That child really matters

THURSDAY COLUMN BY SAFIYA ADAMU

yandokye@gmail.com

Since 1989, 194 countries have acceded to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Only three countries – USA, South Sudan, and Somalia have not. The convention seeks to change the way children are viewed and treated, set aside distinct set of rights for children under the age of 18, who must not be treated as passive objects of care and charity.

This convention has changed the global conversation about children, and set the agenda on children’s right to survival, development, protection and participation. But much as the world continues this conversation, the vicissitudes of children globally have not witnessed any tremendous turn-around.

Worse hit by the vagaries of hunger, violence, deprivation and bad governance are children in sub-Sahara Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Like in most developing nations, the Nigerian child has had an unfair dosage of the macabre quartet, worse than before the domestication of the CRC into national law in September 2003.

When hundreds of girls were kidnapped in Chibok, Borno State and dozens of boys were slaughtered in a dawn raid by Boko Haram insurgents in Buni Yadi, Yobe State, an outraged world called for justice. That call remains just that, a cry for not much has been achieved in that direction as children are used as spies and human explosives to perpetrate heinous crimes like mass murder while many more are forced into militias. Many that should be in schools are either in refugee camps or forced into militias indoctrinated to perpetuate man’s inhumanity to man in the name of religion. But these atrocities are only part of a global picture.

In other parts of the world, just like in Nigeria and most sub-Saharan Africa, children are forced into slavery. Children throughout the world are subjected to myriad of abuses within the family, public institutions, including schools, and when going about routine activities. In many instances, their suffering is largely invisible and silent, but very much present.

Today hundreds of children in and out of school are being kidnapped in Nigeria, by unscrupulous, senseless unreasonable adults whose skulls contain concentrate of cannabis and whatever substance they can lay their hands on. Smoked out reason these elements now stride around the nation and the Northwest in particular like marauding beasts in hunt for blood. They get more and more daring striking fear in the hearts of parents and guardians. We are at an all time low in insecurity and display of utter callousness.

Every year the world commemorates the International Day of the child with pageantry and speeches that pronounce more promises that never go beyond the podium, worth less than the paper they are written on.

Hundreds of children are out there forced to sleep in open fields exposed to any and every conceivable and inconceivable vagaries, being sucked into trauma some may never get out of. Yet we joyfully spend the task payers’ monies on private jets and chartered flights to attend weddings that add no socio – economic values to our common well being. It is a sordid story for the future, it is a sign of how low we have sunk in governance, it is an exhibition of how cheap we have become as a people. It only tells the story of who we are as a people. I duff my hat for these great exhibitors of a people in wilderness.

Provisions of the African Charter of the Child have failed the African child and the Nigerian child in particular.  Children’s voices are easily ignored because they are not heard, no one speaks for them; not the Ministry for Women Affairs, not youths and development, not even the Ministry of education. So who speaks for them? We have failed our children, our future is in jeopardy, and the elders are lost are lost, their heads are buried in the sand, they play the ostrich and pretend all is well while the lowly parents coil up in fetal positions and cry themselves to sleep. That is if the sleep comes, yes we have failed the children and we have run out of excuses. Today children kidnapped from schools are too numerous for any form of comfort; I strain and yearn for words of comfort but I hear none as the days drag on for students of FGGC Yauri.