This is a Black Christmas for the Nigerian Child. This Black Christmas calls for a sober reflection for both political leadership and electorate to join forces to rethink our philosophy and value system about the Nigerian Child.  Do Nigerian children really have valid reasons to celebrate this Christmas? Do these children really know any celebration?  Is it not a reality that the Nigerian Child toils and labours, day and night to either support his or her parents to make ends meet or survive for themselves in this harsh environment? How many of these children really get the promises of a better tomorrow? Should not this particular Yuletide season serve as a National Day of Sober Reflection for our political leaders and the electorate alike? 

The Nigerian Child faces a legion of problems notorious among which are child abuse, child prostitution, hazardous labour exploitation, neglect and rejection, discrimination, lack of access to quality education, sub-standard education, lack of access to good Medicare, forced marriages in some parts of the country, teen pregnancy, teen single parenthood, physical abuse, sexual violence and exploitation, police abuse, brutality and arbitrary detention of street children, ritual killings, child kidnapping and child trafficking. Amidst this plethora of problems facing the Nigerian Child, this Black Christmas should be a Day of Sober Reflection for the parents, teachers, political leaders, and all stakeholders in the framing and shaping of the destiny and future of the Nigerian Child.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child treaty, which Nigeria as a nation is a signatory, is crystal clear about the basic human rights that children everywhere under the sun should have without prejudice. These are the right to survival, the right to develop to the fullest, the right to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation and the right to participate fully in family, cultural and social life.  Let us begin to benchmark our performance as a nation against these expectations and see how well we are doing in ensuring the basic human rights of the Nigerian Child both at home and in public. 

The electorate should realize that our leadership has a lot of work to do in order to give the Nigerian Child the desirable future that can make them compete with children from other parts of the world. The electorate must insist on good governance and accountability from political leadership.  Things are really bad today. The political leaders must address the poor economic situation of the country, which has been fingered as a major cause of the plight of the Nigerian Child. Corruption is so widespread and inefficiency of the leadership sickening that misadventure in governance and apathy of the electorate have rubbished the social and economic expectations of the children.  Everybody is now engaged in a rat race to grab all he or she can get from what is left in the crumbs of the national cake, and the least of attention is being paid to the children.  Nobody is paying attention to policies and programmes capable of shaping the future of the Nigerian Child.

Materialism like a monster whale is swallowing up everybody in the electorate.  The children too are beginning to flow with the tide. They are being swept away. Theirs was a difficult and dysfunctional life indeed. A new survey by the Federal Office of Statistics recently conducted with support from International Labour Organization (ILO) revealed that more than 15 million Nigerian children under the age of 14 are working, mostly to help pay for the cost of going to school. The survey also highlighted that while over eight million of these working children were also attending school, about six million of the working children were not in any school at all. The children that work did confirm that they were forced to work part time in order to pay for their school fees and books. Nearly one million of these children had been forced to drop out due to poverty or because their parents demanded that they work in order to boost the family income. About 61% of the working children were able to remain in school because they saved money from their work to pay for their education. 

This Federal Office of Statistics survey revealed a gruesome treatment that the Nigerian Children receives today and the bleak future that awaits them. The future of Nigeria is on the street, selling ‘pure water’, serving as bus conductors, and left to the vagaries of life.  We may postulate that some children are receiving good education in Ikeja, Lekki, Victoria Island, Abuja, Minna and GRAs of other towns and cities in Nigeria where private schools provide quality education to the children of the upper middle class and the rich who can afford the relatively high cost of education.  This proposition is not sustainable when we consider that this category of children is in the insignificant minority.  The children of the poor today will become thorns in the flesh of the children of the rich tomorrow.  Unless we address this inequality in child development in the Nigerian system, it will haunt the electorate in the future. 

Nigeria is a supposed to be at least a ‘superpower’ in West African sub-region but it is a nation under siege.  The nation is suffocating under internal aggression.  The elements of this internal aggression are forces of disintegration like child labour, human trafficking, growing army of delinquent children with an uncertain future taking to crime at very young age, rising cases of affliction of the dreaded Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome [HIV/AIDS] among the youths.  Again, unless the leadership collaborates with the electorate and commit to implement reversal policies to combat the elements, the nation cannot make any meaningful progress in terms of child development.

Education is a veritable tool of child development.  The negligence or poor funding of education for child development is the surest path to national disintegration.  A nation or culture that neglect the development of their children runs the risk of disintegration and self-destruction.  Other nation will subvert the integrity of its nationhood and denigrate its cultural heritage.  Such nation is mortgaging its future sovereignty on the platter of expediency.  This is because by the time the future arrives there will be no men and leaders to drive the affairs of nationhood.  Political adventurers, economic pirates and national treasury hunters will roam the highway of leadership disparaging the decadent legacies of the previous generation.  A progressive nation will not only think about the immediate.  It will formulate strategies for its young and unborn generation.  This is a virtue that no leader can ignore. 

The founding fathers of progressivism in Nigeria demonstrated this virtue, leaving us an example to follow.  At the address of Chief Obafemi Awolowo to the youth of Nigeria on the 25^th anniversary of the introduction of Free Primary Education in Western Nigeria in Voice of Wisdom [Selected Speeches of Chief Obafemi Awolowo Volume 3] published by Fagbamigbe Publishers, he told his audience:

When we started this scheme in 1955, we were not only concerned with the children of that time who are now big and great adults, we were also concerned about those of you who were yet to come into the world.  We knew that only an educated person can play a full and meaningful role in the affairs of society.  We did not want to allow children to come into the world and allow them to suffer from ill-health and poverty because if only a few are educated the quality of life in society will remain low.  In fact, when the majority are uneducated the few educated people will not be able to live as normally as educated people in more advanced countries of the world.  [Italics mine]

Suffice it to say that the futurist leadership of the visionaries like Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief S O Awokoya and members of the House in the Western Region was responsible for the rapid transformation of the Western Region of a largely rural to a modern state, although the legacies are now being eroded because of the shortsightedness and selfishness of today’s political leaders.  Chief Awokoya in the pursuit of this visionary mandate of preparing for the future of the young generation was quoted by Babs Fafunwa in his book History of Education in Nigeria to have said that, “Educational development is imperative and urgent.  It must be treated as a national emergency, second only to war.  It must move with the momentum of a revolution.”

No nation can develop or attain greatness without paying serious attention to its children and their development.  Russia came under siege in September 2004 when Chechen rebels held its future [children ranging from ages 7 to 17 and their teachers and parents] Kremlin responded with strong demonstration of force.  One would think it was a war.  It was indeed a war because the hostage takers had threatened to kill the children if an assault was launched.  Russian President Vladimir Putin considered the safety of children paramount and said in nationally televised comments from the Kremlin “All the actions of our forces … will be devoted to solving this task.”  He also declared that, “Our main task is to save the life and health of those who have ended up as hostages.”

Is somebody actually listening to Khalil Gibran? 

Your children are not your children.  They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.  They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.  You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.  You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the House of Tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.  You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.  For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.  You are the bows from which your children, as living arrows, are sent forth.

The leaders’ response to child development and electorate’s responsibility as a nation should connote revolution and total war to eradicate all the forces that militate against the Nigerian Children, which we have identified.  Nigeria will only be great to the extent that the Nigerian Children are developed and given the opportunities to express themselves and exploit their capabilities in child-friendly and an enabling environment.

This is wishing the Nigerian Child a Merry Christmas, even when it is Black. 

Babatunde Ayoola Fajimi, Accra Ghana