By Jude Atupulazi
How very good our world would have been if there was no wickedness, how blissful! But here we are, living in a world full of wickedness and pretence. This week I am going to write about the gloomy world of those small angels who serve us as house helps but are living on the fringes in many homes, more like unwanted guests than those brought to help keep the family going.
These are people who have been made to forget the joys of childhood for the simple reason of coming from poor homes and needing others to help them survive. The way these poor souls are being treated has often betrayed our hypocrisy, when we strive to be seen as good Christians, caring mothers and fathers or loving parents.
It is always easy to recognize who ”does not belong” in any family outing. While the children of the house are beautifully attired and happy looking, the house helps are in contrast shabbily dressed and looking dour.
And the reason they even follow at family outings is usually because they are needed to carry the baby of the house or that they are not trusted to be left alone in the house. When they do go out with the rest of the family, there seems an unwritten code that forbids them from laughing or even smiling. They are thus usually the odd ones out.
I remember a few years back when I was entering a fast food joint and saw a family park and get out from their car. Everyone was laughing and the kids were obviously excitedly anticipating the goodies they would encounter at the joint. As they left the car, only one person was left behind: the maid. As I passed her, I could not fail to see the forlorn look in her face as she sat alone, probably wondering what she had done to deserve such a fate.
My heart went out to her. When I shared that experience immediately on one of my Whatsapp groups, one member was so furious, he begged me to confront the parents and ask them why they should do that to the maid. But I replied that I had no right to do that. Perhaps if the maid was being rough handled that would have been a different piece of cake.
That maid’s experience is the exact same thing faced by many house helps in many a home: discrimination. But that is not all. Many have been turned into punching bags and are beaten for any little mistake, starved and made to sleep outside occasionally. These are things we are daily confronted with on social and traditional media these days.
The house helps have simply become the children who live in our homes but don’t belong to them.
In effect, in many Nigerian homes, there are two categories of children: the ones whose pictures are on the wall, and the ones who dust the wall.
We call them house helps, house girl, house boy, or the small girl that stays with us. The euphemism is intentional. It hides what they really are: child domestic workers, often under-16, taken from poor homes in Ebonyi, Enugu, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, etc., to serve middle-class homes in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Onitsha, Aba, etc.
And for too many of them, the house is not a home. It is a workplace without wages, without closing time, and without rights.
Their daily lives revolve around a 6am to 12am routine.
In many cases these poor souls are brought to other people’s homes by a middle person (these days known as a child trafficker) who will tell their mothers that they would go to school or learn a trade. But two years on, the poor souls will still be living in servitude at the homes of uncaring and wicked parents, being treated like outcasts.
For a typical house maid, her day usually starts at 5:30am. She sweeps the compound, fetches water, washes the father’s car, wakes the madam’s children, bathes the youngest, makes tea, fries akara.
The madam’s children go to a private school in a school bus. The house maid goes nowhere, despite the promise of going to school when they brought her. When it comes to her matter, school costs money. So she stay at home to hold the house.
She only eats after everyone has eaten, sometimes what is left, and at other times, nothing.
At 10pm, after washing plates, mopping, ironing uniforms for the next day, the maid spreads a wrapper in the kitchen, beside the freezer. That is her bed.
This is not an extreme story. Ask any teacher in a public school in Nigeria, they will tell you how to spot them: the child who comes late because she had to finish chores, the child with burn scars on her arms, the one who flinches when you raise your voice.
But these people need our help. We should not fold our hands and say it does not concern us. We have to be their voice by reporting such sad situations.
Nigeria’s Child Rights Act prohibits child labour, employment of children as domestic helps, and subjecting them to physical abuse. 34 states in Nigeria have domesticated it.
Section 28 of the Trafficking in Persons Act criminalizes using a child under 12 as domestic help. But enforcement is almost zero. We see the child hawking at even 9pm, we see the one with a swollen eye, and we say “na family matter”. I recall seeing a child hawking oranges around 8.30pm and after seeing the way she was almost frantically appealing to me to buy her remaining oranges, I felt for her. When asked why she had not gone home by that time, she told me her aunty would flog her if she returned home without exhausting the oranges. I had to pay for the remaining ones in order to free her.
Their maltreatment takes many forms. Physical: hot water, hot iron, wire, belt, pestle. In 2023 in Lagos, a woman was arrested for using a hot iron to burn her 11-year-old house help’s buttocks for eating meat. In Abuja last year, a couple was jailed for chaining their house boy outside like a dog. In Anambra here a little boy had his body lacerated with burns from a burning plastic bucket.
Food Starvation: many house helps are deliberately underfed. ‘If you feed them too well, they will grow big and start eyeing your husband,’ is a common, shameful justification whispered among some madams.
Educational Deprivation: They are promised school but become full-time nannies. The madam’s child who is 4 years old speaks better English than the 14-year-old house help who bathes him.
Sexual Abuse: the boy child is vulnerable to madams and older daughters; the girl child to ogas, drivers, older sons. They cannot report, because who would believe the house girl over oga?
Wage Theft: parents in the village are told, ‘we are saving her salary.’ Sometimes N5, 000 a month, but often, nothing is ever sent. The “agent” who brought her has taken two months’ pay as commission.
These things continue to happen because of poverty. A mother with six children and no farm yield is told, ‘let me help you train one.’ It sounds like charity, but it is trafficking.
We do it because we have normalized inequality. We want cheap labour to maintain a lifestyle we cannot actually afford. A young couple earning N300k a month hires a 12-year-old for N15k a month because they cannot afford a professional adult housekeeper for N80k.
And we do it because we are not watching each other. In our estates and flats, we know when a child is being beaten. The screams from Flat 3 are loud at night. But we say, ‘make I no put mouth for person family matter,’ until the child dies.
One young girl, now 19, worked as a house help in Enugu from age 9 to 15. She was not allowed to use the toilet inside the house but the bush behind.
‘I thought that was normal,’ she says, ‘until one day I went to fetch water for madam and I saw her daughter, who is my age mate, using the same toilet I was forbidden to use. I cried that day.’
She ran away. A neighbour helped her contact National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking In Persons, NAPTIP. Today, she is learning catering.
Not everyone runs. Some are too scared. Some have been told their parents have been paid and they owe a debt.
But by whatever name we call it, when a house help is under 18, does not go to school, works 16 hours a day and sleeps in your kitchen, you are not helping her. You are using her.
We should collectively report such cases of abuse for prosecution – be it as landlords, estate chairmen, or neighbours. I call on the appropriate authorities to provide hotlines to make it easier for people to report such abuses and retain their privacy.
If anyone needs help, they should hire an adult and pay them a living wage. Give them a day off. Give them their own room. Let them eat what you eat.
A serious look should be taken at the so-called Agent System. That woman who “supplies” girls from the village every January is a trafficker. She should be treated as such.
In many Nigerian homes, the most dangerous place for a child is not on the streets. It is inside a house with a locked gate, a tall fence, and a family that goes to church every Sunday and sings and claps the loudest.
We cannot claim to love children while we have one category of children we raise, and another category we treat with less love than house pets.
Every house girl is someone’s daughter. Every house boy is someone’s son. If your own child cannot do it, another mother’s child should not be doing it for you. No wonder we are raising children who cannot replicate their fathers’ success because of the soft way they are raised. What they do is just to squander the wealth made by their father and become near useless.
On a final note, many parents will not make heaven because of the way they treat other people’s children. You that are reading this, don’t be among them!
