Date Published: 04/28/10
Child Hawking and the Future of Nigeria
By Aliyu M. Katsina
amkatsina@gmail.com
They are always in droves, looking tattered, starved, and weary. They are tired, worn out, hungry with torn clothes, their shoulders drooping and hunched. Barely able to lift their feet, they shuffle. Swarming and descending like angry fleas on any available place of social gathering in the society: motor parks, road junctions and intersections, public offices, market places and schools. Well about schools, they are so unfortunately poor and Nigerians that they cannot even afford to go to schools except in these forms of visitation. Wait! Who are they? Refugees? No. Child hawkers! Whose kids are they? They are ours. Yes, the very kids, our own, cruelly underage, which the state (our dear Nigerian state) through consistent cruel policies and organised robbery of state resources by its leaders has condemned. They are Nigerians, and they have potentials. But alas, they will never get around to realizing their potentials. Except may be as hired thugs to the politicians or Boko Haram if they come from the North. But if they are from Niger-Delta, then as militants probably. The lucky ones will graduate into big-time touts, bus conductors and small-time pick-pockets. The not-so-lucky however will become drug peddlers, prostitutes and pimps, armed robbers and social mis-fits in the society. They are like bees on migration. They care about nothing but nectar. And in so doing will sting left and right, frequenting all those places, which in saner societies would have been declared out of bound to all decent human beings. They hawk every conceivable article from sachets of pure water, groundnut, dodo, gala to cooked food and sweets and just about anything including recharge cards, phone chargers, and pirated CDs and DVDs.
There is something terribly wrong with a country that will condemn its children, its future, to an upbringing of misery and destitution. Nigeria, literally, abandons them to mother fate. Yet everyday, governments, both federal and states, talk about the need for containing social crimes in the society. Every year, they budgets billions to the police, NDLEA, and other law enforcement agencies to fight crime. Which crime is greater if I may ask? Condemning these helpless and hapless poor kids to a life of the jungle – where might is right, survival is for the fittest – without making adequate arrangement for their future? Or the manifestly counterproductive practice of budgeting money annually into combating crime without making any gainful headway? I think when you used a method or an instrument to achieve an objective, and that method or instrument failed to give the success you expect, the most sensible thing to do is to change method. Not so for our dear Nigeria.
We talk of Vision 20-20; of making Nigeria one of the greatest economies and global power as if we have the resources, technological werewithal and the commitment of creating programmed robots by the millions to help us achieve this fantastically unbelievable dream. No sir! I submit that we need men and women to do this for our country. But this future, our future, is condemned by the present, our present. Remember, the young girl you see around hawking pure water in Lagos in order to survive or that young boy you see begging for food on the streets of Kaduna is no different from millions of other children in Europe and other decent societies except that here they have been conquered by vampires in the guised of public office holders.
In the first place why would someone love to be an armed robber, or girl love to become a prostitute? No, let us face it; they do so because of limited alternatives. Man has to survive, and for him to survive he must explore all avenues. Where he find the legitimate avenue literally shut down in his face, believe me he will go under. If you know what I mean. In Sociology and Criminal Psychology they called it instinct for survival. I called it fear of misery and hunger, and Darwin called it SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST though I have little admiration for the British scientist. Ok! If you have never been REALLY HUNGRY you will not understand what I mean. And if you have never been involved in the struggle for survival, you might as well click on the next page of this website.
In case you missed the point, I am saying we have criminals in the society because the state made them so. And just how does the state criminalize them? Well, how about we start with where Nigeria refused to provide decent education for the poor children. And there is another fall-out. In Nigeria, we don’t give a damn about orphanages, centers of social reformation as well as centers for social development. It is not only criminals that we breed by our faulty policies and foolish actions, NO. I concede that for reasons of economic imbalance and moral depravity (topics for another day) there is no human society in the world without its fair share of crime. But then we also have societies that have succeeded in reducing theirs to the barest minimum possible. New York has the highest rate of crime and crime-related activities in the whole world. Yet New York functions. The news for us is that the day Nigeria displaces New York with the highest rate of crime and criminals, that day we shall write the obituary for this country. Reasons for this are simple: Nigeria needs talented and positively functional citizenry to operate her engines of development. Without an informed and educated citizenry how would a nation move? It won’t. And whoever says otherwise is a big LIAR or well he is a Martian. I guess they are pretty dumb. Informed and educated citizenry is not something that we go and order for with a bulk purchase invoice from a foreign country anytime we feel so doing. No! You trained the people from scratch. In Nigeria we don’t do this. On the contrary, what we do is to condemn them to a life that honestly no one up-above would fancy for his dog. Our future engineers, doctors, administrators, technicians, scientists and teachers (did I say teachers? Well not them teachers, I cannot think of anybody who would want to be a teacher again in Nigeria, except you are crazy like me or maybe you would end up like Umaru. That is if your name is Goodluck) sell sachet water by the roadside. We don’t care. Why should we care? They are not our kids. But frankly, we need to care. One day, we will wake-up to find that Nigeria as we know it simply vanishes.
I am not joking. Some of these things are just so possible and near that we need to take them serious if we want Nigeria to endure. We never for a moment ever reflect on their consequences to us as a nation. No kidding, do we even have time to reflect? I mean what with all the rush to accumulate, and accumulate, and accumulate even more. Sincerely speaking, I cannot think of a country either in Africa or any other continent for that matter that can jeopardise its future by doing what Nigeria is doing to its children. Once upon a time, Ghana was steeped in Nigerian labour markets, providing us with the hands for menial jobs that considerably eased the strain on the indigenous market and its supply base, thus freeing our countrymen and women to pursue careers in professional vocations. That was when Nigeria was Nigeria. Nostalgia? Oh no. I was not even around then; I only heard it from elders and cheap photocopy of Political Science texts. The Ghanaians provided cheap labour for different chores – Shagari expelled them and so they became angry and decided to stay for a while to build Ghana. Go to Accra today and see wonders. Are they glad Shagari expelled them – blood sucking aliens? Evidently, everyone in Africa now seems to be minding his own roof, lest it leaks again. Unfortunately, Nigeria is not buying into this roof-leaking business and I can see the clouds gathering. Unless we want to be overwhelmed by the impending clouds we ought to act NOW. There is the need to urgently halt child hawking in Nigeria. It is common sense. I will not go as far as advocating for the imposition of national emergency on hawking because the last one the President promised on electricity was tragically infected with an affliction known around here as yar'aduaritis. But, I believe one day, except the nation acts now, the leaders will be compelled to impose national emergency on social insecurity. By then, the roofs will not be leaking; they will not even be like sieves, they would have vanished off the face of earth. GOD FORBIDS. And the clouds, on that day shall release a torrential downpour or is it going to be a deluge?
Aliyu Mukhtar Katsina
amkatsina@gmail.com
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