TheCable

As a father, it was traumatic reading the sad story of how a 16-year old apprentice murdered a four-year-old boy last Sunday, July 26 as reported by Vanguard newspapers. Tajudeen Azeez, the apprentice, killed the boy after luring him to a primary school, Anglican Primary School, Deeper Life Bus Stop, Ijanikin Otto, Lagos State. Bear in mind that this is a family newspaper, and so this poses a limitation in describing in full detail the gory incident but it is still saddening that some people paid Azeez N100 to kill Ibrahim Jamiu Hassan for his intestines and kidney. Yes, you read that right, N100 was the amount for a four-year-old intestines and kidney.

Hear the teenage murderer,  “Sincerely, Ibrahim did not offend me, neither did his parents. I have known him since we moved into this area. I play with him and buy him biscuits and sweets.

“I am an apprentice with a local furniture workshop in the neighbourhood. I removed his kidney and intestines and abandoned them at a nearby bush before I was arrested.

“I have not committed this kind of crime before. It was Osan that sent me to help him get human parts. It was this morning that I lured Ibrahim to Anglican Primary School, where I used a knife to kill him.”

There you have it, the cold chilling words of a murderer. Perhaps you are wondering about the whereabouts of Hassan’s parents when Azeez killed their son, they were at the hospital where the mother was rushed to, at the onset of labour.

But how did we get to this stage in our lives as a country? A teenager luring a boy and dismembering him ostensibly to harvest his body parts for money? This is the stuff horror movies are made of, except that this incident was not a movie but one that happened in real life. There are several angles to this crime. One is the apparent failure of communal life in our cities, which urbanization has assaulted more than nay other factor. We live in neighbourhoods where we don’t know one another deeply and so we cannot be our neighbours’ keepers in the truest sense of watching over one another. Parents, in pursuit of daily bread, tend to leave their children to fend for themselves not caring to know what the kids are up to at any given point.

Though in this case, it was a neighbour who raised the alarm when he saw Azeez ‘the butcher’ at work. Unfortunately there were gaps in newspaper stories of the incident as I suspect they were written from police report affirming what a senior colleague of mine calls “’the anonymity of death”, a peculiar way of reporting deaths in Nigerian media without details of the person or persons who died. At a level, it shows how humane journalists are or how denatured we are to the loss of lives in our society. One wonders the kind of house or neighbourhood the Hassans live that they could not ask an older person to watch over him while they go to hospital. Do they live alone in their own house or a rented apartment where there are other neighbours? Azeez confessed that he knew the boy and usually played with him confirming that folks who are familiar with children and their parents are usually those who tend to harm the children.

Organ trade as part of illegal organ trafficking could also be a factor in this crime. This goes on in many countries of the world and Nigeria is not an exception especially with our porous borders. Another possibility is ritual killing despite our religiosity and propensity for excesses in matters religious. We have an increasing number of worship places being built daily yet we are ungodly. With our perpetual economic downturn, rituals offer many a supposed quick route to riches and wealth.

The holiday season is here and parents must keep extra vigilance on knowing the whereabouts of their children. As you read this, do you know where your children are? Some children are attending so-called summer schools or holiday schools that the parents do not know their location just as some are left at the mercy of house helps or nannies with the parents not checking on them at all. Let’s pay more attention to our children and even those of our neighbours, observe any strange movement and raise alarm if you suspect something untoward. My condolences to the Hassan family and it is my hope that they would get justice as the police prosecute this matter.