INVASION OF DARKNESS: Deaf Community Captured, by Kenneth Yali Diouf

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Kenneth Yali Diouf (HOH) - One of Nigeria's Deaf community\s writers: The voice for the Deaf in Nigeria.

I dedicate this book to all the victims of inept leadership, oppression, injustice, misrepresentation and of one abuse or the other within the in-country Deaf community.

It is high time we set about to look at the Deaf community in a way we have never done before and come to terms with the reality of our unwillingness to tackle the problems of disunity and ineptitude in leadership there. It is well known to everyone of us – all Deaf persons – that it is because of unaddressed problems that built up over the years that this community is unable to provide suitable leadership to the elements that make it up.

Disunity and deficiency in accountability are two major subjects, just among others, that beleaguer this community. One problem was allowed to grow and mature to bring in a set of hitches until this community got to a point where it does not know where to begin to work with a view to tackling deep-rooted age-old evils. This stalemate helped to spawn the comedy of desiring to run for positions in associations with no resolute intentions to leave a lasting legacy and impact on the community. Leaders rise, come and go, with nothing for us to see them as champions of the cause of the Deaf.

Perennial stagnation, underdevelopment, obscurity, soulless leadership, meetings without compass, exertions without definite objectives, elections and appointments without tangible achievements – these are some of funny traits of the Deaf community here.

To the above, let us add the barefaced neglect of the need to seek justice for the downtrodden and maltreated Deaf people. The non-existence of mutual unity and corporate disinterestedness in steering the Deaf community ship to safe havens make this community pass for a valley of dry bones. There is nowhere across the land, among the Deaf, where you do not sense the palpitations of discontent that follow Deaf people’s expression of what they feel is the non-materialisation of their expectations. They have become used to the disagreeable routine of seeing leaders in, leaders out – a routine that leaves no long-term legacy for others coming after to emulate in order to make the Deaf community appear worth its salt.

I have seen countless Deaf youths chasing academic credentials in colleges and universities. Most do this because they want higher income after securing a job in their respective home states or anywhere fate deems it right to favour them with employment. However, these people would tell you that unless the Deaf community is truly well led, all this pursuit will not yield them the maximum satisfaction they are aspiring after. For they realise that if there is no corporate unity that brings in the anticipated fruit to spur them on, they are not going to attain the projected height of success on an individual basis; they sense that there must exist a body – exclusively Deaf people’s own – on which they can count to help them march toward sure full success – a body to which they themselves are accountable. But as it is now, there is no such body; and so, those that are struggling to attain heights alone and/or with their organisations in one way or another are not accountable to anybody, and they do not wish to be disturbed with issues bordering on accountability….

Invasion of Darkness: Deaf Community Captured is the product of a careful searching and shrewd peep at our community of Deaf people and the many deliberate deficiencies and mischief there that do not allow for innovative transformation of this community that has long been beleaguered and penetrated by dark forces holding it to ransom. These dark forces have vowed never to let go in their determination to ensure that this community does not become relevant to the teeming populace of Deaf youths; they do not want it to fulfil the purpose for its existence. These forces know that there is within the Deaf community the education, intelligence and ability that can make it a multipurpose powerhouse of pride for the nation. So they are using the foolishness and the ulterior motives of those at the reins of leadership at both the national and state levels to tighten their grip on the community. This is why nothing goes well there as far as corporate achievements are concerned.

The book is in five chapters. For special emphasis, I made repetitions here and there. The last chapter is solely about our educated or privileged Deaf ladies who really can make an outstanding difference and lead us out of the terrible logjam into which crazy-headed male leadership has led us. But it appears the potentials of these ladies are caged or restricted on account of social prejudices, fear or plain lack of interest in concerning themselves specifically with crises confronting the ordinary Nigerian Deaf girl.

I have not written to spite anybody. But if anyone feels insulted, targeted for spite, or notices a reference to his or her person in these pages, I have no apology to tender him or her because I am not out to attack any perceived enemy. I have made it my principal aim to objectively expose things as I have read, seen and heard of them – things that are not germane to the wellbeing of the life of the Deaf community.

Some who are not very acquainted or familiar with serious issues on ground in the Deaf community may be inclined to conclude that I am too judgmental and merciless in my denunciation of some stupid evils so prevalent in the community of the hearing-impaired. I would advise such to set aside whatever subjective stand they take with regards to what they read here, and endeavour to see things in an objective way. If they so do, they will have an experience of the mood that came over me at the sight of depressing situations common in this community.

I hope this write-up successfully presents another part of the picture of the Deaf community here. I then do pray that God gives you the understanding and willingness to take action in your respective locality on behalf of those Deaf you see around you and who are badly in need of one help or another.

Sodom and Gomorrah, despite the prevalence of their excess carnal passions, homosexuality and excess addiction to iniquity, did not offend Nature in this regard. At best, these entities had time to go to sleep, and had time enough to spare for preparation to counter war coming to their territories from Tidal the king of nations in the Bible. And to war they went. ...

But, most certainly, it was the Gibeonites who transgressed against Nature to a degree that would certainly have offended the perverted sensibilities of Sodom and Gomorrah. And that was when they decided to have sex vigil. Their trip into an all-night sex orgy began with the commission of adultery by one woman. This in turn threw open doors to homosexual inclination, gang rape and murder. The swell of this incredible fourfold scandal gave them a turbulent dive into a civil war of costly dimensions.

(Let this be a glaring warning to nations, individuals, and even educational institutions and Churches and dignitaries whose “constitution is sex”, and who encourage sexual perversions to overthrow age-old moral values that used to give us safer and better societies and communities.)

In one of the rare recesses of the Bible, at a time when people ought to form mutual unification in order to guarantee political stability and social security and cohesion, one Ishbosheth was preoccupied with sex, over which he had lost sleep. He was obsessed with the very thing that had caused the undoing of Sodom, Gomorrah – and the Gibeonites lately, among others.

When poor Ishbosheth saw Abner the politician and military leader in his late father’s regime, he at once accused him of having had illicit sexual affairs with his father’s concubine. The accusation had sprung out of a mixture of suspicion and obsession. The first instance had no grounds upon which it was based; but it must have come about on the premises of some misunderstood movement and mutual interaction with the concubine in question.

As regards the obsession that gave birth to suspicion, no one really could tell why Ishbosheth should be so engaged, or why, under the present political fiery chaos, this mean Ishbosheth should unbridle his tongue to allege sexual indiscipline against a great man like Abner.

But we are in a world - this world - in which male and female human beings alike think their lives are not worth living sometimes unless they sell themselves off to become stooges and puppets in the very hands of the spirit of sex addiction and obsession - an obsession that is tearing through the very core of the essence of our physical existence.

Abner didn’t take it easy. The smear of defamation irked him, made him angry and ill-motivated him to aggravate the present political situation in disfavour of the house of late Saul, the father of Ishbosheth. He went ahead and did just as he threatened, Heaven not restraining or forbidding him.

Out of the anger-motivated sudden shift in political direction, there emerged order, though, but only after it had cost the life of Abner at the hands of one revengeful General Joab. It is dramatically ironic that while Abner was out to spite Ishbosheth in a vengeful spirit, he met with his own death through an unforgiving Joab whose brother Abner had earlier killed. If it had not been for the misconduct alleged against Abner, things would have quite been remarkably different for this man as well as for his accuser and the whole nation.

Abner, as a General, had told Ishbosheth that he was going to take a different course of action in order to usher in a perhaps-more-conducive political atmosphere. During his public political campaign, General Abner held his bottled-up grievance close to his heart, concealing it from public hearing and consciousness, but known only to himself, the accuser and the woman at the centre of the impending dark political clouds and storm.

Nevertheless, the unfolding social and political atmosphere became less and less foreboding and tense, and quiet unexpectedly came to sit over the land. It saw one David (an ex-shepherd boy) established over the land as king. This coronation, with strange systematic manoeuvres, ironed out the political cholera, but some little more blood must flow out of the foundation of obsession with sex before people could look forward to a more prosperous future.

When Abner was listed dead, the man that had accused him of sexual indiscipline became weak, fearful, plagued with anxiety; it was not only him who was so upset. But the people that threw their weight behind Saul were also caught in a fearsome uncertainty. Why, the son of their late prince Saul had prized obsession with sex above the loyalty and allegiance of strong and great men like Abner that were for him and who could guarantee his security, greatness and unlimited success under the sun. Over General Abner’s grave rang a strident and heart-piercing lamentation by someone who knew General Abner’s worth, “Died Abner as a fool dies?” – Perhaps he died as a fool, or did he?

But such are the terrific woes and rivers of blood and grievous untimely graves and perdition that are thrust out of the womb of obsession with sex. Too soon, too soon Ishbosheth’s blood flowed also as if to crown or decorate that spirit of scandalous obsession that squeezed life out of Abner too soon. Where Ishbosheth had sent Abner too soon, there he too went too soon: two of his men conspired against him and assassinated him one mid-day in his bedroom when he was taking a soothing siesta, a therapeutic nap, a constructive rest that would put his scattered wits together and enable him to find a replacement for late Abner.

His assassins beheaded him and took his sleeping head as a prize and took it to the ex-shepherd boy now turned king, who also had them slain and hanged -their hands and feet cut off for taking the life of a righteous man.

Does the epithet “righteous” affixed to Ishbosheth after his assassination really hold true or accurate, seeing it was his obsession with sex that gave us Abner’s grave in Hebron, two corpses hanging over the pool in Hebron, and that dug his own grave too soon?

So much sorrow and pain; endless oceans of tears and blood; high palpable anxiety and deathly worry, and thorough loss of character and reputation in all the nooks and crannies of this world have been induced by man’s obsession with sex. The best of interpersonal and communal relationships have turned out to be mere mirages - without value any more - because the ugly stain of sexual obsession has left on them a spot that cannot be erased. The grim mills of this obsession never cease to chug, and the chugging fills our ears everywhere, even in places that are regarded as the finest custodians of morality and superb integrity. Everywhere is shaken; everything is affected - earthquake everywhere.

As people react differently to a situation of a slight bruise of that unnatural obsession that is not even found in the history of Sodom and Gomorrah, we see the world draw to an apocalyptic end prematurely. For, as people react differently, the situation escalates and involves more and more victims and accomplices. Some know why they are victims, others do not know; some know why they are aiding accomplices or conspirators; others do know nothing – but they must be doing something lest Nature chide them because they are idle. They must work whether what they are doing is sound or not.

Sex, which has begun the chaos, creates other causes of trouble, and so on. You would hear people say that this or that thing is the basic cause of their problem, but, in reality, they have not caught the true remote cause of their misfortune. Or where they seem to know what the reason is, they subtly conceal it, deny it, or unconsciously overlook it. This is why some crises – local and international as well as generational – defy and baffle all solution. For instance, in some places where there are civil wars, rebels and warlords and their friends exchange women, wives, or intermarry, and the war strangely, incomprehensibly and wonderfully rages on. Friends fall apart. Ethnic groups clash. Assassins are let loose like wild dogs. Churches’ integrity hit rock bottom. Our political landscape that sends out a sweet smell (like a wheat field) because it never lacks the dew of righteousness and justice now releases a sour and choking odour. Families break and the children become victims of multiple woes, vices and curses, their personalities fragmented and ragged. Economic progress stagnates as more and more of the manpower of lands is digested in the stomach and intestines of the sex obsession ogre.

Morality and integrity, as marrows for the soul, have become the enemies of some educational institutions. These virtues are feared like malaria and arouse the fiendish jealousy of human depravity that thrives on cunning deceit and smart iniquity. Parents have daughters reporting to them cases of sexual defilement, harassment and abuse by school operators, teachers and principals – who are desperately thirsty for virgins whom they believe do not harbour deadly viruses in their blood stream. So the monumental and fierce lust of these crooks in administration and the education sector has made them lose sleep over these damsels. They have defiled very many. They have vexed many to death. They have made damsels drop their education. Some teachers with integrity in these schools have no choice but to engage in indiscriminate resignation or search for transfer to another school. One student observed that “our Director is the root of the problems of his teachers and students.” And parents engage in an endless search for better schools through endless trips around their geographical location or around the country. When they find one school that they believe would not harm their daughters sexually, they sigh and thank Heaven. But…but, alas! – They are mistaken. Not quite too late, they would discover that they have only met with more darkness – a more subtle darkness full of cunning that promises no spark of glimpses of reassurance. The ugly vice they have been trying to run away from is there once again before them like a stubborn demonic apparition.

The path of many Nigerian Deaf girls is strewn with banana skins, okra, grease and groundnut oil. She must walk over these to slip and skip while in her search for her destiny, which, sadly, is not usually easily attained. Men fabricate the slippery items and throw them in her path – and soon she is taken: an early mother, an untimely mother; sexually molested; raped, defiled; an abandoned single mother; distraught by distress; under one roof as a wife with the wrong man the rest of her life. What of her destiny? It is missed – never to be gotten, forever lost. Living in poverty and deprivation, her obscurity is not to be preferred to that of the Stone-Age man. She comes under a siege, captured by dark forces.

The education of most female Deaf children is truncated neither by poor enrolment of the female gender nor by the poverty of her parents nor by the girls’ lack of interest in education nor by parental poor view of education. But it is obviously hindered by the vicious malady of obsession with sex in the very citadels of learning. What an outrageous calamity! Obsession with sex will melt civilisation soon. “A critical assessment,” according to Confidence Wonukwube, “reveals that schools have become snares to the moral and chaste lives of young boys and girls in recent times.”

“Are wild animals really wild?” asks Andy Russell, the Canadian guide for big-game hunters in the Canadian Rockies. “I have learnt what I would never have believed before – that so-called wild animals are not really wild at all. Usually they do flee the presence of man, but only because they have learnt from bitter experience that he is the most dangerous creature they encounter. Offered friendly treatment and respect, they will respond in a most extraordinary manner.”

The terminology “wild” does not really so naturally apply to those animals that are fierce, uncivilised, dangerous and brutish because there is some wildness in man that does not exist among wild animals. Man calls them wild because they live in the wild – the natural habitat given them by God. In that wild you find a vast ocean of qualities of character in animals – discipline, co-operation, care for one’s neighbour, mutual agreement, all of which are qualities that do not easily grow or get painlessly cultivated in man. Animals may be called wild, but they are not growing wilder by the day like man who has been in the routine of taking wild leave of his sense and call himself educated, important and civilised.

Abundant obsession with sex stages man to get caught “making love” to female corpses in some of mortuaries in the name of some strange religious rituals. Or the private parts of these lifeless bodies are removed. Kidnapped and murdered girls and young men, too, undergo the same grim fate in the name of black magic, cultism, witchcraft and necromancy.

Wild animals never do that. Wild animals never kidnap their own kind, nor do they subject the corpses of their own kind to indescribable indignity.

Are animals wild? They may be wild, but not in the sense we think they are. Animals know there are dignity and nobility in their world or kingdom, and they never sell off or depreciate those qualities. In their domain, they do not go from bad to worse.

Quite naturally there are terrors and tyrannies in the animal world, but do they compare with the enormous size of the tyrannies, terrors, oppression and wickedness that human society harbours despite its refined state of civilisation? A canopy of orderliness, adherence to the laws of Nature inscribed in their instincts, and mutual regard lends credit to the fact that some, if not all, sectors of the animal world do indeed have volumes of lessons for humans to learn and stop making this earth too hard to live in….

If human corpses are not spared indignity by way of abuse and criminal mutilation, one need not deceive themselves that those with disability are not likely attractive preys while full breath is in them. It is tragic to be deaf and speech-impaired. But then, when you are kidnapped as a deaf-and-dumb person, then you have been caught in a turbulent whirlwind that promises no retrieval of your person. Nobody is sure when there shall be reclamation of your person, and nobody could give you a firm promise that your person will be retrieved - mutilated or sound and safe – unless God resolves that you must be delivered at a most propitious time, alive and unhurt.

KIDNAPPED 17-YEAR-OLD DEAF-AND-DUMB GIRL BOUNCES BACK FROM THE WOODS WITH A BOUNCING BABY BOY:

Angelina with her baby narrates her ordeal. There are many deaf girls like here in Nigeria and Africa in general who have been forced into involuntary single motherhood.

“Angelina Boton, 17, deaf and dumb, declared missing three years ago, has resurfaced with a bouncing baby boy. Boton’s return was dramatic. An unidentified woman saw her picture and tipped her parents that she had seen her in Iwaya in Mainland Local Government Area of Lagos State.

“Leon Boton, the father, quickly dashed to the place and found Angelina squatting on the floor of Paul Mesa, the 45-year-old father of her son in his one-room apartment. Mesa is now under the police net. When Newswatch accosted him at the Panti Police Station, July 16, he was full of remorse but blamed Satan for his harbouring and making Angela pregnant without her parents’ knowledge. He said he was ready to marry Angelina if her parents agreed.

“Angelina, who spoke to Newswatch in a sign language and interpreted by Taye, her mother, was not happy with Mesa. She lamented the inhuman treatment Paul meted out to her. She told Newswatch that Paul used to beat her at will, starved and compelled her to sleep on the bare floor with her son. With a forceful gesture, she vowed never to go back to Mesa’s house.

“Angelina has every reason to object to Paul’s marriage proposal. He has four wives and many children, thereby finding it extremely difficult to fend for them. Newswatch learnt that this has made him be brutal and difficult to relate with. Angelina recounted an instance he hit one of the wives too hard with iron that dislodged her tooth.

“Questionably, Angelina could not remember anything that happened from the time she left home at Agidingbi, Ikeja, in the company of three unidentified men. She, however, said she found herself in Iwaya with three young ladies said to be smoking Indian Hemp who forcefully pulled her to join them to only God knows where. A woman simply identified as Abraham Mesa’s wife, Paul’s younger brother, confronted the ladies and took Angelina home. The deaf-and-dumb teenager became a househelp to Abraham’s wife until Paul made her pregnant. Neither Paul nor Abraham bothered to locate Angelina’s parents but smartly changed her name to Moni. Angelina said they threatened to kill her if she dared running away.

“When Newswatch asked why he did not look for the girl’s parents, Abraham, shaking and fumbling with words, said he ‘tried but could not get Angelina’s parents. I made up my mind to take good care of her, praying that her parents might surface one day’. But Angelina refuted the claim, saying they enslaved and treated her like a leper, fearing she might be a ghost.

“When Leon found his lost daughter, July 15, he was overjoyed with praise to God who preserved his daughter all these three years. ‘I never had rest of mind. I spent all my money going from one babalawo to another, spiritual churches, and even police stations to locate my daughter. You know, I love her so much, being my first child.’ Leon vehemently opposed the idea of giving out Angelina in marriage to Paul. He said the condition he saw his daughter in is not the type that would warrant his marrying her off to Paul. Leon believes Paul has no conscience even to ask for such a ridiculous marriage. ‘Just look at it, how old is he? Mind you, my daughter is just 17 years,’ he told Newswatch.

“Whether police would bring Paul to book is still uncertain. When Newswatch demanded to speak with the police officer, Songalu, said to have detained Paul on July 15, she angrily refused on the grounds that she did not tell Leon to go to the press. She, however, took Newswatch reporter to the officer-in-charge of D-6 who said the matter could only be treated if they get directive from command Headquarters, Ikeja.

“For Anthony Ofoegbu, Angelina’s return home is a cause for celebration. Ofoegbu has been in the police net since Angelina’s disappearance. He was her boyfriend and alleged to have been the last person seen with her shortly before she ran away. Taye, her mother, said they had every reason to suspect Ofoegbu because they had warned him at various times to leave Angelina alone to no avail.”²

If our world has not lost sleep and sanity over sex, one should wonder what makes a man marry four wives and still have the callous impudence to grab and impregnate a teenage girl not married to him, one who had no natural use of her ears nor her tongue – a fully helpless damsel. Sodom and Gomorrah would hesitate to touch her despite their tremendous perversions.

If that was not the case, why should not such a fellow as Paul Mesa give attention to his squalid one-room apartment that houses him, his many children and troops of wives? But a man’s obsession with sex will not allow him to look inward for self-discovery and self-discipline and implore God to grant him grace for self-mastery. One obsessed with the wrong thing must sniff the air for mischief and rush where angels fear to tread, and so bring trouble on himself. In our society, it is now a cultural norm and cherished fashion to blame the Devil (Satan) for all our sins of commission and omission. People are not willing to own up or accept responsibility for their wilful compliance with Satan in the commission of a dirty crime. Perhaps people accuse Satan because he is a remote entity who does not verbally complain when lied against, and who cannot be arrested by the law and thrown into prison. On the basis of this hopeless hypothesis, men wish to be acquitted.

Paul Mesa impregnated the kidnapped Angelina. There are endless thousands of irresponsible adults like him who completely ruin Deaf girls' future. They see these Deaf girls as mere objects for their sexual gratification. Deaf victims in the Third World never get justice for harm done them.

Some years ago when we were in residential school, one male deaf student seduced a deaf female student and put her in the family way in a brothel. Our colleague brazenly pointed his finger at Satan, whom he had never yet seen with his physical eyes, and said it was Satan who commanded him to impregnate the poor damsel. The guy and his girl were expelled from the school, but no verdict was handed over to the Devil who gave the command for the commission of that abomination.

Granted, Satan made you commit the wrong; but it is not Satan who be would chased, declared wanted, arrested, hand-cuffed and thrown into a police cell to cool his heel and look forward to trial and sentence. Satan would still be free, roaming the earth; but you will languish in jail. It is not Satan who would bear the wrath of an offended parent whose daughter you have ruined. And when the offended parent decides to go and consult a witch-doctor or sorcerer to cast a violent spell on you to make you mad, or kill, it is not Satan, who will bear the full brunt of those potent spells from Hell. The principal malicious intent of that foul fiend for “making me do evil” is to ruin your life and get you to hell.

Paul Mesa must needs be hanged on the gallows, skinned and flogged with cowskin whips dipped in peppery water for the recovery of his senses and the deliverance of his mind from the obsession with the virginity and body of a teenage deaf girl.

The journalist who reported Angelina Boton’s case wondered, “Whether the police would bring Paul to book is still uncertain. When Newswatch demanded to speak with the police officer, she angrily refused on the grounds that she did not tell Leon to go to the press.”

What could one make of this reaction from a police officer in the face of so delicate a case in which Nature would require that justice be done on behalf of the victim? Truth is that this reaction is sheer stupidity. Going to the press is not an excuse why justice should not be done. The press is a constituted authority just like the police force. That police officer certainly had an ulterior motive for complaining about Leon going to the press.

Since the grand liberation of Miss Angela Boton from the cell of the underworld bunkers of sex obsession, we have not heard from either the electronic or print media that a court appearance was staged to deal with the man Paul Mesa. If the matter had been brought before a magistrate court or a federal judge, it would have become a hot national item arresting the attention of the entire hearing-impaired community in particular. Then the pace would have been set for more dormant similar cases requiring the attention of our justice system to be brought before judges. But certainly the Miss Angela Boton case had not knocked at the door of a lawyer’s office or at the gate of any of our courts with a petition….

The disabled community has not always enjoyed the services of our justice system; or as far as the community of those with disability is concerned, the justice system of the federation lacks ubiquity; its tentacles are not felt enough in the community of the Deaf.

Here you could kidnap, rape, abuse and even kill a deaf lady or person and never go to jail for these horrific crimes. You could loot funds belonging to their organisations, even as an executive of a State or National Association of the Deaf and still go free. You could sexually harass or sleep with one of your female students even as an educationist and still never be charged to court.

For any of these evils you could be arrested by the police and kept in a police just to cool your heels, be made to pay some fees to the police and those you have wronged. A few days later, you are released from police custody despite the enormity of your transgression against the peace and wellbeing of the Deaf. This is because the police would have collected bribes, or “exercised compassion” on your behalf, that resulted in your immediate release.

You can see why there are a lot of unresolved evils in the Deaf community in this country. I have seen bloody violence there; I have heard of substantiated murders; I have seen and/or heard of extortion, plain cheating and robbery in that community committed more by the Deaf against the Deaf than by the hearing world against them. Their leaders have raped and spoilt their own girls – some to the point of being clinically certified dead. They have stolen girls and exposed them to the grim realities of this cruel mad world and broken their education and destiny for ever under the sun. Deaf leaders have looted poor Deaf people’s organisations’ treasuries or coffers and impoverished them irredeemably, thus creating circumstances that threw majority of Deaf girls into prostitution and the begging industry.

Other self-appointed leaders would just spring up from nowhere and come claiming that God had spoken to them and given them a vision to “save the Deaf sacrificially.” And the poor, unenlightened, unobservant and unwary Deaf would celebrate the emergence of this “divine leadership”. However, these self-appointed messiahs would more mislead their girls than educate them; and the male youths they would drill in violence, rebellion and indiscipline, even purposelessness through their funny style of leadership that lacks accountability and is full of the spirit of profiteering

One method used by certain Deaf leaders to mislead their ladies is to seduce them (even if they are students) to bed - to fornicate, commit adultery, etc. Another method is to do them good, show them great kindness and even promise them scholarships but with a strong string attached. At the most opportune time, this string would be pulled to bring back to the investor all the “sacrificial” investment made. That is to say, the lady beneficiary must give these messiahs sex, or simply have just a wonderful time in bed together. Where the lady would not yield, she would in the long run still pay a hard price for her “disobedience”. Threats would be pronounced in her hearing for her to reconsider her Spartan determination to flout the gratification of the investor’s dirty wishes.

Happenings of this nature project before us a Deaf community really in a dangerous situation, incapable of self-development, harmony, mutual co-operation and unity. Where layers of bloodshed, injustice, oppression, corruption, kidnappings of deaf girls and abuse are abundant, left unaddressed or unresolved (especially if mostly perpetrated by the Deaf themselves), no development or freedom should be expected there. A wilderness is what shall be the immediate outcome. Our Deaf community is a barren wilderness. Many grievous cases that should have been taken beyond police stations to court houses have never been there. These cases have been left to become dormant unduly. It is now these cases that have become curses that retard or rather prevent significant development in the Deaf community here.

These arrested cripples are hard drug dealers. They are very dangerous strong magnets that attract abused, discouraged, depressed, oppressed and confused Deaf youths in search in search of hope, consolation and relief.

It is not the likes of Paul Mesa alone that have become a snare to the hearing-impaired. The Deaf themselves have become a snare to themselves. We have seen and been told about situations where deaf youths get arrested and thrown into police cells for breaking the law. Then their parents come and push bribes into the hands of law enforcement agents to secure the release of these offenders when they should have left them to languish in cells, kept in prison and then charged to court to face merciless trial that will melt their steel hearts, reform them and bring humaneness out of them.

These youths, bought back with bribes and perverted sympathy and love and taken home, do not repent; they would foment new troubles mostly for fellow Deaf youths, including turning against their own parents, whom they would almost kill. And a foolish mom or dad would still try to convince you that they love this child they “rescue” with bribes. If you love your daughter or your son when they exhibit criminal behaviour, let them be prosecuted to the fullest degree possible; let them be hanged or made to face a firing squad. When you let that be, then you love that child. Securing his release with bribes is an unkind expression of hatred the human heart could show to an offspring.

“A new Transparency International report titled The Global Corruption Barometre said, ‘More than half of the respondents in Africa in the past 12 months paid a bribe.’ The report showed that bribes were commonly paid around the world to the police, and were substantially more frequent than to other services. It added that this result presents enormous concern regarding corruption in process of law enforcement, as the sector identified as the third most common recipient of bribes is the legal system and judiciary…. According to the report, bribery in poor and transitional countries represents a major impediment that holds back human development and economic growth. It added that the poorest in society are least able to afford to pay bribes and often must go without basic services as a result.”³

Bribe-giving and bribe collection have made our world a more dangerous place to a degree never intended by Satan himself. Consequently, it has become very difficult to combat the bloody begging industry that conscripts Deaf girls into a life of uselessness, infamy and physical peril. Many have been murdered, directly or indirectly, in the mills of this industry. It is the life and the blood of innocent Deaf girls that are the fuel with which this wicked industry runs. Where the blood of these girls is thought to be insufficient to keep the industry going more vigorously, the illegimate pregnancies these girls incur while “on duty” are aborted. So even the blood of unborn babies in the wombs of unwed Deaf girls is used to service the industry.

The founders, managers, general managers and directors of the industry are found right within the rank and file of the Deaf community – in schools, in churches, in state associations of the Deaf, anywhere.In the Nigerian Deaf community, we are not right and shall never be right until and unless…

The Nigeria National Association of the Deaf is in and out of meetings annually. Deliberations reached in meetings, however, never make a difference in the lives of the Deaf either regionally or nationally. These conveners of meetings and programs are like our national and international leaders that “drink Russia’s Vodka and toast to a free one-world circus,” while their inefficiency in leadership paves the way for desolation, devastation, the cry of the helpless and oppressed that fill the streets of cities, towns and even villages across the world through war, injustice, greed, despotism, nepotism….

In the Nigerian Deaf community, we are not right and shall never be right unless and until we wake up to realise that nobody owes us anything. For we have fooled and deceived ourselves into believing that our governments – federal and state – owe us money; if it is not money, it is this or that. We blame government and politicians, and not ourselves, for the many problems we have that hold us in perpetual backwardness and permanent obscurity. We do not realise that we have been captured by the darkness of our own carelessness. We are waiting for government to come around and do this or that for us, give us promises that will put foolish smiles on our faces to deepen our self-deception while we refuse to accept the fact that we owe our governments monumental debts we shall never be able to settle. We need to learn and know that it is not a matter of government giving, giving and giving us all the time; but it is our business to understand that we must do something for the government to help it govern the country. Every individual under a government is a governor under training in that government.

President Barack Hussein Obama, in his inaugural speech as the 44^th and first Black American president, admitted “we know that government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenge we face. I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation….” Do you get the message? Do you see that he was not encouraging dependency – not appealing even to the poorest American, Black or While citizen, to line up for a handout. No, no, but he meant that the people should come forth with their creativity and talents and pool them with those of the government to remake their country.

The Nigerian Deaf community needs a “remake” – it needs to remake or rebuild because it had, over the years, been marred by sick vision, incompetence spawned, nursed and cherished by self-seeking and self-interest decorated with graceless daring declaration that “this is service to our people!” But the psychological and moral damages caused by this so-called “service” or sacrifice are clear even for a year-old baby to note and lament.

In the Nigerian Deaf community, we do not produce; we consume a lot; we want to get more than give; we know our problems, we know our responsibilities for the betterment of the Deaf community, but we are not active, frankly speaking. We talk a lot for nothing, sit in meetings for nothing, and then rise from convened meetings for nothing. Stupidity and talkativeness and inactivity give birth to non-availability of redemptive creativity and initiative. “People want to look to men to save them, to be their messiah… [We are] turning to… governments for change and hope… There are players…now lining up for a handout…. A culture of dependency… Everyone is calling out to our central government to give them money…. The first step to ending the culture of dependency is to tell [these leaders] they need to start taking responsibility for their actions by dealing with the consequences they have created for themselves.”⁴

“Members of the Rivers State Association of the Deaf have raised alarm over what they christen ‘marginalisation’ and neglect by the state government.

“Speaking to The Tide on Thursday, the chairman of the body, Comrade Tamunoibi Chamberlain, who led the delegation of three to The Tide in Port Harcourt, said the alleged marginalisation and neglect is a result of the government’s ‘non-chalant attitude towards their plight.’

“According to the chairman, several attempts have been made ‘to get to the state government to tell them our problems so that they can help us, but nothing has come out of it.

“The crux of their plight, according to the chairman, is that no opportunity is given them to prove themselves for suitable employment, even after the body officially registered with the Ministry of Social Development, Youths and Sports in 1994, a year after its formation.

“Comrade Chamberlain noted that the body had over 400 members, out of which only five members are employed by the State Government at the School for the Deaf.

“He explained over 200 of the members have completed their secondary education, ten of them have National Diplomas and National Certificates of Education(NCE), while only one is a First-Degree holder in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka(UNN).

“The body also has ‘over 35 members who are skilled in various fields that could earn them employment if given the opportunity,’ he said.

“Chamberlain continued that ‘because of the neglect, some of our members are compelled to go into such areas as street begging and prostitution to earn a living. We are not begging them (government) to come and give us money. All we want is for government to give us the opportunity for us to have access to necessary education and job opportunities so we would not always be seen as beggars,’ he said.

“On his part, General Secretary of the body, Akim Adegoke, called on the government to look into the plight of the handicapped in Creek Road, saying that the school needs facilities and competent teachers to function effectively.

“‘All this adds up to the neglect because even our education is given less attention,’ he said.

“They thus urged the State Government to ‘please come to our aid including us in the scheme of things so we can have a sense of belonging. I promise the government that if they can give us necessary opportunities, among other things, we can even help to rid the streets of fake beggars.’

“Also present in the delegation was Mr Opuene Yellowe, the vice-chairman of the body.”⁵

We should not always wait for the government to give us opportunities before we can put our hands and minds to work. Ninety-five percent of the problems the Deaf face can be solved by the Deaf themselves through initiative, diligent honest self-sacrifice, self-employment and cooperation among themselves. The reason you have been allowed to register with a ministry is so that you can become a miniature government within the state government. The people who began to build the Towel of Babel in the ancient world did not allege that anybody was neglecting them. They simply said: “Go to, let us build us a city and a tower…” i.e. Let us initiate; let us cooperate; let us sow true seeds of self-sacrifice; let us put our ideas together… No wonder God said that now nothing which they had imagined to do would be impossible for them to achieve!

We have a registered organisation, or an umbrella organisation, with a constitution, but we have allowed the emergence and growth of the begging industry in our midst. There is nowhere in this country where its presence and dangerous influence are not felt and even feared. It is not a registered industry and it has no constitution, but it is more powerful and aggressive in its initiative and drive than the registered National Association of the Deaf. Despite being a ragtag industry, it has yet within it a style of order that helps it achieve its goals. It is estimated that this grim lawless industry run by Deaf men and women costs the economy millions of Naira annually. Deaf beggars are not producers; they do not aid the economy. They suck up from it irresponsibly. To this suck-up, let us add the many barrels of tears forced from the eyes of parents whose daughters they have stolen, ruined and even killed.

Our Deaf associations always write letters to government to give them money to execute programs, hold meetings, etc. But they do not present to the government at the same time works of art like literature (prose, magazine, and journals), sculpture, Deaf cultural dance and Deaf music on video CD, etc. produced by members of their associations. There is scarcely anything to present as proof that we have been developing our respective Deaf communities, and there is no development to see anywhere. And once the money is given to us by the government, it disappears. Members of our associations do not receive micro-credits to set up businesses; students do not receive scholarships; widowed Deaf women do not get anything for themselves and their orphaned children; some of our beggars are now tired of their unrighteous begging ventures. They are sincere about casting off them the garment of unjustifiable begging. They wish to get micro-credits and loans from any of the many registered associations of the Deaf. But they would tell you that they believe it is the craziest illusion and funniest self-deception to think of going to ask these bodies for loans to help them kick off on a new legitimate business venture. Their arguments, comments and assessments of these registered bodies are very worrisome. They allege that these bodies are only usually fond of boasting of or showing off Registration Certificates and Certificates of Attendance gotten at some national programs. These beggars know there is nothing in these bodies. The guys would inform you that there are occasions when noisy squabbles and backstabbing burst out among executives and members alike over these documents, official files, and position. Oh, what a shame! Where would attempts to steal and fight over certificates take us? Are we under the influence of the deceptive belief that beautifully signed and stamped certificates would bring automatic and magical development to our community? Why are we obsessed with certificates of our organisations at the expense of responsible, authentic, committed and active leadership?

We must be alert! I am afraid this blindness is leading us to the “valley of Siddim [that] was full of tar pits” toward which the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah and their associates fled during war and some of them fell into these pits, clamped under indescribable darkness. What will soon become ubiquitous news is that within the rank and file of our associations there is trouble over money – money shared among the leadership at the expense of the membership. Why? Are we now under the delusion we cannot breathe without fighting to grab money?

From the hierarchy of the Nigeria National Association of the Deaf, far-fetched pronouncements issue forth to show us that they really know their job and we are impressed to believe that they are bent on achieving their goals, or statements. We are told that the vision of the body is the “empowerment of Deaf Nigerians to functions in all facets of life.” The announcement goes on to spell out what it called the responsibilities of the body founded in 1975.

1) NNAD has a tremendous responsibility here to see that the rights of the deaf are safeguarded and protected.

2) NNAD repositioned after a leadership re-orientation to discharge its responsibility.

5) Lobby sympathetic politicians so that these politicians can work for the enactment of relevant laws in Nigeria.

But the other day, I asked a Deaf friend of mine if the Nigeria National Association of the Deaf has an international office or a secretariat in Abuja the Federal Capital Territory. I inquired because I wanted to visit the office and encourage them by giving a token gift to grease their elbows. But the reply I got for my inquiry made me shudder with unease and worry. “Don’t mind them. No office, no website. Nothing but corruption…. Don’t mind these guys [the leaders]! Since 1975 that NAD (now Nigeria National Association of the Deaf) was established, nothing has been achieved except dissipating energy on charity hunting…. It will continue forever and ever.”

This umbrella association knows what it should do; but where are the stamina, guts and grits to discharge its responsibilities to the people? If I sit on a throne and all I do is give you a comprehensive list of my responsibilities and duties, what message am I giving you? I am saying that I am not efficient, not worthy even to occupy the throne; I am not serving any purpose. Those are the points we have always heard from our leaders, but beyond hearing, we do not see anything concretise; but requests to government for funds or to come in and do this or that for us never cease to be written and submitted to the powers we believe owe us something. This has given us a community that is in a state of desolation – a wilderness where human potentials are blown away by the winds of inertia and inactivity, and buried under the dunes of nonchalance and consumption syndrome.

“There are more than one billion people of African origin outside Africa. There are over 200 million people who are direct descendants of Africans. The combined earning of these people is estimated at $750 billion per annum. Of this amount a total of about $40 billion is remitted to Africa by Africans in Diaspora. The challenge is that much of this money is used for consumption and not for investment. The consequence is that many Africans go to bed hungry, 30,000 children die daily and 43% of them lack good drinking water” (Steve Ogan, 2009).

It is quite true that government creates problems for its subjects. However, we must not see government or politicians as the stumbling block to our corporate destiny. Politicians are not sympathetic toward the people but toward themselves; they can correctly identify our problems, but they do not do much of anything to alleviate our desolation. “Politicians of every stripe are notorious for their lack of ability to solve the deep-seated problems of our societies. However, sometimes they are able to state the problem clearly.” ⁶

So rather than “lobby sympathetic politicians so that these politicians can work for the enactment of relevant laws in Nigeria,” it is better and most fitting that we lobby ourselves first, gather and pool our wits, intellectual and moral resources to map out development strategies and enact laws for and within the Deaf community. Our problem does not lie with the politicians; our dilemma lies with ourselves, for our community is rotten – rotten with lies, hypocrisy, greed, deception and covetousness.

Unless we lobby ourselves and come to terms with our own dishonesty, politicians will do nothing. God himself will help them to do nothing. We need to collaborate with ourselves before anybody at home or abroad could collaborate with us. We must collaborate with ourselves with a view to putting an end to fighting over money. We must cease making our so-called sacrificial services baits of destruction for our Deaf youths.

Sometime in the year 2008, British Conservative party leader David Cameron spoke in Glasgow on behalf of the party’s national candidate there. He stated: “We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others…. Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour.

“Bad, Good, Right, Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely use anymore…. Refusing to use these words – right and wrong – means a denial of responsibility and the concept of moral choice…. There is danger of becoming quite literally a de-moralised society, where nobody will tell the truth anymore about what is good and bad, right and wrong…. I want a mandate for restoring responsibility to out broken society, to call time on the twisted values that have eaten away at our social fabric” (Ibid). The vice of corruption, blind greed and the “erosion of responsibility” in our associations of the Deaf are just what you can detect between the lines of D. Cameron’s statement – if you know how to read between the lines. For his observations on the rot in the political system and social sector, Cameron came under fierce verbal attack from the opposition – the liberal press and the intelligentsia behind it.

Just wake up any day and have the guts to criticize our key leaders in the Deaf community and they would tell you to “leave the scene”; they would allege (and persuade one another) that they are “sure” you are not a good friend. This they do because they want or wish to allow for the continuity of mediocrity and the allied moral decay it spawns. Their message, in response to your rebellion against the rotten system, is that you should not attempt in anyway to damage the fabrics and networks that hold together their bad ways of doing things. If you do not fit in their system to support it, you are written off as a potential threat or enemy by spoilt brats sitting in the saddle of leadership.

Barely three months to the end of their eighth year of the first decade of this arial, Honourable Nimi Walson-Jack presented a lecture at the Rivers State Stakeholders Conference on Sustainable Development, and observed that “our value system, as it stands today, is faulty and there can be no meaningful progress until this is visited.” He goes on to state clearly that “despite our stated national values of discipline, integrity, self-reliance and patriotism as enshrined in our Constitution and captured by the lyrics of our National Anthem and the wordings of our National Pledge, avarice, nepotism, tribalism, dishonesty, corruption and the like have taken centre stage…. The attainment of the goals and objectives of the development programmes have been defeated by the adulteration of some of the Nigerian cultural values and fuelled by the Nigerians’ way of doing things…. Which values do we, as social beings, find desirable? No matter what tradition we are brought up in, there are characteristics we value in others which transcend social, economic and religious boundaries. Some of these characteristics are:

“Integrity: Integrity is trustworthiness, honesty and uprightness of character. We value people of integrity because we know what to expect from them. We know they will act honourably and that they will do what they think is right. We want people with integrity as our friends, on our teams and in our organisations.

“Respect: Respect is honouring the worth and dignity of all people. Those who respect others treat them with fairness and courtesy. They treat others the way they themselves wish to be treated”.

“Loyalty: Loyalty is a commitment and faithfulness to a person or cause. Those who are loyal to their family, friends, organisations and country stand behind and support them during good times and bad times. They can be counted on to be there when the going gets difficult and to help out when the chips are down.

“Responsibility: Those who accept responsibility are reliable, dependable and willing to take accountability for who they are and what they do. They believe they have a moral obligation to help others and to make a contribution to the society they live in.”

As a community of people deprived of our sense of hearing only but not of conscience, sense of morality and intellect, we should state again that it is fundamentally imperative for us to look inward and see the real great extent to which we must engage in character audit. There are sobering and serious questions we must ask ourselves – or those who are our leaders in Deaf associations should ask themselves: how much effort do we make to develop and maintain integrity in ourselves? Do we respect those we claim to be representing before the government, the public, etc? How loyal are we to our organisations? As chairmen and chairpersons, vice-chairmen, secretaries, treasurers of Deaf associations, how responsible really are we to the people we presume to be serving? Or as a teacher or school director or principal or any other thing for that matter, do you really see how responsible you are to your students while you are with them?

History informs us that in the Shao-hsing reign period of the Sung dynasty (1131 – 1163) Lin-an had been made the capital city and was a wealthy and prosperous district. In spite of the visible and tangible prosperity and wealth, there were lots of beggars, whose presence could not be eclipsed by opulence. “The great number of beggars,” history states, “had not been diminished.” They were set to survive or, at best, to remain in that ignoble profession when they could have left it and taken advantage of the pervasive opulence – available and within easy reach – to advance themselves in all aspects of life’s endeavours. But they chose to remain beggars – and that for good reason. And what is that?

History fascinates us with the wonder of all wonders that held to ransom, apparently, those beggars of ancient China in the begging industry. If I extend to you opportunities to escape poverty, danger, want and shame, and you refuse my offers, we must conclude – and excuse you – that you must have some type of mental illness, or that you are failing to see the day of your divine visitation, or that you are under the spell of hereditary bondage administered by demons to ensure no one in your family prosper in this life.

But the reason our ancient China beggars were content with their profession was that they enjoyed “dignity”, “respect”, and “service” from their master who saw their potential worth, first of all, as human beings and then as useful to both themselves and himself.

One of them acted as their head. This head is called the “Tramp-Major”. He looked after all the beggars in such as caring way as if they were his biological children. When the beggars came back home from their begging business for the day, the tramp-major would demand a fee for the day. During or under harsh weather extremes, it was not possible to go and beg. Either rain or snow lying on the ground constituted a stumbling block; the tramp-master would boil up a drop of thin gruel and feed the whole beggar band. Their tattered robes and jackets were also in his care.

A productive consequence of this profound dignity and respect the tramp-major owed and duly paid was that the troop of beggars was meticulous to obey him – “with bated breath like a lot of slaves, and none of them dared to offend him.” In return for the humility and service he provided, Nature ensured that he was provided also with “a regular income” from the beggars. A rule between the tramp-major and his army of beggars was he would lend out sums of money among them and “extort a tidy interest.” In this it was seen that if the tramp-major neither gambled nor went carousing “he could build up a going concern out of it”. His livelihood hung on this practice.

As much as the beggars didn’t want to leave their begging profession amidst possibilities of growing in wealth amidst opulence, so it didn’t cross the mind of the tramp-major once to – not even for a moment – think of abandoning this position. “There was only one drawback: a tramp-major did not have a very good name. Though he acquired land by his efforts, and his family had prospered for generations, still he was a boss of the beggars and not to be compared with ordinary respectable people. No one would salute him with respect if he showed himself out-of-doors; and so the only thing for him to do was to shut his door and play the great man in his own home.

“And yet, distinguishing the worthy from the base, we count among the latter only actors, yamen-runners (errand runners), and soldiers: we certainly do not include beggars. For what is wrong with beggars is not that they have no money. There have been men like the minister Wu Tzy-hsii, of Ch’un-ch’iu, who as a futigive from oppression played his pipes and begged his food in the marketplace of Wu; or Cheng Yiian-ho of T’ang times, who sang the beggar’s song of ‘Lien-hua lo’ but later rose to wealth and eminence and covered his bed with brocade. These were great men, though beggars: clearly, we may hold beggars in contempt, but we should not compare them with the actors, the runners, and soldiery.” ⁷

The begging profession of the twelfth arial, though esteemed ignoble and base and regarded with contempt, was polished and maintained sacred by those who lived by it. Then people begged for a purpose and with a purpose – to make it to the top and stand on the same ladder of social status alongside those who made it there through prestige, opportunities and expedient means, without begging.

The tramp-major and his crowd of beggars begged, cared for one another as beggars, paid each other mutual respect equitably and grew in prestige; others begged for their food, sang the beggar’s song and played flutes and rose to become ministers – great men with wealth, with no human rights abuse charges recorded against them while they strove to make it to the top – and stood there clean. The only external stigma on their reputation was that they should not be compared with the soldiery.

They begged and became great and wealthy and got for themselves positions through which they now served the society and the country that tossed them pieces of bread and despised them into those days.

The tramp-majors and Co. lived on bits of unwanted foods and mean gifts; yet when they rose to become serviceable to their society, they were in fact paying back to their country for those insignificant and dirty pieces of left-overs of food. They knew they owed society something and they discharged their civic duties to their motherland. They didn’t consume handouts without the consciousness that society would expect an output from them in the form of any kind of service. It might be this sense of responsibility that envisioned them to aim for the top, to steer clear of debauchery, respect each other’s person. They had the vision not to exist as economic liabilities.

The tramp-majors and Co. of the twelfth arial were patriotic beggars – who rose to become leaders.

In our country, in the Deaf community, we have many Deaf beggars. Many of them are under “tramp-majors” whom we call or refer to in our land as “Begging Kingpins”, “Begging Barons”, “Operators of the Begging Industry”. These local tramp-majors are cruel, violent, murderous and wayward. The company of Deaf beggars under Deaf tramp-majors is made up of Deaf girls stolen or seduced away from either home or school. They fornicate with them, impregnate them, abort the pregnancies of their girls at will – and abandon them to a sorry fate in the event of grievous extremities.

Frankly there is an amazing sharp contrast of great proportion between the twelfth-arial Sung dynasty tramp-majors and our local ones who are also the ones that own “suitcase organisations” – philanthropic organisations that only exist in the form of ill-written and ill-edited documents neatly arranged in suitcases. These mobile philanthropic suitcase organisations traverse the breadth and length of the country, cruise through streets, avenues and boulevards in search of funds to help – as their claims go – the Deaf or some other associations in need of assistance. Stop your lies now!

The local Deaf tramp-majors operate under the nose and in the full glare of the Nigeria National Association of the Deaf – some of whose state executives are also active elements of this dangerous underworld body. These self-serving bosses and member-enslaving leaders do not treat the beggar company with kindness. They never wash the feet of their subjects; they just hit and run.

When any female Deaf beggar of their industry suffers an indignity or shameful abuse, or when she falls sick, her tramp-major would abandon her to an indescribable ill-fate or grievous suffering. The money she has brought in goes to swell the pocket of her cruel boss while her soul threatens to leave her body any moment; or her spirit gets broken in her when she later recalls the sexual abuse she has been subjected to.

In circumstances where an ill-treated beggar subject exhibits justifiable insubordination, she is beaten to a pulp till blood gushes out of her body here and there. Deaf tramp-majors have even served themselves the licence to kill some of their female servants. Many Deaf girls have died violent deaths at the hand of their bosses; others’ lives were terminally ruined, with no chances of plausible retrieval from the dustbin of mangled destiny. Still others’ lives were flushed out of them by virulent diseases, grisly emotional damages and the rigours of excessive sexual abuse by hard core sex addicts

Thus the begging profession in our domain, unlike what obtained in twelfth-arial China, is stained with blood and mighty guilt. This accounts for why Deaf beggars here never rise to wealth and eminence. Blood and guilt trail our beggars who have themselves admitted to us that there is no blessing in begging. They say it is a dissipation of energy, a loss and waste of time, and the sure path to a frustrated end and unhappy life. Some of them are haunted by the atrocities they have caused to deaf girls, and they have no peace. Years, years of begging to keep body and soul together have not built up their lives; they sense something valuable – a core part of their dignity and worth – has left them. They have seen how their dark activities have afflicted homes with the characteristics of indelible sorrow and grief which only one’s trip to the grave can console and heal.

For every request for alms from some of the Deaf beggars, a lot of pain and sadness must first have been lashed out at one or two families, or on a certain individual before that request or appeal reached your office, or accosted you in the street. For instance, that girl begging is someone being painfully looked for, at this moment, by her parents and about whom the school she attends is making frantic inquiry here and there. Or she is being seriously expected to return to school one of these days. Or she may just be a neglected Deaf child now in the hands of a tramp-major.

This sure must awaken us to the immediate necessity of arresting every Deaf girl that begs and subject her to interrogation. – This may result in helping to save her destiny.

But how long will the community of disabled people – a community with a constitution and authority vested on it – continue to allow this dangerous activity to consume their community?

Government is not the problem of the disabled; the latter are their own dilemma. We have bound, encaged and abandoned the potentials of creativity in us. We live in a society that is driven by the spirit of acquisition and deranged greed, and, unfortunately, we have chosen also to fit in the system and get anointed in that ugly culture – instead of making a difference. This is why we are unable to use our prestige gotten through position to change our community’s outlook and image.

Hon. Nimi Walson-Jack of the Public Education Works Initiative quoted erstwhile President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999:191) as saying that “what matters most…is the six ‘P’s’ which are pursued at all costs: position, power, possession, plaudits, popularity and pleasure. Nothing else matters. With the six ‘P’s’ [we] can buy anything and buy [ourselves] into anything. Honesty is disregarded, indolence is extolled, probity is derided, and waste and ostentation are paraded.”

Just attend a typical meeting of the association of disabled people where an election into key offices is scheduled to be conducted. There you will find categories of people with disabilities who have travelled hundreds and even thousands of miles to reach the conference venue. Most of them arrive without vision, service to the disabled not being the core motive that drives them to attend and witness the election exercise. Those whose attendance is propelled by a strong desire for change soon find that they are caught in a mesh of organised frustration that will not allow them to be elected into office to bring about sanity in our community.

Watch it. You find certain elements prancing here and there, manipulating, scheming and organising people to “vote me in,” “support me,” “stand for me” – not because our desire and aim will be to cause radical change in the lives of the people with disabilities but because we are merely in hard, relentless, aggressive pursuit of the six “P’s”. That is all in most cases. Nothing more, nothing less.

When we go from individual to individual and from group to group to request that they “vote me in” or “support me in this election,” we do in fact mean that we have no sincerity; we mean we know we do have the character that does not really deserve the position we are after. We mean we know we do not have records of performances done in the interest of the disabled people previously upon which the people can be justifiably motivated to give us votes we deserve. Furthermore, we mean we have not been servants of the people, nor servants and people of God. And perhaps this malady is compounded by the antic of loading vehicles with ignorant and uninformed youths and students, whom we drive over long, dangerous and rugged distances to election venues in other states and urge them to vote for us. This is wrong. Our style of seeking position is poor and uneducated. Our style of doing things is crude.

Then religion, ethnicity, tribal sentiments, educational qualifications and not virtue, no, not the character of candidates – are brought to bear on the results contemplated. So in voting, we vote poorly; we vote the bad into office repeatedly despite the popularity of their obnoxious character, and discard the good. Illiterates, thieves; visionless, greedy and self-serving ladies and men are our presidents, personal assistants, treasurers, vice-presidents, chairmen, chairpersons, etc. here and there across the land. They move in and out of office, leaving behind no monumental worthy legacy upon which those who come after can build. So hard times and woes are in store for posterity. “A leader’s sin is a leading and misleading sin. An authority’s sin is an authoritative, authorising sin. It is both delightful and dangerous to be in positions of authority and leadership. Leaders can be the savour of death unto death and the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?” (Pastor W.F. Kumuyi, 2008).

We are wrong. We are sick. Who will bring cure to the Deaf community? Where shall we go to find the cure to heal us? Those who are manipulated to “vote me in” or “support me” soon become like their very manipulators – community crooks, dishonest, loving position without corresponding discharge of responsibility to the people. Our fate then in this life and the other life is better imaged than told.

Mr Wale Adeyanju is one of us; he is the Executive Director of Sign Language and Communications Technology. I think he has accurately diagnosed our dangerous cancer to which I believe there is no cure under the sun, moon and stars unless we acknowledge we are desperately lacking in seriousness and teach ourselves to look inward. Mr Adeyanju not only diagnosed our malignant moral cancer as a community, but he also proffered the panacea for the eradication of that slow death in our character. The diagnosed cancer is:

The “correct” politics devoid of the above-mentioned characteristics which is germane to our growth and development inculcates the following principles:

Many among us have attended universities, federal colleges of education, computer institutes, Bible colleges and seminaries, and have got certificates, diplomas and degrees. So much knowledge acquired bloats our heads, fans our ego and feeds our pride. We tell the whole world what schools we have been through and what credentials we possess. We want everybody to know us, notice us, praise us the way sycophants do, and we wish and dream that we shall be elected into office in our associations on the basis of our credentials as if that is what authentic leadership entails.

With all our academic achievement – to say nothing, in the least, of our lack of moral integrity and uprightness – we are unable to transform our community’s innumerable problems. We have graduated from schools only to become problems rather than solutions in this community overpowered and captured by darkness; we have walked out of schools with credentials only to pose as experts in talking brilliantly in meetings while remaining devoid of the desire, ambition, drive and will to become specialists in field work. We have no courage to step out into the battlefield to recognise our problems and deal decisively with them. Or when we know the problems, and even the solutions, we are not willing to pay the price to solve them; we are only experts at talking well about our troubles.

Stephen Flurry in his booklet Education with Vision (2008) states: “… the 20^th arial knowledge explosion has done little to solve the problems of the world…. In fact, our problems have only gotten worse. Modern education focuses only on knowledge accumulation…. Education is not something you go out and GET. It’s a way of life. Education is rightly developed character…. But a college degree does not make you educated. One of the fundamental problems with modern education is VANITY. [But] education is building character. It’s doing what is right, not what is pleasurable, or what you feel like doing.”

It is perilous to be educated, live in a country and lack patriotic vision, visionary patriotism, creative vision, and visionary creativity. There is deadly danger in the full-grown culture of going to school merely in order to get certificates. This aberrant culture is the sole industry that will give us warehouses of corruption and the strong unbridled acquisition instinct. Ebi Sikpi, Niger Delta author, observes that “certificates which can never enhance productivity are an aberration…. The acquisition of certificates and degrees without an equivalent discovery and satisfaction of a need is useless.”

And British actress Joanna Lumley, who has had the good fortune to travel widely, doing programs all over the world, stated that education is hugely respected in Africa and China. However, we must go beyond being educated to living out the education we have acquired. This is the only way to become and remain relevant at all times, in all circumstances.

In the 8^th year of this arial I felt the shame of my life. The shame was such that I held my head in my two hands with my elbows resting over my writing desk. A born-again Christian deaf lady had just told me that, according to her observation, it is not the so-called educated leaders of the Deaf community that make better leaders, but rather it is the semi-literate, unesteemed and uneducated[illiterate] members that possess higher standards of loyalty, responsibility and sense of accountability toward the associations of the Deaf. They have stronger moral rectitude and are driven by honest desire for the development, integration, liberation of their fellow Deaf men and women. The water of the well of sympathy, empathy in the grassroots is purer and safer to drink than the water from the polluted wells of the leaders whose “yeast of the Pharisees” you have to be very careful of.

When I heard this revelatory observation, I was ashamed – bloody ashamed and stunned. So is it that some of those among us who are leaders – with all our cultured literacy level and credentials – are the tactical impediment to the emergence of our obscure Deaf community into international limelight?

The lady’s observation is soundly true and truly sound. But I remarked that the semi-literacy of the loyal and accountable grassroots is a problem in itself and would require the assistance of the developed literacy of the better literate leaders to make impact provided the leaders do not capitalise – as they are wont to do dishonestly – on the low intellectual perception of the grassroots. The problem is: the crookedness and love of mediocrity of the educated leaders will clash with the loyalty and desire for excellence and the sterling morality of the faithful grassroots. By virtue of their position, the literate leadership will throttle the accountability and morality stance of the semi-literate grassroots at the bottom. Therefore, the darkness will continue to invade the Deaf community, the horizon will remain darker, faint glimpses of liberation grow dimmer and die out, and the velocity of the whirlwind in the dark tunnel of our confusion, obscurity, stagnation and “direction-less leadership” leave us bewildered. We are, then, better described as a warehouse of wasted chained potentialities in the valley of dry bones, victimised in the valley of Meggido.

In the Deaf community, our leaders strangulate, puncture and kill initiatives; they discourage the ambition of the young and murder sound judgment. The resultant fruit, in the long run, is an open prison in our community.

Then we come to resemble the funny sons of biblical Jacob who, in spite of being family men, or leaders, failed in the time of sore global famine to see the spectre of starvation hard on their heels.

They sat down and stared at each other in the face of looming mass starvation as if looking at one another and doing nothing would spare them. Their aged father came and rebuked them. “Why,” he queried in protest, “do you just keep looking at each other? I have heard that there is grain in Egypt. Go down there and buy some for us, so that we may live and not die.”

These grown boys were men of the field, experienced shepherds; at the best of times, they exhibited shepherding expertise. But when the sky withheld its valuable dew for sometime in favour of their brother Joseph, and their cattle and herds and families and friends were just about being wiped out, they were not able to think up solutions. Why? Perhaps their lies about Joseph’s whereabouts and the mastery they had achieved in being so silent so far about the truth regarding Joseph had hijacked their minds; so they were not able to see the seriousness of the gravity of the stalking spectre of starvation.

They had sort of been creative in dealing with Joseph whose valuable and meaningful dreams they had sought to smother. They had been creative in wickedness, creative in fabricating lies, creative in deception and, appallingly, creative in succeeding to silence their consciences which might have constantly been urging them to make true confession to their father Jacob. In a nutshell, there was enormous ingenuity in their complicity; and enormous ingenuity, too, in their inability to know what steps to take to survive the famine.

The approach of the rod of famine, unfortunately, did not provoke them, as much as possible, to be ingenuous in co-operatively warding off the impending agony of having to bear pangs of violent hunger. In the face of danger their sense of responsibility was hijacked.

The boys clustered together and looked blankly at each other – talking nothing constructive and perhaps not even lending out their ears to catch the latest circulating news from distant lands that might prove useful to extricating them from their present precarious circumstance. Good news did circulate, of course. But they did not hear it; or they refused to open their minds to take it in and meditate on it.

A people guilty of corrupt practices, deception, deceit, and eaten up by jealousy and hardened in conscience are impervious to helpful ideas, suggestions and news unless you rebuke or scold them to recover their common sense that has been hijacked and imperilled.

Jacob their father had posted one ear here, another over there, and monitored all talks making the rounds of the town amidst the stalking raging famine. He had heard that “there is grain in Egypt.” The old man then decided to capitalise on the refreshing news, perhaps tentatively, not minding whatever risks such a step might fetch him. He spurred and nudged his inert sons and made them turn their blank faces, in that dumb conference – or in our own case, Annual General Meeting (AGM), and made them look toward Egypt after breaking the news to them. He sent them with money in their pocket to the country where a purportedly long-dead Joseph was governor, and who had everything they needed to elude grim starvation exacting heavy tolls on communities and nations around them.

This Deaf community’s leadership is, like the Joseph’s brothers, very good at building problems, inventive in corruption, wise at setting up the wedges of underdevelopment, constructing the pipelines of diversionary tactics and greed, etc. This now accounts for the knack we have at calling for meetings often – just to look at each other while our deliberations and speeches are seen as mere empty lip-service to associations of our people.

Maybe we are just a bit better than the sons of Jacob; or maybe we are not. While these guys remained inert, dumb, looking blank-faced, childish, idiotic in a crisis situation, we know how to call for meetings, organise conferences and seminars mainly for just plenty of talk about the problems of the hearing-impaired. We make fantastic deliberations; reach brilliant conclusions buttressed with thunderous applauses and a veneer of confident yells of seeming sure victory.

However, after the sun has gone down and risen again over the horizon the next day, everything will again look as if there has never been recently an Annual General Meeting sponsored either by the federal or the state government. Everything – the time, the talk, the money, etc. – is all wasted because nothing is converted into aggressive practical operations. All this wastefulness is a vexation of spirit, a curse on our Deaf community. The paradox in this wastefulness is that it is a provider of gain to certain elements in the leadership whose pockets soon get delicately lined with lots of money.

God won’t hesitate to bat an eye to flock us together someday and brand us children of damnation, children of wrath for who is reserved the blackness of darkness forever, clouds without water….

Meanwhile, the grim clamp of joblessness, non-integration, non-self-actualisation, intellectual and spiritual famines, among other things, confines the Deaf to the backwoods of society, searing their lives with sordid existence. The casualty rate cannot help rising and increasing exponentially. While action is expected as a measure to stem this ugly and negative development, it is more meetings, more summons to state capitals, with conference themes that are high-sounding.

Who are we waiting for to look around, stare hard at us in the eyes and call us out of stupid endless meetings and instruct us what to do, to face reality, to reeducate ourselves in the recovery of our common sense?

With our constitution(s), organisation registration certificates, certificates of attendance, and with all our annual general meetings – where are our public notices calling for “brave, loyal volunteers”, disciplined and true leaders to help steer the ship of the collective destiny of the Nigerian Deaf community? Do we even yet have such a ship? It is doubtful. Indeed the ship of the Deaf community here has not yet cast forth into deep waters; it is still on shore without a compass, without a map. As such, it has no fixed destination; the ship is hibernating on shore purposelessly. The sea is too rough for it to dare venture further at sea because it is a vehicle built with straw, chaff and carton.

In the noisiness and fast-moving activities of the 21^st arial, we are not even on the horizon of emulating “Germany’s ridiculous advertisement” that used to read something like:

Then where are we as a community of Deaf people incapable of corporate self-development? When shall we wake up to struggle to catch up with the pace of current developments? Let Heaven and Earth never pass away with us in the grip of underdevelopment amidst opulence and available opportunities.

We must collectively take a clue from the Vikings of old as far as zeal and diligent commitment to a cause are concerned. The Vikings professed to be raiders in the eighth to the eleventh centuries in Europe. They organised and formed raiding parties that invaded countries, looted them and took monks as hostages. A typical public notice in the Viking kingdom would read:

A people may have steel in them and a desire to achieve some goal in acknowledgement of the responsibilities binding on them; but if such people are dishonest and corrupt, the steel in them dramatically metamorphoses into rotten straw. Deaf youths are unhappy and embarrassed that they have not developed in very many aspects of life. Most of them will admit to you that the basic symptoms of their stagnation and retrogression are corruption and greed – called the “bottomless pit” by a psychologist.

The ex-chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, states that “we can’t continue with [corruption] here. What most people don’t know is that corruption itself is a manifestation of underdevelopment. It simply means you are not there yet, you are not sophisticated enough, you are not literate enough.”⁸

Mallam Ribadu is a charming guy feared for engaging the high and low in his crusade against corruption. What he meant is that the presence of corruption is a pure sign of moral illiteracy: you do not see the incalculable ruin your corrupt acts inflict on you, your people, your nation and the world as a whole. The repercussions of corruption disturb the judgment courts of Heaven every day. In Africa, we do not make it an ultimate business to achieve corporate development. Whether in private or public, self comes first, self demands to be served and satisfied first at the expense of others who may have given us their votes, trust and choice that have fetched us the position we now occupy. Self reigns supreme in governments, corporate organisations and associations, in educational institutions, in friendship and in families.

We have a way of exploiting and enslaving our own race. Corruption breeds economic and political slavery; it cages the potentials of the people, frustrates their dreams, and they would develop the mentality that you must be corrupt to succeed, to get the good things of life. Or corruption makes a people lose faith in their fellow citizens and native country as a whole. And where faith is lost, anything goes. Africa is the only continent said to be retarded as the result of bad leadership. Yet it is in this continent we are always crying to God in prayer, praise and other religious celebrations. But the truth is that we have not always allowed God to have a hand in leading our affairs; God has been made a mere guest who, though we see our need of Him and know His demands, has been taught to sit down and tolerate, gloss over and cover our bad practices like stealing of public funds, making slaves of others for multiple gains through corruption, ethnic–cleansing, arson, religious riots, tribalism, bigotry and the destruction of our culture.

The noise of the religious drums of Africa is the loudest in the world; it is most pervasive, most noted and conspicuous – and probably most admired. Yet beneath this glamorous religious façade you find only tiny bits of moral excellence. Our leaders do whatever they like whether God appreciates, or not. God has been consigned to the wrong place in Africa, in our lives. In much the same way that we have petroleum products and still suffer from petrol scarcity, so we have much of God in our speeches and yet are without much of God proper. This lack of God proper I call “scarcity of God in the land”.

The “God-scarcity” amidst religious noise and profession holds Africa up as the “continent brimming with poverty, disease, starvation, crime, corruption, war, misery – and diamonds, uranium, manganese, chromium, nickel, bauxite, cobalt, platinum and gold. Crisis-riddled Africa’s tankerfuls of natural resources are up for grabs. Africa also contains 100 billion barrels of black gold – 8 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves,” observed one Philip Nice^9. Here are the fatal consequences of God-scarcity in Africa in the midst of heavy but significantly sham religious noise. God must be brought out of where we have consigned Him and given the right place for Him to demote and destroy the greedy god of self, or else….

Raw materials gotten in Africa go a long way to fuel the global economy. Yet we are unable to produce good and efficient and effective leadership for our people. The only leadership we produce is the type that exploits, enslaves and impoverishes the people. Hear Philip Nice again: “A bright South Atlantic Sky. Deep blue African coastal waters. A low, powerful, omnipresent rumble. The waters agitate, and then divide into white furrows as the prow of a gigantic vessel plows the ocean off Lagos (Nigeria). The monolithic hull, 166 feet wide and more than 60 feet high, displaces 77 Olympic swimming pools of seawater every ship-length it travels. At 987 feet long, this $100 million leviathan could easily carry the Eiffel Towel laying down on the pipe-festooned prairie that is its deck. The gleaming white superstructure, six stories above the waterline, momentarily eclipses the sun, before allowing it to reemerge over a fluttering flag at the stern and a frothing, surging wake. All of this to do one thing: Transport 200,000 tons of African oil. More than 4,000 of these Goliaths cruise the oceans’ superhighways, carrying billions of tons and trillions of dollars’ worth of oil, coal, tin, iron, uranium, nickel and platinum away from Africa’s ports to fuel the global economy. Where are they going?” (Ibid.)

“Where are they going?” is a most erudite question. But “who is behind this ugly deal?” must be the most pressing question because, while our resources are taken away, all we get is frustration, war, poverty, disease, crime, treasury-looting, embezzlement by our presidents, governors, ministers and general managers and managing directors of our corporate organisations.

It is a habitual pleasant ritual, a delectable tradition, to oblige our ears the sweet sound of learning that, in our community, such and such have emerged as the president, vice-president, public relation officers and so and so of our Deaf organisations at both the federal and state levels. The news is relished with abundant pride, loud acclamation and extravagant appreciation that are often misguided and premature. It is as if the mere fact of being nominated or elected into an office has been preceded by some grand spectacular achievement on behalf of Deaf youths. This is how we would have it among us. We want to feel we are great because we have a knot of people under us, or that we can exercise control over people. Usually it is an inconsequential control that does not aim to see fruit, to lead and even die for the people. You would be shocked to hear some leaders say to one another, “You do not have to kill yourself for anybody.”

Now where is the spirit of readiness to sacrifice for our corporate good? Is this our concept of leadership, O Africa?

Our community needs a leader; it is looking for one, not a leader that follows himself or herself and the dictates of his or her deep-seated and entrenched selfishness, not a leader that strikes the followership with the sting of a scorpion through nonchalance toward the people’s well-being.

This community that gropes in the dark in broad daylight is sniffing the air and fumbling about for a leader that is herself or himself a follower of a super role model that is like Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikwe and Andrew Jackson Foster Jnr. Even those that are presently our leaders in the Deaf Community are themselves now looking for leaders to lead them out of the prison of greed and default in responsibility where they have succeeded in mortgaging and jailing their precious conscience and reason.

Oh, this darkness does not promise silver linings on the horizon, nor a spark of glimpses of reassurance! Are we headed for a whirlwind of the terrors of darkness in dark tunnel? The 21^st arial does not hold much light for the Deaf community. It promises only the reaping of the wild oats that have been sown over the years in the name of so-called vision and questionable leadership. Many elements will expire in, under and through this relentless invasion of darkness. So then the liberation of this shackled community lies in the much-distant future; but it is likely not those that fabricated the darkness through phony leadership that will carry out the liberation.

Early this arial, one nice morning, I sat down for my customary devotions. I picked up the Family Altar Devotional Guide to enjoy the Scriptures for the day. I noticed that I had not read the previous day’s spiritual diet, so I decided to take double on this bright nice day.

The previous day’s devotions pointed me to John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” The main body of the devotions read: “When a team from a local congregation set out on their first mission trips, they started to get acquainted in the community. They met a young girl who spoke very little English. One of the team members asked her if she knew Jesus. The girl thought for a moment, repeated the name ‘JESUS’, and then said, ‘NO, he not from around here.’ Her face and her response became imprinted on the hearts of that church as a potent reminder of God’s call to spread the good news.

“John reminds us that Jesus came into our world so that he would be ‘from around here’. The Word (Jesus) became flesh and made his dwelling among us,’ says John. Or, as Eugene Peterson rephrases this verse in The Message: ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.’

“Today, Jesus still moves into the neighbourhoods and communities through the presence of Christians. You and I are the hands and feet of Jesus. We want people to know that Jesus is ‘from around here’ and that we are his ambassadors.

“Many of the people you meet today will have no understanding of who Jesus is. They are virtual strangers to the Bible and basic Christianity. They aren’t strangers to you, however. And, through you, hopefully Jesus won’t be a stranger either!”

What aroused my emotions of pity – as it would yours – in this devotional passage is the girl at the centre of the story. The story accentuated an experience I am so often acquainted with and have to pass through quite often. Why, I don’t have a record of having been called urgently to rescue a Deaf boy caught in a complex mess of trouble and looming life-threatening danger on life’s hazardous paths. My rescue operations have always had girls at the centre of them all.

Life, it seems, is a harsh combination of woes and pitfalls mostly set up to ensnare, crush and victimise girls, not boys who, though, are more active, nosier and rougher than girls, and who are more omnipresent in our streets, at dangerous sites and spots. Boys, they say, will always be boys. And it is these boys you will find climbing big and very tall trees that are infested with angry bees; crawling ants that would resist your incursion into their territories by biting and stinging you. But boys do not fear these. They use their natural rough aggression to crush the aggressive forces and elements.

Tell a boy there is twenty-year-old cobra in the shallow hole on a certain tree trunk, and he would not fear much. He would lose his sleep once his exploratory curiosity has been aroused. He would go and peep into the home of the cobra, not minding that this dangerous beast might spit out poisonous spittle and blind his eyes for life. If the peeping does not satisfy his restless curiosity, you will see his hand slipping into the hole of the cobra to get an experience of what feeling the body of a live cobra feels like. If he gets bitten, he merely would look at the bite spot in a fascinating kind of exploratory observation.

It appears that it is in the light of this fearlessness that Nature seems to be milder toward boys. But let a girl venture half a mile from the doorsteps of her parents’ home, and at once from nowhere dangers spring forth with a bagful of enticing baits of snares, of mirages, of deceptive illusions and fantasies flavoured with vanity – and she is gone, caught in the vortex of some dark terror, agony and painful misery. She is stricken, her opportunities, her regard, her import and relevance to the world despite the fact that without the female sex there could be no continuity in procreation.

Then the world of men sits down to look at the girl (or woman) in and with her many problems and needs. These glaring realities about the female gender developed in our cultures the propensity in men for their wives to give birth to boys, more boys than girls. These realities that are not managed with tact have given rise to the malady of unbalanced preferences in our cultures. So girls are perpetual victims, unwanted but needed to be useful creatures – to give husbands pleasure, serve boys in the family, produce boys that will keep the family name alive and be a dynamic source of honour and economic mainstay for the family.

This low view of the human female sex becomes an eyesore gradually, as you observe how the woman, despite her educational achievement and social relevance, does not allow for grace in men to repose full trust in her enough to let her be at the helm of affairs. The principal established concept of the woman is that she is a machine ingeniously designed by Nature for ingenious productivity and service; but beyond that her person is not respected.

The orchestrated taming and checkmated reaches of the human female sex have made their battles to throw off stigma much difficult. They have a long way to go, many wars to fight. A series of socially engineered ideologies have conspired to give our community women the belief that they are inferior (at least in their own sight) – and that problems are more for men to solve. This programmed mentality is probably what makes our Deaf women less interested in the liberation of our Deaf girls that are being victimised, captured and caged forces of darkness.

The Nigerian Deaf community has educated Deaf ladies and women: college and university degree holders, polished in appearance, cultured in the art of donning the aura of executive flair as leaders of our Deaf organisations. They are vocal within the four walls and hallowed grounds of Deaf Church and/or Deaf Units of our Mega Churches. On the other hand, you have Deaf Muslims among them who you will take for very staunch religious girls because of their discipline in wearing white, blue or black veils. Then the world opens its eyes to see, nod and say that these have “arrived”. But it will not be a misjudgement to state emphatically that this “arrival” is a great loss. For where are they while thousands of Deaf girls – their own gender – are slaves in the Deaf community, serving the industries of illicit carnal knowledge and begging? Where are they while a quack medical doctor advises a sickly Deaf girl to go and get pregnant out of wedlock to “reduce illness” only for her to find herself in hard financial frustration, abandoned by her family, the doctor and the Church she attends? Or where are the high-powered delegations constituted by Deaf Women Associations and sent out to stop some frightened and superstitious man from divorcing his innocent wife on grounds of her having given birth to a Deaf girl child? Where are they even while so-called Christian teaches and/or educationists turn special schools into places girls would later regret having passed through?

Are there Deaf female moralists holding a degree from a university here or abroad that would emerge to save misguided Deaf girls from the snares, shame and disgrace of cohabitation and premarital pregnancies?

Tragedies that have hindered the manifestation of the potentials and the realisation of the dreams and aspirations of the average Nigerian Deaf girl are many. One, among many other factors, is that she tends to marry too soon when she is supposed to be furthering her formal education. She may be ambitious, but she is soon stopped by poverty or the inability and the unwillingness of her parents to invest in her educational pursuit. The family at times would rather she marry than give her the chance to nose through books to explore the world of commerce, engineering, science, politics, journalism, law, religion, literature, music, etc. So for many of them, marriage is the ultimate in life – the final bus stop, since that is how society would have them perceive life. Once matrimony is gotten, pursuits that would lead to the realisation of cherished childhood dreams and turn them into more than mere housewives are seen as dissipation of energy, waste of time, and even a plot to deprive them of marriage in the long run. But it is not until much later that they would realise the error in this line of reasoning.

If she is not stopped by family machinations and unpleasant circumstances, she is stopped by herself through infatuation with the glory of “happy married life”, when she is not even well educated in all that marriage entails. As a result, many have ended up in very regrettable but avoidable divorce, separation or indescribable misery in their conjugal homes.

There is equally the temptation to emulate one’s classmate that has just dropped out of school and gone ahead to wed and got a baby and then appeared to look happier and better cared-for or well-groomed. The predisposition to emulation as well the false fear of being left behind and remaining single for life has tempted many Deaf girls into premature marriage with the wrong man, in the wrong place. When they see their age is going up, they make their minds to marry just any man that ask them for their hands in marriage. Or they just want to see that they are married, although most among them have never attended a marriage class for married and intending couples. We have seen brilliant and industrious Deaf girls that chose to pitch tent in matrimony with men that are illiterates, drunks, gamblers, fraudsters, lazybones or layabouts, unserious men without ambition and dreams. At this altar of impulsive and miscalculated marriage, these girls’ grand dreams and bright destinies are broken and abandoned for who knows who. Dreams are abandoned in the hurried quest to have “Mrs” attached to one’s name, or to be called something like “Mrs Effiong”, “Mrs Chijioke”, “Mrs Balogun”, “Mrs Sotonye”, “Mrs Haruna”, “Mrs Gwom”, “Mrs Diepreye”, and “Mrs Stanley” and so on.

You get to see premature big ladies, too young for the married state – some legally married, others cohabiting but looking forward to legalising their union in the future under duress from parents and friends alike. Still others are “accidental” single mothers who are victims of the landmines of their own love world; a miscalculated encounter with a crafty young man burning with the passions of lust set these ladies in the course of early motherhood while dreams screamed for fulfilment. Some of these big Deaf ladies would sometimes overdress or dress gorgeously and throw themselves into our streets like the big women of our cities, arrayed in expensive local costumes, on their way to a high-profile social gathering sponsored by the cream of society.

Promises of trips to Nairobi, Washington, California, London, Dubai, Abuja, New York and even promises of further educational pursuit at Gallaudet University in the United States of America – all these have proved to be dangerous snares that precipitated many bright Deaf girls into giving their hands in marriage to the wrong man. After the marriage, reality would dawn to show them that the sugar-coated promises hold no water. This way, some of our Deaf girls’ great dreams and unusual tall ambitions are strangulated, killed and buried for life. Their husbands have no desire whatsoever to develop these girls further apart from getting children from them, keeping them at home to do domestic chores. And when necessary, there is the curse of being subjected to brutal domestic violence – sometimes perpetrated by in-laws, while a not-so-protective-and-caring husband watches or sides with his people against the woman he knows to be “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”. In this situation dreams and aspirations evaporate, replaced by long faces, forlorn eyes out of which the former light of dreams has long gone out, leaving behind no trace whatever…. This is just one point that explains why many Deaf girls here lie low.

These husbands that are only interested in having children from these girls need to understand what my employer Dr Steve Ogan said with regard to slaving women at home as childbearers and homekeepers: “She may be a professional in another context... It is time to get her out of the backside of your kitchen [and domestic chores] to the public domain of achievement.”

We are not insinuating that it is wrong to marry if that will cost what you want to become beyond your matrimonial home. But we understand and admit that it is the great dream of every woman to want to get married and become a mother of children. This is the gift of Nature to womanhood, and we believe that this natural desire can be delayed to make room for the pursuit of other dreams that Nature has deemed necessary to give you for your own good and the society in general. Do not let marriage destroy your other dreams, because marriage alone is not enough to help you deal with certain negative challenges that life presents to us unexpectedly. Your other dreams, if realised to the letter, can also be used as weapons to fight off intimidating challenges. The world has become a complex place that threatens to hold everything to ransom, even the marriage institution. So you must seek to become sophisticated through pursuit of knowledge to help you survive and be victorious in the complexities of this world.

When others among these girls are being cautioned to exercise caution before mating with a guy that you perceive t o have a questionable character and who you are sure will ruin their lives, they revolt against common sense. Then they would take steps to avoid and dislike you. You would be seen as a threat to their right to marriage. If they do not employ this attitude, they will hasten to make an appeal to the name of God and say, “In God I trust; He will supply everything I need” or “ Will you find someone else to marry me?” Yet sooner or later these same girls would begin to cry foul from within the hallowed bonds of matrimony against the very person you tried to separate them from. And God is nowhere to be seen. And God is nowhere to be seen. The ensuing incompatibility turns their homes into boxing rings, civil war zones, or like shrines full of swearing and cursing. With things getting out of hand, your ears get hit by spreading words of smearing campaign one disillusioned partner has mounted against the other, divulging sensitive issues to the public. Some have been visited with the misfortune of seeing their partners die too soon.

Either when you see the development or just hear of it, your grief and lamentations would hardly know a limit.

Our privileged Deaf ladies here know that the plight of ordinary Deaf girls is darkest. But they have not been willing to develop persuasive and compelling militancy for the main purpose of seeking to save the not-so-educated or no-so-privileged Deaf girl. The top ladies are a self-isolated group who has caged their potentials for transformational militancy. Some of them have now become the accomplices of their male counterpart that embezzle and siphon resources that should have gone, if they know better, into developing the female gender into a positive moral force to contend with.

Are they even gathering information, as leaders, about the Deaf girl child’s situation in general? In every community, everything will go wrong when the hands of the educated, enlightened, godly and cultured women and ladies are slack. The hands of Nigeria’s Deaf women have not been active hitherto. This is why there are more deaf men involved in the rescue of Deaf girls from perils. This is why statistics tend to indicate alarmingly that we get more Deaf boys than girls at our Christian religious gatherings in southern Nigeria. Up north it is likely that statistics favour boys above girls. Where are the girls?

Deaf boys are enjoying an advantage perhaps because there are more Deaf male preachers of the gospel of Christ and teachers in Deaf schools. Girls do not see Deaf women evangelists as role models travelling from one city to another to preach the Word of God and stay among them for several weeks before returning to base. Deaf girls do not see, for example, great number of Deaf women teachers from the north visiting their Deaf schools in the south, in the west and east, and vice versa. The fledgling Deaf literature in Nigeria is produced, at this initial stage, by Deaf guys like Pawlos Kassu, A. Lawrence Adeyemi, Olaniyi Temitope, Adewale Adeyanju, Kenneth Yali Diouf - most of who are based in southern Nigeria. The literature by these writers has been an encouragement, inspiration and challenge to Deaf boys.

Moreover, as far as our research takes us, Deaf male students maintain a more intimate relationship (through e-mails, cell phones and personal contacts) with their (Deaf) male teachers than do the girls with their (Deaf) female teachers. The number of Deaf male students that use the Internet exceeds that of the girls.

An invasion of darkness has been pervading and eroding the potentials of the Deaf community, whose growth or progress chokes under the difficulty it has in taking steady steps forward. We are caught, as a community, in the regular routine of making one step forward and two steps backward in several aspects. It is fashionable to accept the developed norm that we must beg to survive; we must be dependent and less contributive to make it; and we must follow current societal evil trends to emerge as successful while all the time we fail to realise that we are anchored on foundations of sand and mud.

Insensitive and defective leadership has not even allowed this Deaf community to distinguish itself in the midst of other communities. What are we spectacularly known for in a commendably positive sense in our immediate environment as a people group? Is there anywhere anybody who observes us can remark that we are a “pride” to this or that state, or to the nation? What are the specific traits of Deaf culture that have become pleasant discussion items in households? I think there is none, except our Sign Language which people would be glad to learn and manage to communicate with us. Talks, discussions and rumours here and there brand us as “trouble makers”, “a people who get quickly angry”, “and an impatient people”, “a people who bring problems”, “difficult and stubborn”.

This sounds exaggerated; but the expectation entertained by our hearing counterpart is that a small community with special peculiarities is supposed to display such exquisite traits or qualities as would endear them to those that watch them. Those who watch you are themselves seekers seeking succour; they expect that they would make moral, emotional and socio-economic profits from your traits to extricate themselves from some moral prisons or some dangerous course they have been pursuing to their own destruction.

So when your community does not give them your succouring example, your constructive traits to believe that despite your disability you have impressed their lives for good, then their criticism of you is most justified; and usually the caustic denunciation is solidly based on truth. This is why, according to our findings, majority of Deaf community members are not much valued in our society.

It is Mrs Remembrane Eke of the Niger Delta who observes, in her book The Woman-Gate that “of all the creatures made by God, the woman is one endowed with so many virtues. She is authentically built to function in different segments of activities. She is a multipurpose tool in the hand of the Creator. She is a linking bridge…a three-phase adaptor…an interface facility… a spiritual pillar and pivot…. God has given her so much and also expects so much from her; the man, the world and God expect so much from her.”¹⁰

The destiny of this community lies more in the hands of Deaf womenfolk than in the hands of inept and talkative male leadership. It is not until the Deaf ladies break out of their cocoons and let out the real woman in them and take, responsibly, a difference posture from the men, that they will be able to really help their Deaf gender whom we can see are already in a fast-moving train heading for a horrific plunge into a rocky valley for want of apt leadership. We are tired of the male leadership that is responsible for much of this invasion of darkness.

There are horrors being carried out in society against deaf-and-dumb girls that must arouse holy rage in our educated Deaf women and make them stage a national protest. The National Life newspaper brings home to us one more case of the abuse of the handicapped. It is high time our ladies arose and threw their fists in the air in holy anger like Winnie Mandela of South Africa.

The little dumb girl raped by her landlord. It is becoming common to hear speech-impaired/Deaf girls say that at one time or the other they have been raped or sexually molested as kids. They hardly get justice.

“As the Police authorities in Oyo State appear to have exonerated one Moshood Ayinde from the allegation of defiling Olaniran Ope, a six-year-old daughter of his tenant, the father of the girl, Akeem Olawoore, has requested for his daughter’s pant.

“The Police say the medical test conducted on the little girl at the Adeoyo General Hospital, Ibadan, confirmed that she was not defiled by Ayinde, against the claim of Ope’s parents, and some residents of Monatan, where Ayinde has his house.

“‘The report showed that the virginity of the girl is still intact, to confirm that no defilement has taken place. The report also showed traces of blood and puss, which might have been caused by an infection.

“‘Because of this evidence contained in the medical report, I don’t think we need to hold the man for defilement,’ Police Public Relations Officer of Oyo State Command, Olabisi Okuwobi, clarified on Monday in his office the Command Headquarters at Eleyele, Ibadan.

“However, a doubt was cast on the authenticity of the medical report, as Olawoore said he was prevented from witnessing the test at the hospital. ‘The Policeman that led me and a brother of my landlord to the hospital asked me to stay outside. He entered the room alone with the girl. But later he called me to join them. I don’t know why he did not allow me to be there,’ he said.

“National LIFE gathered that the contentious pant was the one worn by Ope before the incident, and soaked with blood from her genitals. The pant was tendered by Olawoore as exhibit at the Akobo Divisional Police Headquarters where the incident was transferred from Jonku Police post.

“The apparently devastated father has, however, been at the receiving end in what looks like a loss at both ends owing, according to him, to the fact that he lacked the right connection to advance his cause. But in order not to suffer the pains in perpetual silence and possibly pay for it, Olawoore has decided to take his case to the people’s court, where he hopes justice lies for his daughter.

“‘If I keep quiet on the matter and allow it to go just like that, I am sure that the spirit of the innocent girl will deal with me because a father should be able to protect his children in whatever circumstance,’ he stressed.

“The peculiar state of Ope as a dumb, whose condition might have been exploited by Ayinde, perhaps scares Olawoore to rise in defence of the helpless girl, the eldest of his children.

“On the day of the incident, all the girl could do to blow the lid off the incident was to take her mother, Olawoore Serifat, who just discovered blood stain on her pant, to the door of the suspect. What followed was an embarrassment to the family of the man. The visibly shaken mother could not be persuaded as she was set for the worst, shouting the name of the man, a development that drew a crowd of other residents of the neighbourhood to the house.

“‘It was in this situation I met my wife and the people when I returned home in the evening of the day. I quickly held the girl and took her to the mosque, where I met the man. The way I rushed into the mosque destabilised the congregation, but I didn’t mind because the matter involved the life of my daughter,’ the father said.

“The stir caused by Olawoore in the area resulted in taking the matter to the Police post at Jonku and later Akobo Division where the man was detained and would later be granted bail. The bail was granted following assurances by Ayinde’s family that he would pick the girl’s medical bill at the private clinic along New Gbagi Road, Ibadan, where she was treated.

“But, according to Olawoore, the man showed no remorse after his release from detention. ‘He also refused to pay for the treatment of my daughter. It was his wife that later gave me =N= 5, 000.00 when she realized that we might return to the Police. The woman showed concern and pleaded that we should not make noise about the matter again,’ the 40-year-old father said

“New Twist – A dramatic twist would later emerge in the matter with the detention of Olawoore for allegedly blackmailing Ayinde. ‘ I spent one night in the cell. They said I lied against him. I was bailed the following day.’ This signaled the end of the matter, especially as Olawoore’s mother-in-law, Mrs Serifat, discouraged him from crying over spilt milk. It was learnt that the man’s family had pleaded with the mother-in-law for an amicable settlement of the matter.

“But a few weeks afterwards, the girl, now staying with her grandmother, suddenly sighted the man and ran for safety. This reopened the case as it was taken to the Area Command at Testing Ground, Agodi, Ibadan. The PPPRO further said that among the tests conducted on the girl was for HIV. ‘They did all this to establish the true condition of the girl. And happily, she was certified to be free of HIV,’ the Deputy Superintendent of Police declared.

“Missing Pant and Diabolical Dimension – Beyond the assurance of the Police, Olawoore says release of Ope’s pant remains a serious concern to her because of its likely side effects on the health of the girl in future.

“Further investigation revealed that older men rape little girls for ritual purposes. Some people believe that when old men sleep with minors, they get cured of certain diseases. Some fetish people also sleep with their own daughters in their desperate search for inexhaustible wealth.… According to a report by Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative, as at 2001, there was an alarming prevalence of the incidences of sexual assault by old men and youths on young girls between the ages of 10 and 15. Breakdown of the statistics indicates an average of three cases per month, with higher numbers during holidays and among children whose parents, like those of Ope, are low-income earners, with high prevalence in high density population areas…”¹¹

Little Ope’s father complained that he did not have the right connection to advance his cause. So he had to run to a mosque and then to a Police station where, unfortunately, he was detained for a day for allegedly lying against the perceived assailant of his daughter. Perhaps if our Deaf ladies have hitherto been more organised and militant with regards to defending their own rights and protecting their own gender, Ope’s father would have been served better and gotten justice for his child. But as it is, neither in Angelina Boton’s case nor in Ope’s did any of our organisations endeavour to identify with the victims by sending representatives to console the families and possibly join them in the battle for justice.

A noticeable percentage of Deaf persons have not received sufficient enlightenment in how they can put their deafness to good account and not make a sullen timid fuss about being Deaf. They are not being shown that although deafness imposes certain restrictions on them with regards to some forms of socialisation and professionalism in certain fields, they can choose not to mind. Then they can attempt to function to the maximum where their disability naturally places them and put unlimited opportunities before them. But as it is now, the shortage of enlightenment has built in many minds this terrible dislike of their disability. Some have grown awfully dejected about being Deaf and having to associate with other Deaf persons. A handful of these people conceal themselves from the Deaf community because they are ashamed of being identified as hearing-impaired.

In some quarters there is even this plain decision not to date and marry a Deaf lady, not because of certain particular character traits, but on account of being ashamed of their own deafness. So a number among these elements is nowhere to be found because they are lost in the hearing world with their hearing partners. However, a few have re-emerged, having experienced fatal marital accidents and disasters bordering on communication problems among other things. The crises disillusioned them and divested them of all pride and prejudice. Now they are saying it would have been better if they had married a Deaf lady in the first place. They have settled again with female comrades in disability, severely humbled and truly now educated to the core.

The hearing world here and there is also guilty of injecting prejudices in the mind of some Deaf persons about their deafness. Psychological campaigns by the hearing would maintain such views as would make some Deaf people entertain iniquitous self-pity, and their hitherto healthy opinion of their deafness is mortally subverted. And they begin to be dragged to one religious crusade or another to look for miracles of healing, even when they have no idea of what a religious crusade is all about and they do not have the tiniest grain of faith in God and they are total strangers to the name “Jesus”. This illogical and crazy rush for miracles to flush out deafness at religious crusades or in the homes and esoteric shrines of demonic priests, con artists and quack healers has cost many their sanity and even their lives.

The lifeless body of Mrs Joy Okeke(Deaf) dumped on top of a refuse heap after her murder near the religious crusade site where she went to look for a miracle to heal her deafness.

“A 200-level of the Faculty of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Benin, Peter Chukwuemeka Okeke, is desperate in search of the killer(s) of his 67-year-old dear mother whose lifeless body was allegedly found dumped on a refuse site along Akonda Express Road, Ngibidi Town, Oru West Local Government Area of Imo State.

“Mrs Joy Okeke, mother of six children, who hailed from Umuezello village in Akpu, Orumba South Local Government Area of Anambra State, was said to have left home precisely January 1, 2011, having been persuaded by a neighbour Mrs Felicia Uzoamaka Ofor, to accompany her to a crusade purportedly converged by The Lord’s Chosen Church only to be found dead with her lifeless body stripped naked some kilometres away from the venue of the programme.

“Narrating the present travail of the family to News Star, 32-yearl-old Peter Okeke, who said he suspected that the woman was used for ritual purposes, lamented the attitudinal disposition of the Assistant Commissioner of Police of Imo State, Emmanuel Ojukwu, who has since granted bail to the prime suspects.

“But the Petroleum Engineering student is presently biting his fingers over an aspect of the matter that he is still regretting. He never took seriously the premonition of what would happen to his mother at that crusade since she had consistently insisted she would not go although she was in dire need of a miracle to heal the deafness she suffered eight years ago as a result of intake of [drug] overdose.

“He said his deceased mother had decided not to attend the crusade in company with her neighbour, Mrs Uzoamaka, whom until that very period was her good friend. But upon pressure from him and his eldest brother, the mother agreed to go with the assurance that she (Uzoamaka) was going to take responsibility for her safety.

The search for miracles to flush out their deafness has landed many Deaf people into deep trouble, including death, at the hands of criminals loitering around religious crusade grounds.

“‘On January 4, I was standing in the front of our house when I saw Uzoamaka on a lady’s bike being taken home by one of her sons. She was looking like someone who attending the crusade. My mother was nowhere to be found,’ Okeke said.

“The search for the whereabouts of the mother, he said, had led the entire family to embark on a search mission to Ngbidi, along Okonta Express Road in Imo State which is some kilometres away from the said venue of the event.

“‘We had already driven past the refuse dump when my sister stopped us that she saw something like a dead body. We started running toward that direction. As we got there, it happened to be that it was my mother, stripped naked. The situation we found her in was highly pathetic. In fact, she had been murdered.

“‘We know that she was murdered even without being told, even before the autopsy result confirmed that my mother murdered. We suspect that she was used for ritual or her blood was used for that purpose. The position of the family is that we want to find out what killed my mother. What led to her death? My mother did not there alone. She was entrusted into somebody’s care who volunteered herself to take care of her,’ he added.

“He said lifeless body of the poor woman had since been dumped in St. Felix Hospital, Ngbidi, while the alleged assailants, Mrs Uzoamaka and the presiding pastor of the church, Lazarus Muoka, were nowhere to be found two months after the matter was reported at Ngdibi Police Divisional Headquarters.”¹²

There is an invasion of darkness capturing communities. It is a relentless invasion and we are caught sleeping. When shall we wake up and truly perform to liberate ourselves?

Kenneth Yali Diouf—hard of hearing— is not a graduate of any university or college. After his secondary education, by means of personal reading and study programs, he trained himself to become an author and a proof-reader/editor. His association with authors and intellectuals and the serious-minded also contributed to his intellectual development.

His contact with the world of the deaf started at the Christian Mission for the Deaf at Ibadan, where he learned how to teach and evangelise the deaf. Then a year-long training in the School of Missionary Studies run by the Peace Foundation Ministries, also at Ibadan, introduced him to the world of missions and missionaries.

Diouf has been involved with several Deaf Schools in Southern Nigeria as a classroom teacher and “missionary”.

He presently serves as one of the editors in the High Calling Outreach ministry—a literature-evangelism ministry based in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.