In the quest for that sliver of constructive criticism that mattered

The hostile oven of criticism

“Oò serious, Akin”. Is a code switch of mixing languages that you might find among people who speak more than one language, and in this case, this is a Yoruba-English construct roughly meaning, “You’re not serious, Akin.” I however found out that the Dutch who are usually polyglots find the mixing of languages confusing.

The many variants of this phrase, I have heard as the lead-in to criticism and excoriation, an unchallengeable viewpoint posited by those with responsibility, means, opportunity, and the power arrogated to deliver the cutting without the growing.

Along with this, is another in Yoruba, “Kí lón ṣe ẹ́?” “What is the matter with you?” Delivered with sneering, disdain, and derision, maybe just disappointment, but implicitly implying you are not trying hard enough with all the advantages, privileges, and benefits you might have in relation to others, not accounting for any extenuating circumstances that anyone is willing to discover.

Humiliation as character building

In one seminal case, when I was addressed with the first statement, I dared to respond that I thought I was doing my best. It was taken as disrespectful and an affront, and at that point, another uncle stepped in to deliver a stinging slap, before commanding I grovel and apologise. Then, it was necessary to compound the humiliation by being ordered to do house chores, which we had someone employed to do.

Somehow, in many cases, there was an absence of constructive criticism in elements of my upbringing, though, that is not to say that I was not a difficult child and adolescent, I had my issues, and I could argue that they were not considered important in the scheme of things.

Bygones that cannot be foregone

Why dredge up these historical events when as the patriarch is wont to say, let bygones be bygones? It is because the bygones were defining even if the instigators would like to forget what they did and the impact of the same. There is a child in us that never forgets, despite all the work we do in self-development to ensure that the hold of the past does not become a limiting factor in our present or immediate future.

We all bear scars that we apply the makeup of presentation, expression, and personality to conceal to varying degrees of success, it is gratifying that there were still people who believed in us and supported us from under the crushing weight of unrelenting criticism and much else.

Where a child lives

It reminds me of something I read that is attributed to Dorothy Law Nolte who articulated quite succinctly the power of positive youth development. It appears on many posters that I read, and I tried to convince myself that much of what I experienced was positive and a good deal was, but it is never that easy to forget the criticism, the ridicule, the insecurity, the threats, the unfriendliness, and all that feeding a debilitating fear than was deemed respectful.

One moment of searing endearment and concern was delivered when they both ganged up on me in the administration of corporal punishment. He was taking a breather, probably in exhaustion, he said to her, “Mind his eyes.” That is love, I remember it well.

I love them, but they are not saints.

Some contextual references

Blog - Thought Picnic: A dreamy page of a family saga (2016)

Blog - Never maltreat a child (2023)

Blog - Thought Picnic: A child has memories that last a lifetime (2021)

Blog - The damage done when parents fail to listen (2015)

Children Learn What They Live

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.
If children live with ridicule, they learn to be shy.
If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.
If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance, they learn to be patient.
If children live with praise, they learn to appreciate.
If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.
If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.
If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.
If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and others.
If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

© 1955 Dorothy Law Nolte – Children Learn What They Live

Never maltreat a child

I heard a child speaking

I spoke to a child this morning, and I listened to what she had to say. She was staying with a couple, her guardians far away from home, the male was her relation (a distant uncle, perhaps) and the female, was the wife of her relation. She had to do chores around the house apart from being a hawker of goods in the streets around where she lived.

One day, she counted out change from the trading purse in the sight of her uncle and then put the purse away. Her uncle then pilfered the purse which left the child accused of theft. The wife had already been wicked to her ward and could not be convinced that the girl did nothing wrong.

Saving the child from brutality

The culprit however in trying to deflect blame from himself punished the child for hours even as the child insisted she did nothing wrong. Reprieve came with an intervention from the neighbours who concluded that if the girl had been pleading innocence for over 6 hours, it was unlikely she had done anything wrong. The sadism of her guardians was just unrelenting.

Many acts committed against the child sometimes left her within the breath of death, and after that punishment, she could not attend school for two weeks, that was the severity and barbarity of their actions, such people should have ended up in jail for the brutalisation and battering of a child.

When her guardians were transferred to another city, another relation refused to allow them to take their ward with them, there was every indication they would do worse to her. Her new guardians had a kinder man (another distant uncle) and a possibly tolerable but nasty wife, maybe, a case of just jumping from the fire into the frying pan. If you’ve been to hell, any other place will present a modicum of comfort.

Maltreatment displaces honour

There was nothing to honour or celebrate about the first set of guardians when they passed on, the evil they had done would live in the memory of this child and be told in stories to which I became the audience today.

Of the second set of guardians, she was so totally distraught when he was brought back to our village in a coffin, but she did not arrive on time for the internment. That his legs were tied together with a string in the coffin only spoke to who his wife was in character and much else.

If anything, you should never maltreat a child regardless of what you might want to achieve, to violate an innocent child is considered the most heinous thing to do, especially if you are responsible for them and they look to you for guardianship, protection, guidance, and if not love, at least a sense of care and consideration of their vulnerable humanity.

A child never forgets

That child is an octogenarian who has had a successful professional career, is retired and is still involved in her community, a mother and grandmother, apart from being a mother to many more she has schooled, taught, mentored, and guided.

The child remembers quite respectfully and fondly those who treated her well, but the recent death of a younger sibling of the first guardian’s wife triggered the memories of the manifest evil meted out to her.

They might well have been forgiven; the forgetting part is more difficult. Even when Jesus said we should forgive seventy times seven times, it would suggest you need to be able to count to know how much has been forgiven. 

It is not that these issues occupy our minds or our lives, but for stories to be told as they happened, the memory recreates the narrative that we must not forget how people treated us even if out of love we release them to attend to the consequences of their actions, by provenance, intervention, or some other means of fate or opportunity.

A child never forgets even if the child has children of children of children. Do not mistreat or maltreat a child.

Thinking of Daniel Pelka

A pro-choice point

If there were better interventionist policies that were predicated on unconditional love providing the best of parental care to children born into dire, indifferent, violent or extremely atrocious situations, I might have found myself waving flags and placards in the front of abortion clinics speaking against abortion.

Our reality indicates there is no such Utopian environment to fundamentally offload the circumstances that present abortion as an option some people might take for all sorts of reasons.

Unloved in this world

This introduction stems from a number of situations in the UK where children have been born into some of the most harrowingly wicked homes, where the children’s guardians take on the demonic mantle of depriving the child of every semblance of care, fun, happiness, joy and even life for reasons I cannot yet understand even if I were completely devoid of any humanity.

The case of Daniel Pelka represents a feeling that hell might well be an amusement park and the poor child saw more than hell.

Nothing is said of the circumstances in which Daniel was born and that is patently beside the point, he had a mother who starved him, almost drowned him, brutalised him and eventually killed him whilst his mother’s partner acquiesced, if not participated in the evil enterprise.

Unconscionable evil

The only place where I have seen such behaviour is amongst primates where a silverback will attempt to kill the offspring of a nursing gorilla in order to bring her into season to have his way. If I suggested Magdelena Luczak, 27, and her partner Mariusz Krezolek, 34 where worse than wild animals in human skin, I will not be far off the mark.

The unmitigated cruelty to Daniel Pelka mirrors what we saw of Peter Connelly, Baby P, a few years before, where the system failed the child who suffered more than 50 injuries over an 8-month period.

Before that, it was Victoria Climbié, creating a catalogue of guardianship criminality that can find no words of expression close to describing the hell those children went through.

Some justice

It is not just the fact that the children were unloved or probably unwanted but that their guardians especially in the documented text messages of Daniel Pelka’s guardians had no restraint in planning and executing their tortuous sadistic cruelty against defenceless kids for their pleasure or satisfaction.

No justice can be sufficient to punish for the world Daniel came to find himself and if there is a heaven, I will hope that he finds the greatest care and love imaginable to wipe away the sorrow and pain that was his unfortunate lot when he lived 4 short years on earth.

It would have probably been better he was not born because no child on God’s good earth regardless of situation, circumstance, providence or misfortune should suffer the way Victoria, Peter or Daniel suffered and I am glad that our society is still moved enough to ensure that anyone party to such evil will be severely punished for crime that are fundamentally against humanity.

Just because the children are defenceless in life and have been failed by the system does not mean that society will not act to seek redress, retribution and punishment of the perpetrators of evil that contemns our humanity.

May Daniel rest in peace.

Opinion: The Challenge of Rearing Nigerian Children Abroad

An embarrassment of heritage

I was rather discomfited by the news of the conviction of 8 teenagers yesterday for the killing of another teenager in 2010.

There are issues with gang warfare and disputes in London but the brazenness with which these youngsters carried out their assault on another in plain public view leaves one wondering what our society has become.

One teenager stood in the middle of the road wielding a samurai sword and they ended up chasing the victim into a busy London Underground Station where they as many as 15 in number attacked, stabbed, kicked and punched the poor 15-year old Sofyen Belamouadden to death.

That is bad enough, but when I read the names of the perpetrators involved, I feel a sense of eerie familiarity as Junior Bayode, Obi Nwokeh, Christopher Omoregie, Samsom  Odegbune, Femi Oderinwale and Victoria Osoteku all appear to have Nigerian surnames.

They have some Nigerian connection

That is not to say that these people are Nigerian, but one can safely assume they have some connection with Nigeria by reason of parentage and possibly heritage.

The other two might well have Nigerian connections but that is not evident from their names. What bothers me is what the parents and guardians of these kids might have been up to that their wards have ended up on the extreme side of the law having congregated with impunity in the mob act of killing someone else in plain view.

I appreciate that these kids might never have visited Nigeria or experienced what many might call a traditional Nigerian upbringing that gives the parent licence to brutalise their wards in what we broadly call discipline but discipline in and of itself cannot just be corporal punishment – we need to adapt the tools of affirmation and chastisement to the societies we find ourselves in.

Adapting parenting influence

Whereas in Nigeria it is probably enough to dispatch parental responsibility by just being a provider of shelter, food, education and basic welfare, the differences in societal values and expectations mean that parents have to be more involved in attending to the emotional needs of their wards and this is something many might not have found examples of in their own upbringing.

I dare say, where ethnic minorities fail to integrate congregating in conurbations of ghettoised indifference, they shirk in the fundamental responsibility of understanding the pressures their wards face and the society in which they wards are growing – religion and social events amongst ourselves are not enough, we cannot recreate our local villages abroad and hope that it will suffice – it does not.

Just because we cannot bring our kids up the “Nigerian” way does not absolve us of our responsibility in society to bring our kids to respect the rule of law, the dignity of labour and the earning of respect through purposeful activity rather than menace – gangs are fundamentally antithetical to this thinking and one can say it arises because parents are absent from what they are supposed to be doing.

Misguided parental goals

Over the last few years, I have found too many instances where kids of Nigerian heritage have been victims or perpetrators of violent crime, if we must have children in foreign societies it behoves us to exert ourselves to bring them up in environments where they are first not under threat and then not influenced by negative role models.

The preoccupation with keeping up appearances and status in our marooned Diaspora communities when the greater task of separation and integration is of essence for the sake of our children is atrocious – children are better inspired and encouraged by aspirational guardians who provide positive role models that their wards can emulate.

A parenting challenge

It is all too easy to suggest children have become wayward and are the black sheep of the family but if their formative years were spent under a responsible adult’s care and hopefully guidance, then that is probably where things also went wrong – what children end up becoming does not occur in a vacuum.

Looking at those 6 Nigerian names, should be a warning shot across the bows of ethnic parenthood in foreign lands that your involvement is pertinent, that the game plan for child rearing cannot follow the script we once had or experienced back at home and that we cannot spend all hours in the pursuit of filthy lucre if we want the peace of children who will in future go on to live successful, independent lives away from unsavoury encounters with the law and the shame that it brings.

Nigeria: How We Sacrifice Our Children to Paedophiles

Our Child Sexual Abuse Shame

It made my blood boil when I first read snippets of this story in Chxta’s Daily Dispatches, the case of a 7-year old girl who was repeated sexually abused by grown men that the magistrate found it just to release one of the paedophile rapists on bail whilst committing the girl to remand in a Child Correctional Centre. [Full Story]

There is no doubt that we find the issue of child sexual abuse difficult to understand or manage in Nigeria, it is there, children suffer but find no avenue, forum or platform to ask for protection and ultimately justice.

Community Spirit and Commodifying Assault

It is so disheartening to read of the ordeal and terror the 7-year old girl went through from grooming, inducements and threats to her life that the paedophile made it routine to seek sexual pleasures of the poor innocent child as her guardians strove to make ends meet as well as care for the child.

Our community spirit implicitly expects that amongst adults, a child is safe and will be free from abuse whilst any responsible adult in that setting rises to the occasion if need be to protect or extract the vulnerable from untenable situations.

However, when it comes to sexual abuse, everyone seems to clam up, no one wants to countenance the idea that some respectable member of the community has crossed the line to the utterly reprehensible that they all close ranks and the victim is left to suffer from the pall of shame and silence that has enveloped the community.

What Law Allows This?

The girl gave such a gruesome tale of the many times the rotten men took advantage of her and her guardians might well have been derelict in their responsibilities of care, love, attention and protection but to then send the girl to a Child Correction Centre really smacks of the lowest form of apathy that should only belong to fiction.

The  Magistrate, Mrs E. B. Daudu of Ikeja Magistrate Court, does not have to be a mother to be aware of what this child has suffered but if there is any law or recommendation for justice that has informed her of this heinously contemptible decision, it must be expunged from our legal tomes with immediate effect for our humanity first and then for the sake of basic civilisation.

Only a Barbarous community with a primitive mindset redolent of primates of the jungle will see any inkling of justice in freeing the criminal and incarcerating the victim, a child at that.

Our Duty to Childhood Failing

What could she have done wrong to deserve such a double denial of justice, fairness, respite and at worst motherly concern that her attackers have gotten off lightly and she is condemned to institutionalised care? A correctional facility at that as if her crime is to be a vulnerable child who has had the misfortune of being born in Nigeria.

The child should be able to roam free and develop without being fearful of abuse or assault. Whilst guardians do have responsibilities, children cannot be held on leash like dogs though it also means sexual predators be kept off the streets.

We Need New Thinking

With this case, the sexual predators will only seek another to abuse and when done, probably murder the victim to prevent being exposed as they were with this particular issue – this must be unacceptable to every well-meaning Nigerian.

It would be easy to advocate kicking Mrs E. B. Daudu off the bench, excoriating the police and child protection agencies with unspeakable vitriol and lynching the miscreants mercilessly but what we need is a change in thinking in our communities, we must not tolerate, condone or excuse paedophilia making the culprits pay a hefty price and giving the victims all the consideration, empathy and support required to heal them of those rotten experiences they lived through.

Nigeria/The UK: The issue of child slavery by trusted guardians

Guardian abuse

The news [1] about the jailing of a female Nigerian-born church pastor in the UK for child trafficking and slavery is a microcosm of the abuse of guardian-ward relationships that long predates my birth.

Usually, a person of certain privilege or opportunity informs relations that their children would under their care have access to opportunity and a better life beyond that which the parents of those children can offer and in the process have the right of guardianship transferred to the benefactor on trust.

Good and bad guardianship

Taking the example of my parents, my father got to stay with his great-uncle who was a mentor that offered every opportunity for my father to succeed, by encouragement, by inspiration and by challenge – he went on to be a successful accountant and I have seen lots of correspondence between them that shows the amazingly mutual respect they had for each other.

In the case of my mother, she stayed with a first-cousin once removed on her maternal lineage who being a school master with an apparently evil wife meted out unbelievable cruelty to my mother than the stories we heard made the hairs on the backs of our necks stand on end.

Alone with the scars

Being far from home, there was no one to deliver her from the abuse she suffered apart from a neighbour who after enduring much of the anguish and cries of the child tried to intervene. However, the guardians got away with almost anything and made to justify their cruelty with notions of discipline or imparting the benefits of industry in the child.

After my mother left their guardianship, she rarely ever kept contact with any of that family but I was taken aback when he died and my mother was so distraught that she did not make it soon enough to witness his funeral.

Beneath it all, there is was a form of gratitude I could not appreciate but for all the scars my mother bore I am grateful that she did not in turn project that onto others.

Our dread of religious figures

Back to the general issue, this pastor and thereby a religious figure would have offered by reason of her vocation references that we fear to check all due to our cultural dread of the supernatural with regards to people of the cloth or some sort of religious calling. We have the feeling that religious people have the power to call down fire or have the earth open up to swallow us up at command that we rationalise with the irrationality of not touching God’s anointed regardless of character.

A religious person is a self-notarised person who can vouch on their own recognisance that we seek no other references as to their responsibility, honesty, humanity, compassion, competence and ability to do what they profess to be able to do.

That provided one of the elements of trust that allowed the parents of the two children affected by this case to allow this wicked person to take on these children as dependants.

The false Utopia of being abroad

Beyond this, the notion that the benefactor was in the UK beclouded the necessity to check what the benefactor was really doing in the UK. Somehow, to the person in the village and dare I say to many resident in Nigeria, a UK resident and broadly anyone abroad is a person of means, a person of influence and a person under whose mentorship one obtains a fast-track to opportunity and success.

The fact was this pastor was an illegal immigrant in the UK, who had a false passport and had provided false passports for her children and the wards she brought over from Nigeria.

The wards once on UK soil never saw the opportunities that were promised them rather they were engaged as slave labour to serve the whims and sadistic caprices of their presumed benefactor.

Escaping to freedom

No information is given of how long these wards were engaged in slave labour denying them the opportunity to seek out a life of independent borne of honest mentoring but this criminal enterprise came to light when one of the victims escaped the home of her “benefactor” after being physically abused and thankfully this was in the UK where it was unlikely the victim would be sent back to endure her lot and station having received the great privilege of leaving Nigeria for the glorious setting of the UK.

There are other instances of abuse where a young man had been resident as slave for 14 years [2] having arrived in the UK with the promise of getting a university degree but got dumped out on the streets destitute when he rebelled against his treatment.

This kind of ward or dependant abuse I believe is very prevalent in our Nigerian communities, it also extends to African communities where it woman of 47 [3] was brought over from Tanzania and seriously abused.

This problem not only involves those trafficked for slavery abroad but within Nigerian itself from villages or impoverished relations to major cities where the well-off guardians would rather exploit unfortunate distant relations who cannot fight back or complain than employ the house helps they cannot inordinately abuse without sanction.

Core parental responsibility

It is incumbent on parents to ensure that if their children are wards of other guardians, they have ways of ensure that the promises they were given are being fulfilled and there might well be some iota of truth in the conversations they have with their children rather than default to the notion that their children are being workshy.

The best way to elicit such situations is to agree to an innocuous code word that would indicate suspicious activity and they should not take everything on trust from those they have devolved the responsibility of parenthood too.

There are no easy answers to dealing with the abuse of wards and dependants but we need people to know that sending their children away on trust could be fraught with dangers they will never learn of, it is still the responsibility of a parent to ensure that the promise of a bright future is not paved with an absurdly tortuous present.

May I use this opportunity to introduce AFRUCA - Africans Unite Against Child Abuse (UK)[4] an organisation that deals with issues of the abuse of African children and offers a service to deliver children from slave bondage who have been brought to the UK under false pretences.

Source

[1] BBC News | Pastor jailed for trafficking African child 'slaves'

[2] BBC News | Tales of slavery in modern London

[3] BBC News | Harrow woman convicted of keeping Tanzanian as slave

[4] AFRUCA - Africans Unite Against Child Abuse (UK)

Culture of Life - I

But not in a Petri-dish

I have just about have had my fill of the clamour and mass-hysteria that has engulfed the whole of America in the matter of Terri Schiavo. [1]

Terri Schiavo happens to be an unfortunate lady who for the lack of potassium and the stoppage of her heart in 1990 suffered severe brain damage and has been in a medical state for 15 years where heart, lungs and essentials function, but she is paralysed, cannot feed herself. [2]

Her legal guardian who happens to be her husband, who has also started a new family, has been to court time and again to have her feeding tube removed and allow her die a natural and dignified death, but in a bizarre case of hoping against all hope, her parents who have now taken to hyphenating her matrimonial name top Schindler-Schiavo have turned this into an ridiculous public circus so reminiscent of a wolf-pack’s dinner.

If that was not hard enough, the whole of congress and the President weighs in with a bill to have the feeding tube reinserted to maintain a “Culture of life” in which medical treatment can be discovered to help people like Terri.

However, in the case of brain damage, the lack of stem cell research, which became such an issue during the presidential campaign, leaves that a forlorn hope.

This is an unfair case of Mr President having eating his cake, now asking for seconds. It leaves you with one question – Does the “Culture of life” include having some quality to it?

Finally, I note with incandescent rage the hypocritical mission of the Culture of Life Foundation.

“The mission of the Culture of Life Foundation is to provide the leadership and financial resources to promote a universal commitment to protect and nurture all human life from conception until natural death.”

In the carefully chosen phraseology, I note that conception is not qualified; suggesting test-tube babies are allowed and obviously feeding people unnaturally through tubes is nurturing until natural death.

If I have anymore to say, it would be in the morrow.

[1] Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation
http://www.terrisfight.net/center.html

[2] BBC NEWS | Americas | Fight over Florida woman's fate
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3141058.stm#timeline

[3] The Culture of Life Foundation & Institute
http://www.christianity.com/cultureoflife