Killing the little devils

I can't tell if the video above is visible 'cos my browser has issues installing flash player, so just in case you can't see it here's the link. I do hope its visible here though; I suspect that a mouse click might be an enormous load of work for some :) [sarcasm intended]

A friend of mine was looking through this site and I happened to be peering at his computer - in a none intrusive way I must add :) - at the exact moment when a little girl who'd had a 3-inch nail driven into her brain was being talked about.

And here I was about to write about how I grasped those "conundrums" (don't worry I'll explain what that means next post) earlier this year. Its sad the spate of human rights abuses that go on in this country up till now. When I cared more (not saying I dont care now, just talking in relative terms) I was a part of a number of human rights organizations and missionary outreaches, my primary area of interest being womens' and child rights. If you're amazed at the audacity with which that Bishop from Hell in the video talked about his 110 murders and innumerable human rights abuses, it will interest you to know that that his case is by no means isolated.

In the vast majority of injustices occuring in rural areas the perpetrators are protected mostly by the local traditional leaders/courts and the loyalist citizenry which unfortunately include the local police in most cases. Case in point; a relative of mine -whom the tragedy I'm about to narrate robbed me of the privilege of acquaintance with - was caught in the middle of a longstanding inter-clan land dispute (typical african stuff huh?) and lost her life courtesy of a fatal blow to the head delivered by a member of the other clan while she was strolling along in the wee hours of the morning on her way to the university.

Her family lived in a part of Uyo (I failed to mention that this happened in Akwa-Ibom) that was was predominantly occupied by Anang people. My relatives are Ibibio (they are my maternal relatives) and Anang people historically have a strong contempt for Ibibios. When they sought justice from the local police department who were of course predominantly Anang, they were locked up and tortured for their trouble. The severity of their travails I cannot tell, but it was injustice all the same. All this it turned out was on account of their having recieved some sort of moral backing from their much revered traditional ruler. Ask the bugger and he'll probably narrate some historical B.S about how their founding fathers had their fish farms robbed by Ibibio game hunters...tsk. I hear that the case had to be taken to different Local Government before they could even gain audience. The case is yet to be resolved.

And how could it be? There have been innumerable instances of traditional rulers being involved either directly or by proxy in heinous crimes and I am yet to hear of one which ended in a prosecution. A glaring example was the young Ibo man up North who was released BY THE POLICE to a bunch of Hausa Muslims who then beheaded him and delivered his head on a stake to their local monarch. His crime - his wife wiped her baby's poop with a page of some holy book of theirs which she picked out of a TRASH HEAP. But the point is why did these people feel a need to 'honour' their ruler with a souvenir of their 'conquest' . Who is it that sensitizes the illiterate masses of the North into refusing vaccines in suspicion of a plot to exterminate them? Who has enough influence to send these people out on killing sprees everytime a Christian bird poops on some sacred Muslim relic? What sparked the killings of '99 in Sagamu and Kano over a prostitute violating the curfew during an Oro festival? Is it even lawful for a curfew to be placed on an entire town under the auspices of some jerk of a ruler in honour of some disgusting, blood-thristy deity? In the words of Pastor Tunde Bakare "NIGERIA IS A REPUBLIC AND NOT A KINGDOM!!!!!". Why do we persist in honouring these people/practices? Is the catalyst for social advancement not a sustained commitment to continual review and ammendment of laws and public policies. Why do we cling, as onto our lives, to the very menaces which numb our souls? With amazing diligence, we incessantly snatch defeat from the jaws of the victory we fight so hard to wangle.

About two years ago, a move was made to pass a bill outlawing child marriages in the North. If you've ever watched a documentary, or personally witnessed the evils done to little girls in the name of marriage in the North, I'm sure you understand why its been a prime focus of many NGOs. Merciless men, their consciences seared as the Apostle Paul put it "with a hot iron", marry little girls and then go about the lifelong business of physically and emotionally marring them as best they can. Its no news that a girl below 18 stands the risk of contracting vesico vagina fistula or rector vagina fistula which is the damage of the bladder because of the immaturity of the pelvic bones during child birth. After birth, such a girl begins to leak urine uncontrollably and everyone rejects her because of the smell that oozes from her body. Guess what the darling husbands do to them when this happens.

Knowing this, gaining sympathy for such a cause ought to be a snap huh? Well it was thrown out of the Senate having been voted against by the required majority on the grounds that it could potentially subvert their culture. CULTURE???!!!

Why we insist on sustaining such barbarous practices in the name of culture is beyond me. What we have in that video above is a masking of native practice in pseudo-christian worship. How else would a man stare straight at a camera and announce with such deadpan ease "I want to kill that small girl"??!! And the Bishop says there are 2.3m witches in Akwa-Ibom? Thats 200, 000 souls shy of the stated population of the State according to the 1991 census, so to rid Akwa Ibom of all her fiends why don't we just wipe the State off the map?

Witch-hunting and other forms of occultism are practices deeply rooted in the histories of Akwa Ibom and Cross River as any native will attest to. This man and others of his ilk, know that gaining mindshare with people of these communities is a cultural thing. And this is over a century after Mary Slessor fought to end the murder of twins in the very same region. Where is the progress?

Tsk...the gen is about to go off [God bless Nigeria]. I'm hoping you watched that video. If you did, then what you saw is just one of the myriad shapes that the protean monster of human rights abuse takes right here in 21st Nigeria. I had strayed far away from these issues since I left my last human rights group some years ago...it hurt too much. Then again, we can turn a blind eye, a deaf ear or any other conked out component of our anatomy, but there's a good chance it'll come back and bite us in the butt. After my long absence, I think its time to get back in. How did that old lady in Charles Dickens 'David Copperfield' put it? "Let us have no meandering".