Metro

Becheve: Cross River community where parents exchange daughters for loan

Published

2 years ago

2022/10/23

Becheve, a remote village in Cross river state, reportedly has a culture of selling girls as young as ten years old into marriage.

According to a narration by a Twitter user, Tunde Onakoya (@Tunde_OD), “how it really works is that a “rich” man in the village is approached for a loan that is to be repaid by handing over a daughter to him.

“In the case of the unavailability of a daughter, the lender waits till they have one. So most debts are incurred before the girl child is born.

“This practice ensures that once a girl becomes a money wife, she is considered dead by her family and must not return, irrespective of how she is treated by her husband or his relatives.”

Onakoya noted; “girl child in the community is sold out to a man by her parents as a wife in exchange for money as little as 5,000 naira (10dollars), food items, or to pay a debt.”

“Upon the death of the man (in most cases, the girls are married off to old men in their 60-90s), the girl is given to his next of kin as a wife. If the money wife dies without having a child, her parents are obligated by tradition to give another girl child as a replacement.

“The men in Becheve cherish this practice as a status symbol as it earns them acclaim amongst their peers. For the innocent girls, their entire childhood is stolen from them and their existence reduced to being mere sex slaves.

“The physical and psychological trauma that these girls have to face is something we can never fully understand. We have failed these girls as a society. We are far too disconnected from the realities of children in places like this.”

PHOTO Credit: Tunde Onakoya|@Tunde_OD | Twitter

There’s a barbaric tradition known as “Money wife” in a remote village in Cross river state called Becheve where girls as young as 10 years old are being sold into marriage

I decided to travel down to learn more about how these girls are being robbed of their childhood

A thread pic.twitter.com/tFCK26dEH3
— Tunde Onakoya (@Tunde_OD) October 23, 2022