THE recent reports of children allegedly brutalised, s3xually abused, exploited or sold by those who should be their first guardians are truly shocking and barbaric. Such reports should make Nigerians recoil in shame and concern. They force upon the nation a painful and terrifying question: who are Nigerian children now supposed to be safe with?
The reported case in Anambra State is particularly harrowing. A 32-year-old woman, Ogechi Ofoma, was arrested after she allegedly used a hot knife to inflict bodily injuries on her seven-year-old daughter, Oluebube, for allegedly taking meat from a cooking pot. The child was reportedly rescued after the intervention of residents and community security personnel, while officials of the police and the Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Welfare subsequently became involved. The allegation is almost too cruel for ordinary comprehension. A child takes meat from a pot and the response of the person entrusted with her care, her mother who should correct her in love, is allegedly to injure her with a hot knife. What kind of moral universe produces such a response? And this is not an isolated horror. The Federal Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development also recently condemned other reported cases in Abia and Anambra, including the alleged brutal beating of a 12-year-old boy by his father and the alleged sale of children, including a mother’s own twins, by the mother. Then comes the deeply disturbing allegation of a mother s3xually abusing her own daughters and circulating the recorded material online, reportedly in pursuit of attention and financial gain. If established, such conduct would represent not merely a violation of childhood innocence but a terrible inversion of the very meaning of motherhood.
The ancient wisdom that ‘the child is father of the man’, from William Wordsworth, should remind the nation that the treatment of children today becomes the architecture of Nigeria’s tomorrow. Children are not merely small citizens waiting to become adults. They are the raw material of the nation. To brutalise them is to vandalise the future. Traditionally, the home is regarded as the first school of humanity. Before a child encounters the teacher, the peer, the friend, the priest, the imam, the police officer or the judge, the child encounters the parent or caregiver first. The family is supposed to be the citadel in which the vulnerable find shelter from the storms of the world. But what happens when the citadel becomes the battlefield? What happens when the hand meant to caress becomes horrific and demonic, when the voice meant to console becomes the voice that terrorises, and when the parent who should be the child’s shield against predators becomes the predator?
These reports transcend individual criminality. They raise troubling questions about the moral health of the Nigerian society. Parenthood is not ownership. A child is not a parent’s property. A child is human, endowed with dignity and rights, and entrusted to parental care. Discipline cannot be a licence for cruelty; poverty cannot excuse exploitation; marital frustration cannot justify abuse; and the desperate pursuit of money, relevance or ‘clout’ can never sanctify the violation of a child’s innocence. There is, moreover, a particularly poisonous dimension to the recording and circulation of child abuse. Technology seems to have given wickedness a camera, an audience and, in some cases, a marketplace. The Federal Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development was therefore right to warn Nigerians against downloading, reposting or forwarding videos depicting abused children. Every click can become a fresh wound. Every share can become another violation.
The tragedy is also that the cases that reach Nigerian law enforcement agencies and the media may represent only a few instances of cruelty. Behind many compound walls, Nigerian children may be suffering in silence. Some are afraid to speak. Some do not know that what is happening to them is wrong. Others speak but are disbelieved because the abuser is a parent, relative, guardian or respected member of the community. This is where the Nigerian society must recover its moral courage. Churches, mosques and indigenous faiths must intensify their teaching on the sanctity of human life, responsible parenthood, sexual morality, compassion and the protection of children. Moral instruction must not remain ornamental rhetoric delivered from pulpits, temples and minbars; it must penetrate homes and shape conduct. Schools, traditional institutions, the media, community leaders and civil society organisations must likewise become more vigilant.
The Nigerian state, for its part, must ensure that child protection laws are not merely impressive words in official documents. Reported abuse must be investigated promptly, victims must receive medical and psychological care, and perpetrators, if found guilty by competent courts, must face the consequences prescribed by law. Chinua Achebe once wrote that ‘a man who brings home ant-infested faggots should not complain if lizards visit.’ Nigeria must not wait until the consequences of today’s moral failures overwhelm the country’s tomorrow. The question before the nation is therefore larger than the fate of one seven-year-old girl, one abused boy or one traumatised family. It is whether Nigeria still knows what it means to be a parent. A nation that cannot protect its children cannot convincingly claim to be protecting its future. The beasts among parents must not be allowed to define parenthood generally. The Nigerian society should not pretend that these horrors are merely aberrations with no connection to a wider erosion of values. The family is the first institution of civilisation. When its moral foundations crack, the tremors are eventually felt everywhere.
Nigeria must return to the right foundations: love without cruelty, discipline without brutality, authority without oppression, faith without hypocrisy, and parenthood without the abuse of power. Nigerian children deserve nothing less, and Nigeria’s future depends upon it.