How do you arrest someone for wearing an amulet, smoking, drinking or gambling? None of those four are a crime in our criminal code. Unless where the report says the boy is an SS1 student and did all that with his school uniform in a bush.

That’s juvenile delinquency. Every school prohibits that for their students and that’s what I find abhorrent. But an SS1 student is most probably still under age and what the child needs is not an arrest. It’s to take him home or somewhere he can be rehabilitated and given proper direction. It’s simply not his fault yet.

But hell no, the screaming headlines are rather saying he was arrested for wearing an amulet.

What Is An Amulet?

An amulet is defined by the dictionary as an ornament or small piece of jewellery thought to give protection against evil, danger, or disease.

How on this planet and in this country did wearing an ornament thought to give you protection become a crime? If the boy was wearing a rosary or a scapula or tying a mantle bought from a church or wearing a tesbi, will he be treated in the same manner, he is been treated now? Will the headlines write the same thing?

Is this not deliberate indoctrination of this child and other children to hate their African-ness in preference for who they are not?

Is this not discriminatory?

In a country where our kids recite and memorize all kinds of foreign religious jargons daily in their assembly grounds and lesson classes, in a country where our kids have Christian and Islamic religious studies in their syllabuses, in a country where Christians impose the Gregorian calendar, dotted with all kinds of Christian holidays, on the rest of us, where the Muslims are asking for a holiday on the first day of the first month of the Islamic calendar, where El-Rufai has shortened the working week to four days in Kaduna to allow Muslims a holiday on Fridays, there is still a prevalence of despicable attempts to de-market, demonize, stigmatize and demoralize traditional practices including the harmless ones.

This is so provocative, annoying and discriminatory. This is making me angry right now. How this young child is been made to feel that wearing a traditional ornament comes with communal consequences, when it is actually not true. How they are teaching his peers not to be proud of our tradition.

Whoever is humiliating that little boy based on his wearing of an amulet should know that the rights of the child are been violated and that must stop. I hear it is not even the Police that arrested him but a State owned security outfit.

What undertaking do they want the child’s parents to sign?

That what?

Should they strip everyone in that school, teachers and pupils, and see what each one is all wearing and ask them to sign undertaking too?

I wear all kinds of things on my body depending on my belief about each piece and I don’t know how that should be anyone’s business, if you are not an interloper. The fact that you have been indoctrinated by your foreign religions to fear amulets is none of my business. Deal with your fear. I mean no harm on you unless you do, then you must be afraid.

Source: StreetReporters.ng

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