By Obi Nwakanma,

The details are still frankly, quite murky. But the general outline is this: round about August 2015, a young underage girl, Ese Rita Oruru, was abducted by Yinusa Yellow a 25-year Muslim resident of Yenegoa, and taken to Kano, where Yinusa was originally born, and from where he came to live in Bayelsa, where he made home, and a living hawking water.

Yunusa Yellow and Ese Oruru

From Yinusa’s own father’s account, his son, Yinusa, did not abduct Ese. They are a couple in love, he claimed. Ese willingly followed Yinusa home to Kano, where she converted to Islam, although in his mind, no marriage took place between his son and Ese Oruru. It is against the law and the tenets of his religion, and therefore, he was opposed to all this in the first place. I think we ought to listen to Yinusa’s father for his perspective, except that Ese Oruru is a minor, and newspaper reports indicate that she may be five-months pregnant; a situation, if it were  to be true, that puts the  matter into a totally new dimension, because the question would therefore come to be: who raped Ese Oruru?

Who made her pregnant, if as Yinusa’s father claims, there was no coupling between his son and Ese whom he abducted? Current medical technology using the DNA test kit ought to reveal this and put it all to rest. It is also quite important to note that Ese Oruru herself has declared that she did not know how she arrived at Kano. She just followed Yinusa. Was she under some kind of hypnosis? Who can tell these things? I, myself, am of a more  rationale and empirical mind: I do not put much store on magic and the supernatural, nor or the sham of miracles and juju. I would rather Nigerians paid attention to the simple facts of this case: Ese is a minor, and may have been made to leave Yenegoa against her will, and possibly with the threat of bodily and spiritual harm.

She has been made pregnant too in ways that should not be too mysterious, or too difficult to discern, since Angels have long since stopped impregnating young virgins, not since the archangel Jibrin or Gabriel’s last nocturnal holy visitations to the Virgin Mary. Yeshua, the bold boy, result of this divine or supernal rape grew up alienated from his own Jewish culture. Defiant of its highest authority, rebellious and radicalized, and made to feel like an outsider, he found and led a movement of the dispossessed, those whom the land rejected, and ended up nailed to the cross himself.

That’s what happens to children like that, who are conceived from rape, and are often reminded of the unsavory past and burden of their conception and birth: they feel unwelcome and belong to none. And often become dangers to themselves and to their societies. In a few happy accidents, some turn out to be the saviors of mankind. I draw all these allusions and analogy to basically point to the difficult life ahead for Ese Oruru after her rescue, and if she indeed is pregnant, and this doubtlessly from rape, the complexity of the life of the coming child. It is important therefore to think, right this minute, about the nature of her psychological rehabilitation, and preparation for a life ahead that will be full of unanswered questions, guilt, and self-doubt.

Nigeria has far too few mental health counsellors and psychiatrists in a country, in which by my own observation and estimation, though not yet backed by data, 75% of the citizens suffer from serious, undiagnosed mental health issues. This fact alone might help explain the nature of the police, and of the police response to the abduction of Ese Oruru in Yenegoa. In civilized societies where these things work, and where they matter, recruitment to police services requires constant psych-evaluation, regular mental health counselling, and frequent productivity and behavioral assessment. There is also something called empathy-building.

A police service with little respect and concern for the well-being of the populace will, aside from the basic fact of been inefficient, also be insensitive to the necessity to protect and serve the citizen with diligence and impartiality and commitment.

Nigeria arrived as a country into the 21st century with scant preparedness for the 21st century. The reality of an increasingly complex urban culture escapes those charged with thinking of such matters, and tasks the structural and foundational limits of our institutions.

With a primitive police system, built on a colonial constabulary model that is antiquated, that is corrupt, that has very outmoded policing doctrine, and that is not structured to meet with the demands of a civil, democratic, and polite society, it was impossible to prevent Ese Oruru’s abduction, or conduct a quick, scientific, and guided rescue operation before she crossed many state borders from Yenegoa to Kano, where she was quickly “disappeared” behind the hard veils of a Muslim’s hijab, and the warren of “Ba Shigas” behind the old city walls of Kano, and ending ultimately, as we have come to find out, in the old slave quarters of the Palace of the Emir of Kano, whose role in this business needs to be further investigated. At what point did Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Emir of Kano, become aware of the abduction of Ese Oruru, and what was his role in all this? This is the story that should not go away until a full accounting is made. Sanusi might be complicit in the abduction and rape of a minor, and if this is so, he must be arrested and charged accordingly.

The Bayelsa Police Commissioner under whose charge this event took place must resign his commission for his incompetence in discharging his duties to the citizen whom the police act compels him to serve. The Inspector-General of Police, Solomon Arase, who put more store on the “power” of the Emir of Kano, than in his own legitimate authority as the nation’s chief cop in this rescue story should also be compelled to resign for his incompetence and complicity.

The Ese Oruru incident is a muck up. One important revelation however from all this is that Nigerians apparently live in two countries, where parallel governments exist – one traditional and shadowy, the other a “pretend republic.” I should make this clear in a moment. Last week, I wrote about the need to abolish the “traditional rulers” – the Emirs, Sultans, Igwes, and Obas – who run parallel governments in contention with the authority of the Federal Republic. It is clear that Yinusa Yellow did not feel bound by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

He was, even as claimed by Lamido Sanusi who called him “my subject,” under the protection of the Emir of Kano, who felt himself in a position higher than the authority of the Nigerian Police, that sole authority in Nigeria established by law to keep and enforce domestic law and security. The Emir is running a parallel government, can grant and dissolve marriages at will; can keep a 14-year old minor prisoner without consequence, can “order” and “re-order” the police, and can secure the obedience and determine the conduct of his “subjects” in Kano, outside the laws of the Federal republic.

When Biafrans and other separatists tired of the Nigerian contradiction agitate that they do not wish to live in such a country where “anything goes;” where individuals are mightier than the state, and where therefore regular citizens are at risk, vulnerable, and at the mercy of these powerful potentates rather than the common law, and can therefore no longer expect to be protected and secured as evident with Ese Oruru, by the institution of state, their demands begin to ring increasingly legit.