Here is a little story from Bonano. You wake up one day and turn on the breakfast radio news programme. A big story is breaking. Maternity wards have been mixing up the babies and sending women home with the wrong child! Moreover, this has been happening at every maternity ward in the country since records began. Estimates have shown that at least 10 per cent of all children have been brought up by the wrong mother, and possibly as many as 30 per cent!
Can you imagine if this happened? There would be a sociological thermonuclear explosion from the mothers. It is just off the scale in terms of public reaction and horror. Women would be freaking out and having breakdowns right, left and centre and calling for the heads of those involved in the evil act!
But it does not stop there. It has been discovered that these baby mix-ups have not happened by accident. It is done deliberately. The people responsible have been identified. And there are laws under which these despicable acts can be prosecuted. But guess what, the authorities have decided not to prosecute. What? You are joking, right? No, it is the reality.
Bonano wants you to grasp this. The above scenario is essentially true, right here and now in our country, Nigeria. But, it is not women who have been given the wrong babies, it is men!
Recently, with the issue of DNA tests to confirm the paternity of children being on the increase, especially in social media, some women are fighting back with this shocking argument that wives are only beating husbands at the game of infidelity. Hmmmm! Can you imagine that?
Well, if they argue that women are cheating because the men are also being unfaithful, good and wonderful. But they should know that while cheating, some of the men father children and hid them from their wives. Now, the question is, are these men passing on the children they fathered outside marriage to their wives as the wives’ biological children? Bonano just hopes those women who are advocates of retaliation can answer that. Currently, research has shown that 50 per cent of children do not belong to the men, who think they are the fathers. And you call such evil a retaliation?
The truism, a woman acting in love will not pass the products of her infidelity to her husband as his children. It is cruel and bizarre. If the men can man up and take responsibility for their actions, the woman thriving in the boat of infidelity too should woman up and take responsibility for their actions! What nonsense!
Along the trajectory of forgiveness, some women say that when a woman apologises and shows enough remorse, the husband should forgive and forget. All well and good if the women say so, but they should first assume themselves in the shoes of their husbands, then they will appreciate better the enormity of this supreme betrayal. A wife goes outside, what is Bonano even saying? They do not go outside again, these days, they stay inside, right in their husbands’ rooms, commit adultery and get pregnant.
As if that is not bad enough, she pins the pregnancy on the husband. Sadly, some men only find out 10, 15 and 40 years later that the children they regarded as theirs all their lives are not their biological children, and some people are justifying, defending and drawing futile analogies with men’s infidelity. What ‘nonflex’ (nonsense) according to the late Papa Olorkor from Bonano’s village!
And some others even argue that some women did it because their husbands could not father children. Look, for Godsake and with all intent and purpose, you do not make unilateral decisions on fundamental family issues. Because the ills and aftermath of such unilateral decisions and evil acts can only be imagined.
