Three different incidents in the last week cast, poignantly, in bold relief the plight of the girl-child in Nigeria. Thanks to The Punch newspaper which launched the #FreeEse, #JusticeforEse campaign and the civil society groups that took up the fight in a spirited manner. With the outrage and outcry that followed, within 72 hours, this same 14-year old girl who was abducted from Yenagoa, Bayelsa state and taken to Kano, seven months ago, by one Yinusa Dahiru alias Yellow, is now free.While we were still grappling with this bizarre story, on Monday, a group of criminals stormed a school, Babington Macaulay Junior Seminary in Ikorodu, Lagos state and abducted three girls.
And if that was not shocking enough, on Wednesday, there was this other
report about a 15-year old Benue girl, Patience Paul, who had been abducted by
two neighbours and married off to a certain “Sarkin
Musulmi” in Sokoto state. Her brother cried out, obviously motivated to do
so by the Ese Oruru story. Set against
the background of the abduction of 219 Chibok girls in 2014, a story that is
well known internationally, Nigeria must by now appear in the eyes of the world
as a large den of sexual predators, who seem to be obsessed with young,
under-aged girls, and the adolescent female.
The international community would be correct to conclude that something
terrible is happening here. Indeed, can we blame any analyst who may soon
conclude that a girl child is abducted, assaulted or violated per minute in
Nigeria, and that Nigeria is not a safe place for either a girl child or a
female? The sanity and moral temperature of a society should be measured by the
manner in which that society treats its underprivileged and vulnerable members.
The powerful trample upon the weak, the privileged despise the less fortunate;
a long journey to Hobbes’ apotheosis, which is in truth a comment on the state
of our development as state, country, people, and society.
It is instructive, for example, that the girls that end up being abused
in the manner of the aforementioned are usually from poor backgrounds and
perhaps this makes them specially vulnerable. But all the adult males who
abduct other people’s daughters, marry them by force, put them in family way
and convert them to Islam, not only make the entire country look bad, they give
the rest of us a very bad name indeed. In the end, Nigeria is the victim, and
this is why the various government agencies, which were in a position to make a
difference when it mattered most in the Ese Oruru case, or similar cases, and
failed to act, did the entire country a disservice. In some other countries, certain persons
would have honourably submitted their resignations.
But
you can be sure, it won’t happen here.
The standard response in quarters that should be responsible is likely
to be: “ah, wetin? So? “I beg”; Nigeria
go stop because of one girl wey follow man?. And life will go on and go on,
and the tragedy foretold gets moved to the future. Which is why the protesting
small community of men and women with conscience, who have helped to rescue
this one girl from sex slavery and forced conversion to a religion that is not
of her choice deserve special praise.
The Ese Oruru case is a metaphor for the plight of the Nigerian
girl-child. She is a living symbol of the assault on the integrity of the girl
child and her hopes and aspirations in a deracinated, dispossessed and
conflicted society. She was taken away
from her parents at 13 by a man who of course was well-known to her family as a
tricycle rider. Initial reports
identified the abductor and tormentor as Yinusa Dahiru or Yellow, but from that
moment, the story further got coloured by the usual politics of identity,
ethnicity and religion. Yellow was branded “Kano man”. There were also
references to a North-South cultural divide: a Northerner stealing a Southern
child! And then of course, Ese’s conversion to the Islamic religion was a source
of boiling anger - most abducted girls tend to be Christians.
There is also the role of the Emir of Kano in the matter. Too many loud and silent indications:
conflict between traditional and modern institutions, with particular accent on
the relevance, influence, and undue superiorization of the traditional
institution in the North, ethnic and regional dichotomy, power dynamics,
distortions and historical fault lines and the power of the media, old and new,
to change trajectories. No one should fail to notice in this entire saga, how
Nigeria and its many ugly complexities are again, sorrowfully on display. But the more urgent and painful part is that
the life of a young girl has again been scarred forever. Ese could well have been one of the Chibok
girls! Everyday, we are back to Chibok either as symbol, metaphor, painful
reminder or elemental fact.
Mr Yellow not only abducted her and turned her into a Muslim, all
without her parents’, consent, he also
allegedly put the girl in a family way. She is said to be five months pregnant.
How sad and annoying. Perhaps if there had been a strong follow up mechanism in
place at the Kano Emirate Council, the Emir’s order that she should be released
would have saved her the ordeal of being turned into a sex slave. Perhaps if the
police in the Kano zone had done their job, seeing that this was nothing but a
crime in the eyes of the law, and they had remembered that the primary job of
the police is to protect lives and property.
But sorry, they just all forgot!
There must be sanctions and civil society must not get tired of this
case. There are many other Eses out there, whose future hangs in the balance
because certain persons remain morally trapped in the Stone Age. The atrocities
that have been committed against innocent children in this land, are
despicable: in Ese’s case, her right to education was truncated, she had to
miss her JSS 3 exam because a man was busy changing the course of her life; she
was subjected to undue imprisonment, and now she is a child bearing a child.
It is
shocking to say the least that some persons, carried away by religious and
ethnic prejudices, chose to justify this madness. Now that the truth is known
that she is indeed a minor, and that Yellow is an adult who took advantage of
her, I hope such persons will be reasonable enough to apologise, hide their
heads in shame and return filthy lucre. The point has been made ad nauseam that Yinusa Yellow must not
be allowed to get away with his brazen crime. The Zimbabwean sit-tight ruler
has recommended castration as punishment in this kind of context, but
castration not being part of our extant criminal law, we take solace in the
realization that there is more than enough in the statutes to put Yinusa Yellow
away for a long time, to serve as a deterrent to his ilk. He should be tried
expeditiously and a proper closure put to this particular case in line with
natural justice, equity and good conscience. His accomplices if there are any,
no matter who they are, should also be identified and made to face the full
wrath of the law.
This is clearly a case of man’s cruelty to
man. In an interview with The Sun,
her innocence and vulnerability shine through, as compellingly as the madness
of her tormentors. She knows Yinusa as
one of her mother’s customers who comes around to buy food at their shop, and
she being with her mother at the shop knows and relates with everybody, without
any special relationship with Yinusa. “He
is not my boyfriend”, she tells us. “I just followed him. I don’t know how I
followed him.” She says she doesn’t even know how she found herself in
Kano.
She was obviously hypnotized or bewitched. Her kidnappers made her to
recite lines she did not understand. They even gave her some strange water to
drink. They changed her name to Aisha. She comes across as a child whose
childhood and spirit have been polluted by wicked souls. When Ese saw her
mother at the Emir’s palace during an earlier attempt to rescue her, she had
been so polluted she could not even recognize her mother: “I just looked at her. I did not know her and I did not talk to her.”
She
has now regained her senses enough to now ask her mother for “Banga soup and starch”, but there are
many lessons involved. She offers advice, for example, to young girls like her:
“They should be careful with the people
they play with or talk with because it’s not everybody that is good.”
Indeed, we live in a society where “not
everybody is good” and that includes those callous ones who turned this
episode upside down and spilled much ink trying to protect a fictitious
Northern interest. At stake is the human
interest, and it is not geographical.
Child labour such as the type Ese
was involved in, assisting her mother in her food vending business is, let’s
admit, culturally correct in Africa, but it also comes with grave dangers. The
children are exposed to risks and accidents: crazy customers who can’t keep
their eyes or fingers off the female child labourer and kidnappers like Yellow
who go the extra length. Parents must be careful. They must be vigilant. The
need to survive and deploy all possible hands in the house may be given as an
excuse, but the truth is that children lack such negotiating skills that could
protect them in an adult context. Caution is the word.
The argument that obsession with children
as brides is cultural and religious is the most unreasonable thing I have ever
heard and to think that some of the most enlightened and privileged men in a
part of our country are part of this, beggars belief. The girl child is a
child, not a bride, not a sex slave: she deserves her rights to human dignity,
access to education, freedom from discrimination, a decent life in a decent
society and the right to fulfill her potentials as a human being and a citizen.
From Chibok to Kano, to Ikorodu, to Sokoto in the episodes under consideration,
we lament the shame of a nation, and proclaim the right of the girl-child to
dignity.
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