NewStats: 3,262,856 , 8,178,378 topics. Date: Tuesday, 03 June 2025 at 08:18 PM 5p1x3f

an online newspaper mail&guardian online has the following story. i wonder if it is true because i have not heard anything about the story on Nigerian news
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleId=327232&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/

Some parents scrape together sums needed to pay for a deliverance -- sometimes as much as three or four months' salary for the average working man -- although the pastor will explain that the witch might return and a second deliverance will be needed. Even if the parent wants to keep the child, their neighbours may attack it in the street.

This is not just a few cases. This is becoming commonplace. In Esit Eket, up a nameless, puddled-and-potholed path is a concrete shack stuffed to its fetid rafters with roughly made bunk beds. Here, three to a bed like battery chickens, sleep victims of the besuited Christian pastors and their hours-long, late-night services. Ostracised and abandoned, these are the children a whole community believes fervently are witches.

Sam Ikpe-Itauma is one of the few people in this area who does not believe what the evangelical "prophets" are preaching. He opened his house to a few homeless waifs he came across, and now he tries his best to look after 131.

"The neighbours were not happy with me and tell me 'you are ing witches'. This project was an accident, I saw children being abandoned and it was very worrying. I started with three children, then every day it increased up to 15, so we had to open this new place," he says. "For every maybe five children we see on the streets, we believe one has been killed, although it could be more as neighbours turn a blind eye when a witch child disappears.