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!