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“Nigerian politicians are destroying our young girls.” That was the title of the sensational and one-sided write-up credited to Dr. Sam Amadi, an analyst for Arise Television, politician and a law lecturer at Baze University, Abuja. Amadi studied law at Harvard University, a top-bracket university in the United States. To gain admission into Harvard you have to be brilliant. So Amadi is brilliant.
In his write-up that has been trending on the internet he says that at 10.30pm one night he saw at the lobby of Transcorp Hotel, Abuja, a bevy of pretty young girls in their 20s skimpily dressed like commercial sex workers. One of them rushed to greet him. He identified her as his law student at Baze University. He also recognized three others as fresh graduates of his department. He asked a rhetorical question “what are they doing at this kind of hotel at this time and dressed the way they are dressed?” He answered his question without doing any research. “I know what it is. A Nigerian politician or man of means has arranged them for his pleasure and those of his friends and acquaintances,” he concluded.
To reinforce his decision, he remembered his experience as a Special Adviser to a Senate President some years ago. He said that he accompanied his boss to one of the South East states for the opening of a new Government House built by the State Government. The Governor arranged a special reception for his visitors. He said further “when we got to the venue I was shocked. Tens of very young girls sourced from the nearby university between 17 and 22 years were already dancing with top government officials. I screamed and accosted the Majority Leader of the State House of assembly. He answered “Man, Sammy, these adolescents are our counterparts.” “I requested to be taken back to the hotel. That was the end of the reception for me.”
The recall of these two incidents by Dr. Amadi indicates that he either stayed in America for too long or that since he came back he has been marooned in some lonely island somewhere or both. His analysis is as limited as the view of a Nigerian politician who said that “there is no smoke without fire.” It means that he has never gone to a night club where there is always plenty of smoke without fire. Amadi is only partially correct when he blames “politicians and men of means” for the moral degeneracy of our young girls. There are several other factors too. One, the girls themselves have contributed to the degeneracy. Some of them who are from poor homes take to freelance prostitution in order to send themselves to school. Some do so to take care of their siblings and poor parents. Some do so out of greed, greed for Louis Vuitton handbags, N300,000 Brazilian wigs, gold crusted iPhones and diamond earrings. That is the definition of greed.
I was a member of the Commission of Inquiry set up by President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2000 to investigate the killings by cultists at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, that year. We visited scores of tertiary institutions in the country, gathering evidence on cultism. To our amazement there were women cult groups that were prostitution rackets. The big girls recruited the younger ones into these cults and packaged and parcelled them out as the need arose to male clients for a fabulous fee. I do not think that that practice has got any expiry date, especially in these days of acute poverty.
A few years ago, I went to see my daughter in her hostel in one of the universities. The reception was poor so I couldn’t reach her on the phone so I asked one of the girls to call her for me. She said that she would like to talk to me when I had finished talking to my daughter. As soon as I was through with my daughter she materialized from nowhere and suggested we could go somewhere to have fun. I told her that I did not have the time for it. I just dashed her some money and disappeared. You can see that in today’s Nigeria the girls are pushing for patronage with awful audacity.
Two, their quest for male customers has been amply assisted by technology, which now provides pornographic and dating sites on smart phones. These young girls take tuition on sexual matters from these various platforms without paying any tuition fees. They also keep hi-ing people they don’t know on WhatsApp platform. If you make the mistake of responding then it means that “trouble dey sleep, nyanga go wake am.” They will harass you nonstop, pray for you nonstop, send you pornographic materials nonstop. They will pursue you until you yield or send them something for lunch. They are absolutely dedicated to their pursuit. If they show such a high level of dedication to their studies they would graduate in first class. In fact, they do their homework well. They check people’s phone numbers on Truecaller and use the name to google. When Google gives them information about the owner of the phone number they can easily decide whether their target is worth pursuing or not.
Three, some of the weekend newspapers are of immense help to them. Some newspapers have columns that teach sex, different sex positions, how to deliver or delay orgasm, etc. There are also columns where people, men and women, who want permanent or temporary partners can look into. There the names, always one name only, and telephone numbers of the maker of the request are published. If the description of the applicant meets your own specifications, then the game starts.
Four, there is something called ushering jobs whereby pretty girls are hired to perform some functions at book launchings, seminars, birthday parties, weddings, etc. They are paid for these services but the girls, some of them, also use the opportunity to look for clients or the potential clients look for them. It is a willing-buyer-willing-seller market. One thing leads to another and they may find themselves beneath the sheets.
Five, most of our tertiary institutions are the worst culprits when it comes to corrupting our young girls. Amadi studiously avoided mentioning this, thus giving his analysis very limited value. There have been many stories of sexual harassment of students in most of our tertiary institutions. Some of the lecturers have been dismissed from their jobs; some have been jailed but the practice goes on unabated. There are two sides to the misconduct. Some dull female students actually chase the lecturers because they want to scale over their subjects. They do so either with money or with their bodies or both. The stuff is called “sorting.” However, most of the cases are actually initiated by the lecturers. They ask the female students for sex and the male students for money. Maybe some of the female lecturers also ask the male students for sex. If that is true it has not been prominently known. Some years ago, one of the lecturers in one of our first generation universities was harassing one of my daughters for sex. He said that he knew that the girl was gunning for a first class degree but that she would not get it if she did not yield to his desire to sleep with her. I was ready to wire her up with smart audio and video equipment and use the evidence to fight the fool. Initially my daughter accepted the plan but later she told me that she is informed that the lecturers work in cliques and are always ready to defend and protect their colleagues and punish the student who disgraces any of them. She begged me to call off the plan, saying that even if she gets a second class honours upper division she will still make a success of her life. I dropped the plan and the idiot went scot-free.
Lecturers are surrogate parents to the students put under their charge. Any defilement of these students is a major infraction, a major crime, because it is a betrayal of a sacred trust. Amadi should have averted his mind to this even though he did well to name as culprits politicians, a class to which he also belongs.
However, we should worry more about how to curb the decline in morals and values rather than pointing accusing fingers at any particular group. The decline is not even limited to young girls only. Every segment of our society, every social group, every age bracket, every sex is affected by the decline. The danger is that with the high level of poverty and unemployment, low level of accountable governance, our values and morality are more likely than not to decline further. That ought to be our major source of worry.
