Children Are Targets Of Nigerian Witch-hunt All In The Name Of Religion

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 supporting 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.