On May 20, a four-year-old child was rescued by the police and a
crowd of angry neighbours from the grotesque mistreatment she had been
undergoing for more than 3 years in the hands of the elder sister of
that child’s father. That child, Nasra Rashid Mvungi, later died at
Muhimbili National Hospital (MNH) where she had been referred to by the
Mororgoro Regional Hospital for treatment for a range of ailments
resulting from the mistreatment by a woman who was supposedly an elder
sister of her father.
Mother’s death
Nasra’s mother had died when she was a mere 9
month-old and her father handed her over to her aunt and remarried.
Apparently, in the three years Nasra was being kept in a box like dirty
linen, her father claims he visited his elder sister from time to time
and left money for the little girl’s upkeep. But apparently, he never
thought it necessary to demand to meet his daughter who would have loved
to get a fatherly hug! If Nasra’s father’s concern went beyond availing
money for the girl and demanded he sees her for a hug, he would have
discovered the cruel condition which his daughter endured for three
years, much earlier!
Government authorities also got wind of the
mistreatment of Nasra, because it too, like the girl’s father, did not
consider it its duty to oversee the welfare of the nation’s children.
The writing of this piece was completed as this author gazed from the
eighth floor window of a hotel in central Amsterdam, in the Netherlands,
where he had just arrived to attend the Annual General Meeting of a
global coalition against the injustice of poverty amidst plenty!
Nasra’s mistreatment and her eventual death
reminded one of the accuracy of the claim by organisations like Action
Aid that today’s global poverty was the inevitable consequence of
various injustices in the world.
In the Netherlands, children, by being born in
this country, are entitled, as a basic human right, to receive child
benefits from the Dutch state from when children is born till when he
reaches the age of 21.
In Tanzania, the state only discovers the mistreatment of children who are less than a year old three years too late.
This is a sad situation and it should put to shame
all the post-colonial political elite in Africa who have miserably
failed to turn the promise of national political independence to the
reality of a decent life for all the free African people who fought hard
but have been let down by the political elite. Today, Wednesday, 25
June, is exactly a month since 25 May when Africa marked 51 years since
the founding leaders of African countries that had just gained
independence from colonial rule, of the Organisation for African Unity
(OAU), which was later slightly reformed and renamed the African Union
(AU). The African political elite who were behind the founding of the
OAU saw this organisation as a halfway house between newly independent
but balkanised African states whose people were wallowing in abject
poverty and unified continent governed as one sovereign state, most
likely of a federal nature like the United States of America, that
governed a prosperous people for whom poverty was history.
The key movers of the proposition that Africans
needed to unite for its people to regain their dignity were leaders like
the late Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Abdul Nasser of Egypt, and Julius
Nyerere of then Tanganyika. These fervently adhered to the ideological
tenets of the global Pan African Congress movement that dared to dream
of a dispensation that will have African mothers who gave birth to
children who would invariably live to be 70 or 80 and so instead of
dying in the arms of these African mothers before they attained the age
of 5 years.
The noble Pan-African nationalist dreams have not
yet been realised and this truth is rubbed into the fresh wound of the
general betrayal of cause of African liberation. Every other day one
hears of widespread child abuse and occasional infant molestation in
many African countries.
This is apart from the horrifying stories told by
former child soldiers in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and,
until recently, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The case of Nasra and her ordeal that culminated in her death is merely the tip of the iceberg.
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