A priest, Oluwo Olakunle, builds app to check fake spiritualists

I locked myself in the office restroom to escape my colleagues’ chatter. I needed a quiet place to listen to Oluwo Olawole Olakunle, a priest of Ifá—a revered Yoruba system of divination—deliver a virtual reading. In an interview days before, Olakunle, who holds degrees in information technology and electrical engineering, described Ifá as a “query system” akin to a computer algorithm. “Ifá has no emotion,” he explained. “It’s garbage in, garbage out. You ask the right question, you get the truth.”

His analogy echoed the rise of technopaganism, a term for the many ways spiritual practice is merging with digital technology. Today, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and social media allow spiritualists to conduct immersive rituals, join far-flung spiritual communities, and even consult AI-powered oracles. The ancient and the digital are fusing in ways that would have seemed impossible a generation ago.

In the past, finding spiritualists meant relying on word-of-mouth recommendations and undertaking a journey to a shrine, like Olakunle’s in Epe. Now, diviners are gaining prominence on social media platforms and conducting consultations and rituals virtually. Olakunle, who rose to fame in 2021 after his podcast and social media posts earned him a documentary, is one such practitioner.

He claims he has thousands of unattended divination requests dating as far back as three years ago.

Fascinated, I asked him for a reading, posing the question in the minds of millions of young Africans: Why am I not making financial progress? His voice, steady and punctuated by soft Yoruba chants, shared answers that felt more like predictions: “Ifá says you’re destined for authority, but people who should be subjects slander and plot against you.” He mentioned threats to my family’s ancestral lands, a blackmail case, and the glimmer of sudden wealth on the horizon. He continued for half an hour.

At the session’s end, he prescribed actions: practice greater hospitality, discard my old duvet, and pay ₦63,000 for him to procure items needed to “feed” the gods at his shrine in Epe, hours away, and an additional ₦270,000 to fund the design of a personal digital portal for daily divine guidance.

The total cost, almost five times Nigeria’s minimum wage, gave me pause. As I stared at my scribbled notes, half-sceptical and half-mesmerised, I wondered if the predictions were a candid effort or educated guesses based on benchmarks typical of an assertive Nigerian woman navigating a culture where sexism, harassment, and patriarchy prevail. Nonetheless, worldwide, several seekers are doling out cash to online babalawos they meet on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, or custom e-commerce sites where they list their services.

Olakunle is building one such platform: Priests of Africa. However, his goal goes beyond facilitating virtual divination.

Technology has lowered the barrier of entry for seekers who would typically not consult spiritualists for help due to the stigma of paganism in a world where Christianity and Islam demonise other religions. It has also fostered fraudsters—individuals posing as spiritualists without proper initiation or training and extorting unsuspecting seekers. Some of them are encouraging criminal practices like human sacrifice, which several practitioners have stated do not align with the doctrines of the Yoruba gods.

Olakunle hopes that Priests of Africa will curtail this problem. It is an online platform that aggregates vetted spiritualists through background checks, mentor verification, and test divinations. The application also functions as a messaging platform, enabling users to book appointments and chat with diviners through text or voice notes. He says the platform ensures seekers find authentic guidance in a scam-ridden digital landscape.

This has been Olakunle’s focus: guiding people to true religion, and it dates back to his personal religious journey.

Abandoning staunch Christianity for Ifá’s call

Olakunle wasn’t born into Ifá. Raised in a Deeper Life Christian family in Lagos, his childhood brimmed with evangelical fervour. Bible recitations and warnings against “demonic” traditional practices defined his early years. But as a teenager, curiosity led him to a shrine near his secondary school in Abeokuta. There, he studied Ifá, not intending to practice but drawn to its logic, he explained during our interview.

Olakunle strongly believes that his consultations with Ifá are analogous to reasoning with a super-intelligent system, despite prevailing ideas that religion and technology are at odds.

This stems from a long-running belief among a sect of adherents that the practice is scientifically backed. Ifá, also known as Fá, is a geomantic system, which in early Greek etymology means “the science of the sand.” It is a pseudo-scientific practice where spiritualists interpret geographic features, markings on the ground, or the patterns formed by soil, rocks, or sand. These patterns are translated through binary signs, which can take on about 256 configurations believed to reference all situations, circumstances, actions, and consequences in life. These form the basis of traditional Yoruba spiritual knowledge and are the foundation of all Yoruba divination systems, so an Ifá priest is meant to know them, typically through oral traditions passed down from one babalawo to another.

“Ifá is like a database,” he said. “You ask, it answers—pure, unfiltered truth.”

Despite his fascination, he wanted to remain a worshipper and student of the religion while studying electronic engineering at Yaba College of Technology.

But a few years after graduation, Olakunle turned to Ifá as his purpose and full-time job.

Fate had dealt him an economic setback. He was between jobs, having worked for seven months at Forte Oil, the petroleum company founded by Nigerian billionaire Femi Otedola. He later moved to Abuja where he became a national youth leader at the KOWA party. The KOWA party, formed by technocrats and youths seeking an inclusive party, was the first Nigerian political party to adopt online voting and written exams for candidates in its presidential primaries. Despite his political involvement, which kept him among influential people, Olakunle was broke.

In 2016, at 27, Olakunle was jobless and sleeping on a friend’s floor in Abuja, he told me. “I was so broke that when my friends had a wedding in Lagos, they didn’t even give me an invitation because they knew I couldn’t afford the clothes or transportation.” Flights to Abuja were about ₦22,000 to ₦25,000 back then.

Feeling as if supernatural forces were hindering his direction, he sought divination from a friend trained in Ifá. The message was clear: his economic situation would only improve if he became a priest. Olakunle hesitated because he was unsure how to deal with the stigma and societal stereotypes of traditional spiritualists as uneducated or “demonic” and publicly renounce his parents’ religion.

Yet, in 2017, he began training under a mentor in Abeokuta, mastering the sacred texts that guide divinations. By 2019, he was certified as a babalawo.

Instead of being embarrassed by the stereotypical image of a babalawo as “dirty, rugged, not really educated, not conscious of society,” he decided he was going to change it. “By virtue of my venturing to study information technology, I began to see Ifá from a technological viewpoint.” Instead, he decided to be a modern, tech-savvy priest, describing himself as an Afrofuturist on one of his social media platforms. He started a podcast to share his perspective, framing Ifá as a practice aligned with science.

He also had the Founders’ Ifá Program, offering divinations for tech founders and recommending business policies based on Ifá’s insights. He declined to name some of the companies he had serviced to protect their privacy, but shared that these insights could be precise and impactful, such as advising on leadership. “If Ifá is saying that this company will be better headed by a lady, not a man, that information itself is going to save the company from collapse,” he said, citing an example.

His work earned him a significant following and press attention that propelled him to fame. It has also made him more clear-eyed about the vulnerability that the lowered barrier has created for vulnerable seekers who will be deceived by scammers, he said during our interview.

His solution: Priests of Africa is set to launch in June 2025. Vetting is the platform’s backbone; Olakunle says he recently travelled to Ghana and Togo to do background checks, mentor verification, and test divination of spiritualists who have expressed interest in listing on the platform. This way, users can access diviners from different cultures. When I asked him how he would verify spiritualists from other cultures, Olakunle said, “A real babalawo knows another.”

Still in development, the app will offer consultations via text or voice notes within scheduled sessions. It will also ensure that the required rituals or sacrifices are properly performed, and ensure refunds when spiritualists do not finish services. On the other hand, the platform will charge diviners a commission on client fees, which will be used to maintain the platform and support staff that Olakunle is already building.

This is his second attempt at a divination app. His first, an AI-powered tarot system, failed due to insufficient funding. “By the time I had potential funding, it no longer resonated with me. It was tedious to develop the functionalities and connect the spiritual energy to ensure accurate readings,” he said.

Despite this, Olakunle is resolute that Priests of Africa will be a game-changer. However, fraudulent spiritualists have long plagued sacred traditions, predating the digital era. Whether technology can curb this deception or risks amplifying it is an answer that only time will reveal.