Wednesday, June 3, 2020

My Assault Case Against My Elder Brother And The Budding Case Against The Nigeria Police.

On the night of April 23, 2020 I returned home to find a water container missing from the family kitchen. This was unusual. Since the rains had begun to fall, I went outside to check if it was used to collect rain water. It wasn't there. I came into the house and asked my elder brother, Richard, if he had seen the green container popularly called a buta. He said it was in use somewhere. I asked to know if it was around the house. He answered that he wouldn't furnish me with that reply. I asked him if our mother whose property it was, knew about the missing buta. He answered that I shouldn't ask him such questions. I told him that I would inform Mother that her buta was missing on her return. This was sequel to a missing family LCD television that disappeared from the family living room and into his bedroom, last year. He subsequently left for South Africa and his wife would watch Big Brother Naija and his children watched cartoons on that television while the rest of the house without a television had nothing to watch the news. This missing buta incident happened during the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Electric power supply was epileptic and our phones died quickly from being used to listen to the radio. It wasn't a fair deal.

When my mother returned that night I made good my promise and intimated her that her water container was missing from the kitchen and if she had any knowledge of its hiding place. She answered that she wasn't aware that it wasn't in the kitchen anymore. Later that evening, she went to the sitting room and asked her son, my erstwhile brother, about the missing water container. He was impatient with her and answered her rudely to which she enquired if it was being used for juju. Many other incidents had transpired in the family with his wife calling out my younger sister, Amarachi Irene, asking her inciting questions about her lifestyle including a question if she was doing juju. It was also for this woman his wife, Richard sent a confusing school application to the United States of America to the same school and programme Amarachi had applied to, both of them sharing a middle name and a confusing but the similar first names. This is accepting that they also had the same surnames occasioned by Chekwubechi Irene's marriage into the Njoku family, to the best of my knowledge. The oyinbo people in Utah were confused and delayed Amarachi Irene's application and it subsequently led to the loss of about N100,000, last year. Richard who paid the money was bitter about this loss and was angry with our mother and Amarachi. Thank God, I wasn't part of the deal and made no contacts with anybody to have been an aggrieved party. There had been issues with the wife whom he married by his own choice and of course against my wish - I don't condone rude behaviour. His family had supported his marriage before the ceremonies at Mbaise even though things are different now. But I didn't mind as long as they kept their own space. I wasn't against marriage, I was against married people being in other people's spaces and dictating to them. He made her the administrator of every household property including the family kitchen or so it seemed. She had come with no dowry, which was the predominant custom in most of Igboland.

A woman brought her own household utensils to her marriage because as an adult she might have a different taste from her mother in law. When this wasn't the case, she was to be submissive as a child to her new mother and eat from her kitchen modern life or not. At least, it made common sense to pay the piper in order to dictate the tune. I didn't know what predetermined that decision by her family to leave her with no personal items or dowry for her marriage but she was in the house anyway when I returned in January 2018 after I had left the house following an assault by Richard the previous month, before his marriage. This included use of toilet and bathroom that I used before their supposed marriage in 2017. I didn't attend the marriage ceremonies because of not endorsing a rude relationship turning into a marriage and several insults previously. They helped me to rent an apartment in a nearby village called Mgboko Umuette, and I left subsequently in early 2018 giving up use of the bathroom and toilet to them.They are the ones who use it till date. I returned to the house daily because I kept poultry, two adult turkeys, that nobody else could feed. I also ate at home, my mother's food because I had noticed that people looked into my pot where I lived in a self contain apartment building while I was away most days. I didn't eat Richard's nor his wife's meals.

I would come to the house to do my chores of feeding my turkeys or helping my mother to find Richard's wife and my younger brother's wife fighting over doing chores. It was really funny because the younger brother's wife was instrumental to Richard's wife gaining entry into our family and sharing family facts and secrets with her. She came around to dress her hair free of charge and often asked for food. It annoyed me that her attitude was rude and unbecoming but such was typical of the students from where she attended school, Abia State Polytechnic, Aba. I told my mother so but she was on their side saying that I was a habitual faultfinder. I told her of my disappointment with her turning a blind eye to the activities of members of her church against me because I had quit attending. I asked her questions about the character of her visitor now daughter-in-law and she would fly off the handle and suggest that I should get some psychiatric help. This was the usual thing said to me each time I mentioned an abnormal thing in the family. For instance, during the visits of Chekwubechi Irene to our family prior to the marriage, I would have missing personal items including clothing, and text books. I would know that there was a tryst in my room from the foul odour or the unmade bed, which I left made before I left that morning, all of 2017. My whole family would gang up against me and said that I was just covetous of my brothers' good luck. However, after the assault and their marriage in 2017 and I moved out in 2018, which I reported to our village leader at Obekwesu in Isiala Ngwa, the women fell apart. Neither my mother nor my younger brother's wife Nnenna Chinemerem agreed with the attitudes of the new wife who refrained from contributing to house chores probably on advice by her husbands and humiliated the housemaid. On one occasion, and only a few weeks into the marriage, it was alleged that she stripped the maid, Ogechi, naked while my mother was away and ailing at the hospital. I didn't understand why she was putting up such acts of cruelty barely a month into a new marriage. Furthermore, she was also a latter-day saints and allegedly a returned missionary too who wore provocative and indecent bum shorts at home whether her husband was at home or not.

My mother returned from the hospital after a surgery and decided to keep her distance from the kitchen. All this while, Richard was getting ready to return to his base in South Africa. He was delayed because of my mother's ailment. When he returned later that year in early 2018, his pregnant wife was delivered of a baby and subsequently they decided to cook in a separate pot. My mother welcomed the idea since the two young wives in the family were no longer friends. Eventually, Richard Chijioke ordered his younger brother's wife out of the kitchen and banned her from its use when he returned later that year. She stayed away and cooked her food close to the family toilet and bathroom. Close to that place was my mother's washing machine. The one who banned use of the kitchen didn't ban use of washing machine since it disturbed the other woman's cooking area. I didn't understand what was going on and I would express my disappointment to Chekwubechi Irene for her lack of respect for other people this time, Nnenna Chinemerem. If she kept the kitchen space she shouldn't use the washer since it interfered with the other woman's place of cooking. Richard would have none of it because according to him the land on which our mother built the family house belonged to him and so did all property in it. My mother told me that she had consulted him before the foundation was laid on the land. He said the he didn't want to return to Nigeria to a bad building like the one he left in Ehere before he travelled to South Africa. Now, I wouldn't know the details of their phone conversations but I didn't hear any complaints that no house should be built on the land. New land owners in the neigbourhood were beginning to encroach on the land, often removing the marker called a pillar and our mother decided that erecting a building there would stop the encroachment. This is where the family lives now.

I'm aware that he made no monetary contribution to the building of the house according to our mother. And that I was called while I was a student abroad to help them get our of renting because of the incessant harassment from the caretaker's children from the former residence. I obliged the much I could spare from my student upkeep from the USA. It wasn't anything to have built a house but I gave what I had. This was in 2008. I had opposed the building of the house while I was a missionary in Utah because it would be cost intensive, and the place was far away from important things, like work and market. In addition, I was of the opinion that we were mostly adults who mightn't live together at that stage of our development and any house developed should look into that. I preferred us to return to renting a flat until each of us children would find their own personal and suiting accommodation. This suggestion was made in Salt Lake City, Utah over the phone one Mother's Day which was the only day we were allowed a phone call to our house. My mother insisted that the shoes pinched hard from where she and my younger siblings stood. But the construction wasn't done when I returned to Nigeria in early July, 2017. I returned to the USA in September, that same year from a two room rent on Omoba Road, Ogbor Hill, Aba. While I was away, the house was partially built and my parents and younger siblings moved into it in 2008. I was ill in the USA and made an emergency return in April 2011 to join them in the new house at Osisioma. It did make sense to build something more permanent than moving up and down. Any right thinking individual would agree with owning own's accommodation but should it at the expense of peace and common sense? In the USA, people paid mortgage to own homes. In Nigerians especially among the Igbo, people saved up after many years to build homes for themselves and their families. Ours was the culmination of our mother's hard work over the years as a civil servant and the little that I had contributed while abroad. 

In 2015, Richard Chijioke returned from South Africa and brought home a daughter whom we kept till he returned to marry Chekwubechi Irene in 2017. It was to that house that he brought and left his daughter. It was to that house that he brought and left a cantankerous wife. It was in that house that he returned in December 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. It was in that house that he hit my eyes in 2017 because I told him that his then sweetheart Nnenna Chinemerem, who was fostering his daughter was troublesome. It was in that house that he threatened the life of his younger brother Augustine Chinemerem and asked his wife to leave the kitchen but didn't bar his own wife from disturbing the rest of the family with her use of the washing machine. It was in that house that I have been assaulted three times. It was in that house that everybody called me mentally ill for seeing what their desperation and lust would deter them from seeing. It was in that house that I have been missing personal items including an New York & Company army green shirt that I bought abroad. Now, the new colour of keke napep in the state is a close shade of the missing t-shirt and all this makes me wary of being a target of some unknown element. I'm called mentally ill by family for whom I risked my doctoral education by defaulting my loan to help them get a roof. 'Wise people are those who make no contributions to anything and takes them all. I have no issues with sharing or borrowing of property in a family but I have issues with buccaneering attitudes of my people towards my property.I don't know the stance of Mbaise people in getting their daughters married. Perhaps it was customary for them to dump them on other people and hoodwink them into giving up everything to them instead of giving them their own household items, which was typical of most Igbo marriages. To each their own, but I won't agree to being bullied or harassed in my own home. Perhaps too, they dump their children at dormitories without items from the prospectus expecting them to be fed by other students or their house masters or house mistresses. That's quite strange.

In 2010, after graduating with a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts, I wanted a job but none was coming. It was the recession and jobs were scarce. Since I hadn't paid off my student loan and the possibility of doing so from Nigeria was bleak, I decided to wait for a job. I applied for the OPT and also for doctoral admission. I was placed on temporary admission into the University of Texas and I decided to go for it instead of losing my legal residence. I knew that it was a hasty decision but I had little choice to make. While studying in Boston, I frequented Dallas to visit with my cousin in his family. My plans to work and study didn't work out and my savings were depleted in house rents. It was a hard time for me and for most foreign students in the USA. After a few weeks in Dallas, it became hard to meet up my financial obligations and I became very distraught. I went to school and told the authorities that I needed to defer my admission. I was reminded that deferment time had passed and that I would have to finish that school year. I went away and saw some unidentified people trailing me as I drove home. I called the Dallas police to report the matter to them and that started the stigma, humiliation of having a mental illness from family home and abroad and other people, which has persisted to this day. The last event was two days ago, when I was visited by the Anti-Robbery Squad asking me to follow them to the police station at the Area Command, Aba. I had just got out of the bathroom and half naked. I went with the officers and without allowing me to leave any statement took me to Kalunta Memorial Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Ogbor Hill, Aba.

I have a pending court case with my brother who didn't appear in court but went off to the Area Command to ask for my arrest. I asked to know the trigger of that harassment and I was told that it wasn't necessary. I had accused my IPO, one Ruth Nwulu, who was a member of the LDS Church that I didn't want her to handle my case because of conflict of interest. I asked if she could be changed but the police said that since I was going to court there was no change in the matter. The LDS Church had been the sponsors of my problems since childhood. I don't agree that a church should be the source of anybody's harassment. Initially, the church had disciplinary measures to tame wayward members such as disfellowship and excommunication. Nowadays, people carry on without recourse to punishment especially if the women are in sexual relationships with the church leaders. At the mission in Utah, there were several of such acts and I didn't like any of it. Such acts had given impetus to many a wayward return missionary to continue to carry on as a stalker or spy to others. I wrote a letter to the church headquarters asking them to remove my membership and that request isn't respected anywhere I go. A major defaulter is one Ada Obasi, from Ohafia, who came several months after me to do the same mission. At the mission, she flaunted rules and it seemed she was brought to the USA do just that. She would talk about other missionaries but wouldn't report herself to the authorities. I wouldn't know the place of WICCA in Mormonism but I'm afraid this wasn't the same church that I grew up in. Perhaps adulthood has helped me to see the church behind the mask. Stalking by Mormons is done on the phone, email and even with your neighbours causing unnecessary problems for me everywhere I go. We were warned to be wary of external stalkers before I left the mission in 2007. Little did I know that the church would do the stalking itself. It arrogated to itself the right to own property and stalk members. I haven't been able to get a job after interviews because that church leadership would use my mother to get information about my activities and subsequently sent emissary to thwart its success. I had used them as referee when the going was good but none of such event resulted into a job.

I would like the Nigeria Police to realize that my reputation was smeared by them coming for me in an Anti-Robbery Squad vehicle, which would mean that I was a robbery suspect. I have issues with that and may consult a lawyer to determine if these incessant harassment from an elder bully who uses threats to my life and assault would warrant an invitation to see a shrink. Who needs mental health treatment, an assaulter or an assault victim? Everybody who needs help with their mental health should get it and this may translate into every Nigerian as many acts of Chekwubechi Irene and Nnenna Chinemerem are provocative. Hiding mental illness in marriages may just be the new norm. Marriage isn't a place to molest children and get away with it because someone did a white wedding. The police should refrain from being used to subvert justice. The medical personnel determined that the psychiatric incident isn't a permanent ailment used to stigmatize people and denying them their rights. What a court determines is whether a crime was committed and it is not unusual for people to use other people's histories to deny them their rights. In 2012, I was forced to Kalunta psychiatric hospital after I was distraught over a missing makeup kit which disappeared the previous month from our home. My mother, younger sister Amarachi Irene and a cousin Ugochi Nwalocha were suspects not including our father. It was natural not to include him as a suspect as he couldn't use any makeup. This was on December 27, 2011. That day one Ijeoma Ojukwu, now Ajaegbu was getting married in Arochukwu and I didn't know if the makeup kit was used in her marriage preparations. I wouldn't know till date what became of the makeup kit and subsequently went with my mother to Kalunta hospital in 2012. I took drugs despite that my personal losses, abandoned studies and personal items that were still in the USA with one Mr Simeon Nnah of Massachusetts who went against our agreement were weighing me down. The drugs helped but they made me to gain weight. The harassment at home continued. The makeup kit wasn't found yet it was only the beginning of pilfering my personal belongings behind a locked door. Nobody in the family paid for my education abroad. I took out a student loan and paid for the others from my savings from work. It wasn't even the Nnahs nor the neighbours on Hyde Park Avenue who probably kept my mail that supported me. I didn't ask for their help and all wasn't well between us because I didn't know who took out items of clothing from my box in Boston, the Nnah family or the Ugwus, a couple with whom I shared an apartment on Hyde Park Avenue. I don't know the whereabouts of the Nnahs who haven't returned my library of over 40 books mostly bought on Amazon.com, Borders and Barnes & Noble. He gave me a promise to return to the USA to fetch my books in 2017. This is 2020 and he hasn't given me a book out of that lot. I wouldn't understand such wickedness. I was told by a policeman to write a petition against him but being Mormon my family supported him. I don't understand such logic. I sent the key he used to open my rented cubicle at Public Storage, Mattapan to retrieve my belongings in 2011 promising to return same to me in Nigeria in a few months. The man who did me a similar favour from Dallas acted promptly and I have since been using my belongings from him since that year, which included the missing makeup kit. I have a feeling that somebody is playing the game of identity theft and trying to change history. There's a concerted effort to victimize me and make me a subject of public ridicule. I'm resisting this victimization, ridicule and dehumanization from Mr Simeon Nnah, possibly his family, my own family, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Wiccans, the Njoku and Okpulor families, the Nigeria Police and other pagan affiliations and anybody whose job it is to ridicule me in public and in private.

In February 2015, I was assaulted and went to the police who forced me to return to my assaulter for peacemaking. I was later into the family car by Mormons and taken me off to Isiala Ngwa to do psychiatric checkup. There was theft in the family being reported. Probably it's rude to ask a married wife from Ebonyi State where the younger brother married from, who couldn't rent a house why she should use or steal what didn't belong to her. The doctor treated my bloodshot eyes and gave me some tranquilizers. The assault wasn't entered in the police station at Abayi because I had no money for case entry. In 2015, the assault was by my younger brother and parents. And in 2017 and 2020 by the elder brother and each time I'm the one who gets taken to a psychiatric hospital. I ask Nigeria, why? Is subjecting oneself to treatment the only indictment of mental illness? Are Nigerians aware they shouldn't hide mental illness in a marriage? There are pictures of my assaults on my Twitter handle @njoku_ije.

To be continued....

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