Nigeria: Ese Oruru’s Mirror

By Okey Ndibe

I received a plaintive note last week from a young man who seemed rather shocked that I had not written about Nigeria’s scandal of the moment—the harrowing story of a 14-year old girl named Ese Rita Oruru, abducted from her home in Bayelsa State, transported to Kano by a 22-year old drifter, Yunusa (alias Yellow), who contrived her conversion to Islam and then made her his bride. My young correspondent then pleaded with me to write about the Ese matter, as if the burden of rendering whole again a world turned on its head rested with whatever I was going to say.

*Ese Oruru

The matter of Ese, even the fragment of it sketched out above, is a tragic story. But what makes the story truly, deeply tragic is far less the specific details of what happened to a solitary young woman than what the Ese Affair says about Nigeria, its institutions, its attitude to children, and the vexed subject of religion.

In short, the tragedy lies in the fact that Nigeria is a country at war with its most vulnerable, weak citizens. It is a country at war with its poor, its workers, especially those of them who are minimum wage earners, its womenfolk, especially those of them who are, in every important sense, children.

Speaking to a reporter, one of Ese’s best friends at school in Bayelsa State disclosed that her friend’s dream was to become a nurse. According to this friend, Ese excelled at math, integrated science and English. In her first interview with reporters, Ese corroborated the account of her dream. In a child-friendly society, Ese would have received encouragement to enable her to achieve her professional aspiration. But this is Nigeria, a country that’s turned into a killer of dreams, if not of the dreamers. Instead of being on her way to a nursing career, Ese, who is now five months pregnant, must become the charge of nurses as she, a mere child, prepares to bring a child into the world.

How did the young man who abducted Ese manage to pull off his crime—for crime it was—in broad daylight, without anybody, civilian or uniformed, to stop him? How was it that several adults presided over the farcical conversation of the young woman without one of them pausing to ask, one, whether she was competent to voluntarily understand said conversion and, two, whether she understood the implications of what was to follow?

In her interview, Ese described the process of her ostensible conversion. “They took me to one place. Before they took me from the house to Kura, they put me in hijab, then we went to Kura. When we got there, they went to one place, and one old man came there and he would say something and they would say I should repeat. Then I would repeat. If the man said something again, they would say I should repeat and I would repeat just like that.”

A conversion indeed, just like that!

Beyond Ese Oruru: Naming And Shaming The Kidnap-And-Convert Villains

By Moses E. Ochonu

A quick proclamation by way of introduction: Ese Oruru, Patience Paul, and their parents are not the villains of the kidnapping and conversion of underage Christian girls in Northern Nigeria. Blaming the victim is a form of re-victimization, an exculpatory gimmick employed by those who, for reasons known only to themselves, do not want to confront or unequivocally condemn an egregious crime.

*Ese Oruru: After her traumatic experience 

More instances of abduction, forced conversion and in some cases forced marriage of underage Christian girls have now come to light since the resolution of the Ese Oruru and Patience Paul cases. Ese’s case has opened a floodgate. Many cold cases, long-stalled in the labyrinth of law enforcement and legal inaction, are now in the public domain, resurrected by parents as the press and social media have become sensitized to this menace. As of today, there is an unresolved case in Zaria, one case in Zamfara State, and four cases in Bauchi State, the details of the latter appearing in Sunday’s edition of Punch Newspaper with pictures and interviews with parents, law enforcement, and the ubiquitous Sharia Commissions.

There should be no justifying the many wrongs that have been committed against these children and their parents by overzealous religious enforcers who have placed themselves above the legal and law enforcement institutions of the country. Some of these cases, in addition to the crimes of forceful conversion of and sexual assaults on a minor, are clear cases of kidnapping, a heinous offense under our penal code. Even in the case of Yunusa and Ese, clearly a 22 year old (his own father says he is 22) cannot have sexual relations with a 14 year old under Nigerian law. It is statutory rape of a child. A 14 year old is not at the age of sexual, romantic, and marital consent, period; so enough with all the specious mitigations of this egregious crime. Enough with the defensiveness.

Those of us who lived and schooled in the Muslim-majority states of the North know that these incidents have been going on for years. They are not outliers, as some people would want us to believe. Parents and pastors have been crying about these crimes for decades but very few cases actually made it to the national press. Starved of national press attention and without the democratized discursive space of today’s social media, many such cases were never resolved in favor of the children and their parents.