Let us rejoice with children, universally-recognized as the leaders of tomorrow. A world without children is a perishing world. Therefore we cannot afford to toy with the affairs of children.
This year’s Children’s Day Celebration is important for many reasons. In the last one year we have watched with alarm the increasing hostilities against children and destruction of the lives of many of them. Hundreds of thousands of children have been victims of mass expulsions across the different parts of the world. Many school pupils were buried alive in the latest earthquake that struck the mountainous Sichuan province of China .
In Nigeria several school pupils were burnt to death two weeks ago in the pipeline explosion which rocked the Ijegun community, in the Ikotun area of Lagos. Aside from natural disasters, countless number of children have been the victims of man’s inhumanity to man this year. A couple of months ago, a mother was caught in Oyo State selling her children to some European slave merchants. Not long ago a torture chamber for children was uncovered in Ibadan. Nigeria is one of the top countries in the world with the highest number of malnourished children. Children aged between five to 18 years, without basic education, endlessly loiter about Nigerian streets in search of living.
Moved by the plight of Nigerian children, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, broke down in tears two months ago. Just the other day, a seven - year old Okigwe toddler whose limbs were chopped off by his suspected relative has just returned to the country from Germany with artificial limbs, thanks to the humanitarianism of MTN Company.
Among the disturbing aspects of the physical and psychological abuse of children in Nigeria is child kidnapping. A few weeks ago some Port-Harcourt women and kids took to the streets in protest against
the frequent child kidnapping in Port-Harcourt and its environs. In a world completely torn apart by violence, brutal sex, war, hatred, political wrangling, and corruption, our children are also the victims of rape, infanticide, child labour, street hawking, child prostitution, cyber café pornography, condom-sex, modern slavery and all sorts of diseases.
This years’ Children’s Day Celebration affords us the opportunity therefore of putting in place the necessary machinery for the protection of our children. Adults should be made to understand that children have rights which should be protected. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 1989, signed and ratified by Nigeria remains the benchmark for assessing the rights of our children. The CRC states that every child, before and after birth, should have a right to life, right to basic education, right not to be coerced to engage in any unlawful sexual activity, right not to be abducted and sold into slavery, freedom of expression, right not to be used for forced labour, child trade, child trafficking etc. In Nigeria , the Child Act promotes the rights of children, but unfortunately only about 16 out of the 36 States of the federation have so far embraced the Act. Those who are objecting to the Act are doing so on nebulous cultural and religious grounds. Now is the time to reach a consensus on the legal frame work that will protect our children from exploitation, abuse and death.
Our children should be given the opportunity to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially in a healthy environment and in conditions of freedom and dignity. That is the only way we can hope to nurture the future leaders of tomorrow.
