You must have read of one good-for-nothing woman, nay, couple, in Enugu State, who recently turned a minor and house help to a shadow of herself.
Ten-year-old Nneoma Nnadi might forever live with the ugly scar inflicted on her by the couple, who supposedly picked her to serve as a maid.
Mrs. Ifeoma Ozougwu, a mother of two, according to the news media, hit into the skull of this minor a six-inch nail. Unbelievable too was that ground red pepper was inserted into Nneoma’s private parts. The tortured child was also locked inside a toilet.
And what was Nneoma’s offence, you may ask? To think that the poor maid incurred the wrath of this couple from hell, in this particular instance, just because she slept off while carrying their baby by 2 am, as alleged, is enough to make any normal human being feel like throwing up. Yes, my stomach turned while reading this story.
Two o’clock in the morning? Why on earth would anyone keep a child (because that’s exactly what a 10-year-old is) awake by such an ungodly hour to be carrying your baby?
And for such an evil couple, it is most likely they would have this maid up by 4 or 5 am to start cleaning the house and taking care of the ‘privileged’ children in the house. How can one be so wicked?
The good news, however, is that the young woman with her collaborator husband is cooling off in police custody in the aftermath of the ugly incident, which turned out to be the last straw that broke the female camel’s back.
Now, the Enugu State Government has also offered scholarship and financial support to the brutalized child.
Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi said he approved free education to university level. This is in addition to offsetting her hospital bills and funding her family’s upkeep.
The woman from the pit of hell, on several occasions, had burnt the minor’s body with a red-hot pressing iron, thus inflicting permanent burns on her.
Neighbours claimed to have always alerted the police about the savage treatment by the couple, but each time the police responded, they would search the house without locating the girl. Mrs. Ozougwu would easily explain the child’s absence by saying the poor girl had gone visiting her relatives.
But every God-damned lie–everyone should know this–has an expiry date. Neighbours, on an investigation, found out that the girl was constantly locked inside the toilet and denied food. That exactly was where Nneoma was found when police came calling again following an umpteenth tip-off.
She was said to have been taken to the Intensive Care Unit of the Enugu State University Teaching Hospital (ESUT) in Enugu, the state capital for medicare.
This dehumanizing incident, of course, sparked off public outrage with the Executive Director of Women Aid Collective (WACOL), Prof Ngozi Ezeilo, who strongly condemned the act, saying, “We demand the full weight of the law on this woman….”
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Like Prof Ezeilo, I strongly feel it is time we eradicated any form of child labour, ban and punish anyone using minors as domestic servants. The Child Rights Act and the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) Act ought to be followed and effectively enforced to the letter.
You must have noticed that my pen [keyboard, really] is dripping with venom. Therefore, I have no intention to molly-cuddle anyone who turns maids to child-labourers, simply because they come from poor homes.
Just imagine yourself at 10 and tell me how it feels to be left with piles of clothes to wash, doing all the sweeping, bathing fellow minors (children of the madam-of-the-house), doing all the dishes, constantly kept on your toes with one strenuous chore or the other?
And the ‘golden’ sons and daughters of the house? All they have to do is go to school, come back to play and sleep.
This, to me, is the height of wickedness and man’s inhumanity at its peak. If you can’t show love to an indigent minor you chose to live in your house, please, do yourself some good, so that God will not punish you, by leaving them alone with their parents!
Granted that poverty is the driving force for this nonsense. However, if you do not have the heart to help, why take them on only to introduce the worst kind of torture and trauma into their lives?
I see some of these women in the church, in gatherings and public places, including eateries, and most times, it is so easy to identify that innocent and scruffy-looking one among the children as the maid. How about being a vessel through which this indigent child will have a better life in the future?
What some of these women do not know is that by their inhumanity, they are bringing curses upon themselves and their own children, who they train to look down on the maid that helps them out with most of the chores they should ordinarily do by themselves.
Any couple or woman seen to be dehumanising any minor should be punished under the law. That a child is born to a poor home, in this case to a poor widow, does not make him or her any less human.
It is high time we stopped this nonsense of using mere kids as maids.
