By Francis Ewherido

“I started sleeping with my 15-year-old daughter sometime in January after I lost my job.” This is part of the confession of a 41-year-old father in Vanguard, June 28, 2016. He claims frustration over the loss of his job led him to alcoholism and incest. But he was still sober enough to sleep with his daughter only after his wife has gone to work. He therefore knew full well that what he was doing was wrong.

We have talked about rape and incest in this column before, but both maladies have become so widespread, they cannot be ignored. At a meeting of an NGO I belong to, two weeks ago, a woman came to, among other things, report her “husband”, a man she has seven children for, although they are not married traditionally, legally or joined in holy matrimony. According to her, the man left her and the children sometime ago. To lessen the burden of upkeep, she sent her second child, a 16-year-old girl, to live with her mother.

The husband, without informing her, went to bring the daughter back from the village. When she found out, she sent her son to go and verify. She said the son knocked and stayed outside for two hours before father and daughter opened the door of an abode that cannot be more than two rooms. The son came back to tell the mother that he was not comfortable with the compromising position in which he saw the father and the sister and the kind of “play” they engaged in, in his presence. She went to bring the daughter to her house, but the father asked the daughter to come back and she was back with the father as at the time she came to us. We do not act based on one-sided stories, but we advised her to bring her daughter back as a first step.

Many father/daughter relationships, like the proverbial handshake, have gone beyond the elbow. Some are cases of rape and threat to harm if exposed, but some others are consensual. No day passes without a story of rape or incest. These cases of incest have nothing to do with Electra Complex (a young girl’s sexual attraction towards the father or a father figure). In the case of consensual sex, these girls have clearly gone beyond Electra Complex age. It is a phenomenon that bush and naïve people like me can only describe as sexual insanity.

A woman travels, leaving father and daughter at home; unknown to her, she has given two lovers a blank cheque. Who knows what is happening between boys and their mothers? One woman in Zimbabwe actually married her own son and was pregnant for the son as at the time the news broke. With the way some youngsters have developed an appetite for older women, like some lions develop appetite for human flesh, do not be surprised if it turns out tomorrow that incest between mothers and sons is in fact happening and rampant. After all, our people say that it is sleep that gives you an idea of what death looks like. It is not beyond a youngster’s taste for older women to extend to his mother and aunts.

So many reasons are adduced for incest. When the fathers are caught, they blame the Devil or frustration as in the case above. Some people say the fathers do it for money rituals or other devilish intentions. Now, I do not know how this works, but I do know that in the kingdom of the Devil, nothing is free. So assuming the fathers get this money, power or whatever they want for engaging in incest, what becomes of the lives of the daughters?

There was a famous quote during Ibrahim Babangida’s government: “For their tomorrow, we are sacrificing our today.” In this case, the fathers are sacrificing their daughters’ tomorrow for their today. Good parents pray that their children should reach greater heights than they have reached and follow up the prayers with self denial and sometimes enormous sacrifices. These incestuous fathers certainly have other agenda.

But the most scandalizing of all are parents, uncles, relatives and other adults who rape minors, sometimes as young as two years. I asked this question a few months ago: How do you rape a two-year-old? Is that not insanity? Shouldn’t such rapists be confined to special prisons cum mental asylum? Going through our laws, we have many legal provisions to take care of rapists, paedophiles and other sexual offenders, but enforcement is weak. Many families also treat sexual crimes as family matters. We also have security agencies that are unwilling to prosecute cases of sexual assaults. Then there is the society that has not given these offences the seriousness they deserve.

After these traumatized underaged survive the sexual onslaught at home and get into higher institutions, some lecturers want to continue from where the victims’ relatives stopped. In a society where playing the ostrich is the norm, the Senator representing Delta Central, Ovie Omo Agege, supported by 45 other senators, came up with a “Bill for an Act to Make Provision for the Prohibition of Sexual Harassment of Students by Educators in Tertiary Educational Institutions and for Matters Connected Therewith, 2016.” The bill has gone through public hearing where ASUU made efforts to shoot it down. Their argument is that the universities already have internal provisions to deal with sex-related offences. Many higher institutions in Nigeria are cesspits of sexual exploitation. How many offenders have these provisions caught up with?

My only worry is that after passage, will the law enforcement agents and authorities in higher institutions cooperate (the stiff penalties for noncooperation notwithstanding) to bring offenders to book? By the way, the Seventh Senate passed a bill for “An Act to Make Provision About Sexual Offences, their Definition, Prevention and the Protection of All Persons from Harm, Unlawful Sexual Acts, and for Purposes Connected Therewith.” It was one of the 46 bills the Senate passed into law towards the end of its tenure and fills a lacuna in the laws of the federation. Presidential assent is overdue.