Wednesday, November 19, 2014

An Epidemic: Nigerian Men Killing Their Nurse Wives In The United States

By Abiodun Ladepo

"Yes I have killed the woman that messed up my life; the woman that has destroyed me. I am at Shalom West. My name is David and I am all yours.”
Those were David Ochola’s words during his 911 (U.S. Emergency Number) call to authorities after shooting dead his 28 years old wife, Priscilla Ochola, in Hennepin, Minnesota. The 50-years old husband was tired of being “disrespected” by his wife, a Registered Nurse (RN) whom he had brought from Nigeria and sponsored through nursing school only to have her make much more than him in salary - a situation which led to Mrs. Ochola “coming and going as she chose without regard for her husband.”  The couple had two children – four years old boy and a three years old girl.  

*Some Nigerian Nurses In The US
           (pix:nigeriannursesassociationofusa)
In Texas, Babajide Okeowo had been separated from his wife, Funke Okeowo, with whom he resided at their Dallas home.  Upon the divorce, the husband lost the house to his wife, along with most of the contents therein, as is usually the tradition in U.S. divorces where the couple still has underage children.  Mr. Okeowo, 48, divorced his wife because not long after she became a RN and made more money than him, she “took control” of the family finances and “controlled” her husband’s expenditure and movement.  The husband could no longer make any meaningful contribution to his family back in Nigeria unless the wife “approved” it. He could not go out without her permission. Frustrated that his formerly malleable wife had suddenly become such a “terror” to him to the point of asking for in court and getting virtually everything for which he had worked since coming to the US thirty years prior, the husband got in his vehicle and drove a few hundred miles to Dallas to settle the scores. He found her in her SUV, adorned in full Nigerian attire on her way to the birthday bash organized in her honor.  She had turned 46 on that day.  Mr. Okeowo fired several rounds into his wife’s torso while she sat at the steering wheel, mercilessly killing her in broad daylight. 
Also in Dallas (they sure need anger management classes in Dallas), Moses Egharevba, 45, did not even bother to get a gun. The husband of Grace Egharevba, 35, bludgeoned her to death with a sledge hammer while their seven years old daughter watched and screamed for peace. Mrs. Egharevba’s “sin” was that she became a RN and started to make more money than her husband. This led to her “financial liberation” from a supposedly tight-fisted husband who had not only brought her from Nigeria, but had also funded her nursing school education. 

Like Moses Egharevba, Christopher Ndubuisi of Garland, Texas, (these Texas people!) also did not bother to get a gun. He crept into the bedroom where his wife, Christiana, was sleeping and, with several blows of the sledge hammer, crushed her head. Two years before Christiana was killed, her mother, who had been visiting from Nigeria, was found dead in the bathtub under circumstances believed to be suspicious. Of course, Christiana was a RN whose income dwarfed that of her husband as soon as she graduated from nursing school. The husband believed that his role as a husband and head of the household had been usurped by his wife. Mr. Ndubuisi’s several entreaties to his wife’s family to intercede and bring Christiana back under his control had all failed.

If circumstances surrounding the death of Christiana’s mother were suspicious, those surrounding the death of a Tennessee woman’s mother were not. Agnes Nwodo, a RN, lived in squalor before her husband, Godfrey Nwodo, rescued her and brought her to the US. He enrolled her in nursing school right away. Upon qualifying as a RN, Mrs. Nwodo assumed “full control” of the household. She brought her mother to live with them against her husband’s wishes. Mrs. Nwodo quickly familiarized herself with US Family Laws and took full advantage of them. Each time the couple argued, the police forced the husband to leave the house whether he had a place to sleep or not. On many occasions, Mr. Nwodo spent days in police cells. Upon divorcing his wife, Mr. Nwodo lost to his wife the house he had owned for almost 20 years before he married her. He also lost custody of their three children to her, with the court awarding him only periodic visitation rights. Even seeing the children during visitation was always a hassle as the wife would “arrive late to the neutral meeting place and leave early with impunity.” Mr. Nwodo endured so many embarrassing moments from his wife and her mother until he could take it no more. One day, he bought himself a shotgun and killed both his wife and her mother.   

Caleb Onwudike’s wife, Chinyere Onwudike, 36, became a RN and no longer saw the need to be controlled by her husband. Mr. Onwudike, 41, worked two jobs to send his wife to her dream school upon bringing her to the US from Nigeria. After four years, she qualified as RN. Once she started to make more money than her husband, she began to “call the shots” at home.  She “overruled” her husband on the size and cost of the house they purchased in Burtonsville, Maryland. She began to build a house solely in her name in their native Umuahia town of Abia State, Nigeria, without her husband’s input whatsoever. Mrs. Onwudike came and went “as she liked,” within the US and outside the US. In fact, she once travelled to Nigeria for three weeks “without her husband’s permission” to lavishly bury her father despite her husband’s protestations that they had better things to do with the money. Mrs. Onwudike let her husband know that this was mostly her money and she would spend it however she wanted. Through her hard work, she had risen to a managerial position at the medical center where she worked. Upon her return from burying her father, her husband got one of her kitchen knives and carved her up like Thanksgiving turkey inside their home on New Year’s Day.

Death is death no matter how it comes. But the goriest of these maniacal killings is probably the one that happened here in Los Angeles, California. Joseph Mbu, 50, was tired of his RN wife’s “serial disrespect” of him.  The disrespect began as soon as she became a RN.  Gloria Mbu, 40, had once told her husband he must be “smoking crack cocaine” if he thought he could tell her what to do with her money now that she made more money than him. Before she became a RN, Mr. Mbu had been very strict with family finances and was borderline dictatorial in his dealings with Mrs. Mbu. However, Mrs. Mbu learned the American system and would no longer allow any man to “put her down.” When Joseph Mbu could not take it anymore, he subdued his wife one day, tied her to his vehicle and dragged her on paved roads all around Los Angeles until her head split in many pieces. 

[Author’s note: Although these are true stories, all the names and some of the details of the incidents have been altered as a mark of respect to the families involved. All of the killer husbands noted in these stories were found guilty. Most of them received the death sentence. Only the California and Maryland culprits received life sentences without the possibility of parole.]

It often comes to Nigerian men living in the US as a rude shock when their wives become the household’s bread winner. Having been accustomed to the docility, domestication, subjugation and outright terrorization of women back home in Nigeria, many Nigerian men are astounded when their wives assert their financial, behavioral and social independence. It is commonplace for Nigerian men to take important family decisions without consulting their wives; to travel out of town and indeed out of country without consulting their wives. Some do not even bother to inform their wives! It is not a big deal for Nigerian husbands to answer phone calls from their girlfriends while lying in bed with their wives; to buy expensive gifts for their girlfriends and making only perfunctory, casual attempt to conceal such gifts. It is nothing strange for Nigerian men to, in fact, bring those girlfriends to their matrimonial homes while their wives are home! Some Nigerian men think they have the carte blanche to do what they want because they are the bread winners. What’s the wife going to do to them? Beat them? Leave them? Leave them after one, two or three children? Who’s going to marry her? So Nigerian men think.

The President of the Nigerian Nurses Association of 
USA, Inc. (NNAUSA), 
Speaks On The Issues Raised in this article
This cruel and phenomenal hostage-taking by Nigerian men in Nigeria is what Nigerian women in America are trying to stop. And they figured out the easiest way to begin curtailing these bullish husbands’ wings is to improve their own potential to earn more. A good way to earn a decent pay in the US (unlike in Nigeria) is to become a Registered Nurse. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median annual salaries of RNs, based on information from May 2012, is $68,000, while the mean annual salary is $69,000. The middle 50% of RNs earns between $54,000 and $78,000.  Only 10% of RNs earns less than $44,000, while some 10% earns more than $97,000. The BLS also reports average hourly wages: The median hourly wage of a RN is $32.00 and the mean hourly wage is $33.00. The middle 50% of RNs earns wages of $27.00 to $40.00, with 10% of them earning less than $22.00 while 10% earns more than $48.00 an hour.

Nigerian men in the US are quick to send their “newly-imported” wives to these nursing schools in the hope that once the women graduate, they (the husbands) could take control of their finances and continue their enslavement. You can imagine a man who was probably a menial worker earning less than $30,000 annually in an expensive place like California or New York going back to Nigeria to “oppress” the village with dollars.  He finds a “village girl,” brings her to the US and sends her to nursing school. When she graduates and makes twice his salary, he begins to feel inferior to her and his macho instincts take control of him, catapulting his emotions over his sense of reason. If the RN wife decides to take a second or third job, she can easily triple or quadruple the gap between her earnings and those of her menial job husband’s.  

Working long hours takes the wife away from home and because nurses are expected to work overnight shifts, you end up with a husband who is usually home alone at night with just the children. Since even “normal” marriages can be potentially stressful endeavors, adding spousal jealousy and a husband who sleeps alone half of the time to the equation will certainly test the limits of the marriage. It is the reason why even when such husbands do not go over the hill to kill their wives, they divorce them in epidemic numbers. A friend in New York told me that RN women there are being divorced in droves as if they are plagues.


(pix:voice-online)

What is the big deal if a RN wife makes more money than her husband?  There are several other professions in which wives make more money than their husbands. In fact, I know of a few military couples with the wives senior in rank to their husbands even though they joined the military at the same time. Yet, nobody is killing or divorcing anybody.  Is this strictly a RN thing? 

My hope is that some of these RN wives learn from the many other RN wives who successfully manage their homes in spite of making more money than their husbands. My hope is also that the husbands of these RNs learn from husbands of the many RNs who successfully cope with a wife who makes more than they do. I don’t know how they do it, but for every RN who is killed or divorced by her husband, there are hundreds, if not thousands more who proudly respect their husbands and submit to their husbands’ authority – yes, their husbands’ authority (NOT control and NOT abuse) even here in the US.  
By Abiodun Ladepo                            
Los Angeles, California, USA                        
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*This article was first published on another site  recently. We are reproducing it here to bring the issues raised by the author to the attention of our readers.
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10 comments:

  1. 1) These men should stop marrying girls, that could be their daughters.
    2)seems the anger comes from a sense of " I brought you here, let you go to school, probably paid your tuition" you cannot, therefore assert your adult person.
    The solution to this is simple.
    Marry the ones that are already nurses, so you do not have to regret letting her go to school, or paying her school feels , when she starts being a real woman in marriage.
    3) There are a lot of men that are nurses in Nigeria and here too. If you are a man, and wants a nurse as a wife, and likely to get envious when she starts making $100, 000 a year, doing 3 jobs, you have an option to become a nurse.
    Gooogle WWW. USAuniversitiesofferingnursjngprograms.org.
    Be ready for at least 4 good years or more, to get a Bachelor's in nursing. Or
    Try the shortcuts. Do LPN program for one or two years, another 2 years for associate degree in Nursing, then 2 or more years for BSc in Nursing.
    Know it that you need a B or better and an almost an angelic behavior to remain a student nurse.
    Know it too, that , that snake, your wife, you think you harbor at home is everywhere. No escaping it. They will be your professors, be in charge of your clinicals, head you when you graduate and start making $120,000 a year, doing two jobs, and some that have no time for the ghosts ( their husbands ) they left at home would bribe you to sleep with them. You are done forever with your new degree if you refuse. There is no escaping any devil in your household or at school or work.
    Or
    Be the wife and taker in your household, and leave OPK (other people's Kids) alone.
    And for these women, who think they can get away with castrating men, simply because you can afford to abuse your bodies for pleasure with some instruments or rent a hospital house keeper to sleep with you in the basements, or even your house keeper or building maintenance worker, be ready because that man you have made a ghost can become a mad ghost and send you to the great beyond sooner than you imagined.
    Dan

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    1. You are Making lots of sense. Frank talk.

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  2. Why is it so difficult for a wife to keep her home just because she is earning big money? After losing out and destroying your home and wasting your youth in unrestrained immorality (with the attendant risks), you would end up in later in life as some lonely, unhappy, unwanted woman. That is when the reality of your folly will dawn on you. You would then realize, too late in the day that you had sacrificed the lasting joy of matrimonial happiness you could have preserved (if you were humble enough) on the altar of gross indiscretion and misguidance. I, however, won't advise husbands of erring wives to harm them no matter the provocation, Laws of God and man frowns at that.

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  3. Don't forget your roots because you are in America. Don't jettison the sold values you saw at home, which kept your own mother and father happily together, and made you to be raised in a happy stable home. He who has ears, let him hear

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  4. I want to say one thing ,the idea that women making more than men makes them irrational is not true .
    Firstly real men should not make their wives their source of financial deliverance. Either you marry a women because you truly love her or you forget about it .
    A lot of these men came to the USA without anything .They spent years wasting their lives "posing" suddenly they realize that they need to have built a house back home and have a car there and other conquest. Then you now think bringing a woman to get this dream achieved is sensible. Communication is everything and most of these women are brought into a marriage without any discussions on the man's plan, also the woman has her own plan about going to America.
    Some of these men in the first place have no business being with women because they are so concentrated on getting her resources from her that the whole story is despicable. Another story not told in this forum is women in the same Texas (I live here ) who humbly handed over all their finances and life and blood to the man and once all was established ,they dumped the now (old lady) and pick a brand new young chick.
    There has been cases here of men that called their wives work place begging for overtime duty for the wife or men asking for the whole salaries to be handed over or men that live solely on the woman's money and are also not able have the brains to use that money to buy her a gift or take her out to watch a movie. Rather they use that money to buy a car for a girl back in Nigeria . Some men are animals .
    On the other hand ,African women have no identity and I am speaking from experience. Check out women from Asia and India ,they have their own belief systems and honestly there are certain places you will not find them. You will not see them all over the police station,jail and divorce court . I want to put it to you that their men are not the most romantic of men and can rather come off as brash and uncouth. Even with that Indian or Asian women know their place . Take an Indian woman to any part of the world ,they remain themselves same goes for asian women.
    I am talking about a demographic of women that make at least twice what Nigerian women make. Take an African woman to another place like London ,suddenly they start acting like they are from London, move them from there to America and in a few months they start acting like they are from America,they have no identity whatsoever ,they are so easily influenced by their surroundings. So in a place that hostility is shown to men be rest assured that of all demographics ,African women will pick up the mannerisms real quick.
    On the other hand,a lot of African women ,minus their looks came from poverty. In their minds love is expenditure of high currency.For a lot of them the idea of a shared household is out of the place ,they grew up watching Mommy always approach Daddy for money to buy everything right down to that bottle of Kerosene. So why should they share anything with anyone when they are seeing the money that eluded their ancestors finally enter their hands?

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    1. Read your piece. I want to thank you for the mention of the Indian wife and husband as a prototype of an ideal(not perfect though) marriage partner. I mentioned that too in my message. Nigerian couples need to change the stereotype.

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  5. Hello Mr Ladipo,
    Compliments of the season to you.
    I read your piece on the subject this morning through a link
    https://ugowrite.blogspot.com/2014/11/an-epidemic-nigerian-men-killing-their.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR3WMijln1kmwU5MvdGrD7ACAAZD-6fHc_b0Dkv2zJVaTRl3lSWPQENFf6o
    a friend shared on facebook. I find it as informative as it is insightful.
    I and my wife have been discussing this topical issue recently, especially as it is prevalent among Nigerian couples. It is sad.
    Let me shock you, while I was reading your article, my wife was on a long phone call from a university friend who is resident in Texas sharing her matrimonial upheavals. Coincidences, right? My wife's female friend is a LAUTECH trained medical doctor who met her US based husband on the internet. She eventually relocated to the US through the help of her husband. As soon as she got to the US, the union headed for the rocks. She called this morning that they separated 2 years ago. Sad��.
    My wife is a chemical engineer working in a pharma company. She earns more than I do. We have no issues. I am frank with you. I set my wife up for her jobs and interviews. I currently teach in a public school. We relocated to the US same year.
    I got your analysis and point of view on the subject. I share your submissions.
    Nigerian couples need to up their tolerance level. The wives and the husbands need not allow the environment(laws and culture) change them to beasts. The Indian couples made better marriages in the US than their Nigerian counterparts. Nigerian wives allow their earnings get into their heads too early. I have an aunt and 3 close friends that live as singles because their marriages failed. My aunt is a RN and my 3 friends are spouses of RNs. It is pathetic.
    However, failed marriage is not peculiar with Nigerians. It is a global issue. It is inherent in individuals to agree or disagree with fellow men and women. Agreement is comfort, disagreement is growth.
    I recommend:
    Parties in a marriage should be ready to tolerate each other.
    Parties should separate if life threatening issues are suspected. Marriage should not result in the death of parties.
    Nigerian couples should take time out on vacations to resolve issues bordering on marriage conflicts. One of the parties should be honest enough to recognise when to schedule a private time for each other.

    Thank you for your time.

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