Opinion: Children’s Day – Remember the kids on the streets

by Nduka Udo

Childrens-day-in-Sao-Tome

As we celebrate children, let us think about the kind of Nigeria we want to hand over to our children.

As Nigeria celebrates children’s day on May 27th, 2014, as is done every year, I have been privileged to move around to points where groups of children or individual children can easily be located. Such as schools, markets, road sides, streets, homes, churches, and also watch television both local and international stations all to see what are actually celebrated of children the world over. It is not what I watch on television, hear on radio, read on newspaper and the internet that made me write this but what you and I know and see every day.

Most of the programmes I see on television show children going to recreational centres attending parties to be hosted by government officials or media houses. So are children of some schools I passed by.
But as all these celebrations and wishes are going on, a lot keep turning in my mind: as we celebrate children, what is the place of a child in the celebration? The United Nation universal children’s day is on November 20 but Nigerian children’s day is on May 27. Other nations have different dates as well. The Universal Children’s day was first proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1954 to initiate actions to benefit and promote the welfare children all over the world. And the theme of the Universal Children’s day for 2014 is “Children’s education as an imperative to Sustainable Development”.

So as we celebrate children or reiterate their plights, what is the fate of the babies “produced or manufactured” in baby factories? Earlier it was in Aba, then Enugu, Ogun, Ibadan and so on. Lagos is highly reputed for buying and selling of babies. There was once a report that a girl went for N130,000, a boy for N150,000 and twins could cost N250,000.

The issue is not that a child is given out to husband and wife who may be having fertility difficulties, by mother who cannot take care of such baby, but this is a situation whereby people own baby factories like a cartel under the cover of either a maternity home or orphanage and employ young girls commissioned to get pregnant from whoever. (This encourages dissemination of sexually transmitted diseases as contraceptives are not used) the owner of the factory takes cares of the pregnant employees and pays them off after delivery.

The buyers in most cases deal directly with the operator of the factory instead of the mother. This means that she can never know where her baby is taken to or what the child will be used for. The child could be used for rituals.

In spite of that, families are complicating the plights of children in this generation. Father and the mother leave the child with the maid by 7 am to return by dusk. Such child grows up to be quite like the maid who raised it.
How can we explain the situation of children who were taken by the Boko Haram for several weeks now? Children are killed bombed orphaned, captured and used for evil purposes. How on earth could secondary school girls be enemies to people, what harm could the do?

Another issue is the health of children. The United Nations dedicated Millennium Development Goal three to reducing drastically and eliminating child mortality by 2015. This goal has become unrealistic in Nigeria as a high number of children still die under the age of five. They die hospital facilities are not up to date, if there are actually found. In fact, hospitals are not equipped, because if they were there, Senators, Ministers, Presidents, First Ladies, Governors, etc. will not be running to India, Germany, London, the US, and Dubai for treatments such as food poisoning.
So how will a child, especially those from middle and low/no income earners survive when hospitals are not equipped and they cannot travel abroad for treatments?

Talking about the children on the street, this is where all efforts of the United Nations, UNICEF, Nigerian government, and all the concerned bodies should focus on. So many millions of Nigerian children have been trapped in the streets hawking, doing menial jobs or anything that allow them to pass the moment. As some were celebrating children’s day doing match parades in their schools uniforms or attending children’s day parties, many more had bags of sachet waters on their heads calling “pure water” or trays of ground nuts or oranges walking from streets to market squares calling out faces that seemed like they didn’t know to smile: “bai granot”, “bai orange”.

I met a girl of six years selling sachets of water and asked what’s been celebrated. She didn’t because she has never been to any school and all she cared was to sell the water, even when it rained, so that she could get food. Children in the streets need to be rescued. Children that hawk by the road side need to be rescued. Enter any market near you or garage or the street of as you travel from city to city, look around you and you surely see these children. They are the hungry, the battered, the unclothed, the unsheltered, the uneducated, the frustrated, the frustrated, the lost, the orphaned, and they are in need of love and care. These are the children to come to mind when we celebrate and mark children’s day.

Even our education system needs revamping to train our children to become what children really are: those we hand our future into their hands. The Millennium Development Goal for Universal primary education is already in place in Nigeria where a child is supposedly has free nine years of schooling, what remains is creating appropriate platform to ensure that some children do not remain in the street hawking or “hustling” while others are the classroom. Also, there is question about the standard of education impacted to the children.

Our schools cry out loud for facilities as there are none or dilapidated or outdated ones. I went to the pharmacy laboratory of a Nigerian university where they still use equipment bought and donated in the 1960s and 50s.
Also, there is need to change the orientation that education is not all about of learning to read and write English language and pass exams but a process that helps one to discover one’s innate abilities , develop and display them in solving problems. Nigerian children should be taught discover, develop and display their abilities. This is is contrary to the erroneous belief of those who give their children only foreign names and teach them only English thinking that that is how it is to be educated: “Igbo speaking is not allowed” as they used to do us in schools. Such makes us forget positive aspects of our culture which is the light our parents handed to us which we are supposed to hand down to our children.

Now we are in information age. So unfortunate to children that it is actually a negative information age. Majority of television stations and channels, music videos, Nollywood films, the internet and imported films are all out against what a positive child’s entire attitude ought to be in the society. Pornography has become entertainment because performers and producers and marketers think that nudity and sexual perversion sell, with or without story line. Homosexuality is creeping in. What are the functions of the Nigerian Film and Video Censorship Board? Censorship is needed to control those who are bent on disseminating their wild desires, to save the impressionable minds.

As we celebrate children this year, knowing children are certainly going to take over from their parents (whether parents like it or not, as the natural cause of death will surely eliminate mainly the old leaving behind mainly the young), what kind of Nigeria do we intend to hand over to our children?
Is it a corrupted Nigeria with an empty treasury because the leaders have looted public funds to foreign bank accounts which may never be recovered? Is it a Nigeria where politics and religion have been so tribalized and bigoted so much that or children will not be able to gather around one table? Is it a Nigeria with battered economy because oil is the only source of revenue and we are too lazy to think out other sources of income? Is it a Nigeria with an educational system that cannot produce employable graduates to the labour market where twenty millions more are begging to be employed? Is it a Nigeria where portable road networks are few because we build substandard and pocket the remaining cashes while rain wash off the road in three months? Or, is it a Nigeria that functions on blueprint for development and peaceful co-existence?

 

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

 

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