A cheerless Children’s Day

Today, Nigeria celebrates her children under the auspices of the United Nations General Assembly – recommended Children’s Day, which is a day set aside, since 1954, to celebrate children and draw attention to their problems. The celebration, sadly, meets the Nigerian child in dire straits.

From health, to education, to life expectancy, damning statistics regularly paint unflattering pictures of the terrible conditions under which Nigerian children are nurtured.
At different fora in all parts of the country today, government officials will make speeches about the state of the Nigerian child and promise them and their parents a better deal, as has been the routine over the years, yet the condition of the Nigerian child remains unchanged.

Everywhere in the country, the pitiable state of children in Nigeria is evident. In the Northern part of the country, hapless student-beggars, almajiris, roam the landscape. In Lagos and other urban centres of the country, children are often to be found in markets and in the streets, engaged in trading and other strenuous activities that are well beyond their tender frames.

They have been reportedly discovered to be working in cement and stone factories, some have been discovered in brothels, sleeping with men in exchange for money that goes to their “benefactors”, while thousands are engaged as househelps and in other forms of forced labour on farms, factories and in private homes. Children are raped, maltreated and sold at the whims and caprices of depraved adults.

They are largely unprotected by the state and their rights to life, basic education and the rights not to be used for forced labour, child trade, child trafficking etc, as provided for under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 1989, are routinely flagrantly flouted. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child that “mankind owes the child the best it has to give” has little meaning in the country. The exploitation and maltreatment of children in Nigeria have not escaped the attention of international agencies and the rest of the world.

Statistics continually released by both international and local agencies regularly draw attention to the dismal state of the Nigerian child. A few of these will suffice. The most recent, released within the last fortnight, by the United States-based global humanitarian organization, Save the Children, said one million children, a tenth of the global child mortality figure, die in Nigeria, every year.

Nigeria was rated as the country with the second highest number of children who were not getting access to adequate basic health care, with 16 million deprived of basic medicare. Other statistics say that 40 per cent of Nigerian children of school age are out of school. Other disheartening statistics say Nigerian children are among the most under-nourished in the world while they continue to fall victim to easily preventable diseases, while the nation has been adjudged the last bastion of polio in the world, by international health agencies.

Efforts to improve the condition of the Nigerian child have been met with stiff resistance in many states, in the country. Five years after the signing of Child Rights Act 2003, which is the most comprehensive legislation in respect of child rights in Nigeria, less than half of the states in the federation have passed the Act into law in their domain, because of religious and cultural excuses.
Even the existing child protection laws, like the Children and Young Persons (Street Trading) Law, are hardly enforced.

The state of the Nigerian child remains so deplorable that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Honourable Dimeji Bankole, wept openly during a visit, earlier in the year, to the House by children to intimate the legislators with their problems, especially that of rape and violence..
This deplorable state of affairs should not be allowed to continue.

On this occasion of Children’s Day, we urge all state governments to address the monumental injustice to Nigerian children by signing the Child Rights Act into law and enforce its provisions. The government, at all levels, should also make ample provision for the healthcare and education of these young ones who are the future of the nation.
We congratulate Nigerian children on this their special day. It is our hope that celebrations of this day will hold out more to cheer in the coming years.