TWENTY-year-old Chioma Dioke apparently didn’t bargain for the bestial rage which she suffered at the hands of youths in Onunwafor Ezzagu in Ishielu Local Government area of Ebonyi State. But for five gruelling days, the youth took turns raping her after parading her naked around the community. Chioma and two other employees of a local entrepreneur had gone to the community for a business expedition that involved investments which paid off relatively good dividends. But at some point when the business turned awry, the entrepreneur vanished with some unpaid dividends. Then all hell was let loose: instead of making an official report at a police station, the enraged youths took the law into their own hands.
Narrating the horrid details of her experience after her rescue by the police, Chioma said: “The company employed me to advertise Indomie noodles, pampers, power oil and other products. Then in the business, there is what we called investment and win. If you put in N1,000, you would receive N1,500. We were just doing that and we were paying our customers….As we were in the office, youths of the community came there and started beating us, asking us the whereabouts of our boss. I told them I hadn’t seen him. They tore my clothes, took us to a thick forest, and threatened to kill us. They started molesting me sexually…My brother told them that it was against our culture for a man to have sex with his sister, but they put a gun to his head.”
There was more to come: “They then came to me again and started molesting me in the pool of my blood. Some of them came to me and inserted a stick in me. Later, they took us to another forest where we stayed for four days. They threatened to kill us and throw us into the river. They later took me alone and kept me in a place where they always molested me in the night. They didn’t give me any food or water throughout the time they held me. When one of them saw my condition, he took me away from them. He didn’t have sex with me but he was the one that hit my eyes with a heavy stick which made my eyes this way.”
It is, to say the very least, most unfortunate that the offenders in this case chose to behave like savages bereft of any form of decency and respect for human dignity. The victims were savaged by these hoodlums for no just cause and it is imperative that they are brought to justice immediately in order to prevent similarly minded criminals from replicating such horror shows in the affected community or elsewhere in the country. In their criminally defective thinking, the miscreants did not consider the fact that the savagery unleashed on Chioma and other victims could not in any way offer them a reprieve from the losses they had incurred in the business in question. They pounced on an innocent victim who was only waiting to receive her promised pay when the initiators of the business vanished, and treated her worse than many war slaves are wont to be treated.
The action portrayed Onunwafor Ezzagu as a lawless fiefdom. No community still in tune with the time-honoured values of the African society would permit such an abhorrent treatment of a young lady for whatever reason. Had the community intervened, the young lady would not have been paraded naked around the community, serially raped and beaten to stupor and forced to commit incest. But like Onunwafor Ezzagu, there are legions of ungoverned spaces where the most inhuman and most unthinkable brutalities take place, and governments at all levels have a bounden duty to dismantle these spaces and bring the honchos in charge of them to justice. For a start, the ‘forest’ in Ebonyi where Chioma and her fellow victims were dehumanised must be rid of all criminality.
We call on the police to track down all the culprits involved in this infamy, together with their enablers, and haul them before the court of law. They must pay for their cruelty. On its part, the government of Ebonyi State government must approach this case with all the seriousness it deserves. One of the reasons government exists is to prevent the strong from preying on the weak. It must send a strong message to lawless citizens through this case. It must also offer the victims all the assistance they need to get back on their feet and overcome the present despair. We share in the victims’ pain and urge them to take this ugly incident in their stride while the law takes its course.
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