The Log In Your Eye


I was awake when the verdict was read. It was about 4 am and Piers Morgan had tweeted that people should tune in to CNN as the jury had come back. I already knew that Zimmerman would be free but when they declared him 'not guilty', I was gutted. I did not sleep till about 7 am or so, furiously tweeting my anger, and retweeting those who shared the same sentiments, or arguing with those who didn't. How shallow, and blind and evil and callous could these white Americans be? How could Zimmerman be free?

Even the day after, I was still blinded with rage! A 17 year old boy, I thought! Jesus! I was ecstatic when New Yorkers went on a protest march towards Times Square. I zealously retweeted pictures and the commentary of Lola Ogunnaike. Finally something was being done about this injustice...

Then it occurred to me

A few days prior to the ruling, 46 (FORTY SIX) secondary school children had been brutally murdered in Yobe state. Reports from Aljazeera (Aljazeera oh!)  said they had been rounded off into a hostel and then the building set ablaze. Some of the children had been burnt while asleep in their beds, others who were awake and tried to escape were shot. 46 students in secondary school and one teacher. In a state that had been put under a state of emergency. No one from the military could offer, or wanted to offer, any explanation as to how this could have happened. Nor do we know the names of the students or their ages or anything till this day. (Do you know how many 46 is?Take a matchbox and count 46 matchsticks. That's how many)
I spoke about it and tweeted about it but not with the same zeal that I did for Trayvon. And of course, I forgot about it in a few hours; because Yobe was/is an abstract entity in my mind.

The blood of those innocent children had hardly dried on the floor when the news that The FG had signed a ceasefire agreement with Boko Haram was announced. Then to add insult to injury, Hamza AL- Mustapha had been discharged and acquitted. And while the prosecution obviously bungled the case allowing him to walk on technicalities, that would never have happened to a poorer and less influential citizen of the country. Not to talk of one that murdered someone whose relatives were still alive. But I  remember that when one of the Boko Harams -they are many- was giving conditions for the ceasefire, the unconditional and immediate release of Al Mustapha was one of them. (It is amazing that a man that said to be responsible for much of the killings, looting and tortures during the Abacha era was himself afraid to die.) Again I tweeted, but then... I tweeted.

Then yesterday, this . There was a lot of BS voting in the House- as is normal, they have to pretend to be working for their multimillion naira salaries- but the paragraph that broke my heart and caused an uproar was this:
The Senate also resolved to alter Section 29 (a) of the constitution that stipulates that a woman shall not be qualified for marriage until she attains the 18 years as they deleted age specification for women being married from the draft constitution and left the marriage age for women open.
While deleting the section from the draft constitution yesterday, the Senate claimed that a woman is deemed to be "full of age" once she is married irrespective of the age she did so.

Just to clarify, the Senate had already decided to delete that section until a senator raised an alarm, claiming that making girls marry at 18 years of age was against Islamic law. Of course this had nothing to do with the fact that he married a 13 year old girl two years ago, he just wanted the constitution to be fair to Muslims. And more surprisingly the other paedophiles and supporters supported him.

 By that lone action, these bastards have taken us backwards several decades. I do not even know where to begin, and I will not rant as much as I would care to here, rather I will do it on my feminist blog, but here is my take on this issue.
As a television producer, I have found out that a good way to measure the progressiveness of a society is in the number of children's programmes they have. A society without (a functional plan for) children programming is a totally dysfunctional one. Check and see. This is because the plan is for the present, not for the future, and structures are being destroyed and exploited but not rebuilt. But our legislators and politicians have taken it a step further and are ensuring that no other children but theirs have a chance at childhood and at life. Fucking Animals!

So people were angry that the jurors, some of whom were most likely mothers, had no maternal empathy for Trayvon or his mother. With all due respect, forget Trayvon! America will have 50 of those cases and still not degenerate into the decadent cesspool that Nigeria has become. Are there no women, no mothers in the Senate? Shame to all of them! May you experience personally what it is to have a child bride in the family so that you can sit up. So whenever a girl is married she is off age?! Really?!!  So when  insatiable lust drives a randy 40 year old to have sex with a helpless 13 year old girl and he bamboozles her indigent senseless parents with money- stolen money I might add- to get her, she instantly becomes mature? What about the ramifications of this, the unfortunate possibilities as a result of this law: A man rapes a 12 year old daughter of his neighbour and claims the loan he gave her father a week ago was a bride price. How about that? What about the psychological implications to the child? Or the physical? Have they never heard of VVF?  And what about the implications on the development of the country?

Let me regale you with some statistics I gleaned off someone's twitter feed: 84% of the poorest girls aged 7-16 in North West Nigeria have never attended school.  Currently, Nigeria, has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world - 10.5 million, and this is not a function of population. And then 46 of them despite the odds stacked against them get murdered in their quest to learn.

And to help the case a few more have just had their future signed off to leery old goats. 

Wait,  do you even know what a child bride looks like?

How about her
Oh! She's too young? But according to your laws she must be married before her first period. So why not start early? The average 'picking' age is 12 so maybe just pay for her and give her two more years?

And we are talking of Trayvon while the ship of state, the Nigerian Titanic is three quarter submerged.

 We all better wake up. The jokes about Nigeria are not funny anymore. I have signed a petition against this stupidity, and I am ready to go where it takes me.

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