by ‘Jola Sotubo

A man in Lagos is in trouble with the law after he beat up his 8-year-old housemaid so badly she can’t sit down.

Little Sophia Shaidu was brought to the state 3 years ago to be a domestic servant and since then has received continuous beating from Bashir Shuaibu, her employer.

The girl is believed to have suffered a fracture on her arm due to physical abuse and now has a deep gash on her buttocks due to which she has to lie on her stomach.

The child is undergoing care at the  Aniyun Hospital in the Gbagada area of the state and Mr. Shuaibu is said to have almost no interest in her medical care.

Nigerian Eye reports:

Sophia said that after one of such beatings, she had not been able to use her left arm, which was now swollen, hard and discoloured at the elbow area. The girl pointed accusing fingers at her guardian, Bashir Shuaibu, who is from Kogi State.

But what brought Sophia to the hospital was more dire and life-threatening than just the marks on her body and the fractured arm.

The little girl has a gash that is about six inches in diametre on her buttocks. It was created by a sore, said to have developed after several beatings by Shuaibu. Sophia said each time he spanked her, her buttocks swelled up and before it healed up, he spanked her again.

She said, “We are not related. My parents asked me to live with him in Lagos so that I could work and make money to take care of myself.

“He beat me almost every day and I don’t usually know what I did wrong. Anytime he beat me, I would scream and ask him what I did wrong, but he would not say anything. He would just continue to beat me.

“He usually beat me in the buttocks. I got a wound after a beating and I could not sit. He beat me on the same spot every day. He used wire and spatula (what Yoruba call orogun).”

But a doctor who treated the girl was so alarmed by what he saw that he took many photographs before he dressed the wound.

“She still has a long way to go. Because of the extent of the injury, it cannot heal on its own. She has to undergo skin grafting. That cannot even be done at the moment, she has to remain in observation for a while,” the doctor said.

The girl said the man had told her parents that she would be enrolled in school, but that never happened. Shuaibu who was arrested and detained at the office of the Lagos State Taskforce has been released on bail. The hospital said he had not been forthcoming with the fund for the treatment of the girl.

Shuaibu, who claimed he still intended to put the girl in school, said he only spanked her when she acted stubbornly, lied and defecated in the house.

“Her parents are my relations. She is lazy and does no work. I did not know she had injury on her buttocks because she was hiding it. It was when we noticed it that we brought her to the hospital. I really regret that something like this happened to her,” he said.