Children’s Day, Nigeria…. How can corporate interventions spur govt to greater responsibility?
There ought to be more poignancy around Children’s Day commemoration in Nigeria than is seen in most other parts of the world. The reasons for this are obvious and numerous as well. Besieged on every side by some sad reality or the other, it’s a wonder that the Nigerian child makes it out of childhood and, for a lot of them, into fairly balanced adulthood.
According to someone who should know, Hammid Bobboyi, the Executive Secretary of Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, Nigeria now has 13.2 million out of school children, the largest in the world. (Sigh).
These out of school kids are for the most part hawking or idle or involved in vices inappropriate for any age but more so for individuals of such tender years. These underage commercial hawkers are in their millions and they are everywhere in Nigeria, with some of them doing it full time, while for others it’s a part time vocation to help their parents make ends meet.
In doing this, many a child has been raped, abused in other ways physical and emotional and with some paying the ultimate sacrifice with their young lives, case in point being the ritual murder occurrences that happen all over Nigeria and with children being the preferred targets.
Add to this the number of children felled daily by preventable diseases. Many parents do not bother with taking their kids to hospitals because even when the costs are not exactly expensive, it is still prohibitive and well out of reach for poor parents and guardians, many of whom have no wage to talk about, let alone minimum wage. It is largely for this reason that Nigeria contributes a whopping 27% of global malaria cases, other notable ailments being Pneumonia, Tuberculosis, Diarrhoea, Meningitis, etc.
The national burden of poverty is borne mostly by kids. It is the ultimate slayer of innocence. It brings in stark relief the blunt reality of a discombobulated world where nothing exactly makes sense. Kids are privy in a very intimate way to the struggles of their parents, some of whom still make the effort, and some of whom have long given up on any hope of any kind of good life. The parents’ frustration is vented on these hapless kids who can now no longer make any connection between the fairy tales they are told in the storybooks, the seeming fairytales they see on TV from life as lived in other countries, and the reality that stares them in the face every day. These have become adults, bearing adult burdens while they are yet, figuratively speaking, in their diapers.
And how many Nigerian children have been eye witnesses to armed robberies, to kidnappings, to ritual murders, to armed conflicts, to vehicular accidents, to suicides, etc. Currently trending, for instance, is the story of an undergraduate who hacked an 8 year
old girl, daughter of his neighbour, for body parts. So traumatized are these kids that some of them have become the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes.
And can we honestly say that the drug epidemic in Nigeria came out of nowhere? It so happened that some of our children, having not much to look forward to, chanced on a high, or got introduced to a high. And now they will listen to no one until Mr/mrs Moralist can point them to something as good or better than the high they are being asked to forsake.
It’s not difficult to sermonize and to rattle off the dos and don’ts. But the question that leaves folks stumped is “what do you have for me?” The story will yet be told some years hence by sociologists and psychologists currently not doing what they are trained to do as to how Nigerian kids got stuck on a cloud, and happily drift with it day and night. What are the root causes? What is stoking the fire? The answers might seem obvious, like we just tried to provide, but it might surprise us how deep they are and for how long they’ve been tunneling through our collective psyche and imprinting themselves on our sub conscious.
But isn’t it a mystery how Nigerian children, despite the deprivation they are accustomed to still end up on top of the pile everywhere they go? Now this is not just the patriot in me speaking. We just blow everyone away everywhere we go. Only two weeks ago, there was the well reported story of a Nigerian child, Tobechukwu Philips who shattered a 125 year academic record in the United States if America. We are just like that, you know. Someone might say that she did that because she isn’t resident here and so not subject to the stress that kinfolk her age have to face every day. Not quite true, that, because a lot of young Nigerians still leave these shores having faced all of our issues head on and still end up exceling wherever they go.
And they are going! Which is something we should find alarming! The good life is not here. It’s anywhere else but here. Just ask the kids. So at whatever level they are they have plans for ‘the abroad’ wherever that is, be it Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Libya, India, not to mention Canada, USA, UK, Germany, France, wherever. The not so educated are leaving. The educated are leaving. The Labour Minister, Dr. Chris Ngige, caused an uproar recently, when he said with respect to Nigerian doctors migrating abroad, that ‘we have a surplus in the medical profession in our country. I can tell you this. It is my area, we have excess. We have enough, more than enough, quote me’. Does he really live here, one is tempted to ask.
Today, it is the case that many a parent is working hard to relocate their kids abroad. Anyone making what’s considered a decent living wants their kids out of here. That can’t be good in the long run. We can’t run down the country and expect that the kids would live in uncertainty in perpetuity. No, they won’t. It’s not in human nature to not self preserve. And for those who have gone abroad to return to the chaos, their mind having been bludgeoned with the unending problems that spring up from every inch of Nigerian soil, they would just rather not, thank you!
And what is the Nigerian government doing? Oh, every Children’s Day and other some such days, the government reels out its stale tales by moonlight promises, to deceive the ‘leaders of tomorrow’, just in the same way that they are deceiving their fathers and mothers. Despite the promises, you can be sure that there will be no power next year and the year after that, on and on. You are sure there will be bad roads nationwide as there have been from before the kids were born. You can be sure that there will be schools without roofs, without teachers, without blackboards and whiteboards and without chairs. You can be sure that thousands of kids will die of preventable and curable diseases. You can be sure that government says what it says knowing that it will say the same things next year and the year thereafter, on and on.
Corporates are not always the saviours that we crave, self-interest being a prime constituent of their makeup. That is a fact that’s not at variance with what should be. But their nation building role is becoming increasingly important. Even when the children may not look up to them for salvation it is heartwarming that corporates understand that they have a duty to their stakeholders, of which the kids will become increasingly important as the years go by. They constitute, if nothing else, the bulk of the labour pool. They will constitute the bulk of Nigeria’s future armed forces, police, bankers, journalists, lawyers, accountants, builders, architects, sportspeople, politicians, civil servants, and civil society activists.
As secondary enablers, so to speak, one must commend the numerous corporate organisations that are backing our kids with scholarship awards, grants, employment, mentoring, volunteering, clinics, not to mention critical interventions like payment of hospital bills for indigent folks, rehabilitation for miscreants and deviants, shelter for the homeless, and welfare input into IDP Camps to help our internally displaced kids live a little easier.
Corporates are clearly hamstrung as they are not and cannot be government. However, it is important that in realizing the critical roles these kids will play in the long run, that they ratchet up the pressure on governments at all levels to live up to their primary responsibility of being net enablers of a better society as well as providers for children to whom they swore under oath to provide for and look after.
Corporates might be able to do more in this regard even if it now seems like uncharted territory. Seeing as individuals have been unable to get our governments to budge, corporates should take up the challenge of pointing the government to its responsibility. And the better way is when Organised Private Sector gets together to not just mull over short term consequences of government policies but also the long term ones. Profit won’t be the main item on that agenda. It would be about sustainability of the Nigerian enterprise which as it thrives can provide the umbrella under which individual enterprises can blossom and flourish.
Long live the Nigerian Child!