Bad News from North: Children are growing without developing! -By Abdu Abdullahi

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” -Frederick Douglass

Indeed, there is another sad news about the Northern Nigeria filtering the air, often unnoticed, but the soonest we get into action to halt it the better for us as a people searching for survival.

It is not the kind of news to be ignored and carelessly rendered prosaic by people of deep conscience. This awful narration is sending a pathetic tale of how our children, the leaders of tomorrow, are growing without developing. It is this great news that we must give it the adequate value and timeliness it deserves for, it will rejuvenate, enhance and update our reflective analysis and juxtapose it alongside the quest for advancement.

But are we so notoriously adamant that we are only afraid of the sudden emergence and consequences of insurgency, banditry and kidnapping that we are not jittery of not developing our children so that they will not be another generation of brutal gunmen? Are we so lukewarm in attitude and vision that we deliberately dispel factors responsible for the lingering insecurity amongst which is child abuse and we expect that things will be normal?

Undoubtedly, children are huge assets as human resources for proper tapping to be good contractors of a bright future and societal rehabilitation. Make no mistake about it, they are like building blocks for constructing a befitting house where peace and tranquility will reign supreme. Children are a remarkable human capital bestowed upon us to raise and sustain human essence as well as sustainable development. Thus,the more we underdevelop our children, the more we harm our happiness and future.

Against this backdrop therefore, it is first of all imperative to distinguish between growth and development so that we can avert the rise in the devastating dangers undermining our living processes. While growth refers to increase in physical size, development denotes a process of gradual transformation. Unlike growth, development is functional, qualitative as well as life long activity that provides a blissful life.

However, there is a largely negative trend as for the development of large number of children in the North. Accordingly, growth and development ought to be simultaneously interwoven for our desired aspirations as well as yearnings to be actualised. To build a strong and viable North and life for our children, we must remain focused on their developmental scheming and evolution.

According to the UNICEF and for proper comprehension of this theme, a child is any human being below the age of eighteen years. It is therefore fundamental to make some striking revelations on the reality of our children with a view to making reflective analysis and relate it to our overall developmental performance. In 2018 for instance, the UNICEF released the findings of a research on Nigeria’s out-of-school children. At that time, the North carried 69 percent while the South carried the remaining balance. The report further revealed that Bauchi had the highest number of 1.1 million out-of-school children, followed by Katsina with 781,500. To the best of my knowledge however, nothing tangible has been put in place by the authorities concerned to arrest the disturbing phenomenon.

In the same vein, it was reported that in the year 2013, some 15 million children were working in agriculture, as domestic servants, hawkers and beggars across different parts of the North. And as a result of the lingering insurgency in the Northeast, more than one million children have fled home for safety in the neighboring countries while others are struggling for survival at different refugees camps. This implies that they will not have the necessary care from the mainstream society as we are aloof in socioeconomic development of the children of the poor who are the bulk of the North’s children.

Primarily, the predicament with our underdeveloped Northern children is culled from parental negligence which has metamorphosed into a cruel culture, unchecked and has been in practice for ages. Despite the fact that it has not yielded us any positive results, yet we persist in the unwanted perpetuation of the practice. Moreover, the well-to-do in our midst erroneously believe in abandoning the socioeconomic and moral obligation of uplifting those kids endowed with super talents, whose parents live from hand to mouth.

The bourgeoisie and their petty bourgeoisie counterparts in the North are always arrogant in sustaining the current status quo of a class society in which the gap between the rich and the poor must always go the extreme. The Northern Governors have not been helping matters as well. They lack the political capacity to initiate laudable policies and programs that upgrade the socioeconomic status of the children of the masses so that they will never be vulnerable to the gangs of evil men. For instance, in their unlimited desire to accumulate money by getting 10 percent through contracts awarded on infrastructures that are not developmentally viable, billions of naira have gone into these misplaced projects and the huge fund spent on them could have been better utilized by creating job opportunities for the teeming unemployed.

Check the catalogue of who is who in the bloody battle of the gun in the North. They are, of course, drawn from the homes of the masses. Remember that today’s bandits, insurgents and kidnappers in the North were at one time children but socially and economically neglected that now, they are a great threat to humanity and the nation because the concept and practice of development was not entrenched into their cultivation of a ‘ whole’ person who would be developmentally great players in changing the society.

Indeed, the brutish gunmen of our time troubling the North are the dangerous products of yesterday’s children. They are now grown up men, broken in term of human passion and are currently running a parallel government, which has crude violence as its fundamental objective. With this festival of bloodletting characterising the North, the best we can do is attacking the symptoms and not the real disease. Of course, the actual disease is a simple diagnosis of how we facilitated the growth of children in the past without much emphasis on their development and we cannot repair them now because their psychological make up is beyond amendment as they are now big in barbarism, obsessed by wild agitation for ostentatious living as their ultimate goal. For them, it is a destructive campaign of ‘ blood for comfort’! It will be our greatest tragedy if we fail to learn this significant and historical lesson!

At this juncture, the North has woefully failed as a region, thinking that the more we have underdeveloped population, political power is easy to acquire, forgetting that the Buhari Presidency serves us a good lesson that wise people shall never forget. This is the president that enjoyed overwhelming support from the North, but ironically his incompetence has made his home state the worst hit by lingering insecurity, culminating in the massive destructions of lives and properties.

To end this piece, it is fundamental to make a recap of what the deposed Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi said. He warned that the North must change before it kills itself. If we continue to abandon the development of our children, believing only in their growth, the turmoils we are currently passing through would be a child’s play!