On Tuesday, a clip involving two female students of a posh secondary school in Abuja, Lead British International School, went viral. In the clip, a girl was seen repeatedly slapping another girl in a classroom while asking her, “Who broke my heart?” The assaulted girl appeared too hurt by the grave humiliation to answer. More humiliating was when other students were heard laughing as the girl continued to slap the other girl at another location. Nigerians and the media have already named it bullying, and rightly so.
At the beginning, seeing that the question was, “Who broke my heart?” I thought it was simply a case of two girls having a quarrel over a boy, and one of them having the upper hand. I thought so because such relationship squabbles are quite common among adolescents in secondary schools where teenagers – full of unfamiliar hormones – begin to fight for love in words and action. But seeing that the girl had the audacity to slap the other one repeatedly in front of other students who seemed pleased by the cruel drama hinted at a case of disdainful disrespect. It appeared that the assaulted girl had no allies powerful enough to defend her.
The outrage it generated among Nigerians, especially on social media, was immediate. The family of the assaulted girl were seen in another video in the school filled with justified anger and a palpable urgency for revenge. A woman (identified as the mother of the assaulted girl) even slapped the assaulter while asking her, “Did you give birth to her?” Which reminds us, sadly, that in our part of the world, parents have the right to physically assault their children in that manner. The girl who appeared sunken by the shame of her viral cruelty and its accompanying guilt was also seen apologising for her action in another video.
The Minister of Women Affairs, Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, and her education counterpart, Tahir Mamman, went to the school in the afternoon of Tuesday and held a meeting with the school’s management after which the school was declared shut pending investigation. FCT police authorities also released a statement saying they had launched an investigation into the issue and were “on top of the situation and have deployed seasoned officers to the school premises for investigation.” Not just officers, but seasoned ones.
As it stands, the impressions and gestures are remarkable. The assaulted girl has been served an appreciable level of justice. The indignity she experienced among her peers has been properly tackled even though the trauma will require some time and counselling to be fully healed. And the condemnations it accrued from Nigerians on social media have sent a desirable message that we still frown at injustice, even if some of us do the same or even worse.
But would the same attention have been given to the issue if it had happened in one of the public secondary schools with leaking roofs and disjointed furniture and with walls peeled off and worn-out in a village? Would the same attention be given to it by the Minister of Women Affairs and the Minister of Education (or their corresponding commissioners at state level) if the students involved were children of nobodies? Would the police in Nigeria (who are notorious for harassing the less privileged) release a statement saying they have launched a whole investigation into a wrinkled public secondary school over a case involving a student whose parents could easily be shut up with a plate of “fufu and egusi soup”? Would the government like to involve itself in what happened to a student it first of all denied the dignity of good education in a way that’s plainly visible?
How many videos of students assaulting other students have been shared on social media that never generated such level of attention? The Lead British International School’s case is definitely not the first. In Nigeria, a lot of things are easier to get with privilege. One of them is justice. Another is sympathy.
Even from the conversations the bullying video generated on social media, where many Nigerians recounted how they suffered in the hands of their fellow students, especially in boarding secondary schools, where senior students physically assaulting junior ones has been normalised for long, tell us whether the case of the Lead British International School is truly a leading one. Somebody on Facebook said a senior student in a secondary school left a permanent scar on him after breaking one of his teeth and that all he got was a forced apology.
But the good thing is that we have, all of a sudden, realised that we had been so used to some things that we didn’t realise the extent of their wrongness because a lot of distasteful things had been muddled up into the fabric of our existence that we didn’t even notice them until they happened to people they were not supposed to happen to.
Jalal resides in Abuja and can be reached via [email protected]
