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There is one ad on the
Akwa Ibom FM Radio station that, to the ordinary minds, the
wrongs meted to an average Akwa Ibom child are articulately
enumerated and outrightly condemned. They see things only
from that standpoint. The irksome ad in question is one
sponsored by no other than the State's First Lady's Family
Life Enhancement Initiative. But to those who are
constructively, I must say, critical the ad is nothing but a
perfect reminder of what we were taught in the classroom
that PR stands for, at least in theory: propaganda. The ad
has carefully been tailored to exonerate the government
while roping in the parents of the Akwa Ibom child, and it
has been doing just that every morning for months now.
We are not unmindful of the extent the state government has
gone to address the plights of Akwa Ibom child, mostly in
recent times. To this, we applaud the Akwa Ibom State House
of Assembly for the very recent passage of the Child Rights
Bill into law, in consonance with what had already been
obtained at the federal, known as the Child Rights Act since
2003. Very obviously, this is only as far as the paperworks
and the state's information mechanisms go in this matter.
The din from many quarters in defence of the child against
abuse, trafficking and all that stuff is not new to our
ears. Age-long international NGOs like the Unicef, have been
giving their all in terms of donations and campaigns to
seeing that the rights and privileges of every child,
especially in the so-called third world countries, to which
Nigeria prominently belongs, and is very likely to remain so
for a long time to come, are guaranteed, at least to some
extent. The local NGOs have not been left behind.
But when an extension of government's project begins to
raise false alarm to the effect that, “Our people”, a
sonorous feminine voice of Ibibio descent would always ring
out, “let's stop selling children, let's stop causing our
children to hawk around when they are supposed to be in
school”, thereby blaming it all on the child's parents, one
sees nothing in this other than calculated deception and
hypocricy.
Every dunce knows, and of course the leadership at all
levels of government do too, that in the modern society
where the child's future is well guaranteed, the parents
should only do the rest by guiding their ward. But first,
government's policies and structures must determine the
standard of education the child should acquire, the quality
of food he/she should take in, the kind of house he should
live in, and all that. So what could be more hypocritical
than a state or nation that has no clear-cut and standing
educational policy, or any social security agenda whatsoever
for its citizenry that would go as far as to garner all its
available mechanisms in condemnation of what it calls child
abuse and child labour, child and women (no men-oh)
trafficking, and things like that? It is not just
inequitable but highly illusory.
Of course, the government knows that we know that if there
has ever been any genuine case of any form of child or woman
bastardization or trafficking, it is the less-privileged and
not the privileged or the highly placed that feel it. Why
this is so is quite simple. Whereas the aje butter may
decide and can afford not to let his child have anything to
do with our conventional educational system by sending him
to private and special schools, and whereas he should be too
“connected” for his child to even have a feel of joblessness
in his entire bread-and-buttered life, the wretched and the
less-privileged, together with the schooling child have to
toil and sweat to enable them pay their way through our
already decayed educational system.
Therefore, to those in the last stratum of the society, what
meaning is the government's hullabaloos if it is only an
inevitability that the child must hawk his/her way to the
extent the family's strength and God's grace (for they must
not do without it) can take him/her educationally or
otherwise? What sense does it make to a wretched family if
in its style of hypocricy the government chooses to shout
its voice hoarse just because a grown up girl who finds life
meaningless in her fatherland has opted for a greener
pasture elsewhere in our free world, or the family that
willingly and for necessity sake decides to shade its size
by giving out siblings to those that are willing and able to
cater for them? I hear someone quipping here, “Whose fault
if a man decides to have so many mouths to feed?” Blame it
on government still. There should be public orientation to
that effect by government.
You see, I always wish others could toe my line of going
Christ's way by doing all one can to forgive those in the
leadership for they know not what they are doing. Truly, an
average aje butter does not feel what an aje kpako feels, he
does not see what he sees and he does not know what his
downtrodden compatriot knows: the bare pangs of hunger and
lack. If they honestly did, they would have not been wasting
the nation's precious time and huge fund doing jingles on
fake case of women trafficking and child labour, when they
should expend the nation's scarce financial resources on
ways and means of tackling acute cases of deprivation and
poverty in the land in the first place, the banes being more
or less leadership-made.
Once, the immediate past regime in the state decided to take
the mockery of its citizenry too far. Its leadership woke up
one morning and put her major info mouthpieces to action.
They were made to put it to all and sundry in black and
white that the blessing of free education had come to be our
portion. And before one could say “education”, come and see
wretched parents dragging their wards by the hand out on the
streets to various formal schools in the state, private and
public. Guess what the wretched ones got, the shocker of
their pitiable lives. They were simply told by the schools'
authorities to go to Attah so that he could take them to his
free schools, period. And of course, there were no such
thing as “Attah's Schools”. Everything about that grand
duplicity has remained what it was meant to be, a huge hoax,
till this day. By that singular act, what that government
only succeeded in doing was to aggravate the disillusionment
of a dying people. That was only an archetype of
governments' (at all levels) misrule and unfairness to the
common man.
A beg, for Heaven's sake, where does the government of the
day still find moral justification to make a fuss over
children who are out hawking instead of being in school when
it knows it has no programme to assuage the huge financial
burdens of an average Nigerian family; over women and
children that are trafficked, when it knows that people must
migrate to areas of possible means of livelihood.
Just recently, the present government of the state has
formally announced free education from primary 1 to SSIII
and many other physical projects lined up for our school
system. There is a good enough reason why the people should
give Chief Akpabio the benefit of doubt. He has drummed it
into our ears for the umpteenth time that he is a promise
keeper. To say the least, no former governor of the state
has ascribed this tag to himself. But the Digital One has
been proudly doing just that.
And it is about time we stopped fooling ourselves and ended
dissipating of people's fund on vain propaganda. There
cannot be any abetting to the so-called cases of child
labour, and child and women trafficking until and unless the
government actually executes policies that will go a long
way to ensuring good quality education and better social
conditions of its citizenry.  |
