27 May 2007
opinion
Lagos — WHEN, in 1954, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly recommended that all countries should institute a Universal Children's Day to be observed as a day to celebrate children and draw attention to their problems, it could not have imagined that 53 years after, the challenges facing this most vulnerable class of people, would still be staggering, especially in African and other third world countries.
Nigeria adopted today, May 27 of every year, as its Children's Day and has remained faithful to the observance of the day. But children's issues go far beyond observance of Children's Day.
The UN General Assembly, realizing that all is not well with the world's children and recognizing that children have rights that must be documented, adopted by member states, promoted as well as enforced, adopted in 1959, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which addresses the rights of children and youths under 18 years of age, and in 1989, adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which covers, in its 54 articles, every of the rights of children, from health care to education, to the freedom from exploitation and the right to hold opinion.
Notwithstanding that most member states of the UN are signatories to the Convention, however, the basic rights enunciated in this convention are still being violated with impunity in these countries that have adopted the Convention. Children are still flagrantly being abused and neglected, both at the family, community and governmental levels.
Apart from being a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Nigeria has domesticated the Convention in the Child Rights Act which the National Assembly passed after much prevarication occasioned by opposition to its passage by some members based on perceived incompatibility of some provisions of the law with their religious and cultural beliefs.
In spite of both the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Child Rights Act, however, the rights of the children of Nigeria, to a large extent, are still being violated at the family, community, state and federal levels.
For instance, such basic rights as the right to education, healthcare, protection from child labour, trafficking, sexual and other forms of exploitation and drug abuse, right to rest and leisure, play and recreation, right to a decent standard of living, right to protection from abuse and neglect, protection from illicit transfer and illegal adoption, right to survival and development and the right to non-discrimination are scarcely respected or enforced.
In diverse forms, children are being discriminated against. In some states of the country, discriminatory school fees are being charged while in some others, children from some parts of the country are not admitted, all based on ethnicity or religion. Also in some parts of the country, the girl-child is still being discriminated against especially when those to be sent to school are being considered.
In spite of the efforts of the outgoing government through the Universal Basic Education (UBE) scheme, many school age children are still out of school. Indeed, some statistics have it that about 40 per cent of school age-children are out of school in the country. The basic right to education is thus denied this staggering percentage of the country's children from among who could have arisen the great men and women of, tomorrow's Nigeria.
The right to survive and thrive is also a tall dream for many of these hapless children. It is estimated that about 25 per cent of them die before they are five years of age, due mostly to avoidable causes. Indeed, statistics have it that the level of immunization coverage for the child killer diseases that was once as high as 80 per cent has dropped to as low as less than 20 per cent.
Those children that survive beyond their fifth birthdays in the country still have the tough task of developing their potentials in an inclement environment where their basic rights as children would be respected and enforced by government through the relevant agencies.
On a daily basis, the media is awash with stories and pictures of different forms of child abuse, child trafficking for purposes of forced, sometimes, hard labour or for child prostitution, of torture and deprivation of the liberties of children, of child marriages, most resulting in VVF, of female genital mutilation (FGM), of people using children for ritual purposes or for begging on the streets or of children hawking all manner of wares when they should be in school.
Many cities have the challenge of street children, some sleeping under the bridges, in the markets, in school buildings where they are exposed to all manner of abuse and are easily indoctrinated into criminality. There is also the increasing cases of HIV/AIDS orphans who are often left to fend for themselves in the harsh economic environment of the country. Most of these also graduate to become the area boys and area girls that are today part of the problems of the society.
Why are children faced with these challenges in spite of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and in spite of its domestication in the country in the form of the Child Rights Act? One of the reasons may be that though the National Assembly has passed the Child Rights bill and outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo has signed it into law, only 14 out of the 36 states of the federation and Abuja have passed it into law in their respective states, meaning that in 22 states of the federation, the Child Rights Act is not law.
Again, religion and culture have been identified as responsible for the position of these states.
Besides the roles that religion and culture play in the issue of disregard for the rights of children, poverty has been singled out as another major factor that makes people to trample on the rights of children. For instance, people send children to hawk or beg, mostly, just to make ends meet. Some children are not in school even when the schools are tuition-free because their parents cannot pay for school uniforms. People marry off children, sometimes due to poverty, while others force children into prostitution or other forms of crime to survive.
To check abuses of the rights of children, we urge state governments that have not yet adopted the Child Rights Act to get their legislatures to pass them into law in their states. We also urge the federal and all state governments (since all the states should adopt the Act) to begin immediate enforcement of all the provisions of the law, including prosecuting and convicting those that flout the law.
We also call for the enforcement of all aspects of the UBE law so that all children can be in schools when they are supposed to be there, not out on the streets hawking or begging.
Importantly also, government must do all in its power to empower the people so that no family or parent would, because of poverty deny children their basic rights. Equally important is the fact that parents should not, in the rat race to make ends meet, deny children the right to parental guidance and the warmth of family life.
Children are, indeed, not only the most vulnerable class of people, but the most important, as they represent the future of families, communities, countries and the world as a whole. As we celebrate this year's Children's Day in Nigeria, therefore, we call to mind the fact that the celebration would be meaningless if as a nation, we fail to address the problems confronting this critical class of citizens of the country.
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