Of bouncy babies and terrorist teachers

In 1729 the Anglican cleric and satirist Jonathan Swift, intent on shocking the Irish society out of its eccentricities, gave the following proposal: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” Today, centuries later, the humane voice of Swift resonates as Nigeria makes mincemeat of babies, giving wide powers to outlaws. Swift is being taken literally in Nigeria, and babies are now one of the most despised commodities in the national life.

I deploy no hyperbole: ask, if you can, the woman who ran mad last year after bandits fed her twin babies to dogs just after the birthed them in their captivity, what it means to have a baby in a terror enclave. Ask the social workers who pick up babies like cotton in a large farm, and ask the parents of the 19-month old Baby Obinna who was this week beaten to death by a terrorist teacher for doing what all babies do: playing with water. The moron masquerading as a tutor in Asaba, Delta State, killed Obinna in a fit of bestial rage. But she’s not the real problem, as I show below.

Enter Eucharia Agu. On Valentine Day, Agu, a tutor at a Montessori School in Maza Maza, Lagos, lacerated two-year-old Cherish Ohamadike’s body with 24 strokes of the cane. The girl’s crime: inability to pronounce letters S and I. According to the Lagos State government, Agu had blatantly refused to apologise for her wickedness. Rather, she had vowed to continue tormenting the child for “distracting the class”! I hope the court of law distracts Her Tyrannical Majesty with a long sentence. She is just like Kelly Lewis, a Georgia preschool teacher who turned down a five-year-old special-needs student’s repeated requests to use the bathroom. But that’s not all: after the boy defecated in his pants, Lewis forced him to sit in it for two hours. The state quickly slammed a charge of second-degree cruelty to children on her.

Across history—and here, I remember the master columnist Nosa Osaigbovo’s Teachers as terrorists—many teachers have perpetrated grievous acts of wickedness. Fiction writers have also captured tutorial terrorism across ages. There are so many examples but let’s pick Charles Dickens. We are on the pages of Oliver Twist, a discourse world of privation: “The bowls never wanted washing. The boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and when they had performed this operation (which never took very long, the spoons being nearly as large as the bowls), they would sit staring at the copper, with such eager eyes, as if they could have devoured the very bricks of which it was composed.”

Oliver Twist and his companions, having “suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months” and at last got “so voracious and wild with hunger”, chose him to be their spokesman: ‘Please, sir, I want some more.” The master, “a fat, healthy man,” quickly turned very pale, gazing “in stupified astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds.” And then the boy repeated his request. The result: “The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.” The world has run with a false metaphor even since, calling greedy people “Oliver Twist”, but the original Twist had not really had anything.

During the last lockdown, a tutor came, on her own request, to my house to teach my children. Alas, she regularly hurled imprecations at them on my corridor, and I quickly dropped her acquaintance. Sacked from the school after complaints by concerned parents, she now has ample time to nurse her baby. This brings me to my thesis: if teachers are terrorizing babies, it is because they know that such babies are actually parentless. As the Yoruba say, it is how a calabash owner describes his/her calabash that others will describe it. No teacher would dare to brutalise my children, because they know that my children are not orphans with living parents.I repeat: no teacher can brutalise my children. As my elder brother used to say: “Aguntan ti ri Seedu be ko to gba isu owo e.” Indeed, how can Aguntan (sheep), an extremely gentle animal, have the temerity to collect Seedu’s yam if not that it is well acquainted with his stupidity? Many parents are Seedus, a bunch of nonentities. 

Pray, just what is a two-year-old doing in a school uniform? I never started school until I was five. There were jeleosinmi (pre-school) classes, of course, but I never attended any. Time was when suckling babies were not dumped in the lap of lunatics, when parents were actually parents, not serpents running after money and fame. In those days, birth mothers were also emotional mothers; mothers with a conscience. If you say those days are past, then I would reply this way: that, precisely, is why many parents mourn over their children, because it is treason to outsource parenthood. These days, children cannot even be children anymore: they are thrust upon a rotten school system supervised by terrorists when they should still be home enjoying mother’s love. 

 

When they are not feeding the children entrusted to their care with bad English (“My stomach is doing me somehow/Fall down and greet baba. Wait, let me enter the same trouser with you now, your head will correct!”), these terrible teachers are taking out their frustrations on the innocent ones. 

Speaking on the Delta case, Ebenezer Omejalile, Chief Operating Officer of Advocates for Children and Vulnerable People’s Network, said: “Now I agree that Nigeria is the worst place on earth to raise children..Our government should stop propagating laws that protect some people and enable monsters to operate mushroom schools.” The problem, really, is that the government is not prepared to be the government.

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Fayemi’s great gesture

I do not know the Ekiti State governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, from Oduduwa, but what he did at the launching of the book Cowries of Blood in Ibadan on February 8 is so worthy of applause. Engaged in weighty matters of state, Fayemi was said to have told the organisers of the epochal event that he was going to grace the occasion with his presence no matter what, even if it was only the author, our own Dr. Lasisi Olagunju, that was still left at the venue. And he did, evidencing the high regard in which he holds not just the author but the profession of journalism and the culture of intellectualism. I had left UI before he arrived, but was told this story by a senior colleague.  Thanks, Dr. Fayemi. Nice one.

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