Our children

There is a difference between rhetoric and reality, between what we say and what we do, between what we profess to believe and the way we actually live our lives.

Three recent articles on Nigerian children (here, here, and here). And in previous blogs I have referenced other, older articles like this one.

In theory, every Nigerian places the safety, security, growth, health and economic future of our children at or near the top of the priority list. And on a day to day level, parents all over Nigeria work hard and hustle hard to somehow, some way feed their children, send them to school and to have some kind of financial reserves to deal with any health crises. It is that important.

But somewhere between the level of the "individual" and the level of "society", we lose something, and the sum of our parts (i.e. the people of the federal republic as a collective whole) shows astonishingly low interest in children's welfare. The irony is our disinterest as a collective whole makes life more-difficult-than-necessary for the individual parent/family units that strive for the welfare of their children.

Oh, there are grand events and assorted "pet projects" of First Ladies. The churches and mosques do some things, as do charitable organizations and citizen associations. And (with great fanfare) the National Assembly passed a law about children's rights and what-not, just a few years ago.

But if you strip aside the rhetoric, what is the reality? The reality is what was described in those articles above. Let me be clear, it is NOT the case that every child in Nigeria is suffering. But when we refuse to look beyond the surface, we leave ourselves vulnerable, much like those countries that seem to be normal (or better than normal) for long periods of time before some tiny spark exposes fissures and chasms that everyone knew were there all along, but assiduously affected to ignore since there was no urgent need to face them.

There are certain things that are continuous, things that happened before, are happening now, and will happen in the future. We all know about these things. We all know these things are either completely wrong, or are at least not ideal, not optimal, not likely to take our societies collectively where they need to go.

But we do nothing about it.

It is not about our system being undemocratic, because there are many things we debate and discuss, quite vociferously too, even though we know the likelihodd that we as citizens can force our government to do said things is nil. Many of the things we argue most vehemently about have nothing to do with any of the things that actually affect our quality of life, or in this case the quality of life of our children.

When I was a child, the institution of "house helps" bothered me. These children, whether they were extended family relatives or were totally unrelated to their host families, did not seem to have any legal protections. I do not agree with those journalists and "activists" in Europe and North America who call the system "slavery" (to a certain extent, I suspect they are trying to make themselves feel better about their countries' histories), but it was abundantly clear to me, even as a child that these CHILDREN did not have any practical legal protection, nothing to safeguard their welfare.

Most of them had decent host families. Most of them had food, a roof over their heads and some degree of schooling, though never as good as the children of the host family. And defenders of this system like to point out that these are things the children would not have had but for the househelp system.

But some of the girls in these circumstances were sexually exploited (actually, the word is "raped") by the men and boys of the house, and for that matter some of the boys in this situation were exploited for sex too, by the women of the house. This never provoked a surge of public demands for federal and/or state regulation of the househelp system, or (better yet) of its abolishment and replacement with commercial (and adult-employing) cleaning and child-care services. In fact, some people (not a majority) would blame the female child for supposedly seducing the old man of the house, or claim she was trying to trap one of the sons into marriage.

Seriously, who is stupid enough that they do not know it is the husbands and sons who (sometimes forcefully) initiate the act? But the fact of that belief is less important than the broader picture of acceptance.

Even those of us who do not like these things nevertheless live our daily lives accepting that they exist, and displaying no interest in trying to change them. It is not just that we have no interest, we do not even have the BELIEF that change is possible.

Indeed, we do the opposite. Because we perceive that we cannot make things better, we proceed to make up excuses to ourselves for why we let these things continue. We start to explain to ourselves, and to anyone that cares to listen, that these things are in fact good.

I am sure that deep down in their hearts and souls, a super-majority (if not all) of the parents of the almajiri would prefer it if the had the financial wherewithal to keep their sons at home, well-fed and taken care of, attending Koranic schools in their home communities, and receiving (at those schools or elsewhere) additional education of the sort that could get them white collar or blue collar or any collar jobs, or give them the tools to create their own businesses as sole proprietors and small-scale entrepreneurs. Because this is not possible (given our too-small economy, and too-small levels of personal income across too-many millions of our citizens), we end up with parents (and broader communities) who defend themselves (and make themselves feel better about choices that were forced on them) by professing to support the system as it currently exists.

You get the same thing from people all over the country who would defend the househelp system. Or people who would argue that there is nothing wrong with child labour (I worked in the family shop as a child and did a little backyard farming too, but there is a difference between what I did, and what many children go through as professional beggars, as professional road-intersection-and-motor-park hawkers, as househelps, as scavengers for electrical parts on toxic-waste-filled refuse heaps, etc.). Indeed, if you criticize the pastors who accused children of being "witches", and who superintended the beatings and abandonment of these children, there are those who would leap to accuse you of going against "Men of God", which is quite a paradox, considering the fact that one of the early rallying points of Christianity in Nigeria was the fight against religious leaders who claimed God almighty wanted us to throw children (i.e. newborn twins) in the bush to die because they were demonic. What is the difference between that and what these pastors are doing? Do not mistake me; like most Nigerians, I believe in the

But even that is not the big problem.

You see, any Nigerian who reads this blog will probably get angry with me, and accuse me of generalizations. They will insist that they support all the things that are good for children and oppose all the things that are bad for children.

And you know what? They do.

But there is a gigantic disconnect between what we the people of Nigeria want, and what our country as a collective whole actually does. And we the people have more or less given up on trying to close that gap. Frankly we are much more likely to point fingers at each other for causing the gap, while nobody (myself included) is lifting a damn finger to close it.

Children's issues do not factor anywhere near the top of the list of things Nigerians argue about in political discourse. I personally believe that the day our political discourse changes, the day we actually start to talk about things that are important, will be the day that these ephemeral differences (ethnicity, region, religion) will stop dominating the discourse, because the things that are important to us (like our children) are things that affect us all, things on which we have the same opinions, things through which we all benefit from the positive and lose from the negative.