Thursday April 9, 2009 |
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Foreign Affairs Minister Ojo Maduekwe
should be ashamed of himself. Any man who lies against children is
contemptible, and that’s exactly what Mr. Maduekwe did.
|
Early in March, Mr. Maduekwe had
traveled to Geneva as head of the Nigerian delegation to the
United Nations Universal Periodic Review on human rights. The
event is used to survey the state of human rights across the
globe. |
The
camera showed a young girl in whose skull some superstitious
fool had driven a six-inch nail. |
|
Last November, Britain’s Channel 4 TV
had broadcast a documentary on Nigeria’s “witch children.” It was a
harrowing look at the horrors visited on thousands of children in Akwa
Ibom and elsewhere. These children are first stigmatized as witches and
wizards and then subjected to excruciating torture.
In short, the program unmasked the human capacity for evil. Channel 4
took viewers on a graphic tour of some deranged churches and their
so-called pastors and prophets who rake in huge profits from declaring
children as witches. One of the featured “men of God” is a man named
“Bishop” Sunday Ulup-Aya. A self-styled “poison destroyer,” he openly
boasts that he had physically liquidated 110 witches and wizards.
Ulup-Aya’s eyes appear glazed and his slurry speech suggests
drunkenness. He’s shown ordering a child to drink a concoction meant to
“destroy the poison” of witchcraft. Then the reporter informs us that
the concoction is made of strong alcohol, a substance called “African
mercury,” and the “bishop’s” own blood.
Hard as it is to imagine, the child who’s shown drinking the strange
concoction is one of the lucky ones. The program revealed that some of
the children are simply killed. Some are driven out, forced to live in
the open like wild animals. Some are tied to trees and starved for
several weeks. Some are disfigured with acid, scalded with boiling
water, or scarred with fire. The camera showed a young girl in whose
skull some superstitious fool had driven a six-inch nail.
This chronicle of gruesome torture is still available online. To see
this unflinching portrait of cruelty, just go to www.youtube.com and
type in “Africa's witch children”. But be cautioned: It’s a stark,
wrenching expose. The images are hard to watch and impossible to rub out
of one’s mind. When I first saw it four months ago, I sat before the
computer and cried for a while. I shuddered with the shame of being a
member of a society that, out of deep and festering ignorance, would
unleash such violence on children.
What does it say about us when we stand pat and permit nefarious
elements among us to brutalize children, including toddlers? Were the
police ignorant about the bloody goings-on? Are we not all implicated,
to one degree or another, by the dehumanization of vulnerable children?
A teeming league of fake pastors and ignorant seers prey on children, I
believe, because the child-victims are largely voiceless, with few or no
options to stand up in their own defense.
It was natural that the question of Akwa Ibom’s tortured children should
come up at an international forum on human rights abuses. But when the
question was put to Mr. Maduekwe, he reportedly replied that the
“children were paid to say they were tortured.”
That’s a callous, despicable response. It’s either the minister never
bothered to watch the Channel 4 report – in which case, his fitness for
a ministerial post should be called to question – or he somehow felt it
was okay to discredit victims of heinous human rights abuses. In that
event, we should wonder whether Mr. Maduekwe has a heart at all.
The larger crime here is that, after Channel 4’s exposure of the
shameful abuse of children, the Nigerian government pretended nothing
was amiss. Mr. Maduekwe might have helped to mobilize a national effort
to rescue the besieged children of Akwa Ibom. He might also have
persuaded Mr. Umaru Yar’Adua to send a tough bill to the National
Assembly stipulating stiff punishment for those who harm children in the
alleged name of combating witchcraft.
Since Mr. Maduekwe failed to do this, he had no leg to stand on when he
was asked what Nigeria was doing to save children from mindless abuse.
Caught in a bind, a good diplomat might have bought time by stating that
his government was weighing a number of corrective measures. Instead,
Mr. Maduekwe compounded his government’s betrayal of these beleaguered
children by painting them as rented scam artists.
This foreign minister took a low, cowardly road precisely because he
knows that the children are in no position to counter his lie, much less
drag him to court for defamation. Yet, in the court of public opinion –
and especially in Nigeria’s humane sector where conscionable men and
women care about the fortunes of children – Mr. Maduekwe’s stock has
crashed to the bottom.
