Tag: West Africa

A hip-hop-loving hacker on an Islamic mission

In Nouakchott, a dusty city wedged between the Atlantic ocean and western dunes of the Sahara, a young hip-hop fan co-ordinates a diverse group of hackers targeting websites worldwide in the name of Islam.

Logging on to his computer, he greets his Facebook fans with a “good morning all” in English before posting links to 746 websites they have hacked in the last 48 hours along with his digital calling card: a half-skull, half-cyborg Guy Fawkes mask.

He calls himself Mauritania Attacker, after the remote Islamic republic in West Africa from which he leads a youthful group scattered across the Maghreb, southeast Asia and the West.

The Mauritania Attacker’s current profile picture on Facebook.

As jihadists battle regional governments from the deserts of southern Algeria to the scrubland of north Nigeria, Mauritania Attacker says the hacking collective which he founded, AnonGhost, is fighting for Islam using peaceful means.

“We’re not extremists,” he said, via a Facebook account which a cyber security expert identified as his. “AnonGhost is a team that hacks for a cause. We defend the dignity of Muslims.”

During a series of conversations via Facebook, the 23-year-old spoke of his love of house music and hip-hop, and the aims of his collective, whose targets have included US and British small businesses and the oil industry.

He represents a new generation of western-style Islamists who promote religious conservatism and traditional values, and oppose those they see as backing Zionism and Western hegemony.

An unlikely hacker base
In April, AnonGhost launched a cyber attack dubbed OpIsrael that disrupted access to several Israeli government websites, attracting the attention of security experts worldwide.

“AnonGhost is considered one of the most active groups of hacktivists of the first quarter of 2013,” said Pierluigi Paganini, security analyst and editor of Cyber Defense magazine.

An online archive of hacked websites, Hack DB, lists more than 10 400 domains AnonGhost defaced in the past seven months.

Mauritania, a poor desert nation straddling the Arab Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, is an unlikely hacker base. It has 3.5 million inhabitants spread across an area the size of France and Germany, and only 3% of them have internet access.

Much of the population lives in the capital Nouakchott, which has boomed from a town of less than 10 000 people 40 years ago to a sprawling, ramshackle city of a million inhabitants. In its suburbs, tin and cinder-block shanties battle the Sahara’s encroaching dunes and desert nomads stop to water their camels.

In the past six months experts have noted an increase in hacking activity from Mauritania and neighbouring countries. In part, that reflects Mauritania Attacker’s role in connecting pockets of hackers, said Carl Herberger, vice-president of security solutions at Radware.

“This one figure, Mauritania Attacker, is kind a figure who brings many of these groups together,” Herberger told Reuters.

Modern technology, ancient mission
Mauritania Attacker says his activities are split between cyber cafes and his home, punctuated by the five daily Muslim prayers.

Well-educated, he speaks French and Arabic among other languages and updates his social media accounts regularly with details of the latest defacements and email hacks. He would not say how he made a living.

His cyber threats are often accented with smiley faces and programmer slang, and he posts links to dance-floor hits and amusing YouTube videos. But his message is a centuries-old Islamist call for return to religious purity.

“Today Islam is divisive and corrupt,” he said in an online exchange. “We have abandoned the Qur’an.”

Mauritania Attacker aims to promote “correct Islam” by striking at servers hosted by countries they see as hostile to Sharia law. “There is no Islam without Sharia,” he said.

Mauritania is renowned for its strict Islamic law. The sale of alcohol is forbidden and it is one of only a handful of states where homosexuality and atheism are punished by death.

The quality of Mauritania’s religious scholars and Quranic schools, or madrassas, attract students from around the world. Mauritanians have risen to prominent positions in regional jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda’s north African branch Aqim.

As hackers from the region organise into groups, the Maghreb is emerging as a haven for hacktivism as it lacks the laws and means to prosecute cyber criminals, Herberger said.

“There’s a great degree of anonymity and there’s a great degree of implied impunity,” he said.

Security sources in Nouakchott said they were not aware of the activities of Mauritania Attacker.

He says he supports Islamists in Mauritania but opposes his government’s support for the West, which sees the country as one of its main allies in its fight against al-Qaeda in the region.

With tech-savy young Muslims in the Maghreb chafing under repressive regimes, analysts anticipate a rise in hacktivism.

Hacking is a way for young people to express religious and political views without being censored, says Aaron Zelin, a Washington Institute fellow.

“These societies are relatively closed in terms of people’s ability to openly discuss topics that are taboo,” he said.

For disillusioned youth in countries like Mauritania, where General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz seized power in a 2008 coup before winning elections the next year, hacking has become “a way of expressing their distaste with status quo,” Zelin said.

Capability
AnonGhost’s global reach is its greatest weapon, but it has yet to stage a major attack on a western economic target.

Most of AnonGhost’s campaigns have simply defaced websites, ranging from kosher dieting sites to American weapon aficionado blogs, with messages about Islam and anti-Zionism.

It has attacked servers, often hosting small business websites, located in the United States, Brazil, France, Israel and Germany among others.

Mauritania Attacker and the AnonGhost crew say these countries have “betrayed Muslims” by supporting Israel and by participating in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We are the new generation of Muslims and we are not stupid,” read a message posted on the website of a party supply business in Italy. “We represent Islam. We fight together. We stand together. We die together.”

The team has also leaked email credentials, some belonging to government workers from the United States and elsewhere.

As part of a June 20 operation against the oil industry, carried out alongside the international hacking network Anonymous, Mauritania Attacker released what he said were the email addresses and passwords for employees of Total.

A spokesperson for the French oil major did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One security expert said AnonGhost’s attacks exploited “well-known vulnerabilities in configurations of servers” in target countries rather than going after high-profile companies.

Carl Herberger, vice-president of security solutions at Radware, remains unconvinced AnonGhost has the technical skills to wage full-scale cyber terrorism by harming operational capabilities of companies or government agencies.

“The jury is still out,” he said, but cautioned against underestimating the emerging group. “You’re never quite sure what they’re going to do on the offensive, so they have to be right only once and you have to be right always.”

Elise Knutsen for Reuters

11 years ago

‘Our sexual revolution is being blogged’

One of the most popular shows on Ghanaian television in the 80s was Obra. A common scenario in the show was that a young teenage girl would get involved in a relationship with a man and inevitably fall pregnant. This would lead her to drop out of school, the man who had impregnated her would abandon her, the young girl would become an embarrassment to her family, and the rest of her life would be a misery. Whenever we watched this happen, my mum would turn to me and say: “You see what happens when you mess around with guys?”

That was the type of sex education I received growing up in Ghana. Sex as taught to my generation of Ghanaian girls was always ‘bad’, and only ‘bad’ girls had sex before marriage. At the boarding school I went to there were always rumours about the girls who apparently had sex – they were called names like ‘Kaneshie mattress’, suggesting anyone who lived in that area of Accra had slept with them. I myself always believed these rumours about the ‘bad’ girls. How could you doubt stories told with such confidence? It was only when rumours about my own sexuality reached my ears that I began to question these myths.

After a growth spurt one summer holiday, I returned to school with gigantic boobs. One day while walking to my dorm, I overhead a group of girls chatting. “Have you seen Nana Darkoa’s breasts? They have gotten so big. It means she had sex during the holidays,” one of them said. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the following summer a male friend of mine told my boyfriend that he had “fucked me in the gutter by my house”. That was when I stopped believing the ‘bad’ girl myth.

Fast forward to my early 20s. My knowledge of sexuality hadn’t improved greatly. Yes, I had been sexually abused as a child. Yes, I had kissed girls in my boarding school. Yes, I had kissed a boy for the first time in the summer before my O-levels and gone on to kiss two other boys that same summer, but I still knew nothing about sex and sexuality. Until I went to university abroad I had no idea that girls who kissed girls were called lesbians. In my boarding school we called our girl lovers ‘dears’. (Not everybody who had a dear had a sexual relationship with their dear. Having a dear implied an added closeness and relationship with a certain girl/young woman. Your dear, for example, could be a fellow student in your year or a senior who had propositioned you).

I was an avid reader of romance novels while growing up. I would wrap the salacious covers of Mills & Boon, Harlequin and Silhouette novels with old newspaper and read furtively in between classes or in my bed at night. These novels taught me that women could have unimaginable pleasure when tall, dark handsome men ‘took’ them, but they didn’t break down how exactly this happened. When I was 20 and living abroad with my best friend, she seemed wildly mature to me because she was sexually active with her boyfriend and would walk around our shared flat naked. One day she asked me if I ever masturbated. I was beyond embarrassed. She used to tease me that I was going to remain a virgin until I turned 30. When I met my future husband two months shy of my 23rd birthday I knew instantly that I wanted to have sex with him. That was when the process of learning about sex and my own sexuality began. It is an ongoing journey of sexual self-discovery.

Starting Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women in 2010 has been an important part of documenting my own sexual journey. The blog has created a space for African women to learn from and share our stories of sexual agency and the horrific experiences of abuse and sexual assault that have attempted to take away our power.

(Screenshot)

I was inspired to start the blog after a life-changing holiday to Axim in the western region of Ghana. I was with a group of three other African women. One evening while lounging around the beach we began a frank and open conversation about sex, which continued throughout the holidays. We talked about our sexual experiences, reminisced over past relationships, recounted good and bad sex, and shared our fantasies. I was buzzing with excitement when I got back and rang my best friend in the US.

“Malaka, I’ve just come back from holiday and I had the most amazing time talking about sex. I think we should start a blog about African women and sex.”

“Ha! Its uncanny you should say that. I was just thinking of writing a book called ‘Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women’. If only people really knew what went down in our bedrooms.”

We split our sides in laughter. We laughed because we knew that the images people had of African women’s sexuality were myopic. We recognised that people saw us as victims of female genital mutilation and sexual subalterns or, on the other extreme, as over-sexualised women with extra-large genitalia to boot. We laughed because we knew our stories were more diverse than the outside world knew. We laughed because we knew we were continuously negotiating our sexual agency, while battling with the traumatic effects (in some cases) of child sexual abuse. We laughed because this was our opportunity to tell our own stories.

And that’s exactly what Adventures has succeeded in doing. The blog, which receives about 35 000 visitors a month, is a safe space for African women to share experiences around sex, sexuality and relationships. Many contributors remain anonymous because of the social censure that surrounds women who express their sexuality openly. Readers have told me that Adventures has enabled them to have open conversations about sexuality that they were never able to have with parents, friends or in school. At Ghana’s first Social Media Awards in March, Adventures scooped awards in the categories of ‘best overall blog’, and ‘best activist blog’. I felt especially proud that people recognise that providing a safe space for African women to talk about their sexualities was an act of activism.

African women across the continent and diaspora have boldly taken ownership of the site and share their stories of sexual fantasy, sexual experience and sexual abuse. The site’s policy has been to focus on women’s stories, while allowing the occasional contribution from African men. Roughly 60% of our readers are women while 38% are men and 2% identify themselves as transgendered. One of the most popular posts on Adventures is on how to pleasure a woman orally, written by a male contributor. There are other posts that have aroused anger and sadness and highlighted the need for supporting survivors of sexual abuse. These stories and the large number of comments they inspire show that comprehensive sexual education is important not only for women (and men) to gain bodily confidence and an understanding of their right to sexual pleasure, but also so that children do not grow up with a sense of shame around sex, which can lead to silence when sexual abuse occurs.

The fact that most of the stories on Adventures are based on women’s personal experiences refute popular myths such as homosexuality being a Western import. Here’s one comment from a reader:

It’s very refreshing to find like-minded individuals who speak so freely and openly about homosexuality. I think I’m bi-curious. I have crazy girl crushes and love lesbian porn. Having never been off the shores of Ghana, you know the general perception about these things, so I’ve never really talked about it to anyone .

Now run and go tell that to the African conservatives who claim that homosexuality is un-African.

One of the most popular contributors to Adventures goes by the moniker Voluptous Voltarian. She shares:

The reason why I started reading and writing for Adventures was because the very first comment I read was from a man. I realised that Adventures had created a space where African women and men could have an honest conversation outside of a regular face-to-face context where negotiations about sex can be very conflicted and transactional. I think that’s the real revolution. Adventures provides the space for people to work through this conflict, and for people to be their better healthier sexual selves.

Personally, I am still working on being my best sexual self. I choose to do this openly in a world that still judges women for the sexual choices they make; in a world where calling a woman politician a ‘prostitute’ does not provoke the kind of widespread criticism I hope it would. I do this in a country where the Ghana Journalists Association recently exhorted journalists to adopt an anti-gay stance in their work. As a single African woman I choose to blog openly about my sexual life in order to create community with other African women who were also told that having sex outside of marriage would automatically lead to pregnancy, familial disgrace and a subsequent life of ruin. Today it makes me incredibly proud that our sexual revolution is being blogged.

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah works as a communications specialist at the African Women’s Development Fund, is co-owner of MAKSI Clothing and curates the Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women blog.

11 years ago

Nigeria’s yan daudu face persecution in religious revival

On special days, after dawn prayers at the mosque, Ameer, a father of two, returns home to put on makeup from the collection he shares with his wife.

Usually, however, he settles for a colourful headscarf of the sort worn by women throughout Nigeria. Ameer also uses the female version of his name, Ameera, preceding it with Hajiya, the honorific for women who have completed the Muslim hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Ameera is known as a yan daudu, shorthand for “men who act like women” in northern Nigeria’s Hausa language. The phrase means “sons of Daudu”, a fun-loving, gambling spirit worshipped in the Muslim Bori practice, whose trance and dancing rituals are traditionally associated with marginalised poor women, sex workers and disabled people.

For more than a century, hundreds of yan daudu were tolerated as part of an unremarkable but fringe subculture in the Muslim north, famed for their playful use of language, sometimes even accompanying politicians during election campaigns.

In this spirit, Ameera’s parents were accepting. “My parents realised all the things men like, I didn’t like. I didn’t like farming. I wanted to cook and sell things like women. Most of all, I loved braiding hair – I can do yours very nicely if you want,” said Ameera, with a dimpled smile and shrug of delicate, bird-like shoulders.

“They bought me a doll and let me spend hours braiding its hair,” he said, his soft voice almost drowned out by the screech of rickshaws and shouting tradesmen in a bustling, overcrowded satellite town outside the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

But now, with a religious revival sweeping Africa’s most populous country, the yan daudu are increasingly being persecuted. As Nigeria edges closer to passing a Bill outlawing same-sex marriage and targeting groups who support sexual minorities, many fear they will be driven underground.

“I don’t mind it when my friends call me yan daudu, but these days it sounds ugly [abusive] in other people’s mouths,” Ameera said.

On the plastic-covered walls hung miniature portraits of yan daudu colleagues, taken during a special trip to a studio so long ago the edges have yellowed. Many had previously lived in Kano, the north’s main city and a former Islamic sultanate that has long been a regional hub bringing together sexual minorities from across Nigeria and its desert neighbours.

“People were more tolerant then. Now people are more religious, we’ve had to change our outlook too. We can’t go out wearing brassieres and makeup any more,” said Salihu (Hajiya Sara), a yan daudu from neighbouring Chad, dressed in a sober black kaftan and so painfully shy he can barely make eye contact. He fled Kano in 2000, when Nigeria underwent one of its periodic “morality campaigns” and 12 northern states adopted Sharia law.

“It hurts my heart that people say, ‘May Allah reform you,'” he said, washing his feet in preparation for prayers.

As he hurried to the muezzin’s dusk call floating over the lamp-lit stalls, he added: “All judgment belongs to Allah, so if we are different it is because Allah made us different. All these clergymen condemning us should be careful though, because Allah can make one of their own children like us.”

Yet there remain some signs of acceptance. Dreadlocked mechanic Rodney Musa, repairing a motorbike in a patch of oil-stained dust nearby, isn’t bothered by his neighbours. “They’ve been here for the past 10 years – as far as I’m concerned we’re all just trying to earn a living,” he said.

Overhearing the conversation, a passing shop owner, Naz Nwakesi, reacted with horror. “They’re simply homosexuals with bad characters. They should try to reform themselves,” he said.

Amarchi, braiding hair at an open-air salon wedged between the Jesus is Trading hardware shop and Godz Power Barbing salon, said the yan daudu were embarrassing to women. “They should speak to God and ask God to make them women,” she added, before quoting a Bible verse that forbids cross-dressing.

At Ameera’s food shack, where around a dozen yan daudu find refuge working in an occupation normally reserved for women, these criticisms hurt. “That’s why my heroes are female prostitutes. There’s a kinship between us because they know what it is to be judged,” Ameera said. Though many yan daudu are gay, “some of us pretend to be gay just to feel alive – at least we know where gay people fit in the scheme.”

Whatever their orientations, few see being yan daudu as at odds with family life. Ameera is preparing to take a second wife while Yahuza (32), wearing a sparkling red dress and sandals decorated with bright diamante flowers, has three.

Monica Mark for the Guardian.

11 years ago

Nigerian cook survives two days under sea in shipwreck air bubble

After two days trapped in freezing cold water and breathing from an air bubble in an upturned tugboat under the ocean, Harrison Okene was sure he was going to die. Then a torch light pierced the darkness.

Okene (29) is a ship’s cook who was on board the Jascon-4 tugboat when it capsized on May 26 due to heavy Atlantic ocean swells around 30km off the coast of Nigeria, while stabilising an oil tanker filling up at a Chevron platform.

Of the 12 people on board, divers recovered 10 dead bodies while a remaining crew member has not been found.

Somehow Okene survived, breathing inside a four foot high bubble of air as it shrunk in the waters slowly rising from the ceiling of the tiny toilet and adjoining bedroom where he sought refuge, until two South African divers eventually rescued him.

“I was there in the water in total darkness just thinking it’s the end. I kept thinking the water was going to fill up the room but it did not,” Okene said, parts of his skin peeling away after days soaking in the salt water.

“I was so hungry but mostly so, so thirsty. The salt water took the skin off my tongue,” he said. Seawater got into his mouth but he had nothing to eat or drink throughout his ordeal.

Harrison Okene says it’s a ‘miracle’ that he survived. (Reuters)

At 4.50am on May 26, Okene says he was in the toilet when he realised the tugboat was beginning to turn over. As water rushed in and the Jascon-4 flipped, he forced open the metal door.

“As I was coming out of the toilet it was pitch black so we were trying to link our way out to the water tidal [exit hatch],” Okene told Reuters in his home town of Warri, a city in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta.

“Three guys were in front of me and suddenly water rushed in full force. I saw the first one, the second one, the third one just washed away. I knew these guys were dead.”

What he didn’t know was that he would spend the next two and a half days trapped under the sea praying he would be found.

Turning away from his only exit, Okene was swept along a narrow passageway by surging water into another toilet, this time adjoining a ship’s officers cabin, as the overturned boat crashed onto the ocean floor. To his amazement he was still breathing.

Okene, wearing only his underpants, survived around a day in the four foot square toilet, holding onto the overturned washbasin to keep his head out of the water.

He built up the courage to open the door and swim into the officer’s bedroom and began pulling off the wall panelling to use as a tiny raft to lift himself out of the freezing water.

Fish eating dead bodies
He sensed he was not alone in the darkness.

“I was very, very cold and it was black. I couldn’t see anything,” says Okene, staring into the middle distance.

“But I could perceive the dead bodies of my crew were nearby. I could smell them. The fish came in and began eating the bodies. I could hear the sound. It was horror.”

What Okene didn’t know was a team of divers sent by Chevron and the ship’s owners, West African Ventures, were searching for crew members, assumed by now to be dead.

Then in the afternoon of May 28, Okene heard them.

“I heard a sound of a hammer hitting the vessel. Boom, boom, boom. I swam down and found a water dispenser. I pulled the water filter and I hammered the side of the vessel hoping someone would hear me. Then the diver must have heard a sound.”

Divers broke into the ship and Okene saw light from a head torch of someone swimming along the passageway past the room.

“I went into the water and tapped him. I was waving my hands and he was shocked,” Okene said, his relief still visible.

He thought he was at the bottom of the sea, although the company says it was 30 metres below.

The diving team fitted Okene with an oxygen mask, diver’s suit and helmet and he reached the surface at 19.32pm, more than 60 hours after the ship sank, he says.

Okene says he spent another 60 hours in a decompression chamber where his body pressure was returned to normal. Had he just been exposed immediately to the outside air he would have died.

The cook describes his extraordinary survival story as a “miracle” but the memories of his time in the watery darkness still haunt him and he is not sure he will return to the sea.

“When I am at home sometimes it feels like the bed I am sleeping in is sinking. I think I’m still in the sea again. I jump up and I scream,” Okene said, shaking his head.

“I don’t know what stopped the water from filling that room. I was calling on God. He did it. It was a miracle.”

Joe Brock for Reuters.

11 years ago

Celebrity pastor under fire after stampede for ‘holy water’

It’s the middle of a working day, in the middle of the week, but the trickle of worshippers at the Synagogue Church of All Nations is quickly becoming a flood. Around 1 000 people sit silently on plastic chairs cooled by dozens of floor fans at the church – a building reminiscent of an aircraft hangar just off Accra’s industrial Spintex Road – watching its founder delivering a sermon on his own dedicated 24-hour TV channel, Emmanuel TV.

Temitope Balogun Joshua, popularly known as TB Joshua, founder of the Synagogue Church empire, is one of the biggest celebrities in West Africa. His regular Sunday services in Nigeria boasts attendance rates of around 15 000 and the Nigerian government has reported that the number of worshippers travelling to the church in Lagos have significantly boosted tourism to Nigeria.

TB Joshua (Pic: emmanuel.tv)

But he is an increasingly controversial figure in Ghana, after a deadly stampede at the Synagogue Church last Sunday left four people dead and at least 30 injured.

The worshippers were hoping to obtain holy “new anointing water”, which Emmanuel TV had announced would be distributed for free. “The anointing water usually costs 80 cedis, but we learned that on Sunday it would be given out for free,” said Joseph Adanvor (52) who witnessed the fatal stampede. “I have never seen anything like it before. People had come from Togo, Benin, even from Kenya. They tried to close the church but people were climbing over the walls and breaking in. The police and army were there but they couldn’t control the crowds.”

The police, who are investigating the deaths, said that they had not anticipated the number of people who would attend the church, with worshippers arriving from as early as 2am. “All of us were caught by surprise,” police spokesperson Freeman Tetteh told the BBC world service. ” No one knew the crowd will be so huge.”

The church declined to comment to the Guardian but earlier announced that it would pay the medical expenses for those injured in the incident. Reverend Sam Mc-Caanan told journalists that the church was “devastated”. “We have to do a thorough work around this to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.

The stampede came two weeks after Nigeria-based Joshua made a rare personal appearance in Ghana, prompting tens of thousands of people to travel to the 1 500 capacity church to catch a glimpse of the self-styled “prophet”. The event created a crisis for the security services, bringing large parts of the capital Accra to a standstill.

Joshua is one of the most prominent pastors in Africa with a growing number of followers around the world. The church has branches in London and Athens, as well as Accra, and Ghana’s late president John Atta Mills, who died last year, was a prominent follower, whilst a host of other public figures and celebrities claim to have been healed by the pastor. But he has attracted controversy for his significant wealth – with American magazine Forbes estimating that the pastor was worth up to $15-million, and for the sale of products including anointing water and car stickers to people hoping to free themselves from poverty.

“I personally believe there is a level of exploitation going on here, with churches selling things like anointing water and car stickers,” said Apostle Samuel Yaw Antwi, general secretary of the Ghana Charismatic and Pentecostal Council. “Jesus Christ never sold any of these things.”

Belief in the healing powers of pastors and special oils and waters which they claim to have blessed is widespread in Ghana, with products often sold for a profit. “I myself have bought the anointing water, and I have seen the miracles it performs,” said Adanvor. “My father was suffering from pain in his leg. When I sprayed the water, and after praying, the pain went away.”

“It’s like in Jesus’ time,” Adanvor added. “He did a lot of miracles so a lot of people followed him. Now we see that God can manifest again. When people come to the church, if they pray and they believe, they are healed.”

(A screenshot of a broadcast on Emmanuel TV)

In addition to purchasing anointing water and other products, members of the church tithe by contributing 10% of their monthly income, and also give offerings at church services. However, worshippers say that the church is popular because it does not demand payment for healing – a practice common among other churches in the region.

“The problem we have in this country is the type of Christianity people are practising whereby, instead of seeking to know God through his work and a relationship with the holy spirit which is assured to every Christian, are running after signs of miracles,” said Antwi.

“People want instant solutions to their problems, just like they want instant coffee. If anybody comes along offering instant answers to financial or health challenges, people want to go for it. But the Bible warns Christians about that.”

Afua Hirsch for the Guardian Africa Network.