Before you post your next FB comment on the unfolding Ese tragedy, here's an objectivity test, and it applies to all, whether you are a northerner, a wailer, an Ijaw, a Christian, Muslim or a traditional religionist. Ask yourself: "If this thing had been done to my little sister or daughter, what will I write and how?"
In other words, cast any favorite relation of yours who is 13 in Ese's place and then write about the child undergoing psychological torture in Kano. I know this is difficult but try it; I guarantee you will quickly sober up and curb your current excesses.
We have murdered an underage girl using the social media. For a start, the guy who took her to Kano is either 18, 20 or 22. Whichever it is, he can vote and can be jailed if convicted of an offence. He is an adult. However, this adult is being treated by the police, society, and the media as if he is a minor; no one has seen his face, no one knows what he looks like. The minor, on the other hand, is being publicly humiliated every step of the way; her photos are everywhere. The latest gossip about pregnancy ensures that she will leave the rest of her life a miserable human being and might even consider ending it all at some point.
I still see many losing their heads and continuing to write this girl into ignominy and life-long agony, while cleverly hiding behind our legion of parochialisms.
With the social media, we are increasingly losing our sense of decency, empathy, and our very humanity. Think of the human person; stop and consider what we are getting excited about - a girl who is only 13, which is a primary or junior secondary school age.
For fathers who deploy sociological disquisition to further diminish the worth of this girl child, she could have been your daughter.
I'm ashamed of any woman or girl that has ever written anything against this girl.
I feel a sharp pain each time I read the jaundiced opinions that are being served against this girl - for the simple reason that she is the daughter of a roadside food seller. We have seen that she was in school and we now know that her father is unemployed, so where was her school fees coming from? Does she have a choice other than to help her mother serve food at the roadside eatery?
I feel the pain of the poor when I read the magisterial interrogation of the morality of female roadside food sellers, while conveniently ignoring the reality that their poverty (and beauty) are the attractions for the army of depraved male patrons who prey on them.
Answer me, roadside sociologist: Given the situation at hand, is it possible that this 13-year old schoolgirl would have gone out of her way to seduce the man or the reverse is more likely to hold true?
What a country we have. Lord have mercy on our poor souls.
LAST LINE
While the Sunday Punch has finally ignited a national outrage over a 13-year old girl lured from her school and her parents and taken to the north to be converted to Islam and married off, the Premium Times has been persuaded to tell tales that cast the 13-year old as a girl of easy virtue.
The question I would like to ask Premium Times as it breaks it's exclusives is this: Have you considered the critical question whether Islam allows a young muslim boy to chat up an underage muslim girl and then whisk her off to an Imam who will then marry them without reference to her parents? Or is this possible because Ese is not a Muslim girl?
Premium Times, this journalism you're doing sucks. I thought editors are supposed to be thinking on their feet and doing things to help alleviate if not abolish the abominations that privileged people heap on the poor, the vulnerable, and defenseless in our society.
Shame dey catch me.
