What does Nigeria do to its children? What is the experience of children growing up in Nigeria today? For Nigerians who have had the considerable fortune of growing into adulthood, what was childhood like while growing up in Nigeria? At what point if any was childhood fully enjoyed in a country where childhood is taken away from many children before they really find out what it means to be a child?
Children often grow up to hear that they are leaders of tomorrow and that the future belongs to them. The validity of this assertion is an increasingly troubled one in a country where septuagenarians are successfully staking an unspoken claim to power, leaving young people in the lurch and imperiling the future of countless children by their dereliction.
The times are indeed harrowing for children in Nigeria with no place appearing to be safe for them. With homes and neighbourhoods having been shown to harbour some of the most vicious predators of children, even schools which used to provide some safe space away from the horrors elsewhere appear to have been overrun by those who would make the society unsafe for children.
Recently, at the 2022 Oyo State House of Assembly Muslim Community Ramadan Lecture titled “ Nigeria`s Current Social Vices: Islamic Antidotes,” the lecturer, a renowned Islamic cleric and consultant neurosurgeon as the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Abeokuta, Ogun State Mr. Abdul Haady Tiamiyu, starkly warned that the menace of street children at motor parks, slums and markets if not urgently addressed by the governments of the Southwest may be worse than the Boko Haram nightmare in northern Nigeria.
The cleric who strongly wagged the finger at the Almajiri system as the root cause of banditry, kidnapping and terrorism in the northern part of Nigeria explained that the Almajiri system sowed abandonment and deprivation in the lives of millions of street children who have now formed themselves into dangerous groups threatening the peace of Nigeria on many levels.
Mr. Tiamiyu was not done. He went further to starkly warn that that Nigeria can expect an alarming rise in the crime rates when people continue to give birth to children without proper parental care and quality education.
So much truth from one who ordinarily should look away because he can well afford to. Does fire burn without anything kindling it? Has the terror now turning Nigeria upside down come out of just anywhere? Does fire burn uncontrollably if there is nothing fueling it? It goes back to children, always children. It is children that are caught in the line of fire. Terrorism in Nigeria largely has children in its crosshairs.
Within the malevolent ranks of Boko Haram and Bandits, children wear the rags of terrorism like rich apparel. Many children find themselves employed by these terrorist groups to take arms against the Giant of Africa. The question then is: were the pool of discarded and deprived children from whence these terrorists so richly and fruitfully fish for conscripts all but dried up by heat provided by a country which lights a fire for its children to keep warm and not under them as Nigeria currently does, will these terrorists have enough hands to bear the arms they sacrilegiously point at the Giant of Africa? It is highly doubtful.
Yet, here is the Giant of Africa, at a crossroads, its children, loosely strapped to its back and all but falling off. When children go in with their families for the night, gunshots wake them up as attack after attack decimates communities and annihilates entire families. Children now also know the pain of losing family members to unaccountable terror. Children now also know that in school, part of what is learnt the hard way is the chilling audacity of terror which strikes even when they are in school and rips them away from their normal lives until their families cough out millions of naira as ransom.
Children have turned out to be some of the greatest victims of unbridled insecurity in a country and a system which somehow provide conditions conducive to the incubation of terror and terrorists.
Even as many Nigerians lament the gradual but seemingly inevitable erosion of the Giant of Africa, it is for the children that the most fears are nursed.
The question remains whether in a few years Nigeria would remain country that can be proudly bequeathed to Nigerian children.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
