Protecting the Nigerian child
The prestige and respect any country enjoys at the international level is a function of how it treats its vulnerable population, especially the children. Incidentally, the majority of Nigeria’s children cannot be said to be enjoying the best of protection from the society. It is a fact that most of them exist at the fringes of society. One does not have to look far to see the dangerous situations many of them are exposed to on daily basis. In our major cities and towns, many of these children could be seen hawking petty wares on busy streets and roads, while meandering in between vehicular traffic. In the process, some get knocked down by moving vehicles. Others children work as beggars, shoe shiners, car washers, scavengers and bus conductors.
Today, many of these children have been turned to breadwinners of their respective families. Due to poverty, many parents and guardians find it difficult to fend for their families more less sending the children to school. The statistics of children out of school in Nigeria is very scary. According to the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), Nigeria is ranked in the top list of countries with the highest numbers of school dropouts among children. These children represent the face of hunger, insecurity and social neglect.
The plight of Nigeria’s children becomes even more palpable when the survey is carried out across the geopolitical zones. Among them are two categories of children. There those who live and work on the streets and those who return to their homes at night after working on the streets. Even when the point of demarcation is nebulous, both categories of children meet and interact on the streets, thereby making it easier for them to graduate into society miscreants over time.
Rather than abating, the situation is getting worse due to the persisting social climate of poverty and corruption at all levels of government. This social malaise is more profound in many ways. One distinct manifestation is the “Almajiri’ syndrome in the northern part of the country, which is an Islamic education that encourages young boys mostly in tattered apparels and bowls begging from house to house in order to survive.
In the south, they are mostly street urchins known as “Area Boys “who use persuasive and often coercive tactics to demand for money and are often involved petty and sometimes violent crimes.
Another cause of delinquent children is the cult of child witches, especially in some states of the South -South region. This is caused mainly by ignorance of parents who are persuaded by religious ministers and even native doctors to abandon their children who are often branded witches and accused of bringing misfortunes to the family. In the end, these children are unprotected from extremes of weather conditions and exposed to various forms of abuses such as sexual exploitation, vagrancy and kidnapping.
It is therefore imperative that the authorities enforce the Child Rights Act 2003, which is a legal document that sets out the rights and responsibilities of a child in Nigeria and provides for a system of child justice administration. Sadly, only 16 out of the 36 states of the federation have adopted the Act. We call on those states still to adopt the Act to do so in order to protect the Nigerian child from exploitation and deprivation. This way, they can join their peers in other parts of the world to enjoy a brighter future.
