I watched with utter shock and disbelief how the father of Salome Adaidu recounted the rushed and nocturnal burial of the dismembered body of his daughter. He looked resigned – it is hard to tell – whether to his own fate or to that of his young girl or to both. In his voice, I sensed a powerlessness beyond description. Meanwhile, right across the front porch of the police station where a journalist interviewed the murder suspect, Timileyin Ajayi exuded the air of a monarch who wielded absolute power over his fiefdom; an iku baba yeye whose decision to execute his errant subject was irreversible. “I took a knife and chopped off her head…. no regrets,” he said quite dismissively. You should have heard him speak with a ring of finality as he batted off an insect buzzing around his left ear. It was a collage of cynicism to watch the victimised father and the boyfriend from hell speak with unruffled disposition about a very sinister incident.

Is it not bewildering that boyfriends now exercise the powers that even fathers hardly contemplate over their girl-children? The power of life and death over the female gender is a relic of the ancient world where for instance, the father of a Roman household decided at will whether his new-born girl child could join his family as a living member or would be sent back to the great beyond as an unwanted intruder. When the new bride was handed off by her father, the husband inherited that patria potestas, the absolute power which a male family head wielded over all members of his household. Even then, this life and death power was used with some restraint. In Nigeria today, boyfriends from hell have taken it upon themselves to exercise this power over girls whose romantic relationship parents may not even be aware of let alone give their conjugal blessing to.

How do you invest so much in raising your daughter, sending her to school amid pain and struggle for survival only to have her life tossed nonchalantly into an unmarked early grave by a boy whose identity you got to know only when the unthinkable had happened? Yet the Nigerian society looks on without a sense of outrage. Almost day after day, week in, week out, a report breaks on social media of a beheading, dumping into a dry, disused well, a drugging to death, a strangulation or a casting into insanity on the street. And when you check, the majority of the victims of these violent incidents happen to be the female gender, young promising girls under 25 years! Before we had processed what just happened, other comic, musical or half-nude reels arrived to take our fleeting attention away from grieving or seeking a stop to this social malaise. The Nigerian society has become so desensitised to tragic occurrences. Enikan l’omo: only the victim feels the pinch.

Like Cain, we have ceased to be our brothers’ keepers. In this instance, we are even farther from being our sisters’ keepers. The feminine gender has become an endangered species of sorts. We miss the bygone days when the proverbial 200 eyes focused on raising a single child in our communities. While mothers routinely demand that the girl child prepare to be a wife and mother, fathers fail to insist that boys must learn to grow into disciplined and decent husbands and fathers. Hence, the epidemic of boyfriends from hell in Nigeria. Parents who have boys are less apprehensive than those who are “blessed among women” when it comes to the potential for tragic outcomes in romantic relationships. Oftentimes, it is the parents of the girls who must bear the brunt if anything goes south.

What parent of a girl child has peace of mind these days with the spate of wanton killings for ritual or revenge at the hands of boyfriends from hell? Do parents now have to become paranoid when male classmates, male neighbours, male youth corpers, or male co-workers are seen with their young girls? How can parents possibly forbid their girls from getting involved with the male gender as they go on to higher institutions or enter the workplace? In short, how do we protect our girls from boyfriends from hell unless we constantly keep a vigilant eye on the relationship proceedings and encourage our girls to keep the lines of communication open with our parents in the loop? He get reason why as they say in local parlance.

We need a whole of society approach to tackle this social problem that is confronting us daily. As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. Outsourcing parental responsibilities to teachers at school and via private lessons at home ought to be looked at again. Abandoning children’s learning and development to new media (TikTok, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, Facebook etc. have to be reconsidered. The assumption that real moral training of children is taking place at religious institutions must be revisited. The economics of boyfriends from hell is based on the “free rider problem” – the notion that the other person will do the needful; therefore, I don’t need to worry too much about the issue. Parents who have boys think it is the business of those who have girls to protect their girls. Parents who have girls think it is the problem of those who have boys to curb their boys. In the final analysis, neither does what the other expects.

Many of us parents feel that it is too much for us to get involved with our children’s schools. We simply think that our clergymen have the magic wand to turn our children into angels. We also hope that our children are learning only the right things on social media. Should I tell you where mere feeling, thinking and hoping has landed us? A country full of boyfriends from hell. If this does not scare you, Armageddon will mean nothing to you.

As a young boy growing up in the 1980s, I was conscious that all along my route to school were elderly eyes watching and mouth would also wag where hands failed to whack your buttocks if you were late or displayed any unacceptable social behaviour. This moulded you into a fairly responsible adult at least. But nowadays? We adults simply take out our phones and try to make content from out-of-school children that we come by if they pulled a stunt that would make people laugh.

If we insist that the tide of civilization never flows backwards, meaning that it is impossible to re-enact the days when communal parenting was the norm, we must then devise other means to cope with the problem. But what alternative is there to fall back on? Artificial Intelligence? Are we going to programme it to help us reorganize our society morally? What kind of ground rules will machine learning set to help us govern society so that boyfriends from hell are detected early and weeded out from the system? Will the predictive capabilities of algorithms be able to tell us from the moment of in vitro fertilization (IVF) what embryo would grow up to be a boyfriend from hell so that we can label it accordingly and help our daughters avoid him for sure in the future?

As far as I am concerned, there is no alternative to the old-fashioned, painstaking way of being hands-on, rolling up our sleeves collectively as a society and getting our hands dirty in raising our boys and girls on the basis of the fear of God and respect for all mankind. It is not a task that can be outsourced or performed using the Uber or Airbnb business model. There is the talk about garnering “elite consensus” to fix the political and economic problems of Nigeria. But we don’t have to be elites to raise our children right? Change begins with me. It begins with you. The future safety of our girls and the eradication of boyfriends from hell in the Nigerian society depend on it.

Lekan Olayiwola is a peace and conflict researcher and practitioner.