ALLEGED CHILD WITCHES
Let's cry-out with them;Arrest the false prophets
No respite yet for ‘child witches’
They are tortured, starved and most times killed if all methods of exorcism fails. Interestingly, it is the “Church” and various Christian-related churches that have engaged in what many termed brutal, barbaric and clearly outside the instructions of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Holy Bible.
Recently, Saturday Telegraph, visited the Child’s Right and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN), a charity organisation based in Eket, Akwa Ibom State, where rescued children were recuperating.
Four new additions were found hiding in a bush to avoid lynching after they were labelled witches and wizards.
They did that to probably evade more tortures and humiliations by their families. The centre takes in children banished from their family homes by parents and relatives over the allegation of witchcraft practice.
Many of them who came from different villages and communities narrated their sorry ordeals and said: “We feared for our lives while on the streets, that is why we sought refuge at CRARN.” One of them, a 13-year-old Esther Edem, from Edo, Esit-Eket, told Saturday Telegraph that they all had similar experiences.
“I found the other girls roaming the streets and I discovered upon inquiry that they were abandoned by their parents. Instantly we became friends and thereafter I decided to take them to my family home and gave them food.
“I lived with my uncle and when he came back from work, I narrated their pathetic stories to him. I begged him to mediate by taking the children to meet their parents if they could accept them back.
But, instead of yielding to my request, my uncle launched an attack on me and ordered that I leave his house with the girls immediately.
My uncle even added that he had been suspecting me of being a witch all along. “I was surprised when he pounced on me with anger.
So, I left the house and did not know where to go. While roaming the streets in the middle of the night, and as we sat in an uncompleted building, one of the girls, Ima, came up with an idea that we should go to CRARN for protection. We instantly jumped at that and have been here all this while,”
Esther said. Ima was abandoned by her grandmother who told her she could no longer cater for a ‘witch. She lived with the woman in a rented apartment at Ekpene Obo, Esit-Eket. Ima had earlier been accused of witchcraft which first forced her to CRARN in 2010 at the age of five.
Though, she was reconciled back to her grandmother and they lived happily afterwards until a prophet told the woman that Esther was still possessed by the evil spirit and has been responsible for her misfortunes and business downtown.
For the youngest of the three, Blessing Bassey, her ordeal started after she attended a prayer session on a Friday night, which locals called Tarry Night.
Two of her siblings were kidnapped by unknown gunmen which had forced them to seek solace in the house of God. “It was there that one of the pastors accused me of using magical powers to cause the kidnapping of my two siblings and causing the family to go broke. It is a small church close to the Mary Slessor Health Centre.
And things changed for the worst since that fateful day as my parents began a string of torture on me. They do this every night until I was forced out of the house,”Blessing narrated in tears.
Another, Daniel Aniema Ekpo, said his father lived in Upenekang, a fishing settlement in Ibeno where the ExxonMobil is situated while he lived with his mother in Ikot Uso Ekong, in Eket.
Daniel told this reported that it was another alleged child witch who implicated him of being one of them after series of pressure on her to confess and name others in the cult. “This provoked people around who started beating me. My mother also joined them.
They once tied me to a stake and hit me many times with sticks. I was subsequently chased out of our compound with a threat that I would be killed if I eventually returns.” Also in this dilemma is Wisdom Emmanuel Victory, an 11-year-old frail-looking lanky boy.
He claimed to have come from Ikono Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State but ran away from the church he was kept for weeks without food because the prophet told his parents that he was not willing to denounce witchcraft practice.
But the case of a six-year-old Emediong Ukeme Ime Cynthia seems more frightening. Emediong, who hails from Oniok-Edo in Esit-Eket Local Government, told Saturday Telegraph that his parents separated when he was four, and his mother took him to live with his maternal grandparents.
One day he decided to visit his father and stayed for about a month. “That was how my problem started.
“My stepmother returned home one day from a prayer session and told me to leave the house and never to return again.
That same night my father woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me to confess. Such question was strange to me and I denied knowledge of anything like that.
My response infuriated him the more and he brought out matchet and hit me many times, threatening to kill me if I fail to confess. He then dragged me out of the house and told me not to come to his house anymore.”
When he left the house and roamed the streets, he met other abandoned children in a burial ceremony. And they instantly became friends.
They were living in an uncompleted and abandoned building where some people would come and attack them with sticks and matchets. “So, we ran away and hid in the bush where we were finally rescued by the CRARN rescue team.”
The story of two other eight-year-old children from Okobo Local Government Area, who had lived on the streets for six months, after their relatives tortured them and sent them out of their homes for alleged witchcraft, is not different.
Mary Odiong and Ekong Asua told Saturday Telegraph that Mary was blamed for the death of her uncle who died in Okopedi village of an ailment many suspected was Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
She was accused of being behind the man’s AIDS ailment. “My family called me out and started asking me questions concerning my involvement in witchcraft and why I killed my uncle.
But, I told them that I did not know anything about what they were talking about.
“They beat and hit me with cutlasses and cut my buttocks with knives. I lost consciousness when the beating became too much. Later, I woke up to find myself in a bush. I lived on the streets for months without food and shelter,”
she sobbed. In Ekong’s case, his parents died from what was described as a “strange ailment,” and afterwards, his uncles accused him of being a wizard, and blamed him for his parents’ death. “My uncles told me that they went somewhere to find out why my parents died. They said they were told that I killed both of them through witchcraft.
They tied my hands and started beating me up with native sugarcane and asked me to confess.
“When I insisted that I knew nothing about the death of my parents, they took me to a bush, where I met Odiong. Both of us lived on the streets before we were rescued and taken to African Children’s Aid Education and Development Foundation (ACAEDF),” Ekong said.
For many decades now, children in Nigeria, particularly in Akwa Ibom, have been at the mercy of all sorts of deprivations.
They have lived and continued to grapple with misery, hunger, trafficking, and abuses of all sorts.
A report from United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), quoted a staggering 15 million children under 14 years as being endangered across Nigeria.
Many are said to be exposed to long hours of work in dangerous and unhealthy environments, carrying too much responsibility for their age.
Working in such hazardous conditions with no education, little food, pay and medical care establishes a cycle of child rights violations, the report further said. CRARN said it had rescued hundreds of children who were hiding in bushes to avoid lynching after they were labelled witches and wizards, tortured, and abandoned to their fate by their families.
Speaking to Saturday Telegraph, one the centre’s principal coordinators, Ms Elizabeth Wilson, said she led a rescue team to where some of the children were hiding in the bush to avoid persecution after a hint by a volunteer before there were rescued.
“When we arrived, they wanted to run, but I told them we were coming to help them; so they decided to follow us to our centre on our behest,” Wilson recounted.
Many teenage children have been thrown into the streets and abandoned while branding them as witches and wizards. An Eketbased Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Stepping Stone, stated that over 1,000 children were roaming the beaches in Oron and Mbo,
while others were driven outside their parental homes in Eket and Esit-Eket as witches before they intervened.
The NGO’s effort sparked off advocacy for the child’s rights in the country on account of persistent global struggle to ensure that the Nigerian child enjoys full rights and privileges as a human being.
However, former governor of the state, Godswill Akpabio, signed the bill into law, which made it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 15 years in prison to label any child a witch.
The introduced Child Rights Act 2008 was defined as a comprehensive protection for the rights of children, especially against being labelled as witches and wizards.
The state did not only criminalised such heinous practice on the children but introduced free and compulsory education with all the associated logistics and accompanying budgetary provisions, as well as free healthcare for children.
The government did not stop there. It equally fought the war against child labour and trafficking at all fronts and partnered with the National Agency for Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP) in that regard.
This, perhaps, may be why the then first lady of the state, Ekaette Akpabio, established the Divine Children’s Centre in Uyo, to assist in taking care of some of the abandoned children.
The centre, which was established in 2011, currently shelters over 200 children who were labelled witches and wizards by their parents or guardians.
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