By Shuaibu Ahmed Abba
Decadence of morality in the Nigerian society has reached such an alarming level that even a blind individual can see. The young leaders of tomorrow do not show respect to the elders, they behave in a way the society finds repugnant. They engage in all sorts of anti-social behavior injurious to the society. Any society that is not morally sound is bound to witness all sort of social menace as a result of decadence of moral values and cultural norms that guide the actions and conduct of individuals living within such a society. Moral values are found in our religion, culture and traditions yet our youth, for one reason or the other are not that religious, they consider our indigenous culture outdated and our traditions barbaric. Therefore they queue up to embrace westernization in its totality and abandoning our indigenous culture and tradition entirely, thereby losing their identity.Now that the issue has been reached an alarming rate, as it is the tradition in our dear country whenever an issue arise, we point accusing fingers and play the blame game instead of brainstorming on how best to tackle the problem. Some blame the parents, some point accusing finger to the media while others believe it’s the youth whom are responsible for their behavior or misbehavior.
Whichever of them you think is responsible, you may be right and as well be wrong. Here’s why.Parents are responsible for training their children morality, compassion, respect as well as acceptable do’s and dont’s in line with societal values and religious dictates. As such, they becomes responsible for the action or inaction, behavior and attitudes of their children towards others from childhood to maturity. If a child behaves well, people conclude that the child is from a disciplined home and if they behave otherwise, people fault the parents for not properly training the child. You hear people complain “dint your parents teach you this?” or “dint your parents teach you that?” The unfortunate thing now is that parents abandon these responsibilities. For example in a working class family, the father and mother goes to work in the morning when the children are going to school, the mother will not comeback home till 5pm and the father till 9pm. These children will comeback from school and have the whole house to themselves, they do whatever they like, with whatever they like and however they like. This is not because they are alone, but because the house-help was instructed by madam and oga to play nice with the kids, should she do otherwise, she stand the risk of getting fired. Or maybe there was no such instruction but she herself wasn’t trained properly. So what is she going teach them? Imagine asking someone to give what they never had! Now let’s examine the media. The role of the media in society is to inform, educate, entertain and serve as the watch-dog of the society.
Unfortunately, it is no longer so. The entertainment industry for example through music videos, movies and some publications have successfully polluted the minds of the youth and promoted indecent dressing, drinking alcohol and other dangerous intoxicants, smoking, jamboree spending and other forms of immoralities we have to live with. Such youth model their lives in accordance to any of their favourite actor, actress, musician, model and the like. This remind me of the hypodermic needle theory and the bullet theory of mass communication which says that all the media need to do is to send a message and the receivers will respond accordingly.
They therefore dress, talk, walk, and misbehave like their unworthy role models with the highest sense of justification. This may include not paying attention to school or worst, which is dropping out of the school, acting though to their parents, misbehaving in the society and worst of all dedicating their most productive stage of life to temporary fun. What a mistake. For those who blame the youth, here’s your score. Some children are good liars and perfect pretenders. They act and behave like saints in the house and become demons the moment they step out of it. It is universally believed that once a child is 18 years of age, he or she can think and make decisions, iscern between truth and false, right and wrong, good and bad and so on. But the truth is, they need guidance and counselling of the old in order to avoid making an ill-conceived decision the repercussion of which may not end on the individual alone.The time for blame game is over, and each and every one concerned should take up their responsibilities. Parents, no matter how busy you may be, find time to train your children to be the perfect child you ever wanted. The media should be socially responsible to the society and promote morals and values found in our indigenous culture and traditions. Whereas the youth need reorientation to include compassion, respect, tolerance and understanding. Above all, it must be understood that training the youth is a collective responsibility of the members of the society. If you train only your children, my untrained children whom are friends and go to school, mosque or church, play and socialize together can spoil your trained children. By joining hands together we can achieve morally sound society that we can be proud to call home.
Shuaibu Ahmed Abba, Department of Mass Communication, Bayero University, Kano
