Failings of the Child Rights Law
After a random conservation with some child hawkers on the busy streets of Abuja, Chineme Okafor writes on the failings of the Child Rights Act
“Ihave to sell every day after school and sometimes on weekends. If I don’t sell, there won’t be money to pay my school fees or buy food for our home,” Esther told THISDAY in a conversation that started from the bargaining for a bunch of ripe banana. Thirteen years old, and still in junior secondary grade three, she said she linked up with her mother to sell banana and bottles of groundnut on the busy streets of Maitama and Wuse 2 areas of Abuja every day after school.
Her sales from banana and groundnut contribute to her school fees and help the family through its monthly expenditures, indicating she already started to shoulder the family’s demands at such young age.
Not alone in this chore, Esther told the paper that two of her siblings are also involved and like a lot of other school age children in Abuja, they have to alternate between schools and the streets to keep their families running and themselves in schools.
Every day that they have to hawk on Abuja’s streets, they also have to be smart and alert, any slip could land them in the buses of Abuja’s environmental protection taskforce charged with the job of ridding the city of street hawkers, and sometimes beggars.
According to Esther, that was always an experience none of them look forward to. She said a capture by the taskforce meant spending all the monies earned for the day on securing a release for themselves and their goods.
She admitted to the paper that it was not a pleasant condition to grow up, but that she had limited choices.
“We don’t have plenty of choices,” she said, with an innocent smile which seemed to suggest she was resigned to just getting on with life despite the hard path she has to take.
Just before leaving this reporter to look for a new customer, haven spent more time than she would have wanted, she stated with some form of conviction: “At least, I still go to school, and my brothers and sisters go to school too. My mother wants us to go to school and when we get through the university, we will have good jobs and we will not sell on the streets again.”
Moving on and perhaps by chance, this reporter met 15-year-old Ese, during a hot pursuit by an enforcement officer of the environmental taskforce at the Mpape Junction on IBB Way in Maitama. Through a deliberate crash in on the pursuit and the resultant argument with the officer over who was guilty of the accident, Ese was able to escape the pursuit but was subsequently found for a conversation.
Her story which was not very different with that of Esther, showed that these children have embraced the hard path to growing up, and oblivious of the protection guaranteed them by the Child Rights Acts 2003 – a national law that was passed by the Nigerian parliament.
Based on this, the paper studied a recent poll conducted by the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) through its ‘Ureport’- a people-based assessment of societal issues across the country, on the application of the Child Rights Act 2003 in Nigeria, and discovered that 78 per cent of 140,915 respondents who were sampled across Nigeria do not know about the Child Rights Act, while only 22 per cent knew of its existence and content.
The poll equally reported that while all Southern states in Nigeria now have a Child Rights Law to protect the rights of all children, and some states in the North yet to have one, their applications have not been optimal, indicating that a good number of Nigerian children do not have their rights to certain things like basic education guaranteed squarely by the society, while some others face life-threatening abuses with no protection from the law.
Furthermore, the UNICEF’s Ureport indicated that 27 and 53 per cent of the knowledgeable respondents in the polls favoured protection from violent abuse of children and right to comprehensive education as the two most important aspects of the Child Rights Act, but these two are rarely guaranteed.
With regards to out-of-school children, the numbers are quite overwhelming in some states of Nigeria, while violence against children in the forms of rape, domestic cruelty, and trafficking has also risen.
There are reports of violent abuse of children in practically every corner of Nigeria, and the Child Rights Law has overtime failed woefully to nip this on the board.
In 2016, THISDAY followed up the stories of two young girls - Blessing and Aisha, who were serially abused by trusted relatives and caregivers. The stories of these two confirmed fears expressed by experts that the failings of the Child Rights Law were aided by persons and institutions like the Police, traditional institutions and parents who fail to uphold the content of the law by either reporting or prosecuting people who abuse children.
As was reported then, 17-year-Blessing from Nigeria’s Plateau State said in a documentary which a non-governmental organisation, the Media Information and Narrative Development (MIND) produced for UNICEF that she was sexually abused by her father but her mother in support of her husband denied her justice.
“I was nine years old when my father started sleeping with me. He called me to come, I went and answered him. Then, he now said I should lie down. I didn’t know what he was doing. He said I should remove my clothes, and I removed the clothes, then he slept with me,” Blessing said then.
Similarly, 11-year-old Aisha from northern Gombe State who was abused in her local primary school by a caregiver also said in the documentary: “I think I was about five or four years old when he did it to me behind the house. He removed my skirt, he laid with me. I screamed but nobody was in the place. Even in school, they said he had done it to another girl behind our classes. He is the one that sweeps our class.”
To understand the implications of such ineffectual law on the stable development of Nigerian children, THISDAY approached an expert team on child justice in the UNICEF Abuja office who stated that the implications were far-reaching.
“The Child Rights Act was passed into law by Nigeria’s National Assembly in 2003. Thirteen years after its passage into law at the National level, only 23 states have passed a Child Rights Law to implement its provisions in their respective states. The most discerning implication of this failure to act is the absence of a legislative framework for child protection in the affected states,” the team stated in a note they sent to the paper.
They further stated in the note that northern states like Benue, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Plateau, Taraba, Kogi have since passed a Child Rights Law, while Kaduna, Katsina, Yobe and Zamfara states have advanced steps to pass one in their states.
They equally explained that the Child Rights Bill of Kaduna State was before the State House of Assembly, while that of Yobe State has been validated with the UNICEF providing supports for their domestications.
However, the team said that: “The major contending issues are the definition of the age of the child as between 18 years as provided in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Child’s Rights Act, age of puberty and age for consent to sexual relations. Other issues are age of marriage, adoption and fostering. These issues cut across northern and southern states.
“The children in states that have a Child’s Rights Law have the benefit of a legal framework for protection of their rights that is compliant with international, regional and national norms and best practice - the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the African Charter on the Welfare and Protection of Children and the Child’s Rights Act,” they added.
Children resident in Adamawa, Bauchi, Bornu, Enugu, Gombe, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara states, they noted, do not have any legal protection against abuses on their lives because these states do not have a Child Rights law yet.
Although, the Enugu State House of Assembly in August 2016, passed the Child Rights Bill into law, it was still awaiting a signature into law by the governor of the state. Jigawa on the other hand previously passed a Child Rights law but then annulled it.
According to the UNICEF experts, through sustained advocacy, stakeholders and the federal government can change the ugly narrative on abuse of children in the country with the application of the Child Right law.
They thus stressed that: “The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has severally at the launch and commemoration of the launch of the ‘END Violence Against Children’ campaign in September 2015 and in October 2016 committed to ending violence against children. A key tool to attain implementation of the presidential commitment is the passage of Child Rights laws in the states.”
The Child Rights Act was passed into law by Nigeria’s National Assembly in 2003. Thirteen years after its passage into law at the National level, only 23 states have passed a Child Rights Law to implement its provisions in their respective states. The most discerning implication of this failure to act is the absence of a legislative framework for child protection in the affected states