‘I grew up with pain around this scandal’ – Helen Ukpabio

The daughter of Helen Ukpabio, Nigerian actress, movie producer and cleric, says she was traumatised by the constant attack on her mother over her movies.

Mrs Ukpabio, the founder and pastor of the Liberty Gospel Church, is well-known in Nigeria and abroad for her witch-themed Nollywood movies produced in the late 90s and early 2000s.

She also uses her church to organise crusades where she preaches on the “operations of witches”.

The general belief, especially among campaigners against witch killings, is that Mrs Ukpabio’s movies and teachings have contributed to the rise in the attacks, torture, and killings of people, especially children and women, accused of being witches and wizards, mainly in Cross River State where her church is headquartered and the neighbouring Akwa Ibom where she hails from.

“I grew up with so much pain’

“I grew up with so much pain around this scandal,” Mrs Ukpabio’s daughter, Ima Elijah, said on X on Friday, in response to a renewed attack on the microblogging platform on her mother, who turned 60 on Friday, 22 November.

Ima gave an X user a five-hour ultimatum to take down a post which accused Mrs Ukpabio of luring people to burn their children alive through her works as a cleric and a movie producer.

“Question now is, how did Helen make you kill your kids? Why isn’t she arrested or ever investigated locally?” she said in a post on X.

She claimed that her mother was vilified because she “refused to join an international cult”.

Ideba Edu Ele, a social worker and founder of a non-profit organisation, Bonnicare Foundation, in Cross River State, took on Ima on her claim that Mrs Ukpabio did nothing wrong to deserve the attacks.

Edu told Ima on X, “I know and saw with my own eyes. I want to fight you, but I can’t. The nerve for me. Shut your mouth up.”

She posted a video on X where Mrs Ukpabio is seen teaching a congregation about the “different types of witchcraft”.

“You have the dormant black witchcraft, you have the silence black witchcraft, then you have what they call community witchcraft, then you have what they call green witchcraft, then you have societal witchcraft. So witchcraft are of types,” the cleric said in the video.

Edu went on to narrate on X how a 15-year-old orphan girl from Cross River, accused of being a witch, was prevented from going to school by her relatives.

“I begged, pleaded, and reported all to no avail. Her relatives insisted that Gift must make their grandchild (baby) to walk before they will let her step her foot in a school even after finishing primary 6 three years ago,” Edu stated in a post.

The girl was accused of using some “witchcraft powers” to prevent a child from being able to walk.

A traumatised generation

Witch killing is rampant in Nigeria’s southern states of Cross River and Akwa Ibom, despite the existence of laws to check it.

The government and law enforcement agencies appeared to look the other way in most of the cases, therefore making the perpetrators get away with torture and murder while the victims, typically from poor and vulnerable families, hardly get justice.

Most of Akwa Ibom street children, for instance, are victims of witchcraft accusations – levelled by pastors, rejected by parents or guardians, and abandoned by the government.

“We are raising a generation of people who are so traumatised,” a documentary photographer, Etinosa Yvonne, said in November last year, in Uyo, during her photo exhibition, ‘It’s All in My Head’.

The exhibition highlighted the persistence of witch-killing in Nigeria.

“I met with a child who told me how his father tied his hands and wanted to throw him into a river, and he kept shouting, ‘Daddy, I am not a witch’. The father looked at him, cut the rope and threw him away,” Ms Yvonne said.