alerted and they soon came to the scene. Tony left before the police came partly because of the disposition of the police to arrest eye-witnesses and the inconveniences they could face as investigations go on,” our source, said.

Days later, after deciding to stay indoors for fear for his own safety as a result of being confused over what he had seen and how to narrate it publicly, Tony started to receive numerous death threats as some mysterious persons were calling him on the phone to warn him that he had witnessed a cult murder and that they knew he would go to the police (who were reportedly also looking for him to tell what he knew). They warned that they were going to kill him like a dog.

The source told News Express: “One night as he ventured out to buy something to eat near his house, Tony was attacked by a group of men, with some of them wielding machetes. He was hit with a blow at the back and he managed to escape as his assailants tried to cut him. It was at that point he decided to flee from Benin City on the advice of his family members."

Tony became a wanted man. Wanted by the police and secret cult boys.

Soon after arriving in Delta, word went out that he was in the nearby state.

He kept getting threatening calls that said they knew where he was and he was going to die. Too scared of going to the police and other security operatives to tell of his fate, because of the serious perception that those groups could have been compromised in some ways, Tony decided to take further measures to try to leave the country.

Today he is very much in hiding without any firm assurance of his safety.

“The Nigerian security system is not to be trusted. Many people in high authorities are members of a cult group or the other. They treat issues relating to cultism with levity and eye-service and that’s why you have many cult-related killings going on in the country till this day. This is a country where a Justice Minister (Bola Ige in 2001) was murdered and till today there has not been anyone who has been found guilty of the murder. What are Tony’s chances of being safe and getting justice in the country where our institutions are peopled by cultists in large numbers. Most big men in our society today belong to a cult group or the other.”

In Edo state, cultism-related clashes have been a big headache for the city's inhabitants for many years. No fewer than 10 persons were killed in Benin City in February as rival cult groups, Aye and Eiye confraternities, engaged in reprisal attacks.

The fight heightened tension in the affected areas, as fear gripped residents.

The killings in Edo, it was gathered, was triggered by the one year memorial of two kingpins of the two rival cult groups.

Innocent individuals are sometimes fatally caught up in these clash battles.

In 2018, a young man who had just finished his youth service was brutally murdered in his home in the Upper Sapomba area of Benin City when a group of cultists mistakenly identified him as belonging to a rival group during one of their raids.

It is such fate that Tony Ajatiton fears and has made his life miserable as he hides to stay alive.