Some of our children can seem like monsters at times.
I got a call from an old acquaintance who had seen something I wrote a while back. It was a piece about how some of our children can be deceptive. He wanted to tell me about his experience with his daughter.
This gentleman narrated how his 16-year-old daughter came to be expelled from school. She was discovered to be among the students who left school without permission to visit men in town. What was most painful to the father, who by the way informed me he had become a pastor, is that his daughter never exhibited any form of โworldliness.โ
I guess it means his daughter isnโt your usual teenager. He said she didnโt talk trash, hated going out when on holidaysโฆwas a good student. So how did she get to the point of being expelled for going to sleep with men outside school? It didnโt look like she was coerced into it. She had been pretending to be a good child to her parents but was being naughty at school.
Didnโt I start by saying some of these children are monsters?
But I told the gentleman she hadn’t made any life-damaging mistakes, so far. She could still finish school and be taught to do right. For her, I think thereโs more than a glimmer of hope.
To say I understood his pain would not be appropriate. He felt totally blindsided by his daughterโs action. However, his disappointment is nothing compared to what the parents and most especially the mother of Temidayo Awe, the 21-year-old Nigerian student convicted of murder along with three others, in the UK, will feel.
Who is Temidayo Awe?
Let me start by saying, she is such a pretty girl. She was already in her third yearโฆkind of like Chidinma Ojukwu, (the one alleged to have murdered Usifo Ataga) if you think about it. And if she hadnโt been caught, she may have had a good life, a brilliant future, maybe.
Temidayo Awe was a Coventry University student, in the UK, who has been convicted of manslaughter. She had actively participated in the murder of Saul Murray, a 33-year-old man. Saul Murray was killed in his home over a fake Rolex watch he was seen posing on instagram with. Murray was lured into a threesome with Temidayo and another convicted lady, Surpreet Dhillon. After the act, they drugged him in a bid to rob him of the Rolex. Unfortunately the drug didnโt have the desired effect and so Temidayo called for help from two other thugs. 31-year-old Ikem Affia and Cleon Brown, 29. They came into Murrayโs home and killed him, and made off with the supposed Rolex watchesโฆwhich turned out to be fake but letโs focus on Temidayo.
Temidayo Awe is ruined. I hope not forever, though
She has been sentenced to seven years for manslaughter and six years for conspiracy to commit robbery to run concurrently.
I saw a video of when she got arrested, and how she denied the act, claiming not to know a thing about Saul Murrayโs death. I wanted to believe the police got the wrong person. But they had CCTV footage of her at Murrayโs home; of her phone pinging around Murrayโs home, they had even her coat type, matched to her homeโฆeverything to pin her to the murder scene.
When Temidayo realised the game of pretense was up, she began a โno commentโ response to all the questions the police had for her.
I felt for a mother who has to witness this about her own child. In the video, we see Temidayo telling someone on the phone, she had disappointed her mother.
This broke me.
The “disappointment” Temidayo is seen talking about isnโt the fact that she had emptied down the drain all of her motherโs funds spent on her to get her that far, third year in a uniโฆshe had just months to graduate.
The “disappointment” may not even only be in monetary terms, they may be in the labour of love her mother had expended over the years, priceless tears, priceless days of going hungry just so her daughter can have the best, priceless words and deeds parents know they will do, have done for their offspring in the hope to give them something better than they got.
A motherโs love
I have no idea who Temidayoโs mother is or what sacrifices she has made and is still making. All to ensure her daughter finishes university. I know as a parent the sometimes extreme lengths we go to in order to keep our children schooling abroad going. I know the many stories we have told them to let them understand how hard it is for us to keep them in school so that they remain on the straight and narrow.
With news like this conviction, Temidayoโs mother would have felt the bottom falling out from under her.
There will be many sleepless nights for Temidayoโs mother and the word โdisappointedโ would be mild compared to exactly what she feels.
More like gutted.
It’s like constantly feeling like the air is being sucked out of her.
More like wondering why she keeps gasping for breath.
It will take her a while to come to terms with her daughter being in jail. The worst part is, she canโt even hide it from friends and family. Itโs in the news, itโs on the internet. There, for people who despise her, use to shame herโฆ
She would ask herself over and over again, โWhere did I go wrong?โ
I donโt know if this is a legitimate question to torture herself with but I do know that Temidayo isnโt the only one jailed. Her mother is also in jail and she wonโt experience freedom until her daughter is let out.
May our children not make life-damaging mistakes.