Nigeria is really a strange country.

Like an invalid living with the putrid smell of a suppurating wound, it is easy to adapt to the stink and grow listless. In fact, if you are mired long enough in Nigeria’s fermentation, you might find your rationality and capacity for sensible thought eroded along with your sanity. (The sanity always goes first, trust me, the sanity goes first!). Stay here long enough and you might notice yourself beginning to ‘logicalise’ the most irrational actions.

I think what perhaps alerted my very soul to this danger, is the most recent fiasco our national assembly embroiled their engorged selves in; the Child Bride debacle. I watched Sentor Yerima’s interview on Channels television today, and I went still.

In a nation with well over 70% of its people uncomfortably squatting in the ravaged fields of Squalor, where crime is increasingly on the rise, a nation with weekly terrorist attacks in the ravaged, niggardly North, with portholed roads able to sink lorries whole in the suffering South, with intermittent electricity supply even in the 21st century, with polluted water….our legislature believes the most efficacious use of their expensive time is to deliberate on the amendment of section 29 (4) (b) of the 1999 Constitution, to impliedly reduce the age of women for marriage?

Please reread my last paragraph.

Now riddle me this Batman, giving them the benefit of the doubt, can we honestly say that our legislators have ANY desires but theirs at heart? Tell me, after reading that paragraph; do you think that perhaps (and this is just a suggestion), we might have an issue or two that the national assembly would be smarter to use their time (our money) to discuss? Do you think?

What have we done that our leaders hate us so much?

What disturbs me the most about this Child Bride wahala, is the terrifying boldness of senators. How a grown man, a man in public office, a man popular around his constitutency, can proudly state that any man is permitted to marry a woman and engage in sexual relations as soon as she sprouts breasts? Breasts are equated to mental maturity in Nigeria? HAHAHA…and those Americans think they have problems with the objectification of women because 30 year olds are volunteering to twerk on TV. In Nigeria, women are not even being objectified, little girls, babies are being considered sexual objects. I not as scandalised by this as I am by the fact that GROWN MEN ARE TALKING ABOUT HAVING SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH LITTLE GIRLS!! Even in the most permissive of European societies like England underage sex is a strict liability offence. I shudder to imagine the furor, the rage, the rabid, relentless, ravaging rage against any politician (POLITICIAN!!), who dare declare a preference for little children! Even in jails abroad, paedophiles are deservingly persecuted by fellow inmates.

Not in Nigeria though. Here our protectors are our predators.

Senator Yerima boldly declared yesterday that not only is a woman’s maturity determined by the arrival of breasts and her monthly period, but as soon as a woman is married, she is mature. So she is made mature by the declaration of a man that he wants her for a wife. What a self-serving catch 22! So on the lecherous determination that she is worthy of marriage an 8 year old automatically morphs into a grown woman? Yerima, you be magician oh!

You know what shocks me the most about the legislators voting on this matter? the absolute audacity and shamelessness. Even in the Italy that Yerima cites, in support of his argument, as a modern nation where the age of sexual consent is 13, has a ‘No-Lecherous-Old-Men clause’.

“The age of consent in Italy is 14 years, with a close-in-age exception that allows those aged 13 to engage in sexual activity with partners who are less than 3 years older. The age of consent rises to 16 if one of the participants has some kind of influence on the other (e.g. teacher, tutor, adoptive parent, priest). Not knowing that the victim is underage is not a legal defence, except it was unavoidable ignorance. If the minor involved is under the age of 10, the crime can be punished even without a complaint and the punishment is aggravated. It is also illegal to perform sexual acts in the presence of a minor aged less than 14 with the intent of allowing the minor to witness the acts, even if they do not take an active part.”

So what are you really saying, Yerima?

It’s sad but there’s a trickle-down effect in this callousness to children. The audacity of our leaders is reflected in the political impropriety of the masses. Look at this, a paedophile suggests that the law be amended to allow him abuse a toddler, a child or a teen and the entire Nigerian nation appropriately responds with a violent outcry…followed by a shocking plethora of social media jokes. Yes, of course we are appalled…but in true Nigerian style we can still laugh at the foolishness of our government and crack jokes about paedophilia. This is the abuse of innocent children, we are talking about. No wonder child abuse is so rampant!

Nigerians, when will we stop laughing? Or are we afraid that if we stop, we might be able to more evenly view the abhorred desolation and moral bankruptcy that is our land?

Today, we are witnesses to perversity in every faction of life. Like the old English saying goes, “…the baby beateth its nurse, the arse wipeth its master.” In Nigeria today, true masters are being wiped by people that can be aptly described as arses, and the faecal stains remain plastered about the society; raising a putrid stench that insidiously pollutes everything.

My dad says my blog leans a lot, perhaps a little too much, to the Christian. Very true. But I believe it must be so because there is too much horror in the world around us and too little positivity, light and truth.

Who will speak for my Nigeria if I do not?

“And the light shines in the darkness, and the dark cannot overcome it.”
-John 1:5