Stealing their future “
My views of the Nigerian child, from across the plains, the hills, the forests and the swamps of Nigeria are those of innocence and boundless creativity”, said Prof Wole Soyinka as he appreciated paintings mounted by young Nigerians at the opening of his Vision of the Child Art Exhibition, 2017 in Lagos.
The issue of the Nigerian child has always bothered me, but never has it become more compelling than now when we are confronted with an unprecedented number of homeless children at a time when stolen billions of local and foreign currency are being excavated from caves, underground sewage, overhead tanks, warehouses and decoy factories which manufacture nothing but serve as dumping ground for proceeds of crime.
The three million street children in Kano may be the highest concentration of such deprived kids in Africa but every state of Nigeria has its own version of Kano’s Almajiri. In some states, such kids are used as vassals or they eke out a living from garbage dumpsites and sleep in the open under overhead bridges. My heart bleeds whenever I see them.
Once, at a local restaurant in Kano, a group of Almajiri kids swooped on my food thinking I had finished. I couldn’t stop them, neither would I have tried because they cut the very picture of desperation, hunger, hopelessness and poverty. I felt a pang of conscience that they were forced to steal a bite under such dehumanising conditions.
According to Hussain Obaro, “The Almajiri grows up in the streets without the love, care and guidance of parents; his struggle for survival exposes him to abuse (homosexuality and pedophilia), used as a slave, brainwashed and recruited for anti-social activities and used for destructive and violent activities”.
When we dehumanise children, we make them available for recruitment as thugs, assassins, drug pedlars, sex offenders and terrorists. They lose their childhood and in return wait to haunt us in future, ensuring that we know no peace, no security, no social stability.
To avoid a miserable future which inexorably awaits all of us, we have to rescue as many of those deprived children from the jaws of hopeless existence. I don’t know anything more distressingly shameful than the sight of a four-year-old boy begging for a meal in the midst of fast-moving traffic. If things continue like this, we shall one day arrive at that junction foretold by renowned economist Prof Sam Aluko’s aphorism to the effect that, “The poor cannot sleep, because they are hungry, and the rich cannot sleep, because the poor are awake.”
At the universities, our children are living like animals at the zoo. I saw a photograph of students in one of the federal universities in Southwest Nigeria, where the students were living on the corridors. Mattresses were thrown all over the place with a tiny space at the side for passersby. We have not deployed adequate resources to cater for our young people. They nurse untold bitterness against the system that dehumanises them. Imagine what they will do to society when they find themselves in any position of power!
Already, they are crying out through various creative outlets if only we bothered to listen. One of such channels was the aforementioned Vision of the Child art exhibition on which Soyinka pronounced this verdict: “The vision I see so eloquently expressed in these wonderful pieces of art is that of the irrepressible Nigerian spirit, refusing to be put down and reaching out for the Nigeria of our collective dreams: the Nigeria where our commonwealth is used for our common good and not looted by a few greedy, self-centred lot.”
We will never be able to deploy adequate resources towards sectors where they would positively impact the lives of our teeming young population if we continue to condone corruption in any form; otherwise we may soon be like Zimbabwe where goats may soon be used as collateral for school fees loans.
I have heard it said that there is also political corruption. I agree. But no other form of corruption trumps barefaced stealing of public funds; outright looting. I don’t know how anyone with half a healthy brain can begin to justify financial brigandage of the level we have seen in Nigeria in the last six years.
For our sake and the sake of the country we call our own, corruption must die or be pummelled to such a state that it becomes ineffectual. Can the war against corruption be further refined? Oh yes. But should we allow some camels to pass through the eye of the needle in the process? Hell, no!
That is why this government should intensify the anti-graft war. Nobody in his right mind would say that lawabiding citizens should be harassed. But anyone who has had a handshake with the monster of corruption, no matter how big the position he occupies, should be made to cough up the loot.
Laundered funds usually find their way into the financing of terrorism, coups, militancy and creation of private armies. The danger of corruption is that it arrests our possibilities and reduces our communities to conclaves of one millionaire vs one million beggars.
WELCOME, CHIBOK GIRLS
Congratulations, Nigeria, on the successful release of additional 82 Chibok girls. May all the remaining captives breathe the air of freedom!