Ese Oruru and government’s neglect of our re-orientation – 1

What is the world turning to?
How come we are being driven by a new strain of negative feminism? With all the people that Boko Haram killed and kidnapped, it was when 200 plus girls were kidnapped that the global media descended on Nigeria in the Jonathan days. The unspoken message was passed quite eloquently; “we care less if boys were killed, kidnapped or drafted to the warfront as child soldiers. Men and boys are savages anyway and deserve whatever they get. It is even better if women and girls were killed. What we cannot bear is if they are likely to be raped!”
It’s the world we now live in; a world where masculinity is criminalized, where men have become mere tools in the hands of powerful women, where the lives of men get easily destroyed and manipulated.  In the western world, it is commonplace. Men get ruined everyday. The story was carried by The Punch Newspapers just esterday about the pitiful death of one Mr. Ihediwa, a Nigerian in the US, whose former wife ensured was totally ruined and his children turned against him. 
Men are paying for past sins in the Western world.  They have no rights whatsoever and are being trampled upon.  Maybe men will get wise and speak up for themselves as a group someday.  In Africa too, it is an increasing phenomenon, as we copy verbatim what goes on in these countries that we admire.
The problem is that the world deceived itself for too long; women are actually the stronger sex. I see the weakness of men daily and I pity us. Apart from carrying heavy objects, I doubt if we are stronger in any other thing that women. I fear them. You dare them at your peril.  And fearing women does not preclude one from loving them. Any man that disrespects a woman will live a miserable life.
And so it was, that delectable Isha Sesay, and a bunch of others from global media descended on Nigeria and made thorough media mincemeat of us. We will probably never recover from that episode. The girls have not been found. The Buhari administration has ‘almost’ told the Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) campaigners to go to hell.  But what is of deeper concern to me, is that the world did not rage when over 20,000 other Nigerians – and some foreigners – were butchered by those crazy guys. The world did not even wince, as thousands of boys are recruited against their wills into war fronts. We don’t even know as yet, what Boko Haram is, and how come a bunch of allegedly ragtag illiterates routinely beat our Army and sophisticated global intelligence anytime they wish to, very easily.
 
This is just to provide a premise for the Ese Oruru saga.
I did not get involved very early. I had other things to worry and write about. But trust Nigerians to be very interested. There was sex involved. The possibility of rape. And then… ehmmm…. Islamisation! Ha! Everyone went into overdrive. The debate raged about how old Ese was. We finally concluded that she was 13 when abducted. And today, she is probably 14. Newspapers went into a rage to ‘rescue’ Ese, who was allegedly forcefully ‘married’ to one Yunusa ‘Yellow’ from Kano State, and had changed her name. She has even learnt very fluent Hausa in a short while!  Some people said the Emir of Kano was party to the abduction. This news occupied the media for almost two weeks.
Of course the usual recriminations increased.  Many Nigerians from the south, seized the opportunity to excoriate northerners for their ‘backward’ culture. The religious ones amongst them pointed out the ‘Islamisation agenda’. An old video clip from Kenya, wherein four old people were lynched and burnt to death was shared by an ‘Apostle’ on social media and people were asked to pray for Christians in Nigeria who were being persecuted. Religionists were again in overdrive. I pointed out to the so-called ‘Apostle’ that he was sharing false information and heating up the polity.  People wanted ‘Yellow’ to be jailed. Some said ‘castrate him’. Some wanted him killed outright. Anyone who offered any contrary opinion was shot down by the Voltrons.  It was bedlam in Nigerianistan.
 
The pushback
Then some smart northern guys started sharing pictures of baby factories from the South-East, such as to remind some of their persecutors that whereas they have problems with these pedophiles, the baby factory phenomenon also involved pedophilia. Some of the girls caught in baby factories, heavily pregnant of children whose father they know not, children who are carried for nine months, and then sold for money, were between 12 and 16 years.  Whereas these baby factories are all over Nigeria, most existed in the SE of Nigeria. It was a reminder of a greater evil. Before then, I had personally stopped thinking of baby factories. But they still exist; and many small girls are being ‘processed’ through them.
Nigerians don’t care about being ‘politically correct’. Put in another manner, many of us – especially southerners – don’t care about how what we say and do hurt others. No matter the positive change we are trying to cause in society, it is important to choose our words carefully and to know when to cease and desist. The approach we have usually taken so far has only hardened positions and driven a wedge between us, turning this country more and more into a nation of enemies. Admitted, it seems the government has no clue what to do or is deliberately neglecting its duties in uniting the people and fostering cooperation but more on that later.
Some South-Easterners did not find it funny that the baby factory pictures were being shared. Some termed as asinine, the attempt by some northerner to ask which was the lesser evil, between ‘kidnapping’ a 13 years old girl for marriage, or doing the same – or perhaps collecting her consent – to become a producer of babies for sale! I shudder at the thought.
 
Poverty as enabler
My position is that at the bottom of many of these problems, lie poverty. I wrote recently about slums in Abuja. I actually visit them from time to time. When one sees the conditions in which our people live, you would understand that their minds are messed up and would not be surprised by some of the things they get up to. Ese’s parents are strugglers. ‘Yellow’ was a Mai-ruwa in Yenagoa. It goes with the territory. More often than not, it is the poor, illiterate people who suffer from these afflictions. And so the solution is in better governance, resulting in better education for Nigerians, lower poverty levels by closing the income gap, provide an enabling environment for infrastructure and give our people a chance. Our children will think differently and our challenge will be how they will not adopt the oyibo way of thinking in all its entirety. More next week.