Nigerians were made unhappy some weeks ago when the story of a 17-year-old boy, Destiny, who was assaulted by his mother with hot water one early morning went viral on the social media.
Upset by the inhuman act, a Nollywood actress, Angela Okorie, shared a video of the boy, who was profusely crying in pain while waving the cover of a plastic plate at his peeling skin.
Okorie wrote: “My eyes are filled wit tears as I type. I have never seen something like this in my entire life, not even in my wildest imaginations, especially from a biological mother to her own first son and first child…”
The offence of the boy, according to the story, was that as at 5:48am on that fateful day of 25th of last month, he had not woken up. In anger, therefore, probably, the mother, who was said to be between 29 and 30 years of age, had warned him on his habit of sleeping late, poured hot water om him, as a way of punishment. What a way to wake someone up, let alone one’s own child?
Since Destiny didn’t wake up on time to make her water to bath and do some other house chores assigned to him, even when the boy slept late the previous night, because he had lots of chores to do in the house, she simply conclude that this boy deserved to be punished and the only way to do this is to get very harsh. She had no other way to deal with the situation than to boil him up.
Before that time, The Nigerian Xpress gathered that, that was not the first time, Destiny would be facing a severe punishment from his mother. According to.him, it happens like everyday. The woman had hired boys to beat him up until neighbours came to his rescue before and each time something like this happened, all investigations into what the young boy had done always revealed nothing.
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When Okorie resolved to taking the boy to his father since the mother’s cruelty couldn’t be curtailed, she indeed got the shock of her life. ” At a point, I thought he should return to his father if the mother have this level of hatred for him for no reason, but, then, I found the mystery behind the hate. His mother is about 29 or 30 years old right now but she had him while she was very young, at age13 by rape from three or four men. Since then, the innocent boy has been going through hell for something that was never his doing.”
The mother, obviously swore to take her pound of flesh from him since she does not have access to any of his “fathers”.
As pathetic as Destiny’s story is, his mother’s plight equally sounded very sad. But, should this be the way out of the pain? It won’t be anything new to reveal that more children are currently suffering the same plight. Many have fled their homes in search of a safer and less hostile environment and have ended up on the streets in one cult group or another, operating as hardened criminals of different sorts.
Some females have left their hostile home environment to become prostitutes, criminals, baby-factory-mothers while others have been forced to get married to a nonentity, a weakling, who could barely cater for them at times of health challenges, a development that had cut their lives short.
In this year alone, there are many children, who have been killed by fathers, who suddenly found out they were products of their mothers’ acts of infidelity and other reasons like unwanted pregnancies like the case of Destiny.
The question now is should parents transfer their pain to their children? Why resorting to harsh corrective measures despite the level of civilisation in the country? How corrective is being harsh at disciplining children is?
At what point does a corrective measure of a parent becomes harsh? How best can parents deal with their personal plights without necessarily involving their kids? We shall be looking at these in the next edition.
In the meantime, here is wishing all children in the country a better year ahead.
