Maltreatment of househelps is a woman problem, it has no tribe

Recently, a friend told me that he got home one day and did two things.

The first thing he did was to sit his wife down with one instruction.

The instruction?

“If I am no longer alive tomorrow, under no circumstances should you send my children to go live with anybody. Not even my blood relations. No matter how hard things become for you, keep the children with you and keep going through that hardship with them. If you send my children to go live with anybody when I am no longer here, my spirit will haunt you over that action.”

The second thing he did?

He knelt down and prayed to God to keep him alive so he would be able to care for his children. He also added that he prayed to God not to let his children’s reality become such that “both mum and dad are no more alive” while they are still vulnerable.

When I asked him what informed these actions, he said that he had actually come back home with tears in his eyes that day after observing the fate of a little girl in the hands of the couple she lives with as a househelp.

He swore that the girl was not more than eight years old. Yet, she was being made to wash a car that she had to stand on a stool to reach with her hands.

It should not be the fate of a vulnerable child in your hands that leaves people in tears of pity or trepidation over the fate of their own children, should life happen to them.

I have often said that the easiest way to attract God’s mercy and protection over your children is through how you treat other people’s children, especially the domestic help in your home.

It is my conviction that over 85 per cent of househelps in Nigerian homes are better off with their biological parents, even with all the wretchedness of their background.

Take a good look at households where children are misbehaving badly. They are often spaces where domestic helps are or were being poorly treated. There are things you do not get away with, especially those things that break the human spirit.

Life will simply “package” your payback and deliver it to you when you do not see it coming.

A man reached out to me sometime last year. According to him, he came back from a trip only to be confronted by neighbours who made it clear that the only reason he did not come back to meet his wife in a police net was because of his good nature.

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What happened?

His wife hit their househelp with a pestle, and the little girl’s wrist was badly injured. Neighbours saw that and confronted the woman aggressively.

The girl in question was less than 14 years old. He noted that it was not the first time neighbours had intervened to save a househelp from his wife.

He also pointed out that they had had four domestic helps in under one year and wondered what to do about the situation.

The feedback I later received from him was that he had banned his wife from ever bringing any househelps into their home.

Sometimes, your authority as a reasonable man is what can save your home from certain unpleasant realities. “For peace to reign” is what will make some men find themselves in public humiliations they never bargained for.

Maltreatment of domestic help is more of a woman’s issue. It has no tribe. Therefore, it is very wrong to pin it on any tribe.

Many women in marriage are not mentally stable.

The easiest way to identify a frustrated woman is to observe the fate of a domestic help in her hands. They are often a very convenient outlet for unhappy emotions.

It is a psychological disorder when you observe no barriers to inflicting pain on others. You have an empathy deficit, and you can kill someone.

If you are a man in a home where a child, in the name of a househelp, is being routinely maltreated, and you are neither putting an end to it nor putting your foot down to enforce a “no househelp” order, I put it to you that marriage has reduced you.

The worst thing marriage can do to any man is make him lose his voice or his ability to put his foot down in the face of wickedness in his own home. The wickedness or unfairness of a spouse towards anyone, including your own people, is not something you can simply ignore and expect to have peace.

It will surely come back to bite you someday.

The demon that pushes a woman to inflict injuries on a hapless child will not stop until something dire happens.