- Laws guiding their recruitment must be enforced, among other safety measures
Arising and increasingly disturbing cause of avoidable deaths in Nigeria is the gruesome murder by domestic staff of their employers right in the supposed sanctity of the latter’s homes. One such tragic incident recurred in the public consciousness on November 9, when Prince Adewale Oyekan, said to be the son of the late Oba Adeyinka Oyekan of Lagos, and his accomplice, Lateef Balogun, were arraigned before an Ikeja High Court for the alleged strangulation to death on October 17, 2012, of a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and businesswoman, Alhaja Sikirat Ekun.
The crime reportedly took place at about 1.00a.m. in the deceased’s bedroom at her No. 5, Babatunde Ladega Street, Omole residence in Lagos. In his statement to the police, Oyekan had confessed that he was employed in the late Alhaja Ekun’s restaurant and lived with her while Balogun had also previously worked and lived with the woman before they parted ways after a disagreement. Oyekan’s chilling account of how life was snuffed out of their victim reads like a scene out of a horror movie.
According to him, “on that day, I sneaked in Balogun into the building and hid him inside the toilet so that we could kill her around 1.00a.m. Balogun strangled her and both of us carried her dead body and dumped it inside a well in the compound so that no one would find her. We also used the kitchen utensils and some heavy loads to suppress the body inside a 1,000 feet well in order to prevent it from floating”. The motive for this dastardly act, the accused confessed, was to “kill her and seize her properties”.
Incidentally, this base material motive was also at the root of the recent alleged murder in his room at his Parkview residence in Ikoyi, Lagos, of the late Chairman of Credit Switch Technology, Chief Opeyemi Bademosi, by his newly employed Togolese cook, Sunday Anani. The police report of the crime, which took place on October 28, stated that “according to the suspect, when he got to the deceased’s room and met him on the bed, he said, ‘chief, I am not here to kill you’; the deceased asked him, ‘what do you want?’ and he replied, ‘money’. When the deceased said he had no money in the house, the suspect said he tied him up with a cloth and put him on the floor”.
The Togolese cook narrated to the police how a scuffle led to his stabbing the deceased twice in the chest with a knife before fleeing the house. In these two cases, which are symptomatic of a growing trend, there is no evidence that the victims did any thorough background checks before engaging the alleged murderers as domestic staff. They thus had no independently verified information on the past life of their employees, their character or state of mental health. This is certainly most ill- advised for domestic staff entrusted to work and live with their employers.
Although domestic staff are categorised as part of the informal economy, their sensitive roles in thousands of families are too critical to be left as unregulated as they are today. It is important that appropriate laws be enforced and institutions put in place to guide the recruitment, documentation and registration of such staff well monitored too. This is to ensure as much as possible that domestic staff are employed through registered agencies that undertake proper background checks and thus reducing the possibility of hiring people of questionable background and antisocial disposition.
Equally important is the need for such legislation to also stipulate standards of decency, dignity and welfare that such domestic staff must be treated in order to reduce instances of criminal behaviour caused by maltreatment on the part of some employers.
