Drones over Nigeria

‘The excesses of Boko Haram must stop. That is the decision of this present government now. It must stop, whatever it will cost the government, it must stop.’
                                                                                        President Goodluck Jonathan

Speaking at a press conference during the latest African Union jamboree in Addis Ababa, President Jonathan sounded an optimistic note concerning the government’s latest assault on the Boko Haram insurgency: ‘The military intervention...is going well. I am optimistic that with the level of success already being recorded, the emergency rule in the affected states may not last up to the six months stipulated by the Constitution.’ He also took the opportunity to reassure us on the safety of the civilian population: ‘There is no human rights abuse and there is no collateral damage with regard to security of individuals.’

 

It’s possible that Jonathan believes his own ‘optimistic’ prognosis, although, as I argued in an earlier blog, it’s questionable whether he believes in anything beyond the unlikely fact of his presidency, which perhaps still seems like a daydream and would explain his fundamental lack of seriousness. So it was, for instance, that even as he found the time to reassure the world that all was well on the terrorism front and that Nigerian soldiers had suddenly understood the necessity of treating Nigerian citizens with courtesy, it was also reported that Mr President failed to deliver his address to his fellow African rulers, ostensibly because he was too drunk. Nor was this his first no-show. He did the same at the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Auckland because he was too busy celebrating his wife’s birthday.

 

But not to worry. This, after all, is the War on Terror and the US Secretary of State was close at hand to endorse the latest development – ‘Boko Haram is a terrorist organisation, and they have killed wantonly and so we defend the right completely of the government of Nigeria to defend itself and to fight back against terrorists’ – at the same time as he assured that he had ‘talked directly about the imperative of Nigerian troops adhering to the highest standards and not themselves engaging in human rights violations and atrocities’. Given the scandal surrounding the drone attacks by the Obama administration on suspected terrorist hideouts in faraway lands, along with the continuing outrage of Guantanamo Bay, Jonathan – to say nothing of the army - clearly has plenty of latitude. Who knows? We might even yet see drone attacks on suspected mountain hideouts in Adamawa State, and anyone accused of terrorism will have a difficult time proving their innocence.

 

Boko Haram, for its part, was not slow in refuting Jonathan’s claim that the military had made any significant inroads with this new, more muscular approach; according to their leader, ‘My fellow brethren from all over the world I assure you that we are strong, hale and hearty since they launched this assault on us following the state of emergency declaration.’ He also claimed that ‘in some instances soldiers who faced us turned and ran away,’ and promptly invited Islamists from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq to join them in creating an Islamic state in Nigeria: ‘We call to us our brethren in these countries I mentioned. Oh! Our brethren, come to us.’

 

It’s impossible to believe who is telling the truth in any of all this given that the military has cordoned off the affected areas – no mobile phone access, no free movement of people – but there is no reason to think that an insurgency now entering its fourth year without any appreciable results will suddenly collapse within six months because a few more troops are on the ground for a limited period of time. Moreover, the administration’s conflicting signals about how best to deal with the problem - now sabre-rattling, now appeasing - continues even under the emergency, with the President’s peace committee still touring parts of the north seeking dialogue with a group which has told them point-blank that it couldn’t be less interested. Or, as recently reported, releasing fifty imprisoned suspected insurgents from detention as a goodwill gesture. It was for this reason, perhaps, that the same peace committee was snubbed by the Commandant of the Jaji Military Cantonment, which was itself attacked last year by Boko Haram members in one of its more daring operations. Either fight them or settle with them.

 

The nightmare scenario, of course, is that Jonathan is in effect overseeing the final disintegration of Nigeria as we approach the centenary of what was never anybody’s baby. That this should be so is not directly his fault given the deep fissures in the state he inherited after decades of misrule, but there would seem to be some sort of irony in the fact that it should happen under a person many believe to be the most incompetent head of state the country has ever laboured under, military or civilian. Reports emanating from Aso Rock paint a picture of an administration which is paralysed by the myriad problems facing it, and which perhaps accounts for the persistent stories concerning Jonathan’s drinking problem. Moreover, he is particularly badly served by his special adviser on media and publicity, the ubiquitous Dr Reuben Abati, whose increasingly intemperate language against his master’s detractors – ‘medieval-era ignoramus,’ ‘mental indolence’ - is itself a sign of an administration which has lost its grip.

 

Given all this, it seems unlikely that Jonathan will survive even his current first term, never mind getting himself re-elected in 2015, although, as I also argued in a previous blog, the opposition is hardly inspiring. This, too, is the result of the deadly politics we have been playing this half-century of an independence which has merely been an extension of indirect rule by other means, in large part because we have allowed it to be so, hence the importance paid to the opinion of the US Secretary of State, but that is another matter entirely.

© Adewale Maja-Pearce


Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,
and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

Children's Day

Selling children has become an industry in Nigeria as people find ever-more desperate ways to survive. Much has been made of the more sensational cases, which is only to be expected, for instance one Lillian who was discovered to be running a ‘unisex camp’ in Abia State with '43 young girls and 11 robust boys for premarital procreation for commercial interest’. At the time of the police raid, over 30 of the women were ‘already heavily pregnant’. Then there was the ‘maternity home’, also in Abia State, which was found to have nine pregnant women between the ages of 15 and 26 waiting to be delivered. The home was run by one Ijeoma – known to everyone as Mummy – who lured the girls with the promise of free treatment for the duration of their confinement, whereupon the newborns were sold to ‘ritualists, child traffickers and adoptees’. She also apparently employed two bouncers to ensure that none of the inmates tried to escape although this seemed unlikely given their reason for being there in the first place. She later confessed to making N400,000 per boy and N300,000 per girl and claimed that ‘part’ of the proceeds went to the women she had assisted in their hour of need but was careful not to give a figure.

 

These are by no means isolated stories but what seems remarkable about the sex farms and bogus hospitals is the apparent acquiescence of the local community.  In the case of Ijeoma, for instance, it wasn’t as if she was particularly discreet given that the neighbours themselves complained that they had observed strange comings and goings over the last three years without attempting to do anything about it. Doctors, especially, seem to get away with bluff and bluster but then these are mostly rural areas where the locals are easily browbeaten by the Big Men, a pattern replicated all the way to oga at the top.

 

Still, not all child sellers are regular criminals. In 2008, a British journalist from the Daily Telegraph wrote about a married couple in a one-room apartment who apparently offered their two young sons – three and five - for ‘the price of a second-hand car’ in order that he might take them to Abroad for a better life. The mother was quoted as saying that it was ‘hard for us to do this but we are desperate and this is our last hope'. When they were eventually told that the prospective buyer was not the Great White Hope of their dreams the husband voiced his disappointment – ‘We had already started to make plans’ – but added that he also felt relieved: ‘This must be God’s will.’

 

The latest case to hit the headlines involved a mother of four who, in the process of confessing to having sold four other children, startled even the police by further confessing that the seven-month foetus she was carrying had already been sold in advance for N200,000; as she put it: ‘I was against it but [my husband] convinced me to agree to it, saying he had already collected the money.’ This was half the price of a child they had sold earlier in the year: ‘In March 2013, my neighbour’s son, Stanley Ezeaka, was following me about in the compound at Jakande Estate and it was at that time that my husband received a phone call from his partner that she needed a child for sale. My husband then suggested that we took Stanley even though he was a bit old.’ Hopefully, Stanley has been reunited with his family but the chances are slim.

 

It is possible that some of these children do actually end up with genuine ‘adopters’, like the woman who paid N600,000 for a boy because she was lonely following the death of her husband after a 28-year childless marriage. Perhaps, also, she had been turned down by the state government adoption agency which charges only a nominal administrative fee but takes its time, Nigerian bureaucracy being what it is. But not even the couple desperate to sell their two boys could have been unaware of what happens in that Abroad, for instance Cynthia, who was bought by a Nigerian couple in London when she was 12 years old to look after their three children and generally skivvy for 16 hours a day for no pay. As she said when she finally managed to escape four years later: ‘They used any excuse to hit me. I was treated as a slave.’

 

At least Cynthia lived to tell the tale. Not so seven-year-old Samu Danjuma from Nasarawa State who was kidnapped and beheaded by a neighbour who was promised N250,000  for a fresh human head for ritual purposes. There is also ‘the case of a baby sacrificed by the wife of a governor of one of the states grappling with Boko Haram insurgency, to secure her position,’ although this story, which appeared in only one online publication (Nigeria News, 17 February 2013), has been impossible to corroborate, which is hardly surprising in a country where no one high up ever gets prosecuted for anything. And in a country where no records are ever kept, it is equally impossible to guess at how widespread this practice is. The police, who might otherwise be in a position to let us know, are often themselves implicated but let us not go there. The police are a recurring decimal in any story about Nigeria but only because they are the most visible face of the corruption which makes it all possible.

 

It remains a pity that many states of the federation have refused to ratify the Child Rights Act passed by the federal government a decade ago, and that even those which have done so seem reluctant to enforce it because it would mean, amongst other things, banning children from hawking when they should be in school, always assuming that the state government in question was even interested in educating the children in its care.

But enough already! Monday is Children’s Day and since we never tire of reminding ourselves that our children are the future – The Young Shall Grow - let us equally celebrate the parents and guardians who struggle against the odds to do the right thing by that same future.

©Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories, and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

Heart of darkness

President Jonathan recently announced the imposition of a state of emergency in three states of the federation. For the next six months, Nigerian troops and ‘other security agencies’ are permitted to ‘take all necessary action, within the ambit of their rules of engagement, to put an end to the impunity of insurgents and terrorists’. These actions include ‘the authority to arrest and detain suspects, the taking of possession and control of any building or structure used for terrorist purposes, the lock-down of any area of terrorist operations, the conduct of searches, and the apprehension of persons in illegal possession of weapons.’ Given the recent activities of the Joint Task Force in razing a village in Borno – itself one of the affected states - in retaliation for a soldier killed by the Boko Haram insurgents in whose name all this is being done, we can only guess at what the affected inhabitants are about to endure.

 

Unlike the two successive states of emergency declared by the Obasanjo administration, which many saw as politically motivated (and perfectly in keeping with Baba’s style), Jonathan has left the democratic structures intact even as he has urged the affected governors and their (largely) rubber-stamp state houses of assembly to cooperate with the new dispensation. Quite how this will actually work out in practice is not altogether clear. Among the many anomalies of our lopsided federal arrangement is the constitutional absurdity of making the governors the chief security officers of their respective states while vesting control of the police – and never mind the army – in the federal government, i.e. Jonathan himself. 

 

There is also the continuing question of the role of the police. It is not my intention here to join the chorus of those who make a profession of denigrating them. The culture of impunity they daily exhibit merely reflects the system they represent and we all saw the conditions they endure in the police colleges they begin their working lives in; but calling out the army to do what is properly their job in a democratic setting is an indictment of the very democracy we are supposed to be enjoying. If it is in the logic of military rule that the police should be rendered impotent, it is equally in the logic of civilian rule that the police should be given the wherewithal to maintain law and order. That they have not been is testimony enough to the way in which they are viewed as the convenient tool of whichever gang happens to be in power, most notably at the polling booths that are supposed to guarantee the democracy they are supposed to be protecting. But it was ever thus, all the way back to their formation in 1861 as the prospective instrument of the colonial power a full half-century before the actual birth of the nation, and which continues under a different mask half-a-century again after our ‘independence’. No wonder the authorities are not keen on the study of history, of which more in a future blog. 

 

But the question this new development raises is whether Nigeria as conceived by a foreign conquering power for its own administrative convenience can exist other than rule by decree, which after all is how the country began its life, with Lord Lugard as our first military dictator (and, by some accounts, also a mercenary, which seems fitting enough). As I mentioned in my previous blog, even a cursory visit to the Niger delta where soldiers man the many checkpoints will disabuse anybody of the illusion that democracy is the name of the game. That Jonathan himself is an indigene of this same Niger delta is just one of the many ironies inherent in the tragedy of an artificial creation designed purely for plunder; as Conrad put it in Heart of Darkness, ‘reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage’. For all that their cause is just the leading lights of the Niger delta resistance are conspicuous only by their presence in Abuja, where they are busy championing Jonathan’s cause two years before his expiry date on the grounds that it is now their turn to eat, this being the sum total of politics Naija-style. Boko Haram, on the other hand, appears to have no other agenda than to dip the Holy Book in the Atlantic, just like Buhari said he would do before he became a born-again democrat, but that is another story in the continuing nightmare that was recently visited on a fishing village in the same Borno where the soldiers have now been given carte blanche. 

 

The three affected states have undoubtedly witnessed huge levels of violence – Borno especially, reputedly Boko Haram’s birthplace - but then so have Bauchi, Benue, Kaduna, Kano, Plateau, Taraba and, latterly, Nasarawa (and not forgetting the bombings of the police and UN headquarters in Abuja, along with assorted churches, newspaper houses and telephone companies). The underlying problem in Nigeria is the fact of too many unemployed young men, a large number of them unable to read and write and therefore useless for anything in a world they nevertheless depend on for the communication gadgets and the firepower manufactured and deployed by the same world which labels them terrorists, which they undoubtedly are – along with their detractors. Moreover, we have been here before. There is nothing new about Boko Haram, otherwise known as Maitatsine in a previous incarnation, the rump of which retreated to Borno when they were chased out of Kano in the military operation against them in 1980, also under a civilian dispensation.

 

According to recent reports, the emergency has already scored a major victory: ‘The aerial bombardment, involving jets and helicopter gunships, targeted at Boko Haram terrorist training camps in the southern and northern parts of Borno State, continued Friday with unconfirmed number of militants reportedly killed, according to a top officer.’ Goodluck to them.

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,
and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

 

Drawing the battle lines

The battle lines have been drawn. On the one side, the Niger delta militants – or is it ex-militants? - threatening mayhem if Jonathan is not re-elected in 2015; on the other, northern youths threatening mayhem if Jonathan is re-elected. First into the fray was Alhaji Asari-Dokubo, former president of the Ijaw Youth Council: ‘I want to go on to say that there will be no peace, not only in the Niger Delta, but everywhere if Goodluck Jonathan is not president by 2015… Jonathan has uninterruptible eight years of two terms to be president, according to the Nigerian constitution. We must have our uninterrupted eight years.’ This was immediately countered by a shadowy northern group (no website even) calling itself African Youth for Conflict Resolution. According to their spokesperson: ‘We want to tell the whole world that we are not afraid of anybody and if it is violence, we are more violent than Asari-Dokubo;’ and added: ‘...we will not vote for President Goodluck Jonathan come 2015 and therefore, in his own interest, he should not even make any attempt to vie for the presidency come 2015 because he is going to meet a strong opposition.’

Both the House of Representatives and the Nigerian Labour Congress immediately called on the Inspector-General of Police to arrest Asari-Dokubo for treason, although they were silent on whether his northern counterpart should also be questioned, in his case for incitement to violence. The police are unlikely to do anything to either of them in order not to ratchet up the tension, especially since the hitherto silent Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta quickly added its own voice: ‘On behalf of the hapless Christian population in Nigeria [MEND] will...embark on a crusade to save Christianity in Nigeria from annihilation. The bombings of mosques, hajj camps, Islamic institutions, large congregations in Islamic events and assassinations of clerics that propagate doctrines of hate, will form the core mission of this crusade code-named “Operation Barbarossa”.’

It should be said that the Christian community – north and south – has been remarkably forbearing given the murderous activities of Boko Haram in the three years that Jonathan has been president. I am not aware of any reports of mosques being blown up in retaliation for the bombing of churches, although if a group were to initiate such a campaign – and as MEND has now threatened – few would be surprised or even particularly outraged. Whether MEND would actually do so is a moot point. Some commentators believe that the group is no longer the force it once was since it accepted the amnesty deal. Their statement might even be a ploy to secure the release of their former leader, Henry Okah, who was convicted of terrorism in South Africa and sentenced to a long prison term, as indeed MEND canvassed for in their press release.

It is tempting to see all this as proof that Nigeria is in fact two countries yoked together by the British for its own administrative convenience, the centenary of which we are about to celebrate (and for which the inevitable contracts have been awarded), and that the country has only managed to hang together for as long as it has because the south colluded in the fiction – also promoted by the British – that the north has a monopoly on power, hence the northern sense of entitlement that suffuses so much of its rhetoric, in the process camouflaging the mundane facts of its relative backwardness it refuses to address. That particular jinx has now been broken, hence the fury at Jonathan’s ascendancy. There is no intrinsic reason why Jonathan should not serve a second term if the populace is convinced that he deserves it and not simply because he happens to come from an area of the country deemed unworthy of the presidency, as many northerners evidently believe.

That said, the sense of triumphalism one hears repeatedly from the south-south, and evident in Asari-Dokubo’s outburst, is hardly helpful, partaking as it does of the ‘It’s our turn to eat’ syndrome. The fact that ‘their’ oil largely pays Nigeria’s bills doubtless gives them leverage, and few would deny the injustices suffered by its inhabitants over the years, but merely having one of your own as top dog doesn’t by itself deliver the development that is long overdue. On the contrary, Jonathan’s presidency to date has been to make a few people stupendously rich – including, it is said, Asari-Dokubo himself - while the region continues to suffer neglect, as I saw for myself when I visited parts of Rivers State last year. Worse yet, the mechanisms of repression are still very much in evidence. On Bonny Island, for instance, an armoured personnel carrier with fully armed soldiers patrols the streets twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, and in the village I stayed at on the mainland I witnessed a detachment of soldiers round up okada riders following a minor scuffle and whisk them away with a speed that was impressive if disconcerting. Military rule may have ended in some parts of Nigeria but evidently not in the Niger delta, presidency or no.

In fact, there is no such thing as a monolithic ‘north’ eyeballing a monolithic ‘south’ for ascendancy, which is merely a convenient fiction exploited by a venal political class for its own advantage. But the real question is why ‘ordinary’ Nigerians – for which read the overwhelming majority - continue to buy into it as if a poor man in the one was somehow different from a poor man in the other. Both are poor, period, and with little prospect of being anything other in a country which stopped working a long time ago. Nor need one blame the politicians themselves for exploiting the atavism of them and us to their advantage even as one longs for just one example of the species to show evidence of thinking beyond their bank account. Ultimately, our problem is not our politicians but ourselves.  

© Adewale Maja-Pearce


Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,
and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

Raping the nation

On 16 August 2011, a video was released on YouTube (since censored, although the audio version can still be heard) showing five male students from Abia State University taking turns to rape a young woman. In the hour-long video, filmed and uploaded by the rapists themselves, she pleads with them not to do this to her but they tell her that if she doesn’t consent peacefully they will make sure that they torture her for two days. As the rapes progress, she begs them to kill her so that she won’t have to live with the shame of what they are doing to her but they just laugh as they continue recording.

The video immediately went viral and caused national outrage. The ensuing publicity forced the police to act but two months later (by which time three of the rapists had been identified by name, complete with their degree courses) the police suddenly decided that there was no case to answer. According to them, it was evident from the video that she had acquiesced in her ordeal and that, in any case, gang rape was often videotaped as a ‘tool’ by undergraduate boys to ‘rubbish the self-esteem of snobbish girls,’ and that, even if she had not consented, she might have been a girlfriend of one of her assailants ‘and must have probably cheated on him and when queried insulted the boy hence he probably assembled a gang to teach her the lesson of her life!’ With the intervention of certain prominent people, including Ms Abike Dabiri, one of the more energetic members of the House of Representatives, the case was re-opened.  One year later, after ‘exhaustive investigations,’ it transpired that that the rape didn’t actually happen in Abia but in neighbouring Rivers State, and that the woman in question, who wasn’t even a student, had in fact been raped by another bunch of men in reprisal for something or other.

From the start, the university authorities themselves appeared more concerned with protecting the name of their institution than investigating the allegations: ‘We want to vouch for the enviable reputation of our students and therefore want to disassociate them from this immoral, animalistic and dehumanising act,’ and threatened legal action against those peddling the story. The state government swiftly followed suit: ‘Henceforth, the state government would undertake extreme legal actions against any person or group of persons who trade in spreading dangerous rumour against it.’ Which is all well and good but other sources (necessarily anonymous) have claimed that rape is a ‘regular occurrence’ on the campus but that most victims are reluctant to go public - which is hardly surprising. Nor need one single out ABSU, which merely had the misfortune to be thrown into the limelight. Just recently, five students were expelled from Ekiti State University for raping ‘a number of women’ (and which, to its credit, the university is not denying, having handed over the culprits to the police), and yet another video making the rounds shows a woman being raped at the University of Benin earlier this year.

In the case of the ABSU rape, at least one activist has pointed out what many believe, which is that the perpetrators of this ‘immoral, animalistic and dehumanising act’ are rich men’s sons – ‘Igbo men of timber and calibre,’ was how he put it – and so ‘the officials want to sweep this matter under the carpet’. Given that we live in a country where a former President was recently rumoured to have kept a hit squad in Aso Rock, and that under his watch a number of prominent ‘sons of the soil’ were mysteriously murdered when they began to prove difficult (including the then Attorney-General and Minister of Justice), covering up a rape seen online by one-and-a-half-million people worldwide would seem to be a small matter. We live in a society where ‘the full weight of the law,’ as the authorities like to put it, is visited selectively, for instance the young woman who was imprisoned for one year for stealing a handset worth N4,000, or the young man imprisoned for six years, also for stealing a handset but worth N50,000.

It is this impunity enjoyed by the privileged (a severe minority) which explains why the police are so anxious to ‘deal with’ the not-privileged. There’s little point having laws unless they are visited on some people, who must be further made to pay for those who are exempted, a sort of redistributive justice. In the meantime, civil society organisations have since tracked down the woman and attested to her psychological state: ‘The girl is a ticking bomb right now; she is a potential suicide case.’ They have also called on the authorities to bring the perpetrators to book but this is not going to happen. The witnesses who initially came forward have now decided that it was a bad idea after they were warned off by the police, and the university authorities are rumoured to have threatened ‘to rusticate the victim if she escalates the matter,’ in the process acknowledging that she is a student of the institution, after all.

But the story goes beyond the woman concerned, beyond all the other women raped the length and breadth of this land (both in and out of university campuses) to the rape of the nation itself. The police weren’t being disingenuous or especially callous when they quipped that she had invited the ‘lesson’ - if she hadn’t indeed acquiesced in it. This is perfectly in keeping with the mores of the society we have engendered over the years, a society in which rich men’s sons know they can get away with anything at all, having watched their fathers do the same. Indeed, there’s no point knowing you can do what you like and ‘nothing will happen’ unless you actually do it – and post the resultant video on the internet to prove it to your and everyone else’s satisfaction.

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU