3 Ways You can avoid Cultist Advances in Public Universities (Part 2)

I am sure you have read the story of Alawunmi Femi, the cultist that claimed to have killed 60 people? If you haven’t read that you can check it up HERE. Let me quickly discuss the 3 ways you can identify cult guys and avoid their (sometimes coy) tactics to get you into the fold. These are the things I employed when it became apparent that I might be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

You see, LASU (Lagos State University, Ojo campus) was the unsafe’st’ of places you can ever be as a human being (2004 – 2009) and right there in broad day light, students lives were wasted like unwanted animals. My first baptism was in early 2004. I was in the class taking lecture THA 105 or thereabout and we suddenly heard loud noise. My lecturer then, Mr. Komolafe (we call him Baba Komo) was very calm but we the ‘jam-bites’ (new students) we were all hysteric and we ran helter-skelter. He mumbled certain words like ‘awon omo yi tun ti bere’ (these kids have started again) and he picked up his stuff and left the class.

We quickly climbed the stairs of the main auditorium which was our department and learning forte and peeped through holes and windows. For the first time in my life, I saw a man stand over another man and machetes him in cold blood. The victim was in a small canal that runs through the faculty of arts classes and the field where we played inter-faculty football competition. The victim was covered by grass so I didn't see how the machete landed on him but I saw that with every blow the cultist landed on the victim, streams of blood splashed all over the green lush as it follows the machete. He would wait for almost 5 minutes, confirmed he had died and then disappeared into nothingness.

I was not really scared or surprised. Of course I had heard about all this barbaric killings and this was the first of the many other killings I will witness in the school. It was a sad experience for me, and when I look back it is still very sad because this embarrassingly uncouth attitude from supposed students made us all looks like ‘killers’ and not academia. Sometimes it is hard for me to proudly claim Alma Mata of the school despite the fact that it has produced great people like YAW, Ruggedman, Sound Sultan and I personally gained a lot from the school.

I would later have a close brush with some cult guys and I was saved just by God’s grace. But let me share how you too can avoid these guys no matter how bad they are on campus. 3 simple steps and you might just graduate with your life in your sack (lol).

1)      Avoid Coded Parties:

Especially as a jam-bite, the best thing for you to do is to face your book squarely for the first two years. There will always be parties; faculty welcome party; departmental jambite party; jci welcome party and so on. But once the party is coded and your new friends who you barely know and who also barely knows his/her way around the school invites you to a party that has no address until you get there or the venue is so faaaaaar away from the campus, then you need to be wary.

Parties are the subtle ways to initiate new intakes to cult gangs. In fact I can almost say that all the stories I heard about initiations into cult groups (and trust me I have heard more than enough) have been done through proxy parties. They know new guys wanna parry and enjoy because of the new found freedom so they brandish free parties with lots of babes and beer but when you get there, you just might meet with such unpleasant surprise. So avoid as much as you can any party that is not properly defined.

2)      Avoid Going with the Flow:

When you get into the university, after about 6 months friendship realignment begins. This means that some of the people you met when you first came in will no longer be your friend. You probably became friends out of circumstances but after 6 months, you now know your way around and you want to consciously choose who will be your friend. The tendency that you will want to go for the popular guys is always high and the danger in that is that; they just might be the ‘cult’ guys.

I have a story to share and I hope that my friend (I won’t mention his name though) won’t be angry I did. When we got admitted into Theatre Arts department, myself, Damilola, Adeyemi and that friend of mine that I won’t mention, we all hung out together. Despite the fact that we were in Theatre Arts, my nameless friend had a brother that was admitted in Economics Dept but he would rather come stay with us because we were much fun than the Economics dept (or so I thought)

After the first semester, I just noticed that my nameless friend’s brother stopped hanging out with us. He was now ‘rolling’ with new set of guys from his own department. No biggie, if that is what he wants but we missed him. In our 200 level, he completely stopped coming to our department and even when we see him, he was with some set of boys that my instincts knew weren’t guys one can hang with.

But deep in our subconscious, we knew that he couldn’t possibly become a cultist because he was from a good home. In economics department, which also shared the same carnal I mentioned earlier where someone was killed (in fact the guy killed was a student from Economics Dept), they are super notorious for being in contention with FMS (Faculty of Management Science) as to who has the highest number of cultist.

One evening, I left school early to my hostel in Iyana Iba and when Damilola came home, he broke the horrific story to me that my nameless friend’s brother had been brutally murdered at the gate by rival cultist. He was shot at close range with a pump action which left him ‘headless’; people recognised him with his shirt. It was a horror of a tale as I cried my balls out that night. It so happened that one of the rival cult number ‘3’ had been killed by the cult my nameless friend’s brother hung with and they decided to retaliate. He was oblivious of this because that same day, all his own ‘guys’ he rolled with didn’t come to school but he did. He didn’t know because he only ‘rolled’ with them, he wasn’t a cultist.

But because they saw him too much with the ‘cultist’, they assumed he is part of them. My friend’s parents (because I am close with the family) were devastated; as was his brother and we the genuine friends. So as much as possible, choose wisely the kind of friends you choose.

3)      Avoid Activism:

Yeah, that is a tough one to take especially for someone like me that liked and still likes politics and social awareness but as much as possible; try and avoid the hard part. I was the Head of Class of my set from 2004 – 2009; the General Secretary of Association of Theatre Arts Student (ATAS) in my 200 level, a Presidential contestant of the same ATAS and a member of the Student Representative Council, SUG LASU. So I was very active politically and of course if you follow university unionism, it is mostly a tool used to bully others.

So one fateful morning, we arrested some NURTW buses from Iyana Iba bus tarmac, impounded their buses and drove them to school (It was a norm in those days when they misbehave). They had just increased bus fare and we refused to pay it as students. They came and beg and paid some money but before the end of that day, there was reprisal. We heard that some female students had been kidnapped by some of the ‘agberos’ and they are demanding that the SUG pay back the money ‘we’ collected.

So we assembled ourselves and decided to storm their hood, which was also my hood because at the time that was where I lived; myself, damilola, adeyemi and kolade. We got Intel also that the ‘agberos’ that did the job had been initiated into cult groups hence the boldness. We successfully arrested some of the guys, freed the girls and took them back to school. We were feeling like some hero that had ‘James Bond’ our way to stardom. Little did we know?

After few weeks when the issue had supposedly died down, unknown to us, the ‘agberos’ with their cult guys were still smarting from the way we ‘disgraced’ them. The opportunity came for them when LASU rioted because of increment of school fee (the first increment Gov. Fashola did from N250.00 to N25, 000.00). Because of the chaos that ensued, the ‘agberos’ and cult guys used the opportunity to stage a comeback and started witch hunting the ‘activist’ student who disgraced them earlier.

They specifically came to our hostel and demanded that we be brought out for ‘jungle justice’ but luckily for us, the people living in the hostel I stayed are well known people in the ‘hood’ and they insisted that we were not part of the students that came to disgrace them. They insisted that we are very good students and that we avoided fracases as much as possible. That was how we were saved from the possible lynching that we could have experienced that day. Maybe I would have been dead and maybe you won’t be reading this. Just maybe!

The second incident I had was on a fateful day that we were walking back to the hostel just in front of the school fence that was very close to the Iyana Iba tarmac; me, damilola, adeyemi, kolade and John Francis Ozekhome. As we negotiated the busy international road, we noticed unusual movement behind us and before we could even comprehend what could be going on, the number ‘3’ of one of the cult groups which I will not glorify by mentioning names just rounded us up; 4 of us with one of his foot soldiers that carried the small pistol which scared the sh*t out of us. 

We were first rooted to the floor as he told us all to submit out phones and specifically called out John Francis name as the person who got his greatest wrath. I can’t even recollect how we escaped that scenario but all I know is that from that day henceforth, we all decided not to walk with John Francis Ozekhome in public view. Not that he was a cultist but he was more active as an activist back then in school and we could have been shot dead on the spot.

So my friend, if you can avoid these avoidable, you should do just fine as an undergraduate. I wish you the best in your studies.