It is the season to
celebrate children, and that is happening in many churches and out there in
schools and homes, culminating in Children’s Day on May 27.
Oh how many of us
remember this day with nostalgia; how we would hardly sleep deeply in the night
of May 26 with our little minds set on May 27, our own day. We would have
washed, starched and ironed out our school uniforms and readied our footwear,
set for march past at the stadium. That is after a few weeks of practice in our
schools.
Sometimes, there
were also cultural dance and sports competitions. And yes, we often had free
meals or at least cabin biscuits and soft drinks back in the school a few days
afterwards. For whatever it was worth, our governments remembered us and that
was some fun for us. Those sure were the glorious years of childhood, in an
equally glorious era in our country.
Pan to 2014 and you find us in an entirely
different kind of country where even being in school is precarious. Killing,
kidnap, terror. No thanks to the heinous group that calls itself Boko Haram,
and the shame for its continued success so far is collectively ours as a nation
and people.
For this reason, on
this year’s Children’s Day, there cannot be many things to wish for than just
one thing – Bring Back Our Girls! Yes, the campaign for this has gone on for
too long, reaching a crescendo two weeks ago when many world leaders and
influential persons signed up to the trending hash tag of #BringBackOurGirls or
#BBOG.
But so far, little
has come out of it. And this is where frustration begins to set in. Soon, many
will go back to their life routines. But where are the girls? What is happening
to them? What is going through their minds? What about their parents and
siblings? Oh, what about other children in schools, especially boarding schools
across the land? If we listen well enough, there is a feeling of fear among
many of our children about going to and staying in school, if others like them
could be harvested from their academic environments for one month and life is
going on ‘normal’ in the rest of the country.
Or isn’t life back
to full throttle? Even with the bombs going off in Kano and Jos in the last one
week, the two major political parties were planning and staging major campaign
events few days after, as they seek to win the Ekiti gubernatorial election.
Every day, especially in the electronic media, we are assaulted with direct and
indirect political campaigns. Even the reactions of politicians to the fate of
the children have been laced with partisanship, at a time one expected to see a
pan-Nigerian attempt to resolve the matter. That is despite the earlier promise
by them to stop all campaigns until the children are brought back. Now we know
better that they did not mean what they said and did not say what they meant.
With the teachers’
union threatening to shut down all schools in sympathy with the abducted and
yet to be brought back school girls, and more than 173 teachers lost in all the
attacks so far, life could never be more gloomy for our children. And if such
shutdown ever happens, we would have unwittingly played into the hands of the
evil group whose aim anyway is to stop education, as they claim.
What society owes
children is safety, and this must be provided wherever these young ones are,
especially where they are legitimately. For their level of development, they
need to be provided quality education as guarantee for a future out of poverty,
and nothing must stop society from doing so. The state must do everything to
provide that safe environment for learning. For residential schools,
particularly, security agencies need to exercise extra surveillance around
their locations as preventive measures, rather than wait to react after an
attack.
As we mark
Children’s Day this week, all we ask is for them to Bring Back Our Girls and
save our children and their schools from future attacks.
http://www.thenicheng.com/on-childrens-day-just-bbog/#sthash.VtzpnOYj.GjLQVQDM.dpbs
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