Girl-child Education: She arrested her father

LINGUISTS have shifted focus from how the English Language should be used to describing how it is manipulated to suit communication purposes with context in mind. So, please, consider ‘necessary’ to be a noun and not an adjective.

Seen in this light, ‘Failure to provide necessary’ is good English. So good and true it almost sent a family man to jail.

A very senior colleague has enough near-death and hair-raising experiences to write an engaging memoir. Now that he is a desk Oga, he regales me with rib crackers. Oh yes! Comedy is tragedy plus time.

Anyway, he told me of a secondary school girl that almost turned her father to a prisoner for failure to provide necessary. Her father had suddenly stopped paying her fees: “I no go train girl for another man to marry.”

So she arrested him. Yes. She arrested her father. Girl-child education is a serious matter.

My senior colleague was asked to intervene as an elder and relative. By the time he got to the station, father was behind bars, swollen with righteous, but impotent, anger.

“What is this man’s offence?” my Oga asked. The officer-in-charge pointed at the charge board. Written against the father’s name was: ‘Failure to provide necessary’. What kind of law is this, he wondered aloud.

Olokpa was provoked: “You claim to be educated and a journalist, yet you do not know the law?” On and on he ranted.

The said law is so catchy that I resist the urge to go through my copy of the 1999 Constitution. If it is not there, it will lose the magical taste. It might be in one of those many books of by-laws.

One thing is sure, Nigerian politicians are more educated than this my Oga at the top. They obey this law to the letter because to be an ex-convict can be damaging.

This must be why no close friends or neighbours of a politician suffer lack of basic amenities. Farm roads in the hometown of a former Aso Rock number two are tarred with good drainage.

If in the middle of a Lagos suburb you suddenly run into good road network and ‘steady’ power supply, a commissioner or legislature once lived there or still does.

When one pipe snakes out of a politician’s 10-foot high fence to meet a community’s daily water needs, that politician does not want to be charged with ‘Failure to provide necessary’.

So you are not fortunate enough to have a Special Assistant to the Special Adviser on Road Navigation to a minister’s driver living in your area? How is that my business? I am coping. So you can.

Now, what happened to that father that went against this law?

Sorry, let’s wait for another day to complete our tale.