A better deal for the Nigerian child

Today is Children’s Day, a day set aside to celebrate the Nigerian child. The day was chosen by Nigeria in response to a call from the United Nations General Assembly to member states, in 1954, to set aside a day to promote mutual exchange and understanding among children, initiate action to benefit and promote world’s children and celebrate childhood. The day is observed as a holiday for primary and secondary school children across the country.

To mark this day, some media and other organisations as well as a number of schools, especially those in the city centres, will host children’s parties, and a few privileged children will be given treats by their families, such as a visit to amusement parks. But for many Nigerian children, this day that is dedicated to raising awareness on their rights and wellbeing will just come and go like every other day, leaving no positive impact on their lives.

To say that the Nigerian child has not had a fair deal in virtually every aspect of life is to state the obvious. Despite some progress made, issues of child abuse, child labour, child marriage, child prostitution, lack of access to basic education, lack of access to proper health care, malnutrition, extreme poverty, among others, still persist in the country. The statistics are sobering.

According to UNICEF, about 1 million Nigerian children die each year before their fifth birthday, representing a shocking 10 percent of the global total. In Nigeria, 43 percent of girls are married off before their 18th birthday, and 17 percent are married before they turn 15, according to a report, in spite of the fact that the Child Rights Act of 2003 sets the national legal minimum age of marriage at 18. The prevalence of child marriage varies widely from one region to another, reaching an alarming 76 percent in the North West region.

The plight of the Nigerian child has, however, worsened since the Islamic terrorist sect Boko Haram started its deadly campaign. Since 2010, Boko Haram has targeted schools, killing hundreds of students. It has also been known to kidnap children, giving the very young ones over to Islamic schools, using the girls as cooks or sex slaves, while the male ones are conscripted and indoctrinated as supply channels for their horrible missions.

In February 2014, 59 boys were reportedly killed by Boko Haram in a Federal Government College in the north-east. In March 2015, BBC reported that about 500 children aged 11 and under were missing from Damasak, a north-eastern town recaptured from Boko Haram militants. The over 200 girls kidnapped by the sect from a boarding school in Chibok town, Borno State in April 2014 remain missing over a year after, with the sect’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, once saying in a video message that the girls had been married off. A conservative estimate puts the number of children that have been unable to attend school as a result of Boko Haram activities at 10,000.

In the face of all this, there is an urgent need to negotiate a new and better deal for the Nigerian child. That children are the future of any nation is a bare fact. Without them, no nation can hope to build any meaningful future. It is the child of today that will grow into the adult of tomorrow, supplying the direly needed productive workforce, providing leadership, and moving the economy forward. But without quality education and training, proper health care and other basic necessities, the child of today will grow into an irresponsible adult, constituting both a nuisance and a burden on the country.

This is why the incoming government must go beyond mere populist sloganeering and such half-hearted expressions as “children are the leaders of tomorrow” to really look into the plight of the Nigerian child and begin afresh to build a successful generation of Nigerians that will move this nation to the desired destination. In a country where children in the 0-14 years age bracket make up 43.8 percent of the entire population (CIA World Factbook 2013 estimate), and where some adults in leadership positions have openly declared the older generations as total failures, this is imperative.

Happy Children’s Day to the Nigerian child.