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!

Lechers And Child-Brides

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

ON any occasion when the facade of sophistication  and sensitivity to the needs of their fellow citizens crashes, our leaders are often  revealed as  a people who are scandalously ensconced in a notion of self-importance that negates the humanity of those outside the circle of their socio-political and pecuniary influence.  It is because they are deluded by this warped notion that they do not mind neglecting the poor citizens to wallow in their abject misery or deliberately inflicting on them policies that would seal their pulverisation and reify their overbearing sense of importance. 

*Ese Oruru - The Victim 

This is why our leaders steal the money meant for the improvement of the lot of the people, divert  the funds meant for buying weapons and yet send soldiers to the battlefield unarmed. But the citizens still appreciate the true worth of the life of the average Nigerian. This was demonstrated in the past few days by the outrage they expressed at the abduction of the Bayelsa girl, Ese Oruru, who was forcibly Islamised and married at the age of 13.

This outrage did not come from the leaders of the society who were complicit in the ordeal of the teenager.  It came from those outside the realm of power. And without this, those who had the power to set Ese free from captivity would not have bulged.  But  since there is  apparently  official complicity in the ordeal of  the minor, there is  the danger that beyond the outrage that has led to her release,  the culprits  would not be punished . 

And there is a worse danger in so far as a lack of punishment would spawn a recurrence of this aberration. For the case of Yunusa is only a grim upshot of the failure of similar acts of impunity in the past to tug the conscience of the nation and pave the way for appropriate sanctions.  If the Yunusas of our society are not merely serving as minions for some privileged persons, they have only demonstrated that they have learnt enough to appropriate for themselves an art their masters have deployed to satiate their lecherous appetites.

Imoke Denies Lobbying Emir Of Kano To Stop EFCC Investigation

Press Release 

Senator Liyel Imoke, the immediate past governor of Cross River State has dismissed an online news report alleging that he is running from pillar to post trying to lobby the Emir of Kano, His Royal Majesty Sanusi Lamido Sanusa to stop EFCC from probing him as the height of falsehood and a ploy ostensibly to smear his image and instigate a war of attrition against him by the Federal Government. Sponsored by his detractors and political opponents, the story seeks to malign the former governor and to portray him in bad light to the reading public.

Titled: "Imoke Lobbies Obol Lopon, Emir of Kano To Escape EFCC Noose", the story is a mendacious miscarriage of the politics of hate by sociopaths who promote politics of vendetta and acrimony in an era of growing political maturity in the country. The only substance in the story is that  Senator Imoke's chief antagonist, Chief Okoi Obono Obla has written series of petitions to anti-graft agencies urging them to probe the immediate past administration of Senator Imoke. But this after-dinner grandstanding is not capable of causing the former governor his sleep since every activity of the state government under his watch is in black and white for all to see.

Interestingly, the claim by CrossRiverWatch that the former governor was 'clandestinely' reaching out to Obla with an appeal to soft-pedal using Abi Chiefs and the Obol Lopon of Ugep, is spurious and fallacious, to say the least. It is pathetic that people could go to any length to pull others down just to score political goals. In fact, since his coronation in June, 2015, Senator Imoke who was out of the country at the time, has not met the Obol Lopon in person and has never had any communication with the monarch. It is simply the figment of the imagination of pimps in the state who have no other means of livelihood than petition writing.

Not only has the publication lied through its news source, that the former governor insulted President Muhammadu Buhari during his campaign tour of Calabar, it also averred that Senator Imoke reached out to HRM Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Emir of Kano to get the ear of the President for him. Imoke has never met with the Emir of Kano since he ascended the throne of his ancestors. Undoubtedly, Senator Imoke has never been known to be arrogant or boisterous in the course of his political career not to talk of insulting anybody. 

You may not like his style, and call him whatever you will, but no one can deny the fact that Imoke has handled all his assignments, from national to state levels with uncommon composure, tolerance, candour and patriotic fervour. He believes that criticisms, even ruthless ones are part of the democratic culture provided they are not meant to tarnish one's reputation.


Dan Amor
Media Adviser to Senator Imoke
Abuja,
August 15, 2015.