In a hospital in Katsina last week, Kubra Khalil (not her real name) cradled her newborn and tried breastfeeding it but she could not produce milk for the baby. Kubra herself is a child. She is only 12 years old.
In the hospital, her mother, also nursing a baby—Kubra’s sibling—is caught between caring for her own three-month-old baby, or her daughter and her newborn grandchild.
The man responsible for 12-year-old Kubra’s situation is 38. He was her teacher and the vice-principal of her school in Kadandani of Rimi Local Government of Katsina State. He is married, not to one or two but to three women. His name is Ibrahim Saleh and that is his real name.
Last week, this man suffered the ignominy of being paraded alongside other rapists arrested by the police in Katsina. One of the other suspects had defiled a five-year-old girl.
This certainly is not the first time something like this has happened. It would sadly not be the last. Mr Saleh, a husband of three wives, happens to be a paedophile. Many like him exist and many of his ilks are entrusted with the care of children all over the world.
Mr Saleh admitted to serially raping Kubra. He confessed to giving her between two hundred and five hundred naira to violate her over some months. He called this girl ‘daughter,’ even when he was raping her.
How a man, a father, with three wives would stoop to the level of serially abusing a child is something I cannot explain. How he will live with himself knowing that he has ruined her life, burdened her with a child she neither wanted nor is equipped to care for is something he would have to live with. If he has a conscience.
Children have been abused for centuries. Many by the people who have been entrusted with their care. The attitude of the society has often gifted the air these abusers need to breathe, to grow and to continue to devour little children in the complicit silence of society.
In these parts, attitudes to rape and child abuse have not always been sterling. Enablers have often bent over backwards to explain these things away, to blame the victim. Even the rapists too. In Kano, shameless Alhaji Aminu Musa, 41, was caught in 2018 defiling his 8-year-old pupil, who he blamed for leaning into him every time he was trying to explain her lessons to her.
In a baffling case in September 2019, when a teacher in Adamawa was arrested for impregnating a 12-year-old schoolgirl, the person who rose to his defence was Mr Rodney Nathan, chairman of the Nigerian Union of Teachers in the state.
“One cannot call a mutual relationship between a schoolgirl and her teacher who are mutually in love a rape case,” Mr Nathan said.
Puzzling as this statement is, it is drawn from the cultures that allow child marriages and even see it as desirable.
But how someone as highly placed as a chair of a teachers’ union would stick his neck out to justify the abuse of a pupil under the guise of a relationship is troubling.
That someone like that thinks there can even be a “mutual” relationship between a grown man and a 12-year-old means that as far as he is concerned, the little boys and girls entrusted to their care as teachers are, for all intents and purposes, fair game. That is worrying.
The abuse of children in the name of having “mutual” relationships with them has a long history. Child marriages are rampant and this is not peculiar to one part of the country. A 2019 UNICEF data shows that at least 23 million women and girls alive today in Nigeria married in childhood. Six of the top 10 countries with the highest rates of child marriages are in West Africa.
The prevalence in these parts is significant. As is the prevalence of raping minors and justifying it by rewarding rapists with their victims.
Sometime in 2015 in Ungogo Local Government of Kano, Usaini Ja’afar and three of his friends gang-raped a 13-year-old girl and were apprehended by the Hisbah, the local moral police. Usaini owned up, said he was remorseful for the act and offered to marry his victim to atone for the crime. Her father consented.
When the news broke, the Hisbah made a grand show of halting the marriage, insisting that Usaini and his friends would face justice. Months later, the wedding went ahead quietly, with a few relatives in attendance.
“I allowed him to marry the girl because our consultations with our malams showed that there is nothing wrong with that,” the girl’s father, Ya’u Shuaibu, said.
The father, however, conveniently forgot to mention that in Islam and the law of the land, there is everything wrong with rape in the first place.
Many rape cases have been resolved in this fashion; most never make it to the press and many relatives of rape victims prefer the hushed arrangement. It is a practical solution for a problem no one wants to be saddled with.
Generally, our attitudes to rape have always been nonchalant, and rapists have found this attitude and culture to be useful enablers for their acts.
To curb this, there must be a two-prong approach. There needs to be a change in orientation, a determined effort to alter perception about children as sex objects, to be forcefully taken, bribed with biscuits or loose change in exchange for something whose value cannot be quantified.
And secondly, the authorities must be more proactive in addressing rape. Police officers must be properly trained and special victims units need to be established to receive, investigate, and prosecute each rape case, of minors or otherwise, in an efficient and professional manner that would make victims and their families feel comfortable enough to report. Instances of police officers, including policewomen, laughing at victims of rape and asking them derisive questions are all too common.
I imagine that when Ibrahim Saleh was lifting up little Kubra’s skirt to defile her, to take from her what she did not have the sense to offer, what he had no right to take—her dignity and her life—that he only thought about himself. That perhaps as long as he wasn’t forcing her, even if she was not old enough to consent, he was not committing a crime. Just as Nathan Rodney who tried to justify that abuse in Adamawa. Maybe just like any other rapists of children around the world.
With manimals like these on the prowl, we should all know that our children are in danger. What exactly are we going to do about it?
