Imagine being flogged every day for 88 days.
And being beaten for not committing any offence!
This is what the just-released abducted children of the Salihu Tanko Islamiyya School, Tegina, Niger State, suffered in the hands of bandits who have held them for close to three months.
Despite their tender age, they were made to trek for four days after they were kidnapped.
This was, however, like a rehearsal towards the suffering that awaited them.
According to one of them, Furera Isah, they were made to sleep on bare ground and were ceaselessly beaten by rain.
‘The Nation’ quoted her as saying, “The months we spent there were not comfortable at all. Our lives were not sweet. They beat us all the time. Every time, they call us at night to beat us.
“As for food, they gave us rice and kunnu. We usually ate three times a day. They did not starve us. But they beat us every time.
“They allowed us to pray. We slept in a shabby place. The rain usually beats us whenever it falls.”
Meanwhile, Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has urged the United Nations to invoke relevant charters to save children and other people in areas being tormented by kidnappers in Nigeria.
Soyinka said it was clear that the Nigerian state could not protect them, hence for the UN to act.
He told journalists in Lagos on Friday: “We are calling on the United Nations to intervene and stop this slave trade; to live up to its noble intentions, declarations and rescue these children and put a stop to this act. If Nigeria continues to stand on her sovereignty, I leave this to the experts, I am talking as a layman, I think the protocols of the UN enable the organisation to declare sections of this country under the UN.
“If the government has failed to protect its own people and failed to fulfil its responsibility under protocols it’s a signatory to, the UN has a right and responsibility to declare those zones UN protectorates. We don’t want what we are undergoing now to become the new normal peculiar to the Nigerian nation.’’
