Monday, April 6, 2009•Photo: pls see Sun News Publishing also on above date.Looking at him, all seems well. He is handsome, tender and perfectly weighted. But this four-month old yet-to-be-christened baby is living with a split images. He is straddling between the two sexes and has ended up neither a boy nor a girl. No, he’s not a victim of one of those inexplicable cruelties of nature.His mother had allegedly sliced off his external genital shortly after birth, leaving bemused sympathizers wondering whether what used to be there was a male or female organ.His scrotum, testes and penis were carefully scrapped off leaving a bare surface with sore, covered in a pool of clotted blood. He wriggles in wide and unimaginable pains, as his two legs were permanently placed wide apart.But for medical doctors who later described him as a boy, it would have been hard figuring out his true sex. Doctors had explained that since his urine runs in the upward direction when he urinates, it’s only logical to believe he is a boy.He laid helplessly on one of the beds at the Wuse General Hospital, Abuja. Life couldn’t have been more gruesome.The tragic story started from Kogi State where his mother, simply identified as Eleh is said to be a known lunatic. The Igala-born mother who seems to be in her late teens is said to have been delivered of two pregnancies some years back by some unidentified persons.With her lipstick-red glossy lips and her equally pierced nose decorated with a stud, Eleh could hardly pass for a mentally deranged woman. The only thing that gave her away as being emotionally unstable is her bout of unprovoked momentary laughter and the fact that she is overly aggressive.She had been taken off the streets by her relatives when it was noticed that she was pregnant for the third time for yet an identified man. The burden of taking care of her soon overwhelmed them and she was allowed back into the streets where she had her baby.But one day in March, the residents of Adankolo area of Kogi State woke up to the persistent cries of a baby in an uncompleted story building. Not able to bear it any longer, the curious tenants decided to find out what was going on. What they saw numbed and shocked many. A young mother was trying to breast feed a baby who has had his genital organ totally cut off and in a pool of his own blood. Because the young girl is known in the area as deranged and many had seen her pregnant, the social welfare people were quickly alerted and they took charge.But this was short-lived as Eleh soon escaped with the infant from the hospital they were being taken care of. It was on her way to Abuja that she was apprehended by the authorities.But the question is who has performed this crude surgery on the innocent baby? The suspicion raised by some members of the public is as a result of the neatness of the procedure. Could it have been done by someone suffering from mental illness or a ritualist? Why did Eleh decide to run with her child from Kogi to Abuja? How did she get the transport money to have embarked on the trip? These are all questions that are still waiting for answers while she is being rehabilitated in a social welfare facility in Abuja.“The difficulty in trying to cross-exam a supposedly mentally challenged woman can be daunting”, laments a police detective who does not want to be named.“Eleh does not reply to questions and stares at you with a mean mien that is very scary,” says a counselor in the Social Welfare Service department in Abuja after she was transferred there by the FCT police command after a fruitless investigation to ascertain whether she is actually the culprit.“She had at a time said she, Eleh, knew that her child was a girl. Though her statements are incoherent, she would not answer you if you ask her any questions, but could suddenly reply you if you are talking to another person,” the counsellor explains.According to Dr. Tayo Daramola, a psychologist at the Wuse General Hospital, “the statement proves that she could have envisaged the baby as a girl and thought that the genitals were a distraction.”So pathetic is the case that the Commissioner for Women Affairs in Kogi State, Mrs. Ruth Iyaji, is keeping a close watch on the matter.The baby is at present being “protected” in an undisclosed orphanage in the FCT.The Chairman of Wuse General Hospital Board, Dr. Gbenga Bello, told Daily Sun that, the little boy is responding to treatment and is doing well. “But one thing is for sure, there can be no replacement to the genitals that have been taken from him,” he said matter-of-factly.
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