Residents of Langbasa, a community in Ajah area of
Lagos, are accusing a woman in the neighbourhood of causing a grievous harm on
her two-year-old stepdaughter. Kehinde, as she’s known, is in trouble for
allegedly dipping the two hands of her little stepdaughter, Esther, into
oven-hot water.
The girl’s hands were boiled terribly, and many are
raising concern that one of them might have become utterly useless. Esther, it
was gathered, lost her own mum about a year ago a few days after her first
birthday. The poor little girl has since been living with her father, known
among residents of the area as Baba Eleja. Baba Eleja, Esther’s dad, later
brought in Kehinde, a mother of three, as his wife. He put Esther in the care
of his new wife, Kehinde. Continue after the cut:
Trouble started for the woman on Wednesday, October
31. She wasn’t feeling good and invited a nurse to prescribe drugs for her. It
was the nurse that noticed Esther’s boiled hands. The nurse also realised that
the little girl was very unhealthy. She sought to know what was responsible for
the little girl’s condition and Kehinde allegedly explained that the girl
mistakenly put her hands inside a bucket of hot water in the room. Obviously
not satisfied with that explanation, the nurse went to inform Kehinde’s
neighbours about the strange development.
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| Kahinde - The Stepmother |
Many of the neighbours, who had all along suspected
that all was not well with little Esther as Kehinde was always beating her,
rushed to the room to see the girl. One of the neighbours, who described
himself as her father’s kinsman, spoke to the reporter. His words: “When we saw
Esther, lying on the floor with her boiled hands, we were moved to tears. We
feared that the poor girl might die any moment from then.
We quickly made efforts to rush her to the hospital
for treatment. I don’t think Esther was the one that dipped her own hands in
the hot water. In fact, if you see that damage done on those hands, you would
know that somebody must have dipped those hands in some boiling water. The
hands were boiled to the wrist. Even that poor girl wouldn’t be able to use one
of the hands again.” Another resident of the area, a woman, said Kehinde never
spared the cane on the little girl.
“She is always beating the girl with canes. You can
even see scars of the wounds that her canes inflicted on the girl’s body. Since
we noticed what happened to Esther, we have moved her away from the woman.
Earlier today, when the girl saw her stepmother, she was so terrified that she
cried and ran away. That shows she (Kehinde) has been wicked to her. I advise
the relatives of the girl’s mother to take her away from her father so that
something more terrible than this doesn’t happen to her,” she told the
reporter.
When Daily Sun sought to speak with Kehinde in her
husband’s one room apartment in Olugbe compound in the community, her husband
as well as some of her relatives wanted to prevent the encounter, saying they
didn’t want the family’s dirty linen washed in public. Explanations by the
reporter that since the matter had gone to the police, it had already gone
beyond their private domain, did little to persuade the angry relatives. In
fact, at a point, Baba Eleja got angry and rushed to the nearby Langbasa police
post where he reported the “intruding” journalist.
Meanwhile, other relatives as well as the landlord
of the apartment granted audience to the reporter and urged Kehinde to grant an
interview. In the course of the interview, Baba Eleja suddenly materialised
with a policeman in tow, apparently to get the ‘busybody’ arrested. But as soon
as the police officer discovered the reporter’s identity, he asked the
journalist to continue his job. He advised the enraged husband to cooperate
with him. Amidst verbal invectives being hurled at her by neighbours and some
relatives, who believed she did dip Esther’s hands into a pot of steaming
water, Kehinde told the reporter her story: “It happened a few weeks ago.
That morning, I noticed that Esther was looking very
dull. So, I asked her to come to me and I gave her a potty for her to urinate
into. I discovered that the urine was black, which showed that she was sick.
So, I didn’t allow her to go to school. That day, I was also bleeding because I
just had a miscarriage. After a while, I kept a bowl of very hot water that I
wanted to use on myself beside our bed and rushed out to the kitchen. Suddenly,
I heard Esther’s piercing cry and I rushed back into the room only to see her
struggling with the bowl of hot water.
By the time I could rescue her, she already boiled
her two hands. I thought she wanted to drink water because she was eating the
rice that I cooked for her and my own children before I left the room. I
quickly went to borrow N100 from a neighbour with which I bought some balm that
I applied on the hands. I also gave her some drugs for her fever and she soon
slept off. “When her father returned from work in the night and noticed what
happened to her, he beat the hell out of me, in spite of my condition. It took
the intervention of our landlord before he left me.
Since then, Esther has been staying with me at home.
She has not been going to school and I’ve been doing my best to treat her. “But
a few days ago, I invited a nurse, who is also a neighbour to attend to me. As
a result of the miscarriage, I have been feeling very weak and I have lost a
lot of blood. The nurse came and I was lying on the bed. Esther was resting on
a mattress close to the bed.
The nurse came to attend to me but when she saw
Esther, she looked worried and asked what happened to her. When I explained,
she asked why we didn’t take her to hospital yet and I said I didn’t have the
money and that I was expecting that Esther’s father would do that. “The nurse
promptly attended to me and hurriedly left after examining Esther’s boiled
hands for two or three times. It wasn’t long after she left that a crowd of
neighbours broke into our room to see Esther.
They soon pounced on me and started beating me. It
took the intervention of policemen, who were invited by some of them, to rescue
me from the mob. I would have been lynched. They thought that I deliberately
dipped her hands into boiling water. I didn’t do that at all. I have always
been taking care of Esther as if I were her mother. Even people call me Mama
Esther because of the way I treat her. I couldn’t have done such a terrible
thing to her.”
Culled from Sunnews
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