I had a nightmare last night. It was my longest night in many years. I had received two emails the night before. One was about a child, 10 years old, who had been raped by a man, 35 years old. This email came at a time I was beginning to see the thread of rape stories on many websites and blogs.
At first, I thought it was just a scramble for page-views as the stories often looked incredible. Then I started to think that the same stories were being tweeted everyday, the same way I’d do if I had interest in a news story or article. I discovered how wrong I was when I started clicking on some of these rape stories.
One theme seemed to run across each one: they were all gruesome. Then last night, I got the email about yet another rape case. It was one issue too many. Yet another one was on the way.
A lady, 27 years of age, sent me an email. She had been raped as a child. Now a single mother with one child, she wrote in her email she couldn’t exactly say what happened, as she couldn’t remember being penetrated but she was absolutely certain that experience had taken something away from her.
She lived in a big house and, from the look of it, was from a well to do family. Her father was oblivious to what happened until his death. Her mum is alive but is not aware of what happened to her daughter even as I write these words. This happened almost two decades ago.
The child has grown into a woman. Yet reading through her email, the pain felt fresh, the agony came through her words and I saw enough pictures in her words to have a nightmare of my own. One can only wonder how many nightmares she has had to go through all these years.
She was one of too many children begging for help. And there are so many of them today. Our country, our society, our culture has abandoned our children. Everyday they suffer from the evil ones in our midst but the society does not expect them to talk, so they keep these nightmares and pains within. This has nothing to do with whether the child lives in or comes from a rich or poor home: Nigerian children are being raped and abused everyday! Something has to give.
Life in Nigeria is hard enough for these children; their mothers are more likely to die at the point of their birth in Nigeria than almost everywhere else in the world. Most of these children are more likely to die before their fifth birthday in Nigeria than almost everywhere else in the world.
The ones that survive that are not likely to go to school because our country has the world’s highest number of children out of school. There are more children out of school in Nigeria than there are people in Liberia, Mauritania and Gabon put together.
The ones that manage to be enrolled in school are faced with a future that holds more failures than promises. Nigerian children are faced with a future that promises nothing but a long, gruesome travel through a country that continues to get darker by the day.
We cannot fix all of these problems in one day, maybe not even in one generation but we can start with fixing some of them. It appears our society has come to accept the inevitability of seeing children raped by adults. We can’t afford to be in that position. We’d have the future of our country damaged before it has even started. We need to do something to fix this.
We cannot continue to have children raped everyday and continue to pray for a prosperous country. How can a country prosper when most of its children live in fear of its people? How can Nigeria see peace and prosper if we continue to deny justice to our children? When will these raped children see justice? When will those yet to be raped find protection from the evil that lurks in our cities, villages and homes?
No comments:
Post a Comment