Mikky Attah
I was listening to the radio without too much concentration a couple of days ago when a caller phoned in on the programme. I didn’t get what the discussion topic had been but the story the caller told froze me in my seat.
From his story, the caller worked in a lab in a hospital, and one time a pregnant woman and her daughter, a girl of about four; had come in for some tests. But the little girl later wondered off unnoticed. When her mother later realised that her daughter was not about her, she went off round the various rooms of the hospital in frantic search of the little girl. After a while a nurse surfaced with the child in tow. The nurse said the girl had wondered into the ward she was in and had come right up to her. Unfortunately, she had been very busy at the time the child wandered over, and that was the first free moment she could get to locate the mother or father. At that, the mother sprang up and dealt the girl a series of terrible slaps, in rapid succession and on both sides of the face.
The caller said he was so angry then that a thought had come to him that if he had been the father of the child and seen that happen, he wonders how he would have restrained himself from hitting the child’s mother! Everyone around there was horrified and wondered at how the toddler was being treated at home.
I listened to the rest of the programme with all my attention after that; and it felt like walking into a dark and dreadful place.
Caller after caller phoned in, all with sad tales of the terrible beatings they had suffered during childhood at the hands of their parents. One person said that his mother once beat him until blood began to come out from his nose.
Many told of how the physical scars from the merciless beatings of childhood were visible on their bodies. Then you wonder: how about the emotional scars that are left ?!
Parents use- balled fists (!), canes, (iron) rods, skipping ropes (now how come this sounds somehow familiar) ; and any and everything, to beat their own children.
The promise by a lot of these parents is that they would “beat the hell out of them”. They talk as though they have the gauge or instrument of measurement for the scale of hell wrapped up in a child and thus know the level of beating to be given to “beat the hell out.”
The results are predictable all across the world. Here, it is left now for one dedicated researcher to record and reveal the number of infanticides by parents across Nigeria over a set time period, for all to see. Even as it is, we are constantly inundated with horrific tales of deaths of children at the hands of negligent and, or violent parents. A lot of young ones who survive end up with disfigurement, permanent facial paralysis or with horrible scars which today give law enforcement officials cause to pick them up and frivolously charge young men and women as cultists, or gangsters. Others suffer a complete shut- out from careers in any of the forces where body marks are not permissible for recruits.
The baby in the picture below was battered and disfigured by her own father such that it is no longer discernible that this baby is actually a girl. This girl was brutalised for doing whatever little thing she did without even being old enough to know that whatever on earth it was, was wrong! She is still a baby, for heaven’s sake.
It has reached the level that several countries across the globe have long outlawed corporate punishment at homes and at schools.
American children are taught an emergency number to call, should their parents ever go ahead to hit them.
Please do not get me wrong here; I agree totally with the fact that boundaries matched with accountability and discipline spell love for a child. But is that what a great many parents have been pursuing while bringing up their children?
Just as I was writing this, right on Twitter came this distressing piece- a 26- year old was beaten to death by some policemen in Kano and his father witnessed the beating.
Reports have it that the police alleged that Abdulkadir Nasiru had participated in a neighbourhood gang fight. He was not at home when the cops came calling with the allegation, but upon his return, his father Nasiru Madobi took him down to Madobi police station. There he was brutalised and tortured to death.
His father’s claim is that he took his son to the station for interrogation but quarrelling and fighting broke out with the young man well outnumbered. This he said was because at a point the young man decided to fight back against the police brutality. From the same father’s account he himself LEFT his son in that situation, after taking him. There and proceeded home. At the end of the day his son’s corpse was sent back home. Now I ask, why did the father LEAVE his son there in that situation?
The Kano police command says (only) 4 policemen have been arrested in connection with the murder. How about the father? He needs to be interrogated too.
Well whatever the case, like faazbeautyhub says on Instagram : May Allah guide us to carry out our responsibilities well.
Twitter @mikky_princess
