Hearth, home and hammer -By Kene Obiezu

It`s not just that there is no place like home, home is where the heart is. When home and hearth is evoked, it is to express everything familiar about familial love and the fabulous feeling it should bring. These days however, Nigeria adds a hammer to hearth and home.

It is not just terrifying and traumatizing, the dark depression it engenders wrenches at the heart pulling the heartstrings hither and thither while slipping a delicate world of emotions into a deadly tailspin.

When violence visits home, running its scraggly fingers over the tender psyche of innocent children, the damage is incalculable, irreparable and inexcusable. At once, Nigeria`s watery laws and a repulsive romance with patriarchy are indicted.

A man hits his wife and the moment she opens her mouth to expose the maggot, she is harshly reminded in a police station that domestic matters are domestic and there is no marriage without occasional crises. Thus, a kind of violence so vicious as to be visceral continues to receive justification, even blessings, in a country where there always seems to be one vulture too many hovering over many houses.

In June 2021, in Edo State Nigeria, a forty-five-year-old man reportedly beat his wife to death because she refused to advance him a loan of N2,000. To be clear, she was killed because she refused to give her killer a loan.

Just last week, out of the conflict-scarred soil of Nasarawa State, another domestic graveyard sprung up at Sabonpegi-Shabu community in Lafia local government of Nasarawa State when a man identified as Ovye Yakubu allegedly beat his wife to death over a domestic quarrel. At the heart of the quarrel was a carpenter brought home by the deceased school-teacher wife to fix a broken window net that was decidedly leaking mosquitoes that were leaving their three children intermittently sick with malaria. Again, it was the woman who commissioned the carpenter and presumably she was to pay him out of her own pockets.

When the couple disagreed over whether the carpenter should stay and work or go, the deceased 39-year-old school teacher met her grisly end at the hands of the hyena she mistook for a husband.

In the many contraptions of convenience many mistake for marriage these days, are there no boundaries?  What kind of a husband raises his hands at his wife at the slightest disagreement? What`s the provenance of the man who must beat every disagreeing opinion out of his wife? Hell. Of course. Hell and all it comes with.

In a country where  insecurity is  forcing an ever growing number of women and mothers to become breadwinners in large families, it is absurd in the extreme that death is sometimes the reward women get for heroically holding the forte when their men die or simply leave home and don’t return..

The heartbreaking witness borne by children many of whom live firsthand the spectral horror of domestic violence is also a dagger to the heart. When children are forcefully fed into the unforgiving furnace of domestic violence, there is no telling what breaks or bursts. But the certainty is unyielding that a flood is loosened from which fury there may be no escape.

In many ways, Nigeria`s painfully perverse patriarchal society fans the flames consuming many women who in signing their marriage certificates unwittingly sign their death warrants at the hands of hellions disguised as husbands. 

In many ways, Nigeria`s patriarchal society provides the audience from which rise the raucous cheers that embolden wife beaters and killers to bring down the oft final fatal fist. When a man kills his wife, what becomes of the children? What do the children do, having just witnessed their mother killed and their father become a killer?

Nigeria has a Violence Against Persons Act but it appears yet another toothless law in Nigeria`s toolkit of toothless laws. In spite of the abundance of culprits, this salubrious law finds only very little use at the hands of the many hypocrites who man Nigeria`s legislative, executive and judicial gates.

From the beginning of many a marriage, the society cheers the husband onto the top rung of the domestic ladder. The wife and children bring up the rear. For many men, this is a license to unclench their iron fists. The utterly shameless among them don’t even give a monkey`s whether they provide for their families or not. As far as they are concerned, they head the home and that is often enough to abominably unleash a regime of physical, emotional and psychological terror in the family, which is the cradle of life.

Thus, for many men who are husbands, or part-time husbands as the case may be, irresponsibility ignites the shortest of fuses to unleash the infernos which burn their families badly and sometimes fatally.

The Nigerian society reinforces domestic violence in many ways. A country with an ever-rising debt ceiling also seems to have an obsession with the ascendancy of the glass ceiling. While other countries, recognizing the gargantuan contributions women can make to building stable societies, have marked out large swathes of public life for women in a bid to engender equality and have tallied astounding economic miracles as a result, Nigeria has continued to retrogress, the Giant of Africa taking many swift steps backward to a place long left behind. So, here, many women feel powerless with the pressure cranked up on them at home or elsewhere while patriarchy looks on amused.

Nigeria is a country that provides a fertile breeding ground for the dangers that lurk in every woman`s worst nightmare. Patriarchy fastens its proboscis into every peroration that seeks to give women a foothold. Gleefully, it brings religion and superstitions to the banquet.

One only needs to look at the pangs of the Gender Equal Opportunity Bill that is all but dead at the Senate, its demise hastened by those who wield religion like cudgels. If we must do more to prevent our homes from becoming graveyards, and children traumatized witnesses of unspeakable violence and epic injustices, we must do more.

The country must hurry because just as the heart is breaking, the hearth is dying, all imperiled by the hammer of domestic violence. A chill like nothing the country has ever known is waiting to take root.

Kene Obiezu,

keneobiezu@gmail.com