A YOUNG man whispers a confession: as a university student, he killed six or seven of his peers. He cannot be sure of the number, since his shots were fired in gun battles. He intimidated professors, burned their cars, and helped kidnap—briefly—their children to force them to give good marks to certain students. He did it all as a member of a campus cult. When he renounced his membership, he got death threats and moved to another city, where he lives today.

Nigeria's university system used to be the finest in west Africa, but today's classes are overcrowded, buildings are crumbling and the curriculum has remained unchanged for years. The cults emerged from the shambles. Having started life as confraternities for the most academic students, they have deteriorated into gang violence. The Exam Ethics Project, a lobby group, says that inter-cult violence killed 115 students and teachers between 1993 and 2003. The real number may be much higher.

The situation is particularly bad in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, the country's wealthiest and the centre of the oil industry. Here cults have spilled beyond the campus walls to mix with the political militants, thugs and crooks responsible for a violent insurgency in the Niger Delta. Most city residents believe that nearly all of today's most prominent militant leaders were or still are cult members.

How did the cults become such a problem? Wole Soyinka, a Nobel prizewinner for literature, helped found the Pyrates Confraternity, the first such group, in 1952 at the elite University of Ibadan. Slowly, splinter groups emerged: the Black Axe, the Klansmen Konfraternity, and countless others. It was harmless fun to begin with. But military leaders of the 1980s and 1990s saw the groups' growing membership as a chance to confront the leftist student unions, often aligned with pro-democracy movements. So the confraternities were given money and weapons. They turned against student activists—and against each other. By the mid-1980s, violence had become so fierce that Mr Soyinka tried unsuccessfully to disband his former creation.

As their strength grew, the cults' influence on the universities became more malign. They exacerbated the corruption that had already bred in unmanageably big classes and deteriorating facilities. Today, older students and alumni flood campuses in the first weeks of the new academic year to recruit for the cults. Omolade Adunbi, an anthropologist, says that some students, fearing that they are going to be failed in exams, believe the only way to protect themselves is to belong to a cult where they can “harass professors”.

Ban them—if you can

Rivers State outlawed cultism in 2004, setting up rehabilitation committees and special courts to try those accused of membership. But the law has had little effect, since politicians play a big part in keeping the groups rich in cash and arms. “In Rivers State everybody is fighting for the soul of governance in the state, and you need everything—everything—to get it,” says Professor Chiedu Mafiana, a director at the National Universities Commission. Politicians use the students to intimidate opponents, he says. “And so if a student has gone to commit some level of atrocities on behalf of a political group and comes back with good money, another person joins the bandwagon in order to make money for himself.” Though the cults charge membership fees of between 10,000 ($85) and 30,000 naira a year, the boys can expect to make a profit on the streets.

The pay-offs after university can be no less rewarding. With a well-connected alumni network, students hope that their cult membership will win them a job in a country where most graduates are unemployed. Alumni of the Vikings Confraternity, for example, claim at least 11 members of the Rivers State House of Assembly.

Some progress has been made in tackling the cults at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, thanks to 200-odd security officers, covert surveillance and student informants. For the first time in over a decade there were no gunshots on the campus last year. Yet many students say the violence has not ceased; it has just moved to the streets. Recently, a new vice-chancellor took over the university. Asking him to do the job, the Rivers State governor, Rotimi Amaechi, put the task simply: “Go on a rescue mission for me.”