How unhealthy narratives hurt the Nigerian girl child

While women are shattering glass ceilings everywhere and others are exercising their freedoms of choice, they are not representing the majority of girls across the world who will never have such opportunities in their lifetimes

The reasons are far fetched and rarely zero on to our hypocrisy and our lack of will to change the status quo. When global conversations are started about the plight of the girl child in Nigeria, it is the Leah Shuaibus- the famous ones- that get all the attention.

An unimaginable number of millions of dollars have been spent of workshops deliberating on the fate of the girl child. While the deliberators sip coffee in the air conditioned seminar rooms, another 12 year old is given away in marriage with no one to fight for her. 

She is being spoken of because she fits into a certain narrative- of the Northern Moslem child of illiterate parents who has not, in her entire life, seen no woman who is not covered up and silent; subservient and submissive.

She knows no other way to be: no one has told her. No one has shown her. She is groomed, from the day she is born, for the propagation of the species for the advancement of male agendas. She exists for no other function than to procreate and give pleasure while getting none herself. This narrative is too narrow, too shallow and therefore part of the problem. In a twist of irony, it is so exclusive, it fails to include the army of hurting and needy girls across the country in various strata of society and various circumstances.

Three weeks ago, CNN once more outraged the world by exposing a trafficking route around The Bois de Vincennes, a sprawling park on the outskirts of eastern Paris. As expected, Nigerian women constituted a healthy part of the commercial sex work community there, trafficked as girls at a time when they ought to have been getting an education and acquiring lifelong skills.

Back home, they are labeled “greedy” and “stupid” as it was revealed they had paid hundreds of thousands- sometimes up to a million naira to their traffickers, whom we prefer to regard more as businessmen than as the villains that they are.

Perhaps the most insidious violation against the girl child in Nigeria is our reluctance to address the age of marriage as well as the age of paid labour. A majority of middle to high income families across the country engage underage girls in domestic labour as ‘house helps’. Many of these girls are never paid directly and suffer various forms of humiliation and abuse. 

If you are taking part in the conversations around the plight of the girl child, do not look to the 12 year old bride in Zamfara or the teenager from Edo pushed by circumstances to sell her body in Europe. Look, rather, at the young house-help in your own backyard