BENIN CITY-Business activities around the ever busy Oba Ovoranmen Square, popularly called Ring Road, Benin City, Edo State were on May 18th, 2015 paralyzed following the mass protest embarked upon by some members of the public over the refuser of the Edo State House of Assembly to implement a law on female genital mutilation and other disparities associated with the women fold.
Top on their agenda was the call on the legislative arm to promogate a law forbidding a process where women were subjected to undergo certain barbaric rites to prove their innocent as regards the circumstances surrounding the death of their husbands.
According to the protesters, several middle aged women have been subjected to untold and unbearable situation and sometimes banished over issues of genital mutilation which they viewed as primitive in nature.
They also lamented a situation where some women who lost their husbands were forced to drink and bath the corpse of their husbands as a way of proving that they did not have a hand in their death before burial could commence.
This the protesters led by Ehrauyi Isaiah to embark on the peaceful protest to the law making body with a view to promulgating a law prohibiting what they viewed as man inhumanity to man.
However, the peaceful protest was later hijacked by irate youths who turned the peaceful protest into a rioting one.
When newscrew visited the scene property worth millions of naira were already destroyed before the arrival of the security agents who dispersed the protesters with tear gas before declaring Ehrauyi Isaiah wanted over the incidence.
