Promise, a bright and sharp boy lives with his mother and step-father in Kollington area of Ijaiye, Lagos, while his biological father lives in Benin, Edo State.
At about 8am on Monday, Promise’s mother, Comfort, stabbed her son four times, inflicting life-threatening injuries on the boy’s body.
The broken bottle the woman used on her son tore into the boy’s flesh inflicting one three-inch injury and another two-inch injury on the boy’s back. Two other wounds looked equally horrific but were not as long and deep as the other two.
Neighbours said if Promise had not run away from his mother, who held tight to his wrist and stabbed him as he screamed, he would have been stabbed to death.
What manner of crime could such a young boy have committed, people who witnessed the scene have asked.
On Wednesday, our correspondent visited the woman’s house on Olawoyin Street. The story that Promise, his neighbours and the hospital workers told could only be described as incredible.
Promise, who seems to have a remarkable memory, told Saturday PUNCH that his mother has a “N30 cane”, which she uses to flog him, even when he had no idea what he had done wrong. He said she would sometimes beat him till he could not walk.
“My mother is wicked,” Promise said simply, quietly. As shocking as that sounded, coming from a six-year-old, it explained the kind of treatment the boy had been experiencing in the hands of his mother.
Promise said he had been living with his father in Edo State since he was one year old. But when he was five, his mother came to take him from his father’s house.
The boy said, “I was sweeping the day she came. I did not know her as my mother. My father then told me that she was my mother and she had come to take me to Lagos.
“When we came to Lagos, I started to live with her and my step-father. But she beat me all the time.”
Asked what happened on Monday to make his mother stab him, Promise said he tripped and fell.
He said, “When I fell, my mother asked me what pushed me and why I fell. She was angry and went to take her N30 cane. When she was beating me too much and I was screaming, one of our neighbours came to hold her hand to take the cane away from her. The woman said I should run away because my mother would kill me the way she was beating me.
“My mother said ‘I will kill you, I will kill you’. When she could not find anything else to beat me with, she took a broken bottle on the ground and started to stab me on the back.”
Promise was rescued by alarmed residents, who took him to a private hospital nearby.
But by the time the boy was taken to the hospital, Comfort had planted another story in the boy’s head.
Pastor Charles Agboola, a pharmacist who founded the hospital, said the two people who brought Promise in said the boy fell down and landed on a broken bottle. When Agboola’s wife, a nurse, asked the boy what actually happened, Promise told her that he was watching two people fight when he sustained the injury."
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