The blood-thirsty squad that invaded the Federal Government College in Buni Yadi, Yobe State, comprised adolescent boys. Moving in deathly herds, they invaded the high school on February 25, 2014, like a storm cloud split by snaky thunderbolts.
They stabbed through the night with a huge spear of mayhem and pumped hot bullets into the students while they slept, killing 59 boys.
Eyewitnesses said they threw explosives into dorms as they sprayed the rooms with gunfire. Some of the students who tried to escape through the windows landed right before the terrorists, who slit their throats. Save a few survivors, the rest were burnt to death.
There was no outrage in the wake of the massacre. Just silence. Convenient disconcerting quiet.
Two months later, on April 14 – 15 to be precise, another batch of terrorists stormed the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, and abducted 276 female students aged 16 to 18. And all hell was let loose as women’s rights activists, international and local NGOs started a campaign to free the girls. The movement gained global appeal as prominent figures identified with hashtags in the girls’ interest.
Through the hubbub, nobody paid a good mind to a curious development concerning both attacks and several other terrorist attacks afterwards: the majority of the perpetrators were boys at the cusp of adolescence. Some of the survivors of the attacks attested to this fact.
Joseph David aka Ibrahim Al-Hajjar, a Boko Haram commander, would subsequently reveal to me in an exclusive interview that he led a troop of at least 150 teenagers and underage boys in Sambisa forest.
David also forcibly married two of the Chibok girls: Precious a.k.a Faridah and Elizabeth a.k.a Amina, as co-wives to his first wife, Faridah, who he abducted from Madagali, in Borno State.
A dangerous storm is brewing as you read. The boys we ignored have learnt the ropes of savage being yet nobody gives a hoot. At least, we would worry about what becomes of us when they set our neighbourhoods on fire, in a manic search for the warmth and attention we denied them.
There is the argument that these boys are the results of polygyny gone wrong in the Muslim north; self-styled intellectuals and critics are quick to point out that Islamic polygyny is a problem that afflicts the north with hordes of almajiri, who are oft recruited as cannon fodder for ethno-religious crisis and terrorism. They recommend monogamy as a better alternative. This is a cheeky and self-serving argument.
Islam and its precepts of polygyny cannot be blamed for the protracted violence in the north. The violence was borne of extreme politics and governance failure and must be blamed on the politicians, civil societies, parents, and individuals who are abusing the system in pursuit of selfish political, ethnoreligious, coital, and emotional lusts.
How do we explain the thousands of children/child goons birthed outside wedlock in the southern parts of the country? Many of them are products of broken marriages and serial monogamy. There are several cases in which children are sired by a parent across successive monogamous marriages and informal cohabitation; one marriage breaks down, and the parent moves on to another partner, and so on. Lest we forget the ubiquitous ‘love-child’ and products of high school teen lust.
Children sired via such arrangements are often sent to live with their grannies or forced to live as house helps in the homes of close and distant relatives. When they stay with an apathetic or extremely busy parent or guardian, they are condemned to the gruesome life of a latchkey child.
Amid the sullied wave of awareness blowing through the country, these children learn assertiveness the way of the streets; some eventually flee the cold comfort of their parents’ or guardians’ abode – such children are called: ‘Awon omo o sanle.’ They constitute the rippling muscle of teen gangs and cult groups haunting Lagos, Oyo, and other parts of the southwest. While their peers in the northeast and northwest are forcibly recruited by bandits, Boko Haram and ISWAP death squads, they assume a different kind of terror to families, neighbourhoods, and States in the southern parts of the country.
Hundreds of children are dumped in refuse, school, and public latrines; and subsequently condemned to shady orphanages and remand homes. If they are female, they become easy marks for sex traffickers and drug barons. If male, they end up as political thugs, drug mules, armed robbers, assassins, kidnappers, and gangbangers.
In Osun, teenagers and young adults fleeing EFCC arrest in Lagos reassembled to practice internet fraud; recently, they rioted against frequent arrests and investigations by the police and EFCC. Many shamelessly identified themselves as ‘Game Boys’ (internet fraudsters or Yahoo boys).
Cut to Lagos, the melting pot of turf battles and teenage gang wars. The city grapples with the menace of teen cults including the Awawa Boys, One Million Boys, Fadeyi Boys, Ereko Boys, Akala Boys, Ijesha Boys, Awala Boys, Shitta Boys, Nokia Boys, No Salary Boys, One Hour Boys, Oshodi Boys, No Mercy Boys, Aguda Boys, Night Cadet, Black Scorpion, Red Scorpion, Akamo Boys, Omo Kasari Confraternity, Para Gang Confraternity (mainly teenage girls), Japa Boys and Koko Boys, among many others.
What started innocently as a group of minors begging people for money eventually metamorphosed into a gang of fearsome underage and teen cultists and armed robbers of ages 6 to 19.
More worrisome is Awawa’s incursion into primary schools. Several months ago, 12 pupils of the Egan Community School, between the ages of 6 and 16, were reportedly caught after their initiation into Awawa, in the Alimosho area of Lagos. But their initiation would have taken place undetected for a Guidance and Counselling teacher at the school.
The pupils were allegedly recruited by a 16-year-old girl, who attends a sister school, Egan Senior Grammar in Igando, Lagos, and were undergoing training to become future hitmen of the cult.
The Awawa Boys operate in rag-tag squads of four, five, seven, 10 to 15 boys bearing deadly arms including baseball bats, clubs, meat cleavers, daggers, crude metal bars, ‘two by two’ (wooden planks with nails) and forks. For large missions, they operate as flash mobs of 100 to 150 boys.
They terrorise Agege, Iyana-Ipaja, Ibari, Ashade, Dopemu, Ogba, Ifako-Ijaiye, Abule-Egba, Ifako-Ijaye, Agege, Isale Oja, Ogba Ashade, Aluminium Village, and other parts of Lagos mainland and island.
Though predominantly a cult of boys, females including prepubescent girls are recruited into the gang. An Awawa Boy can be identified by a drippy teardrop tattoo beside the left eye.
Members of the cult are drug dependent. They binge on psychotropic substances including omi gota (gutter juice), colorado, pamilerin, codeine, cannabis, rohypnol and tramadol. And members nurse a morbid fascination for raping older women and also young girls.
These are the monsters we created. Growing up, all they needed were exemplary masculine role models to emulate but what society offered them was an ethos of manhood that they could dumb down to.
Nigeria treats the boy-child as an affliction to society and females, in particular; he is cast as inconsequential in the scheme of things. In truth, he is.
This minute, he is marching as a terrorist or armed bandit, to abduct, rape, and kill perhaps, the daughters we frantically empower and protect.
This is the world we built: a cosmos of ‘strong women’ reliant on Atlas’ strength, yet imperilled by his shrug.
In commemoration of the International Day of the Boychild
