When the social and economic history of today’s Nigeria is written in a few years, this period will be portrayed as the era when human blood became a pricey raw material in wealth creation. Historians will show how human blood and other body parts endangered Nigerians and turned them into prey to murderous money mongers.

The blood economy created in Nigeria is a potent threat to the normal economy, which all of us should play. If this monster is not checked or disbanded, it will breed a crop of rich men and women, who will lay claims on the outputs of the normal economy to which they have contributed nothing! We will have hordes of millionaires or even billionaires, who will parade around town in the latest car models, displaying their affluence.

A young lady, a serving member of the National Youth Service Corps, has become the latest addition to the victims of a growing list of blood-for-money men and women in Nigeria. The story of her decapitation by a man described as her lover, and her severed head found on the fellow, has been in the news this week.

It is a chilling, gory story about how in the blood economy the line between love and hate has become so thin. In this economy, the one who loves you the most this very minute could be the same person who cuts off your head and delivers it to a head-processing factory.

What was being shown by our local film industry, Nollywood, has within a short time become indeed our lifestyle. It is no longer happening on TV screens; it is now our daily experience. A young man wants to make money in the fast lane. He approaches a native doctor  (also now known as a ritualist). The doctor tells him what he should do, including the raw materials for money making. They instruct him to kill his mother or father.

Another man wants to make money fast, and the prescribed raw material is a young boy’s head. So, the head hunter, raw material supplier runs off, and finds a lone and unfortunate boy, reading in a dilapidated school building. Pronto, he beheads the boy and takes the head to the money factory.

This blood economy has developed so much that every part of the human body now has a price tag, from the confessions of operators that have been arrested. This is an existential threat to our economy.  We face the danger of having human blood and parts replace trucks of raw materials transported to factories and delivered to warehouses.  The company processes these raw materials and turns them into finished goods for sale to the final consumers. Or, depending on the sector, this company could process these raw materials into intermediate goods for further sale to another company to produce other goods and services. This is how economies run.

These processes could be undertaken by companies of various sizes: small, medium, and large. It does not matter the size. What is important in today’s economy is that entrepreneurs find a level at which they can operate in the economy and be relevant.

The normal economy as a system runs on the principles of effort and result; input and output. But in the blood economy, the above processes are disdained. Blood economy operators count these as sluggish, slow paths to good and fast money, and the way of the old guys. The masters of the blood economy are in a hurry. They want to make it big, and fast too.

The blood economy is sucking the rural population of young men and women who are fleeing the rural areas into the fast-decaying urban centres. Our urban areas are buzzing with activities of the underworld economy, but the current trend has raised the tempo of criminal activities to a new height.

Until recently, these crimes centred on theft, stealing, and fraud, all these being done within the existing economic framework. Thieves stole existing money stocks, and through the work of law enforcement agents, they could be found easily. Sometimes the money stolen could be recovered.

But the blood men create an economy within the economy. They create an economy founded on blood, not human labour.  This is the reason society must tackle them with every sense of urgency and seriousness. They take human lives, the greatest asset on planet Earth. That is a contradiction and assault on the creation story. By creating an economy founded on blood, they seek to supplant the real economy.

When they create money (as alleged, using human parts to make money rituals) without a corresponding output of goods and services, the actions of the central bank could be jeopardised. The money supply in the books of the CBN, for instance, could be at variance with the volume of money outside the banking system. Therefore, when reports say there is inflation and that a tight monetary policy is required, the activities of the blood economy could negate this polity option.

The blood from this economy is crying! The earlier we listened and rose against this cry, the better for the larger economy.