Nigerians recently received some surprising news feeds. A simple run of the headline reads:Teenage apprentice impregnates master’s daughter, nine others in five months.’ In a country where many scoops revolve around fatal shootings by ‘unknown’ gunmen, bandits, trigger-happy security operatives, and daredevil kidnappers, an irony is not lost when the latest item turned out to be a randy marksman. In an undisclosed community in Anambra State, an 18-year-old unleashes loaded libido and embarks on the grim mission of cutting down the future of 10 hapless young girls.
The state’s Commissioner for Women and Social Welfare disclosed the incident while speaking in a live video on social media. Perplexingly, she sought advice from the public, declaring the issue was “beyond my capacity.” She stated how the young man was dismissed after putting his boss’s daughter and a salesgirl in the family way within three months. Thereafter, the teenager, appearing to have upped his antics, widened his dragnet to ensnare eight other young women back in the village.
Asked how he constantly succeeds with the girls, the boy replied that he always confessed his love with a promise to marry them when he becomes wealthy. According to the commissioner, the mother, who reported her ordeal, cried for help, saying her heart “jumps” whenever she sees a girl coming towards her house. The commissioner capped the narrative, questioning whether the saga had a “spiritual” undertone.
The escapade resonates with the public in diverse ways. Depraved lots might envy a proficient sexual opportunist. The empathetic would bewail the misfortune that has marred the destinies of the would-be mothers. Concerned parents and guardians may emplace preventive strategies, and some faith-based institutions might find a case study on subjugating the fiendish elements that assault society. It bears the semblance of a trifle when set against what most citizens consider the nation’s more pressing challenges, like the cost-of-living crisis. However, unless concerted efforts are undertaken to checkmate the broader implications, the seemingly passing story of a lubricious youth could become the metaphor for a looming social catastrophe.
As a top government official appointed to oversee matters affecting women and social welfare, the commissioner’s blurted admission of helplessness is uninspiring. It betrays gaps in the state’s institutional capacity to handle complex social and behavioural issues. There is evidently no established protocol for handling such cases.
Sadly, the postulation reflects an all-too-familiar disposition in many of the nation’s sector heads, where casually dropped words or body language have indicated that even the drivers do not appear to know the exit to societal encumbrances. In worst-case scenarios, troubles, like kidnapping, have simply swallowed up both the protector and the protected. Also, the suggestion of a spiritual cause rather than immediate recourse to psychological evaluation or counselling for the boy shows a lamentable abyss of the pervasive escapism in the psyche of Nigerian leadership.
It is a fearsome probability that the Anambra incident is the tip of the iceberg. While bawdy boys and their victims have consistently ticked history’s checklists of unwanted pregnancies, the 18-year-old’s adventure might reveal a disconcerting low in the lack of fundamental sexual education among Nigeria’s youths. It suggests a breakdown of vital communication between parents and children about sexuality, a situation that has not been helped by a culture of hypocrisy veiled as religiosity. The ability of an apprentice to persuade multiple girls and put them on their backs or otherwise signifies a scarcity of awareness among the victims over what constitutes relationships, consent, and consequences. It indicates a lack of empowerment to shun vain advances or make informed decisions about their sexual health.
Besides unplanned motherhood, many of Nigeria’s young sit on the precipice of irreversible career disruptions and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). Statistics by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reveal that the country accounts for 15 per cent of the global total of Out-of-School Children, with more than 50 per cent of girls not attending school at the basic education level.
Studies have also shown that the STI prevalence rate stands as high as 17 per cent among adolescent females. Given a 2023 World Bank estimate indicating an estimated 87 million Nigerians lived below the poverty line, representing a poverty rate of 38.9 per cent, the least the country currently needs is the inflation of these figures by uninhibited apprentices.
If an apprentice can wield so much phallic influence, it is left to be imagined what lecherous havoc individuals, high up the country’s social ladder, are perpetrating. That young girls would most readily believe promises of marriage and love from glaringly uncertain and untested quarters highlights deep socio-cultural and economic vulnerability.
Somewhere, in the crust of our cogno-emotional plates, there appears to have been a tectonic shift in comprehension of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Consequently, the foundations of validated unions between men and women are threatened on scales that may never have been imagined.
The apprenticeship scheme, hugely popular in the South-East, has often earned commendations for boosting the economic fortunes of the region’s youths. This recent incident, however, might affirm the need for close monitoring of the age-old enterprise to prevent cracks amid grave lapses, particularly in the oversight of young apprentices. It is concerning that when the lines between masters’ territories and those of apprentices start getting blurred, shifts occur in protected obligations, often with devastating consequences.
How did a community, supposedly steeped in cultural and ethical norms, receive the news of conceptions flung and scattered across 10 protruding bellies without an uproar or some intervention? Where have the elders, the custodians of societal values, disappeared to? Why should a mother turn away from the guardrails of knit family solutions and flee to a government representative, who, in turn, flings the dilemma into the public space?
The steamy exploits of Apprentice X beckon the nation to embark on a journey of introspection. How did we get here? And where do we proceed henceforth? Rather than let the shameful incident slide down memory lane as a misfortune that merely befell a small section of the population, stakeholders must rise and condemn both the acts and the failed governmental and parental responses surrounding them.
Institutions, including family, need to enhance their methodology for tackling societal problems. Unlike doubtful and overflogged narratives, the apprentice is no bandit that crossed into Nigerian territory from Mali, Niger or Libya. The randy gunman is the product of a society’s amnesiac loss of its moral identity.
