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Written by Clement Idoko 
Sunday, February 13, 2011

Clement Idoko writes about a seven year-old girl who is multi-talented but had to stop school due to lack of fund in primary 3, and how her jingles on President Goodluck Jonalthan were hijacked by Goodluck Jonalthan 2011 Support GroupTHIS seven-year-old whizkid, Mimiemiracle Emmanuel is an incredible multi-talented young girl; very hyper-active and outspoken. She is a gifted child with uncommon talents and abilities well beyond her years. One's interaction with her will reveal this or when one sees her on stage.

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Calm and gentle, as she heralded her mum into the newsroom of Tribune's Abuja office, nothing about her suggested precociousness. But the word would be a disservice to what nature has deposited in this seven-year old. Mimiemiracle is simply a genius, though a primary three drop-out, who is left with a single mum after her father, a military officer reportedly eloped with another woman in Jos, where mother and child were living. The unending crises in the city had however turned them into refugees living in an uncompleted building in Abuja.

Unfortunately, Mimiemiracle is one among the millions of disadvantaged children in the Nigerian society today. Driven away from Jos by the crisis that had enveloped the city in recent times, the young girl has been turned to a beggar on the streets of Abuja with her mother, Princess Momoh.

Last week, she was in Abuja office of the Nigerian Tribune newspapers, in company with her mother. The girl dazzled the Tribune staff, when she clutched the newspaper on a table and screamed the headline "Jos Boils Again!" and read the news story effortlessly. After reading through, she mused, saying "All these killings, yet government can't do anything to stop it".

The young girl, brought up by her single mother, stopped school in Primary 3 because her mother could not raise money to support her education further. She told Sunday Tribune: "I was a pupil of Local Education Authority School. I am not in school because my mum has no money to pay my school fees. My mum was making efforts to get some money to put me in school so that I won't be left out. There was a day that I asked my mum, 'won't I go to school again? Look at other children going to school'. But she still encouraged me and said 'don't worry, you will soon be in school'. I was in primary 3 when I stopped school".

Interestingly, aside being a gifted child and a genius, little Mimiemiracle is an incredible back-up singer, a budding poet, actress, and a voice-over expert. When asked of her innate abilities, she said: "I can sing, I can do movies, I can do jingles, I can produce films and a lot more".

In schools, such gifted children like Mimiemiracle have been tagged as 'possessed', derided as oddballs, and ridiculed as nerds. The parents of such young people are often criticized for pushing their children rather than allowing them a normal, well-balanced childhood. These children are so different from others that schools usually do not know how to educate them. But understanding them would help teachers to effectively handle them in classes.

In Mimiemiracle's case, she seems to take after her mother, who herself is an artiste and a script writer. The vicissitudes of life, no doubt, has been overwhelming. She was married to an Army Officer but unfortunately, a supposedly married woman came in between them and snatched her husband from her. She was then left as a single mother to fend for her little baby she so much cherishes and would do anything to protect.

As if that was not enough, all her toil in the cold weather of Jos, over the years, to eke out a living, went with the lingering crises that had enveloped the state in recent times. According to Princess Momoh, who hails from Owan Local Government Area of Edo State, she came to Abuja with her kid early 2011 as refugees. They had to put up in an uncompleted building for a long time in one of the Abuja suburbs because she could not afford the rent for a room.

Her travails were made worse when she met one of the coordinators of Jonathan 2011 Support Group on June 29, 2010. Princess Momoh said she met the Coordinator with two scripted jingles titled "Jonathan 2011 and "A New Dawn" and was made to borrow money from people for the production of the jingles, only for them to be hijacked.

She stated that ''the coordinator took an interest in my script. After the production was done, he disappeared and I never saw him again. I was usually told he was busy, he would not want to see anybody or that he was not around. Meanwhile, he was always around".

She added: "This continued until we ran into armed robbers in the process. The robbers took away copies of jingles we laboured over and took loans in producing at the studio. They took my ID card, my demo-production, tape recorder, handbag, and all that I was given and managing with my baby. In the process, they almost harmed me and my baby but God intervened. They pushed us into the bush''.

Princess Momoh, speaking with tears rolling down her face, while describing the pains and agony she had gone through producing those jingles, further revealed that she suffered the same fate in the hands of a former Deputy Governor.

She said: "Again, I had to start all over again when the women wing came in, still on Jonathan Support Group. I had to do a similar scripting and presented them to a one-time Deputy Governor. I started afresh with her, I presented the demo production of my jingle titled "A New Dawn," which was on my cell phone, to her and she took an interest in it and handed me over to one man in her media unit that we should work together.

"We did the work and after everything nothing came out of it. It was 'come today, come tomorrow' and I discovered finally that she was not really being sincere with me. I had thought that she was working with me as a mother would do to a daughter. At the end of the day, she pushed me again and referred me to people that I might not be able to see in the next one year.

"Eventually, all that I have laboured on with my baby for close to seven months now, since June 29, 2010, just went like that. We are on the streets, I sell baby's clothes every Friday market at Mpape, and on Mondays in Garki Village Market, just to make ends meet. Yet, I have things I can do, my baby can do beautifully well, take some lines, do jingles, do poems and some other beautiful things to add value to her life and to the society," she stated.

Also, it was the little Mimiemiracle that thrilled the audience during the 2010 celebration of the Day of African Child with her poem recitation. The poem titled 'The Child' was also scripted by the mother.

The young girl's last hope was when she came in contact with the First Lady of Nigeria, Dame Patience Jonathan at the end -of -the- year children's party she organized. To her, meeting one-on-one with the wife of the President had provided a golden opportunity to present the beautiful projects they did for President Jonathan but were hijacked by the politicians.

At the occasion, Mimiemiracle said she summoned courage to personally hand over the two copies of the jingle one audio and one visual jingles she helped the mother to produce on President Goodluck Jonathan to the wife. The seven-year-old girl said she was surprised that nothing has been heard from the First Lady or the President till date even when her mother did a follow up with letters to remind her and copied the President.

Mimiemiracle appealed to President Jonathan and other public -spirited individuals to help her go back to school to continue with her education. "I want to tell Mr. President that I will be grateful if he can raise some money for me to be able to start school again, not that today I will be in school, tomorrow I will stay at home."

(CNN) -- At age 13, Hope Witsell struggled in middle school. Not because her class work at Shields Middle School in Ruskin, Florida, was challenging, but because Hope was being bullied.

Her friend, Kyla Stich, told CNN that fellow students would "walk up to her and call her 'slut,' 'whore,' and they would sometimes, they would call her 'skank' and just be really cruel to her.".

Another friend, Lexi Leber, said, "We had to make like a wall, we had people surrounding her, and she had to be in the middle because people would come by and try to hit her and push her into a locker or something.

"She was afraid to walk alone, she was afraid someone would do something to her, like verbally attack her, so she would always have someone with her," Leber added.

This all started in the spring of 2009 during the last week of school.

Friends and family say Hope had "sexted" a picture of her breasts to her boyfriend. Another girl from school, they say, got her hands on the photo and sent it to students at six different schools in the area.

Before Hope could do anything to stop it, that photo had gone viral.

The school alerted Hope's parents. Her mother, Donna Witsell, told CNN how she learned about the photo.

"The assistant principal had a meeting with my husband and I and pretty much told us that he did not see the image but that he had heard that it was Hope and when he confronted Hope, Hope did not deny it. She wasn't proud of it but she didn't lie," Hope's mother said.

Mrs. Witsell says she had warned her daughter about the dark side of technology, about "some of the pretty sexual images of young girls and guys."

She added, "Hope was very aware of that, of inappropriate dress and most definitely posing."

Still, because of that photo, Hope had become a target for 11-, 12-, and 13-year-old bullies.

But she didn't share her pain with her parents.

Even when bullies wrote horrible things about Hope on a MySpace page called the "Shields Middle School Burn Book" and started a "Hope Hater Page," the young girl kept silent.

Summer provided a bit of a break, but when the new school year began, the taunting was even worse.

On Saturday, September 12, 2009, Hope Witsell helped her father mow the lawn. They cooked a special seafood dinner together as a family. Then Hope disappeared to her room upstairs. Her parents stayed downstairs and watched TV.

Donna Witsell will never forget the moment she went to say goodnight to her daughter.

"I went upstairs to go in her room and kiss her goodnight. That was when I found her. I screamed for my husband. And started doing CPR."

It was too late. Hope was already dead. She had used her favorite scarves to hang herself from her canopy bed.

After Hope died, her mother learned her daughter had been summoned to meet with a school social worker. A spokesperson for the school says the social worker was concerned Hope might have been trying to hurt herself, so she had Hope sign what's called a "no harm" contract in which Hope agreed to talk to an adult if she wanted to harm herself..

Hope's mother says she was never told about the contract, which she found crumpled up in the garbage in her daughter's bedroom after she died.

School officials told CNN they believed the social worker had tried calling Hope's mother to alert her but weren't sure if she had left a message.

"The school dropped the ball," Donna Witsell said.

"The school did not call. We have the digital telephone; we have the cell phones that indicate when there was an incoming call and what number was calling in. We have a house phone, I have a cell phone, my husband has a cell phone. We have emergency contact numbers at the school which was my sister-in-law and her husband. There was no indication that the school called any of those numbers," Hope's mother said.

Days after Hope died, her older sister, Samantha Beattie, discovered the bullying was still going on. Even in death, Hope could not escape it.

"I knew she had MySpace and Facebook. There were people putting comments on there: 'Did Hope really kill herself?' 'I can't believe that whore did that.' Just obscene things that I would never expect from a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old," said Samantha.

In the year or so that has passed since Hope Witsell took her own life, her mother has started a group called Hope's Warriors. She hopes it will help combat bullying and save other moms from feeling the horrendous pain that she feels.

Donna Witsell has a message for parents: "It happened to my daughter, it can happen to yours too. No one is untouchable. No one is untouchable."