When young Chinenye Uzogu was handed to a couple who claimed to have come from Lagos, far away from her small rural community in South-Eastern Nigeria, she had no inkling of the harrowing experience that awaited her in the hands of her future guardians.
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Chinenye Uzogu

The couple, Mr. Jude Ezeuzo and his wife, Anthonia, needed a maid to help out with household chores, in addition to nursing their eight-month-old daughter. They therefore approached Chinenye’s parents and requested to take her to live with them in Lagos.

Saturday Punch learnt that no sooner had little Chinenye settled with the couple at their 13, Ebun Otti Street, Mende, Maryland home, than she became the victim of a shocking form of child abuse.

Neighbours recount that most nights, they were woken up from sleep by the girls’s screams. “Some nights, we would hear the sound of blows and the lady hurling abuses at the little girl,” said Miss Tessy Mathews, who lives in the compound next to the Ezeuzos.

One day, Mathews noticed that the girl had tell-tale bruises on her body. “I did not like what I saw. I asked her who had inflicted the wounds on her body and she told me it was her aunty. I decided to intervene,” she said.

In spite of her intervention, however, the beatings did not abate, so much that she feared that the hapless child might be seriously harmed.

According to Matthews and a few other concerned neighbours, repeated efforts to persuade Anthonia to temper justice with mercy yielded no result. On one occasion, Chinenye’s guardian claimed that she had punished her for attempting to poison her eight month-old baby. To her audience, it seemed unbelievable that the little girl, who was only eight years-old, could be so malicious as to poison a baby. Next, Anthonia accused her ward of filling a feeding-bottle with urine and forcing her own daughter to drink it, in her absence. Still in a bid to justify her actions, she accused Chinenye of stealing pieces of meat from her soup pot.

However, Anthonia’s reasons for brutalising Chinenye did not seem to impress her neighbours who felt she was too hard on the little girl.

As one Chinedu put it, Chinenye was not only too young to be subjected to such abuse by her guardian, she was a pleasant and respectful little girl, who was quite popular among her peers in the neighbourhood.

But they could do nothing about her predicament until the Ezeuzos allegedly resorted to locking her up in their big apartment for several weeks at a stretch.

Whenever it rained heavily, Saturday Punch learnt, most houses on Ebun Otti Street experience floods. On such occasions, Chinenye’s guardians would move out of their home and leave her alone in the flooded house, most times without food. At such times, the poor girl would weep aloud and, though not visible to passers-by, she would also beg anyone within earshot for food. One afternoon, her cries caught the attention of two of her playmates whose father owns an auto-mechanic workshop on the street. Moved with pity, the kids went back home and requested some money to buy biscuits and pure water. Unknown to them, they were trailed by their father, who had found their request rather suspicious, to the Ezeuzos’ compound. By now, the little girl had been transformed by frequent beating and starvation to a bundle of bones and badly bruised skin.

Attempts by Saturday Punch to confirm whether the auto-mechanic was one of two men, Taofeek Akinleye and New-Year Adebayo, said to have reported the girl’s plight to the Anthony Police Station, did not yield results.

Initially, residents of Ebun Otti Street were reluctant to speak on the subject. Even Mathews offered to speak on condition that the conversation would not be recorded. She eventually disclosed that to save Chinenye from sure death, she decided to contact a lawyer who brought the matter to the notice of the Office of the Public Defender, a civil rights and advocacy agency established as a unit under the Directorate for Citizens’ Rights of the Lagos State Ministry of Justice.

According to Mrs. Yinka Adeyemi, Assistant Director of the agency, who spoke to our reporter in the absence of her boss, Mrs. Omotola Rotimi, the Office of the Public Defender formally took up Chinenye’s case with the Anthony Police Station and subsequently got Anthonia and her husband, Jude, arrested.

The little girl was said to have been found in a very bad shape when the police eventually rescued her from her guardians.

A report signed by the Medical Director of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja, Lagos, Dr. Segun Olugbile, indicates that she was admitted for treatment at the hospital with a fractured upper humerus, a broken wrist-bone, blisters on the head filled with fluid, swellings over the right side of the scalp, and teeth forcibly removed as a result of constant hitting of her head on the wall. The report also claimed that Chinenye was malnourished and had lost consciousness.

At the Anthony Police Station, Saturday Punch gathered that the couple were initially detained at the station before they were transferred to the Maximum Security Prison at Kirikiri, Lagos. The Divisional Crime Officer attached to the station declined to give the details of the charges against them, since, according to him, the case was already in court.

But a source at the station, who spoke on condition of anonymity, disclosed that Anthonia had confessed during interrogation that she tortured and starved Chinenye because she discovered the little girl had witchcraft.

So far, the couple have been charged to court under Section 340 of the Criminal Code. They are to appear at the Magistrate Court in Ogudu, Lagos for assault occasioning harm, endangering life, deprivation of liberty, and failure to provide food, clothing and housing for their ward.

Meanwhile, the identity of Chinenye Uzogu’s parents remains shrouded in mystery. According to Mrs Adeyemi, efforts by the Office of the Public Defender to establish her origin and contact her parents had been fruitless, giving rise to speculations that the girl may have been another victim of child slavery. Meanwhile, Saturday Punch learnt during the week that Chinenye had been moved from the intensive care unit of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja to the Children’s Transit Home, Idi-Araba, and was responding well to treatment.

Outstrip:

Wickedness

sistawoman:

Offenses against children do not go over well among the crmials here.