Ada Onyejike-Ananaba, founder of the Girl Child Art Foundation (GCAF), will be arraigned in courton Monday  for allegedly abusing her 10-year-old domestic servant.

According to a source at the Office of the Public Defender (OPD) in the Lagos State Ministry of Justice, the case will come up at Court 9 Ikeja, on Monday.

Ananaba was arrested in December but was subsequently released by the police without being charged to court.

Ananaba was arrested following the rescue of a 10-year-old girl in her home at Omole, Ikeja by the officials of OPD

She had allegedly been abusing the girl for three years, since bringing her to Lagos from the eastern part of the country.

A source told the ICIR that the girl had been subjected to untold hardship and abuse by Ananaba. “She is up as early as 5am sweeping the house and even up till 11pm. You need to see all the marks on her body; horrible!” the source said.

“She gets beaten up by Ananaba all the time; morning beatings are customary. This is a very serious case of human trafficking.”

The girl has been in the custody of Lagos State Government since December.

“GIRLS ARE NOT RELEVANT IN NIGERIAN FAMILIES”

Ananaba — a graduate of Fine and Applied Arts from the Institute of Management and Technology Enugu (IMT), Enugu, who also holds an M.Sc. in Management of Development, with specialisation in HIV and AIDS from Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Science Wageningen, Netherlands — once told an American audience that girl children were seen as people who were not important in the Nigerian families.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs awarded the 2008 Patricia Blunt Koldyke Fellowship on Social Entrepreneurship to Ananaba, upon which she featured on Chicago Tonight presented by Phil Ponce on WTTW.

In the interview, Ananaba said she founded the foundation to build the confidence of girls in a society that discriminates against them.

“I started because I had to go through the process of fighting beliefs against me as young woman that I will not be able to do certain things in the society,” She said.

“You are not expected to get to certain level in the society as a young woman. So in my class in school, I had to deal with graduating as the only female student.”

She claimed to have used arts to empower and educate thousands of young women where sons are more highly valued than daughters and many girls drop of school at a young age.

Through her foundation, Ananaba claimed to have used performing and visual arts as well as creative writing progrmmes to build girls’ confidence, promotes education, social rights and help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.